The first Kip was a border collie blessed with a sweet, alert face, a glossy black coat patched with white, and a huge boredom. He was underemployed, and he hated it. He wanted to live. His yawns were vast, prostrate, heavy with reproach. He cocked an eye from the verandah whenever Anna left the house, ready to bound in if this were an adventure that she had embarked upon, not simply another egg or firewood run. But, once a month, Grandfather Ison would visit from the city and deliver him from boredom. Wishty, wishty, wishty, Grandfather Ison whispered, a kind of sibilant secret language that Kip strained to interpret, yipping a little, eyes intent in his cocked head, just like the man talking to him. Grandfather Ison worked Kippy to the bone on useless sheep musterings that made both of them feel useful, and they returned from the paddock lathered and panting and ate huge meals at bedtime. Kip liked to patrol the stock ramp at the front gate, where letters, bread and the daily paper were lodged in a milk can marked Isonville. The family knew that he was a chaser, but they couldn’t catch him at it. One day Anna heard a horn, a thump, Kip’s infernal howl, and ran from the house with streaming hair and eyes. She found the mail contractor’s station wagon idling beside the ramp. The driver’s door was open and the contractor, stricken by Anna’s face, began a ceaseless dry-washing of his hands: No warning, love. He just ran right under the front wheels. Anna knew that her luck was running bad that day. The second Kip was a red kelpie. Rarely in his short and cranky life did he ask more of the family than food and shelter. He had a favourite spot in the slanting sun on their verandah, another on Great Aunt Beulah’s, and even when Beulah was dead and gone and Uncle Kitch and family had claimed her rooms, he continued to pad around to her part of the house every afternoon, following the sunlight. Anna didn’t know what that Ison mob had done to hurt him, but one afternoon after school she found Kippy stretched, blood-flecked and imploring, in his morning spot. She explored his coat for broomstick injuries, Aunt Lorna’s style. Kippy never ventured around the corner again. When the family moved house he claimed new places in the sun. He wasn’t interested in the six-forty acres, only in sleep, but Anna’s father took him out to the paddock anyway, for his own good. One day he emerged from the stubble, whimpering softly, proffering his paw. There was a star-thistle spine in the pad behind his claws. Anna felt that it was a kind of loving for him to need her so, and she hugged his head, overwhelmed. But Kip had run out of love and warned her off, a snarl starting low and deep in his throat. At the bleakest hour of an all-night party, Anna and two friends took a taxi back to Women’s College, smelling, at 3.00 a.m., of incense, Buddha sticks and beer. They sprawled over the seats of the taxi, dangerously bored, as ready to fall asleep as to bare exultant teeth and buck in heat if the right lover came along. You girls look like you enjoy a good time. It was a question, not a statement, and slowly they turned their heads to look at the taxi driver, a man wearing a twenty-four-hour smile crammed with gold fillings. He continued: I could take you to see something you would not believe. They watched him. There’s this woman, he explained. She does it with a dog on her hands and knees. They shrugged. It was a way of saying, So what? to the man, as if it wouldn’t mean anything for them, either, to shrug off two decades of good breeding and perform contemptuously in front of a nobody like him. The taxi driver went on: Before her husband went to Vietnam he gave her an Alsatian. He was killed over there. It’s sad, like the dog’s a substitute. But you gotta see it. I can arrange it. Ten bucks a head. Anna’s first punch grazed his cheekbone. She landed another on his ear. Five boys dead in a foreign war, her own true love gone over the sea. If Lockie were taken from her, what would she do? How would she live? Hey, Jesus Christ, get her off me, fucking bitch. Get out the cab, go on, the lot of you. Little bitch. Anna could not be consoled in the chill dawn on that dismal street. The others wrapped her in their arms and said to one another above her head: What on earth’s got into her? One day in the second year of Anna’s marriage, an exclamation of pure delight drew her to the kitchen window. Bluff was dragging Michael along the verandah by the strap of his overalls. Dog and baby seemed to regard each other as siblings, so perhaps it was inevitable. Bluff had two black paws, two brown, and her wiry coat was black flecked with fawn lights. She could not walk in a straight line and her hindquarters never kept pace with her front. Mrs Jaeger would say to Sam: I hope you know what’s going on in your house. When Bluff proved to be unmanageable around sheep, the Jaegers called in Anna’s father and the latest Kip, hoping that a trained dog would settle her. As the men watched the two dogs channel a dozen headlong ewes in the sheepyards, Anna watched the men, particularly her father, as if for the first time. She recognised clearly that she loved and admired him, a feeling reinforced later when he took her aside and said: No offence, sweetheart, Sam’s a nice bloke, but his old man’s not too bright, is he? Suddenly Anna wondered what she had done with her life, marrying into the Jaegers. There is a new Kippy in Anna’s life, her daughter Rebecca’s dog, bought as a companion for Meg’s dog. Young women and their dogs. When Anna visits and if the weather is fine they might spread blankets in the park. Rebecca likes to sit and talk but Meg likes to scoot over the grass with a dozen other women and a dozen dogs, in full cry after a soccer ball. There was another mother there recently. Anna nodded briefly, gravely, and the other woman returned the nod, communicating everything: Your daughter, too? Today Meg’s old flatmate has come along to the park, a young woman with a husband and new baby. The husband concentrates mutely on the baby’s curls, aware that he is of no account here, today, in this company. The wife talks too brightly, too tolerantly, her eyes jumping in her head at every brushing sleeve, every footfall in the grass behind her. Anna thinks: You have a long way to go. Maybe I have a long way to go. But so do these women. Anna will retire to a unit where she may keep a dog, although she will choose to keep a cat. Its self-sufficiency will suit her. She will show her granddaughter the tiny scar, rather like a ragged fishhook on the back of her wrist, where one of the Kips had bitten her. She won’t always be certain which one, or when.