Up until Oreo joined our pack, I could count on one paw the number of times my humans had said, “No!”
Now, they were saying, “No!” every time I turned around! I started to get paranoid. I was pretty sure they were talking to Oreo whenever they said, “No!” He was a bad boy who seemed to get a thrill out of making them say, “No!” However, unless they said, “Oreo! No!” I could never be positive they weren’t yelling at me. This was nerve-wracking.
There I would be, minding my own business, lounging on my living room bed and cleaning Oreo’s earwax off my nails. And then I’d hear it.
“No!”
Guilt would seize me. Full of guilt at having displeased my humans, I would jump up off my bed. I’d be thinking, “OK! I thought that was my bed, but if you say so, then I’ll stay off of it. But you don’t have to yell. Just tell me once. I'm a good boy. I’ll listen.”
Or I’d be giving my no-longer-stuffed dragon a bath, practicing because my mistress had given me the job of pack nanny: first for Oreo, whom she thought was a puppy, and I was sure later I’d be the nanny for her own young.
“No!”
Feeling horrible, I would jump up and leave the little no-longer-stuffed dragon alone.
And I would think, “OK! I thought that was my toy, but if you say so, then I won’t give it a bath. But please don’t yell at me. Don’t you know I’m a good boy?”
I’d be shaking, I was so guilt-ridden at having displeased my master or mistress.
Every time, it would turn out my humans were yelling at Oreo, not me.
He was constantly getting into things or trying to pee on the floor. Oreo always had a scowl on his face when the humans weren’t looking, even when he was lying on the comfy bed they had bought for him. He scratched at the carpet like it was leaves outside.
You would think Oreo had never been in a human’s den before.
That was silly, though.
Wasn’t it?
Could a Kaxian get to be three years old without going into a human’s den?
No, that wasn’t possible in this day and age.
Later that evening, our humans were both reading books in the pack’s sleeping den while Oreo and I got acquainted in the living room. It had a shoe rack by the front door, a huge stone fireplace, a TV and stereo, and a black leather couch.
The humans weren’t around, so I had to be the one to yell at Oreo.
“Oreo! Stay off the couch! No! Don’t chew shoes!”
Of course, the rascal wouldn’t listen to me.
“Will you relax?” Oreo said. “You're more uptight than the humans.”
“They don’t know what you’re doing in here!”
“Yeah, and what they don’t know won’t hurt them, Uptight Dog.”
“She will be upset if you chew up her shoes!”
“She won’t spank me.”
“Put that shoe down right now!”
“Make me.”
I was going to have to make him, but I couldn’t let him guess how I did it. I shook my head at him and went down the hall, to make him think I had given up in disgust.
I could hear Oreo, still chewing on our mistress’s shoe, growling and grunting as if he were killing it.
OK, time to make him stop. In my mind’s eye, I composed a little movie for Oreo. In it, he put the shoe back in the shoe bin and then lay down on the orange shag carpet, chewing on what was left of my favorite toy, the empty skin of the stuffed dragon my master had given me back when I was still teething.
Popping sounds came from the living room, where Oreo had probably broken part of that shoe.
Closing my eyes, I concentrated on Oreo’s mind. There it was: slightly red with anger but still accessible, if I concentrated. I uploaded my mental movie and played it for him, watching his mind’s aura change from red anger to yellow scheming.
I chuckled to myself. Let him scheme against my toys rather than our mistress’s shoes! I was a year-old adult and over my attachment to my toys. I only played with them now to show appreciation to my humans for supplying them. I always ended up giving them baths instead of chewing on them.
Our mistress was training me to care for the young in our pack. She started with Oreo, and that was unfortunate, but I would make her happy and do as she said, of course. Besides, it would be great when she finally had babies for me to care for! I was excited about my future as our pack’s nanny.
Of course, Oreo was taking advantage of the situation.
“Hey, Uptight Dog! Come clean my ears; they’re getting really waxy.”
Oreo sidled up to where our mistress was petting me, presenting me his ears to clean.
I licked the wax out of his ears.
Come on! I had to.
She was watching, and anyway, I was bonded to her. She had told me to take care of him, and I had to obey her commands.
Oreo was a jerk about it, though.
“Don’t worry: there’ll be dirtier areas for you to clean later, after she lets us out.”
I know it was immature of me, but you know my frustration at having to care for a ‘baby brother’ who was really two years older than me?
I took it out on the cat.
For deliberately peeing on my sleeping bag, she had been relegated to spending the rest of her days shut into our huge bathroom. Our humans went in there often, and I followed them in whenever I could. Since our mistress was training me to care for her future young and making me practice on Oreo, I figured I should practice on the cat, too. Oh, how she growled and fussed whenever I gave her a bath!
“MMMMmmmrrrrrrOOOooowwllll!”
Our mistress loved my attention to my ‘cat sister’ and encouraged me.
“Aw, Puritan. Mommy Raffle’s just giving you a nice bath. It’s OK.”
I’m bonded to our humans, so I don’t mind our mistress calling me Mommy Raffle. I know that’s sissy. Part of being a grown-up is accepting that you are going to do some sissy things and even enjoy them. Our mistress had given me the role of nanny in the pack. That’s an important job. I accepted this duty with love and keen anticipation of the time I would be caring for her pups.
I did my best to keep Oreo in line with my mental movies, but I had to sleep sometime, and he knew it. Well, he knew I couldn’t tell on him while I was sleeping, not that I could somewhat control him while I was awake. That is, if he wasn’t too emotional, I could.
Oreo dug out of our yard that very first night.
I had fallen asleep on the living room floor, lulled by the sounds of the cop show our master was watching. Our mistress let Oreo out into the back yard to do his business, and in the cover of darkness he dug his way out under the fence. I found out about it pretty quick when I was woken up by my mistress’s yelling.
“Scott! Oreo’s not in the yard!”
“Did we leave the gate open?”
“No!”
I searched for Oreo’s mind, but he was already out of my mental range. I had no clue where he was. There were many Kaxian minds nearby, though, so I was sure Kax would help me find him. I kept trying.
We all tramped through the sliding glass door into our back yard. It was a grassy square about 50 feet on each side. My master shined his flashlight around the bottom of the wooden fence. Out loud, I told every Kaxian within earshot what was going on, making it sound to my humans like I was howling in sympathy to their distress:
“My humans adopted another Kaxian today, and I’ve just found his dig-out. He’s not anyone I know. He’s part English Springer Spaniel and part Border Collie this life. Sorry, I don't even know his Kaxian name yet. He’s mostly black with white splotches and speckles, about three years old, and really obnoxious. Please, if you recognize his description, let me know right away what his Kaxian name and duty are, and warn his pack that my master is looking for him.”
My humans found the hole a minute after I had.
“Oh no. See here where he dug under the fence?”
“Uh! What do we
do?”
I knew that the only chance my humans had of getting Oreo home again was if they took me out looking for him and I managed to get close enough to play Oreo a mental movie of him coming home with us. I wished I could just let Oreo run away and be rid of him, but my mistress had ordered me to keep him from running away. I didn’t think she knew I understood her command, but that didn’t make it any less compulsive. I was going to do everything in my power to get the big stinker back—and then I was going to be very angry with him.
Right then, all I could think about was the best way to get Oreo back.
We would have to go in our little Nissan truck because there was no way my master could run fast enough to catch up with Oreo. He was probably miles away by now.
I played my master a mental movie of the two of us driving off in the truck and my mistress staying home and letting Oreo in when he came home on his own.
It worked.
“You stay here in case he comes home. Raffle and I will go look for Oreo. Come on, Boy!”
I barked to my pack then, using the timing to make it seem like I was responding to my master’s enthusiasm.
“My human is taking me out in the truck to look for our new Kaxian, whom they call Oreo. Let me know if you see him.”
Of course, our pesky Nique neighbors got their humans to let them outside so they could nose into our business. They knew just what to say to hurt my feelings.
“Ha ha!”
“Raffle lost his ‘baby brother’ already!”
“Some pack nanny you are!”
“Can’t even care for one puppy!”
Glad to have something I was allowed to take my anger out on, I played mental movies for the squirrels in the nearby trees, showing them throwing pine cones at my pesky Nique neighbors. Squirrels are good at throwing things!
Bop!
Wham!
I got some cheap satisfaction out of hearing Cherry and Fred cry out in pain.
“Ouch!”
“Hey!”
“Watch it!”
My master and I got in our truck. He put my harness on and buckled me into the passenger seat for safety, the way he did when we guarded construction sites together at night. He started up the truck and drove out of our cul-de-sac.
The lack of any report on the Kaxian duty my new ‘baby brother’ performed disturbed me more than his running away. In addition to the ‘bark relay’, I was using mental channels to ask for any information anyone had on him. The lack of any response surprised me and made me uneasy.
When I finally realized my mistake, apologized, and asked Kax directly in my mind for the answers, I was shocked at the messages I received from the various Kaxian minds close by me:
“Oreo’s Kaxian name is Ferd.”
“Raffle, be careful. Ferd doesn’t know he’s a Kaxian.”
“He was born and raised in ignorance, so his Kaxian memories have not awakened.”
“Ferd represses the memories.”
“This life, Ferd has only served the humans, never done any Kaxian duty.”
“No humans can know that dogs are aliens.”
Well, that last part didn’t surprise me. That had been drilled into me ever since I could remember, by every Kaxian I had ever met and by Kax directly in my mind, too. But what came next was almost more than I could take.
“Your Kaxian duty is to bring Ferd back to us.”
“Make ‘Oreo’ understand that he’s a Kaxian.”
Dog Aliens 2 - Chapter 6: Oreo
Oreo here. Yeah, I was not going to stay in that joint one minute past when Uptight Dog fell asleep. I was a free spirit; you couldn’t put chains on me. Well, not for long, anyway.
Not only had they put a harness on me and seat-belted me in the truck, they were going to make me sleep in a cage! Just like the one my last human had abandoned me in.
No thanks. No way. No how.
That male human had paid good money for me, so he would come looking. I knew I’d best go where his truck couldn’t get to me. That meant the rugged hills that surrounded this unnaturally green suburban desert community. There were many dog trails there, and I always picked the turn going up.
I thought by getting out of town I would escape the scents of my fellow dogs and not just the humans, but I was wrong. These trails were covered in dog paw prints, and dog scent permeated the area.
It was weird.
I was pretty far from home, though. I’d been raised on a farm up on the I-5 grapevine. Back home, in sparsely populated farm country, I had never run away because everyone within a hundred miles knew who I was and where I was supposed to be.
Maybe my suburban brethren got out more. Heh! Yeah, that must be it. Getting out was easier here in the suburbs, just a matter of digging under a fence. Why was I surprised that I wasn’t the only one who thought of digging out?
I got up near the top of the group of hills, and wouldn’t you know it, someone had parked some kind of RV up there. It baffled me how they got it up there on these narrow trails, but the fact remained it was there. The real kicker was it didn’t smell like humans, just dogs.
A German Shepherd and a Great Dane were sitting outside the RV, guarding it from what I could tell. They must have been there an awfully long time, because their humans were long gone, leaving no trace of scent.
Weird.
They didn’t seem starved, and they weren’t tied up. They spoke to me in this weird slang I couldn’t understand. I’d heard a lot of barking all the time since I’d come out here to the suburbs, but I couldn’t quite understand. It sounded like I should be able to make sense of it, but I couldn’t. These two seemed really excited about something. They planted their paws in front of them and quickly lowered their heads while they spoke, sure signs of being serious. They obviously wanted me to help them.
I didn’t trust the dogs around here. Not yet, anyway. They weren’t like the country dogs I was used to. No, these suburban dogs wandered around and talked funny.
Since they were using slang, maybe these suburban dogs were up to something. I didn't want to take part in anything I didn’t understand, so I kept going on up into the hills, hoping if I went far enough I would escape the scent of fellow dogs in addition to losing the scent of humans.
I felt some relief when those two didn’t follow me, but I shuddered at all the slang they barked out and when others barked back to them.
I felt like an idiot up here in the wild hills wearing the new blue collar those humans had put on me, so as soon as I felt safe from being followed I hooked that collar on the bare branch of a low bush and pulled it off. There. That was more like it. Just me and my considerable amount of fur.
Full of dog food, I didn’t need to hunt for my dinner, but I knew how, so I wasn’t worried about where my meals would come from out here in the wild. Most dogs don’t know how to hunt. Did you know that? Only us hunting dogs have the instinct for it. Other dogs can learn, but they have to be taught by one who knows how to hunt. I smelled all kinds of game up here in these rocky sage-brushy hills that looked bare from below: blue jays, pigeons, squirrels, snakes, rats, mice, raccoons...
This brought back memories of hunting with my buddies back home on the farm, during the happy time before the cage, when they called me Ferd.
Most of the time, we hunted the gophers that threatened our humans’ strawberry crops. There were hundreds of gophers every spring, but by fall the pack always had them down to dozens. Hunting in a pack is easy and fun.
“Ferd! You go north side!”
“OK! I’m going north!”
I ran as fast as my legs would take me, over the strawberry rows. It was a race to get the gophers boxed in before they got back to the warren just outside our farm to the north. These pesky gophers ate the strawberries we were guarding. Guarding the humans’ strawberries was our job, the reason our humans gave us water in the summer and warm dry places to sleep in the winter. We had to hunt for our food, and the gophe
rs were pretty tasty.
Are you uneasy at my talk of hunting?
Hey, we dogs are organic pest control. Still, we do have to pee now and then. I’m just saying you should wash your strawberries before you eat them, even organic strawberries.
I could see the gophers running for their warren, a dozen of them or more. We had them on the run, alright. My job was to get in front of them and make them pause long enough that my pack mates could catch them. I was good at my job. I jumped over the strawberry rows, wagging my tail and barking out with the joy of the chase.
I was there! I beat the gophers to the fence. They had dug under the fence, and so had we, but getting under it took too long. Besides, it was a point of honor among us hunters, to catch our prey on our side of the fence. It was a stupid fence: just a few sticks criss crossed here and there. It might keep a cow off our land, but it neither kept us dogs in nor the gophers out.
Planting my front paws, I quickly lowered my head and barked, wagging my tail high in the air because I couldn't contain my energy; I was so pleased with myself.
“Come right to me, you pesky little gophers!”
It worked. The gophers close to me stopped in their tracks. The pack caught up with them from behind, and those gophers were no more.
It was another point of honor among us hunters that no other animals were welcome inside our territory. We knew the humans expected this of us, and we were hungry, so we hunted down every last animal that came inside our fence. Why the humans had put up such a useless fence was beyond us, but we were there to do a job, so we did it. And like I said, hunting in a pack is easy and fun.
I can handle the small pests and prey on my own.
Are you scared of snakes?
Not me. I’ve killed more than my share of snakes. All I have to do is wait for them to pop out of their hidey holes and bite their heads off. I don’t suggest you humans try that, though. Your mouths aren’t big enough, for one thing. You’re not quick enough, for another.
You humans need us dogs. Just face it.
Birds love to peck at strawberries, and I have stopped my share of birds, too. You don’t believe I could catch a bird because they fly, eh? Heh! You must be one of those city or suburban humans. Everyone out on the farms knows about bird dogs, and we Springer Spaniels are bird dogs. I tell you what: birds are complacent in their ability to fly. All I have to do is sneak up behind birds while they are busy pecking into things that don’t belong to them. You’ve never seen a dog sneak? We sneak just like cats do: with our bodies close to the ground, bending our elbows and knees. I can be just as silent as any old cat.