"BBbbbbbrrrrrraaaaaawwwwwwlllllll!"
* * *
The cat got back at me in such a way that got her relegated permanently to the bathroom. She spent the rest of her days there. Don't feel too bad for her. It was a huge 12 x 12 bathroom, as big as a small bedroom. She had her bed in there, and her food and water were up high on a counter-top, far away from her litter box on the floor.
Still, I wonder if she thought this consequence was worth her worst attack on me, which happened right in front of our mistress.
Our master often brought home things he had found in the street or near the dumpsters of apartment complexes at the end of the month: furniture, clothing, toys, books, and even tools. One day it was a bench for the yard. Another time it was a bird feeder. Twice he brought home functional, expensive exercise equipment which other humans had abandoned because they were too lazy to move it. Often, he brought home toys for me. My master's mate would wash whatever it was and then find a place for it in our home. It was nice, how he provided for us.
One time, my master brought home a child's sleeping bag that he thought I could use as a bed in the room that our mistress used as an office. So, I made my daytime bed on this cute little pink princess sleeping bag. Don't laugh! It was nice and comfortable, and I appreciated the gesture.
Puritan did not like this at all, for two reasons. Number one, she didn't want to share our mistress. She was possessive. Number two, she never got presents from our master. This was his fault, that he showed blatant favoritism to me, but she took it out on me. Lucky me.
This cat was fifteen years old.
She was housebroken.
Or, in human terms, she was potty trained.
But, she peed on my sleeping bag!
She did it to show her contempt for me, and for no other reason.
I had gotten up off my bed briefly, perhaps to go get a drink of water or something. I was in the hallway when I heard the sound of the cat peeing. I smelled it then, too, and rushed back into the little office.
Our poor mistress was on a corded phone, talking with one of her insurance claimants, discussing a serious injury. She couldn't react to what the mean old cat was doing in a way that the caller could hear, and her phone cord "leash" wouldn't let her go far from her desk, but Kax bless her, she sure did let the cat have it with her foot!
That darn cat was determined, though! She maneuvered around my sleeping bag to where our mistress couldn't get to her, and continued to pee on my little sleeping bag!
Equally determined, our mistress grabbed the corner of the sleeping bag and pulled it out from under the cat.
The cat fell undaintily onto her bottom.
Now, our mistress was still on the phone, and she needed to be typing notes on her laptop computer about the crucial information the insurance claimant was giving, but here she was, holding up a pee-soaked pink princess sleeping bag that was about to start dripping on the brown carpet.
"Can I call you back?"
Chapter 15: Work
When I had been with my new master a few months, I had settled into a routine. My master would wake me up each morning with the sound of his truck coming home from work. The two of us would play fetch in the back yard for half an hour or so, and then he would feed me. I would lie at his feet while he watched TV for a few hours until he went to bed, and then I would go lie on my soiled but laundered pink princess sleeping bag in my mistress's office and listen to her business phone calls about car accidents and the injuries people claimed had resulted from these accidents. After she finished work, my master would wake up and we would all eat dinner, and then a few hours later it would be time for bed.
One evening, my mistress had an idea.
"Why don't you take Raffle to work with you tonight?"
"Uh, I guess that might be fun!"
Now, that sounded like fun to me, too, but I hadn't slept all day, as had my master. I was just winding down for bedtime when we left for work.
Working with Scott was fun! He was guarding a complex of freshly built, uninhabited human dens. Most of them were finished, but some were still being built. Our nightly duty was to walk into each den and make sure no one was living there. I tried to explain to him that I could smell there were no humans in the entire complex, but of course he didn't understand. We had to do our job the difficult, human way.
It was a bit creepy out there, even though my nose told me we were alone. These new dens were at the edge of civilization.
Before men came to live in Southern California, the place was a desert. This new housing tract butted right up on what is still the wild desert, complete with cactus and sage brush that turns into tumbleweeds. Coyotes have a very real presence out there, and every once in a while we could hear the eerie sound of coyotes yipping.
My master wasn't afraid. I admired his courage. He didn't even carry one of those gun weapons that many humans rely on. He only had a long flashlight that he carried the way a human carries a night stick. His movements were fluid at all times, and his steps were sure. I wasn't at all sure what to make of that vision I'd had of him fighting off people at the pound, but I was pretty confident he knew how to fight. I was also sure that my part in our partnership was to be the eyes, ears, and nose, as well as to help him fight if it came to that.
Secretly, I vowed to get him inside with the doors closed, if the coyotes ever came. I knew he would be OK in a fight with one or two humans, but those coyotes run in large packs.
Most of the time, the two of us were alone the whole night. All of that walking kept us in pretty good shape, so it wasn't a total waste.
But, that first night, I was falling asleep on my feet. Any time my master would stop for more than a minute, I would be out cold. Without even reaching out to his mind, I could tell he was getting frustrated.
The ninth or tenth time he pulled on my leash to wake me up, I heard some humans getting out of a vehicle on the other side of the complex we were guarding. I sprang to my feet and told him what I heard.
"Four humans just got out of a large van on the other side of the complex, Scott! Over this way!" I went as far in the direction of the intruders as I could, inside the room in the human den.
He couldn't understand me, of course, but he knew I was telling him we had company, and in which direction he could find the intruders.
"Good boy!"
I love it when he says that.
We got in his truck to drive over to the other side of the complex.
It was warm in the truck.
I fell asleep.
I woke up to Scott talking on his phone.
"Yes, they are loading property into their van! They are not authorized to take anything! Please come stop them before they get away!"
He ended the call on a grumpy note.
I sat up in the front seat of the truck and looked out the windshield.
A block away and around the corner from where we were parked, four men in dark clothing were each removing a window air conditioner from a different one of the new dens we were guarding. Their van idled in the middle of the street. They were too far away for me to use my power of suggestion, but I thought Scott was smart to park far enough away that they couldn't see inside our vehicle. I wondered how we had arrived there without them noticing, but guessed lack of knowledge was what I got for sleeping on the job.
Trying to make up for that lost time I had been sleeping, my mind was working fast.
"Hm. I imagine Scott just called the police. It looks like these men are going to get away before the police arrive, unless we stop them."
Several fight scenarios played out in my head in the seconds it took me to decide what to do. My conclusion was that the four of them were spread out too far for the two of us to take them on in a fight. Besides, one of them had one of those gun weapons. I could smell gunpowder on him. Our only chance to stop them was for me to get close enough to use my power of suggestion.
Like I said, my mind was working
overtime.
"Kax! What am I going to suggest to them?"
"I doubt I can make all four of them randomly decide that stealing is a bad idea. Could I make them fight each other? No, they are too far apart for that to make sense. In just another minute, they will have removed those air conditioners out of the windows. I need to suggest something that will make them all want to get into the human dens they are robbing, get behind another door, brace it, and stay there until the police arrive. I need to make them afraid. What can I make them fear, Kax?"
I didn't hear any answer from Kax, but I did get an idea. I would make them sort of afraid of... me.
I happened to know that my master kept the cab light in the truck turned off so that he could open his doors at night without calling attention to himself. I was proud of him. He had really thought things through.
I needed to get out of the truck if I was going to get close enough to those robbers to use my power of suggestion on them. I did not want him to come with me. He couldn't run as fast as I could. He was safer in the truck.
I looked at the door and whined to be let out. At the same time, I reached out to his mind and showed a mental movie of him opening the truck door and letting me out, and then me peeing in the sprouting grass along the brand new parking strip. I did this to protect him, so I did not have any qualms about using my power of suggestion on my master.
"OK, Puppy, make it quick."
He opened the door to the truck.
As soon as I was out of the truck, I put a picture in Scott's mind of him staying in the truck. I then ran toward the four men, talking as fast as I could and in different pitches, in order to make myself sound like a whole pack, instead of one.
"Look out!"
"The coyotes are coming!"
"You better run!"
"You better hide!"
"Lock yourself up safe inside!"
As soon as I was within range, I reached out to their minds, all four at once.
They were calm, cool, and collected, concentrating on their thievery like the professionals they were. Their minds were perfectly blue, and easy to reach. So, my suggestion took without resistance.
I circled around them while I continued my yipping and put in all their minds a mental movie of a pack of coyotes running in from the dessert, getting close enough to attack any second. I also placed in their minds the sounds of coyotes yipping, as I yipped, willing my suggested sound to be the one their brains told them they heard...
All four robbers scrambled into the empty human dens through the windows where they had removed air conditioners. They each went through the next door they found, closed it, braced it, and stood there trembling.
I continued the yipping suggestion and my own yipping until the police arrived, and then I ran back to my master's truck and sent a mental movie of him getting out and talking to the police.
And then I crawled back into the truck and fell fast asleep again.
Chapter 16: Mister
My Nique neighbor, Mister the Chihuahua, never passed up a chance to taunt me. Every time my humans let me out through the sliding glass door into the back yard to do my business (and they were now wonderful about noticing when I told them I needed to go outside), Mister would use his doggie door and go outside, too, where he would mouth off to me through the fence the entire time I was outside:
"Ooh, look, it's the big tough Clem, going now by the human name Raffle."
"Could you be any more domesticated?"
"I heard you're not even interested in leaving the yard anymore!"
"Haha! Clem's gone native!"
He never once let up.
I tried to reach out to Mister's mind and suggest that he knock it off, but his mind was so full of contempt that it was impenetrable, even while he was sleeping.
To make matters worse, my misguided humans thought the three of us dogs were all friends. More often than I liked (which would have been just once), they arranged "play dates" when the neighbor humans would come into our yard with their two dogs. It was expected that we all three would play together, so that is what we did. Remember what I told you was the foremost command from Kax? (It is from Nique, too, but who cares about that?)
No humans can know that dogs are aliens.
This command is serious business. If we break this command, we are not reborn.
The humans do think we are animals, though, and animals do fight, so sometimes I would let the wolf in me have its way and start to attack Mister.
"Ggggrrrrrruff!"
I'd growl, and bite at Mister's belly.
Regs would always stop me, though.
"Gggggrarff!"
He'd growl, too, and bite at my neck.
I would turn to face the threat, and the two of us would tumble off in a wrestle of mouths snapping at throats. Although we were about the same age, Regs' Pit Bull body was twice as heavy as my Australian Cow Dog / German Shepard body, and his jaws opened twice as wide. He always succeeded at getting me off the "brother" his human pack had given him.
Our humans would stand around laughing and saying:
"Look at them go!"
"Yeah, that is how they practice."
"And learn. They are teaching each other how to defend themselves."
"They sure do enjoy play fighting!"
We were only half playing. If I ever got the chance to actually kill Mister, I might just do it. Bad enough that his kind were jex thieves, but he was also the biggest jerk I had met so far in this life. He was worse than Millie's Snookems, and that is saying something.
Regs was my fellow Kaxian, but the dog bond overrode that. He was bonded to his humans, too, as I was. They expected Regs to defend his "brother," and so he obeyed them.
One day, we were having one of these "play dates" in the front yards of our houses and out into the cul-de-sac that we lived on. Regs and Mister's human was throwing one stick out into the cul-de-sac, and the three of us were competing to be the one to bring it back to him.
I could run the fastest, so I almost always got to the stick first. However, Regs' American Staffordshire Terrier jaws were the strongest. If he managed to get hold of the stick before I got it back to the human, he almost always managed to get it out of my mouth. Sometimes, the stick would drop to the ground, and Mister would grab it and actually be the one to bring it back. The game was actually fun, and a good contest of our various abilities.
A message tagged for Raffle came right when the human threw the stick. I needed to listen carefully to the message and then relay it, so I couldn't run after the stick. I needed an excuse to stop playing the stick game and stay where I was.
"Kax! What now?"
I didn't hear any answer.
Ooh, but then I got an idea. I pretended to hear small prey in the bushes nearby. Perking up my ears to listen to the message, I turned toward the bushes to make it seem like I had heard something in there. I wagged my tail slightly to make myself seem wrapped up in hunting small prey in the bushes, and having fun.
I guess it worked, because everyone just went on playing the stick game without me. If they had been in my pack, they would have joined me, but Regs and Mister knew I wasn't going to share anything I caught with them. Mister and I were enemies, and Regs was in Mister's pack, so he was my enemy, too. Sad, but true.
I heard the message that was tagged for me.
"Gara needs Mlic."
How odd. One Kaxian needed another Kaxian's presence. I relayed the message right away, and then I puzzled over it for a few seconds, until I heard my master's truck coming home. When it rounded the corner onto our cul-de-sac, Mister's human took us all into their back yard.
"What was it?"
Regs was asking me.
Whoa! That's right, Regs understood the messages I was relaying. This was getting complicated.
"Oh, nothing."
I was hoping he would let it go.
"Heh, you didn't even come close to catching it, did you?"
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Whew! He was speaking in the language that Mister could understand, and playing along with my hunting charade.
"I would have had it if your master hadn't called us back here just then."
"Heh! Sure you would have!"
"You couldn't kill a fly!"
What do you know, Mister was back to taunting me again, right on cue.
I lunged for Mister's belly.
Regs lunged for my neck.
I jumped straight up in the air, out of Regs' reach. He was right on me again when I landed, though, and we went tumbling across the yard, mouths open and snapping at each other's throats.
The human did nothing to stop us, because after all, this is why the humans brought us together: to "play."
We were half playing.
Thank Kax, that was when my master came into the neighbor's yard and took me home.
With friends like Mister, who needs enemies? Well, maybe I couldn't kill Mister, but I wasn't helpless. I had some power, and I was going to try using it to see if I could get Mister's doggie door sealed up. Let him have to beg to be let out! That should teach him some manners. That would be hard on Regs, too, but I wasn't thinking about him.
That night when Mister was digging out of his yard to go help his Nique pack steal some Kaxian jex, I reached out to his human's mind. His human was asleep, and that wouldn't do for my plan. No problem. At least I had learned something from my time with Randy. I suggested that Mister's sleeping human needed to wake up.
It worked. I could tell when the human awoke. His mind became more lucid. Freshly awakened, it was not full of any particular emotion, either, nice and calm and perfectly blue.
I sent Mister's human a mental movie of Mister digging under the fence.
In my mind's eye, I "saw" Mister's human's mind starting to fill with pink alarm, and then red anger.
Before it filled too full for my power of suggestion to reach inside, I sent a mental movie of Mister going through the doggie door to get to the fence, and then changed it to a picture of the doggie door boarded up. I zoomed in on the nails in the boards to make them really thick and strong. There. That ought to do it!
It didn't work out the way I had planned.
One morning when my master and I got home from work, Mister, Regs, and their humans had moved out. They left a bunch of furniture behind in their garage. My master went over and talked to the landlord (who also owned our house and happened to be a deputy to the sheriff).