Rob Chilson: Teddy

“TEDDY!”

Then he was startled by a thunderous bang. He leaped aside and paused; Teddy was gun-shy. Then he smelled black powder smoke, realized that The Big One was trying to scare him again with a firecracker. The tractor barked louder and faster, and so did he, racing around and laughing at The Big One.

“Hear us a quarter’ve a mile off,” grumbled the Other Old One, spitting tobacco.

It was the beginning of another perfect day in a little black and white dog’s life.

Teddy dozed more than normal that day, and that night, too, he was dozing when the light faded and the foxes began to bark. He awoke quickly enough then and was yelling back at the foxes when he heard a noise in the barn and remembered, with hope, that The Quiet One had played with him the night before. And sure enough, to his delight, it was The Quiet One who came out of the barn and ran to meet him, laughing quietly and grabbing his ears, jerking his head about gently and talking joyously to him. Again, to Teddy’s brief puzzlement, he smelled grown up, but Teddy soon got used to it again.

They went for a long ramble in the moonlight, and again The Quiet One spent much time sitting and talking, holding Teddy and patting him and ruffling his fur affectionately.

And in the nights that followed, while the Moon waned and faded, then waxed again, The Quiet One came out of the barn almost every night. But every morning he came out of the house, and by day he was young, while he was old by night. Teddy soon accepted this; who can fathom Their ways? Sometimes they went for long rambles about the Place at night, sometimes hanging about the fringes of the yard, sometimes walking up to the Road. But he never went into the house, or even near to it. And every day The Quiet One did the things he had always done by day. One night The Quiet One climbed into the tree where the boards were, and lugged Teddy up with much grunting and laughter, and they sat looking down on the yard and the house and barn and crib and henhouse all silver and ink in the moonlight. Then Teddy had a fleeting sense of how strange these nights were. But The Quiet One spoke and he lost the feeling.

And so the summer wore on, the Moon waning again and waxing. Now the days were shorter, the land dryer, the air rich and ripe and heavy with fruitful odors, the nights cool and dewy. The Young Ones began to leave the Place early in the mornings, in the Big Iron Thing, and return in the afternoon; the old rhythm, five days gone and two days home. The Quiet One came out of the barn less frequently at night, then still less frequently. Now at nights he seemed melancholy, and spent much time hugging Teddy Then there was a chill in the air, finally one morning a frost, and at last he stopped coming out at night at all.

Some time after that Teddy ceased to expect him. He made a vague connection between the frosty nights and The Quiet One’s nightly absence. But still he was there by day, always young. Teddy missed the nightly rambles and the attention, and sometimes felt lonely, as when he had lost his mother. But the mornings always came.

The nights got colder, and then it was winter, and that was good, too. Armored in his long thick fur and his fat, Teddy did not suffer from the cold. Every day They were out and about, and always They called to him and patted and fed him. Finally came a softening, a wetness of the air and soil, wind and rain: spring.

Then summer, and Teddy pricked up his ears at every odd sound in the night, expecting, then hoping, then gradually disappointed. All that summer, Teddy hoped, but The Quiet One did not come to play with him in the night.

The winter came again, and the summer, and the winters and the summers came and went, each season with its special joys. Never a summer came but that Teddy hoped The Quiet One would come out of the barn again in the night. He never forgot.

Meantime, The Quiet One was growing up in the days, his smell changing, his voice deepening. Teddy himself changed. Now he ran where once he had scampered, walked where once he had run.

One night of early chill he stood beneath the denuded walnut trees, feeling the chill of the ground beneath his pads, feeling the crispness of the air in his nostrils, hearing it in the distinctness of sounds, comfortably aware that it could not reach him through his fur and fat. But it reached him in another way, in the stiffness of his joints, the deliberation of his movements. As he sat propped on his front paws listening alertly to the barking of foxes that would in earlier years have sent him yelling defiance back at them, his mind wandered. Soon, he knew, it would be winter. It would be cold. And for the first time he could remember, he wished it different. He had always loved winter, too, but now he dreaded it. He wished summer would come again. He wished it was summer and that The Quiet One would come to him in the night.

They would go off to the berry patch, enjoying each other s company, enjoying the coolness after the heat, and he would laugh and leap and run and sometimes forget, and bark. And The Quiet One would pat him and ruffle his ears, and it would be as wonderful as it had been, that wonderful summer, the most wonderful summer he had ever known.

From these musings, he passed into a memory of his Mother. She had gone away a long time ago, when he was barely full grown. He was already bigger than she, before that. It was she who taught him to chase cars, but the family made him stop. He did not know what had happened to her. His confused memories included mourning and a mound of fresh earth, and the scent of death, but these things had so little to do with his memory of Mother—her bark, her joy, rushing crazily around the yard, each chasing the other—that there was no real connection in his mind.

To Teddy, Mother was still there, somewhere, in some confused way in the world as well as in his mind, if he could only find the way to her.

Teddy sighed, and the sigh became a mournful whine. If only he knew the way! He would go running (as when a pup he had rushed crazily around the house and found his Mother again), into the woods and come panting back into the yard as it had been then, the trees smaller and the house different, come back perhaps from behind the barn, and find Mother awaiting him there, her joyous bark, scampering puppy-like to meet him, tumbling in play, just as it had always been in his memory…

Teddy sighed again and lay down, putting his nose on his paws. Off in the woods, the foxes barked as they had done when he was young.