Secret Dog's Business

The most peculiar moment of Richard Granger’s life occurred at two o’clock on a muggy Thursday afternoon, when he’d opened his front door to see his three dogs standing around the dining table. They looked to be in serious conversation, though just what three labrador retrievers had to be serious about Richard wasn’t sure, and anyway he was more concerned by the fact they were all on two legs. The scene had only lasted a moment before one of them had glanced sharply up and let out a bark, and then he’d fainted in shock.

When he woke up, his three labradors were sniffing him curiously. He rolled onto his back and squinted up at the sky, which was cloudless and far too bright. Had he really just seen what he thought he’d seen? His faithful canine companions having some sort of bipedal family meeting in his absence? No, of course not, that would be crazy. He must’ve just been imagining things—after all, he was still a little out of sorts. He’d been stung by a bee at work during his lunch break, and being seriously allergic had needed to use the EpiPen he always carried around in his pocket. It had worked, but it still left him weak and he’d been given the rest of the day off.

Richard groaned and tentatively got up, rubbing the back of his head. Thankfully his grass was overgrown enough to have somewhat cushioned his fall. His labradors padded around him, looking just as doggish as when he’d adopted them six years ago. He regarded them suspiciously, then went inside to replace his EpiPen. He kept an orange tub in the bathroom, and it had a hole cut in the side so that if he was ever in a state where he couldn’t open the lid, he could simply tip it on its side. After he’d retrieved one, he headed down to the stables.

His house was on a hill, but he kept his horse below it, where a good few acres of fields lay for his horse’s pleasure. Benjamin was an old palomino he’d adopted the same week as his dogs, and the horse was always happy to see him. Or perhaps just happy to see the bucket of feed Richard carried with him. He poured it into Benjamin’s feed bin and leant against the fence as his horse ate, mulling over what he’d witnessed. ‘You know… I just had the strangest dream.’

Benjamin’s yellowish head was buried in his bin as he ate, but Richard pretended the horse knew what he was saying. ‘At least, I’d have to call it a dream. Maybe more of a daydream. I just… I swear I saw the labs standing upright.’

His horse slowly raised his head and fixed him with a look. Richard grinned bashfully and shook his head. ‘I know, I know. It’s ridiculous, I must be going mad. That’s not something dogs can even do.’

Benjamin returned to eating, but then Richard said, ‘Just in case, I think I’m going to put a camera up tomorrow and make sure’, and his horse bumped his head on the bucket and let out a surprised whinny. Richard laughed and patted the horse’s long, golden neck, then headed back inside while his horse watched from the gate.

After the surprise of the afternoon, Richard’s evening was an uneventful one, but he kept a close eye on each of his labradors. They were all a different shade; Bailey was an energetic gold, Bertha was a raucous chocolate, and Bella was a sleek, cunning black that tended to lead the others around. Richard must have looked a right fool, creeping around the house in his socks, ducking under furniture or climbing over the kitchen island to peek in on his dogs. But no matter how quietly he snuck into the room, none of the three did anything vaguely un-doggish. And by the time Friday morning arrived, not a single scrap of evidence had been uncovered.

So, he decided to go ahead with his camera plan. Before his wife had died they’d lived in the city, where they’d set up a little security camera discretely by the door. It had come over here with the rest of his stuff, and the previous night he’d put it on charge at the powerboard underneath his bed. Now he looked at it thoughtfully as he stood in the bathroom, dressed from the waist up. He couldn’t let his dogs see him placing it, else they remain knowingly innocent in front of it, so he searched around the bathroom and decided upon the orange tub he kept his EpiPens in. He tipped the contents into the high-up bathroom cabinet, and put the camera in with the lens facing out the hole in the side. He whistled an innocent tune as he sauntered into the living room and put the tub on the kitchen bench, where it would have a perfect view of the living room and dining area beyond it.

‘Right, I’m off’, he said, pleased with his sneakiness. ‘Now, you three behave yourselves while I’m—oh! Hello.’ He’d turned around to see Bella sitting just a few feet away, looking up at him with her head cocked. He grinned nervously. ‘I was just… putting this somewhere slightly more accessible.’ To demonstrate, he took his EpiPen out of his pocket and put it in the container. But Bella didn’t move… until she flicked her charcoal-coloured tail and he looked down and blushed. ‘Right! Pants! Yes, I should probably get some of those on.’

The eight hours at work went tortuously slow, filled with paperwork and phone calls and several million emails. Even the half-hour commute home felt like watching paint dry in a void where the concept of time, and drying, hadn’t yet been invented. But eventually he was parking in his front yard and striding into his house. He threw open the door with gusto, ready to shout in triumph as three surprised labradors scrambled from their positions around the table, but to his ire they were all simply snoozing in their beds. Undeterred, he took the tub into the computer room and plugged the camera in.

The footage takes a second to load, then fizzes up with a crackle of static. There he is, putting the camera in the tub. Then he’s opening it up again, putting the EpiPen inside… and then there’s a slam as the front door shuts and the roar of a car starting up. The three dogs all pad to the door to watch him go, but now they’re heading back to their basket, curling up, and drifting off to sleep.

Richard frowned and skipped through the video. Nothing, just sleeping dogs. For a moment he wondered if the camera had frozen, but then he saw a bird, a black-and-white magpie, fly past the window. And still, the dogs slept. He let out a long sigh and skipped through the rest of it. He’d expected them to at least play a bit, but they remained just as lazy as they had that weekend. It was like they knew he was filming them—after all, Bailey usually couldn’t lie still, always padding around looking for something to do, or rolling in dust and mud in his apparently fascination to get his golden fur dirty. In fact, the only thing of note through the entire clip was another magpie flying by the window, and then several more subsequently further in.

He rubbed his eyes with the balls of his hands, then sighed again and left the computer. His dogs all watched him go outside, but he refused to look at them. He was so sure they’d been hiding something, even though he realised how bizarre that sounded. Needing a bit of fresh air, he made his way back to Benjamin. The palomino was right up at the gate watching him come over, and he nickered in welcome.

‘Afternoon, Ben. Lost your fly veil again, I see.’

The horse snorted and flicked his tail, shooing away a small armada of flies. It was the time of year when they came out in force, determined to annoy everyone—human or animal—they possibly could. Richard wasn’t sure how exactly Benjamin managed to lose his mask quite so often, but he wasn’t about to let his equine friend have a face full of flies for the rest of the day. Still, he had to feed him first.

Ben got right down to eating when Richard filled his feed bin, and then just like yesterday he leant back against the fence. ‘I’m not… I’m not insane, am I?’ he asked, then looked down at the ground and scuffed his shoe against the dirt. ‘No, of course you’re not Richard. All you’re trying to do is catch your dogs pretending to be human.’

He looked at Ben, who just flicked his tail and kept eating. Richard leant over and patted his neck, and said, ‘well, I guess I can stop all this nonsense anyway. I watched a whole video of my dogs sleeping in a basket, and the only thing that was vaguely human was a bunch of magpies commuting to wherever magpies eat worms. Seriously, there were… heaps of them. All on a regular schedule…’ He frowned and stopped patting his horse. ‘You know, it kind of reminded me of that scene in the speedy bus movie. You know, the bit where they loop the footage over and over to trick the guy behind the camera?’

Ben’s eating slowed but Richard didn’t notice as he begun pacing in front of the gate.

‘What if they figured out some way to loop the video? So they could pretend they were sleeping all day when they were really partying like animals? All they’d have to do was plug the camera into the computer, hack into my profile, make it loop for the exact amount of time until I came back, and then made sure everything was exactly back where I left it when I arrived! Yes, that must be it, right!?’ He looked excitedly at Ben, who finally raised his long head and gave him the most sarcastic stare he’d ever seen a horse muster. It was so intensely sceptical that Richard immediately looked down in shame. ‘No, you’re right, that’s the dumbest thing anyone’s ever said. I just have to face facts; my dogs are dogs, and I’m going crazy.’

He gave his horse a guilty smile and opened the gate just enough to get through, making sure to close it tight behind him. Then he headed off into the field in search of Ben’s fly mask, seriously regretting not changing his shoes. The fields were full of wild field oats and wind grass, all of which seem determined to embed themselves as far into his socks as they possibly could. Back when he had sheep, they’d mown through it all in a month, but just one horse was no worthy competitor for the Australian summer grass and so he found himself wading through knee-high foliage. He hoped there weren’t any snakes or spiders hiding in the growth, but he felt like an outback explorer, on a quest to find his horse’s fly net. So he pushed on.

It didn’t actually take him long to find the discarded blue-and-grey garment. Ben tended to frequent the back fields in the early afternoon, a good four or so minutes’ walk from the gate, and so it had been an educated guess that it would be lying somewhere in here. Still, he was pleased about finding it so quickly, and realised he now felt like a weight had lifted off him. After his hopeless fixation of spying on his dogs, it was like he could finally rest assured that his pets truly were just loveable animals. They didn’t have deep conversations, or carry out meticulous hardware hacks on cameras, or stand on two legs, and Richard found it hard to believe he’d ever thought as much. No, they’re be no more craziness anymore.

He bent down and picked the fly mask up, then went to shake it out when suddenly he felt a sharp prick in the middle of his palm. He grunted in surprise and brought his hand to his face, and saw a small red spot with a tiny brown stalk in it. His eye twitched and he slowly looked down at the mask to see a bee stumbling around inside it.

Trying to stay calm, he dropped the mask and reached into his jacket for his EpiPen. But his pocket was empty. He turned and started walking back toward his house, forcing himself not to break into a run. He could already feel his heart starting to quicken, and he knew he had to keep himself steady. While he strode across the field, he tried to think back to where it could be. He’d put the pen into the tub with the camera, right? And then he’d taken out the camera and gone to the computer room… or had he taken the tub with him? Was it going to be on the desk or on the shelf where he’d put the camera? He couldn’t know for sure, and he didn’t have time to look. He remembered he’d emptied out the rest of them into the bathroom, so as long as he could get there he’d be fine.

His head was starting to feel light and his throat was tight. He was only just now passing through the open gate of the back field, and he was still several minutes from his house. He was feeling sick now, and had to pause a few times when he thought he was going to vomit. He gritted his teeth and tried to push on, but the grass stalks in front of him felt like wading through thick jungle. He didn’t want to be an outback explorer anymore. Maybe he could just sit down for a minute… yes, just a quick sit down, and then he could keep going…

Richard clenched his jaw and balled his hands into fists, forcing himself forward. If he sat down now, he was never going to get back up. He kept stumbling forward, passing through the middle field’s gate and now he was in the same one as Ben, and nearly at the last gate…

He saw Benjamin look back at him in confusion, and then Richard’s leg buckled and he fell to the ground. Ben disappeared beneath a view of thick summer grass, and he rolled onto his back and wheezed up at the sky. His throat was closing tighter, and his fingers scrabbled at his tie as he tried to loosen it. He felt weak, and his eyes were half-closed, and for a moment he thought this was going to be it. But then a worried snort sounded right beside him, and he looked up to see Ben staring down at him. Richard put his hands up, touching his horse’s golden cheeks… but then the horse pushed his head through his human’s arms, making them wrap around his neck. Richard blinked in confusion, but in a last, desperate burst of energy, forced himself onto his feet and clambered onto Ben’s back. It was anything but a graceful manoeuvre, and he ended up flopped over the horses back like a wet rug, but he managed to face himself forward as Ben walked speedily over to the gate. Richard hacked as he tried to draw in breaths through a constricted throat, but that didn’t stop his eyes widening when he saw Ben make it to the gate, grab the chain in his teeth and pull it dextrously off the fastener. The gate swung open and the horse trotted carefully up the hill to his owner’s house, all while Richard struggled with both trying to breath, and the realisation that his horse apparently had free reign of his entire property.

They made it to the house and Richard slid off, but couldn’t even make it to the door before he fell back over. Ben gave a warning whinny, and when he was certain Richard was out of the way, turned and gave the door a stout kick, blasting it right off its hinges. But the horse couldn’t fit through the doorway, and so tried to shove Richard in through the doorway as the man crawled on his arms, his breaths short and ineffective.

He was so close now, he just had to make it to the bathroom. But he couldn’t even stand, and each time he hauled himself along the floor he moved less and less. But then Bertha appeared in front of him, her brown ears perked in worry and a moment later there were teeth on his shirt, dragging him toward the bathroom. Another two sets joined in, grabbing the sides of his shirt like a mother carrying its pup, and together his three labradors pulled him through his bedroom and into the en suite. His heart was beating a million times a minute, and he couldn’t breath now, just gasp like a stranded fish. He was deposited in front of the sink and he looked up at the high cabinet in despair. There it was, full of the EpiPens he so desperately needed… but it was far too high to reach. He tried grabbing the towel rack to haul himself up but with no breath in his lungs he was too weak and just dropped back down. He wheezed in despair and reached out to his nearest dog, patting the black coat in distraught farewell.

And then she looked down at him, her expression set as if deciding something crazy. Bella looked at her brother and sister, who both looked back at her, and they all nodded. Richard watched, unbelieving, as the three of them rose up onto their hind legs and open the cupboard with paws that seemed far too dextrous to be real. Bella grabbed an EpiPen, threw it to Bertha who caught in in her mouth, and Baily reach over and removed the tip. She jabbed it into his leg, right through his suit pants, and a second later a rush of adrenaline coursed through his body and Richard gulped in air. His lungs filled and his eyes opened wide and his body filled with relief and amazement and sheer elation. He lay there on the bathroom floor for several minutes, gasping like a fish, and laughing through all of it. He saw his dogs looking at him in concern, and he gave them a weak thumbs up. They all collapsed next to him in relief.

‘I knew it’, he wheezed. ‘I knew I wasn’t crazy. And don’t you three dare try and say this was a dream too.’

Bella looked at him, rolled her eyes, and rested her head gently on his chest with the others.