The daylight
Bella and Ginger
The dogs keep the day. They do not go outside at night. That round belongs to Alex, the General, who sleeps inside while the sun is up so he can walk the ground after dark. At sunrise he gives his report from the top step, and the dogs take the watch from there. By day the two of them listen. A noise on the property, a commotion at the fence, a step on the path: they already know which of them should move. It is as if the jobs were explained once and then never needed explaining again.
Bella at the path
Bella is a German shepherd, full size and beautiful, and the house is her charge. She protects it and everything in it. A visitor does not reach the porch unseen. She will go forward to check a person, ears up, the question already in her stance.
In the chronicle she wears a day-watch kit. A riveted brass gorget sits at her throat, and set into it is a small pressure gauge no larger than a pocket watch. She checks it at the gate each morning, the way a keeper checks a barometer. The needle rarely tells her anything she did not already know. The checking is part of the watch. A spyglass rides in a leather loop on her harness. When something moves at the far fence she goes very still, and the house likes to believe she is looking through it.
The night rig is still not hers. Daylight is enough.
Ginger at the door
Ginger is a Border Collie, and she is bound to Myla the way some animals and people simply are. When Myla is away, Ginger waits outside, patient, until the return. She is not the protector of the gate. She is the dog with enough love for the whole family.
Other people frighten her. She will not come up to be friendly until she has decided a person is safe. Bella may run the path. Ginger stays nearer the door until that decision is made.
Her kit is soft on purpose: a jerkin of supple leather, with nothing on it that clanks and nothing that could startle her. At her collar hangs a clockwork locket keyed to Myla’s footsteps. While Myla is home the spring stays wound, and the locket ticks quietly against Ginger’s chest. When Myla leaves, the spring runs down and the ticking stops, and Ginger goes outside to wait. When the footsteps come back up the path, the locket winds itself again. The shop says it made the locket. It does not claim to have made it work.
One bowl, one report
They share their food. Heads close over the same bowl, they seem to keep a private language for the day’s duties: what was heard, who came up the path, what can be left for the night cat. Nothing about it is written down. The house only sees that the meal is one meal, and that afterward the daylight is covered.
The General reports at sunrise. The dogs report over the bowl. Between them the house is never told less than the whole day.
The herald
The dawn still has a herald. The rooster, the hen who keeps his ledger, and the rest of the news of the yard now live on the Lucky Hunter’s Ground.
