The Femur Incident

My wife came home with rawhide chewies shaped and sized like human femurs, and I want it on record that I objected on medical grounds before I objected on aesthetic ones. A dog’s stomach does not need rawhide. A dog’s stomach especially does not need rawhide shaped like something a county sheriff would be carrying out of the woods in an evidence bag. Nobody consulted me. Nobody ever does.

Captain finished his in under ten minutes, the way he finishes most things, which is to say without ceremony and without a second thought. Morgan took his outside, gnawed it into something soft and un-photogenic, and then, in the space of about half an hour while nobody was watching, lost it entirely.

He came to me first. Not panicked, exactly. Consulting. He had the look of a man patting his pockets for keys he’s fairly sure he had a minute ago. I checked the usual places; the spots under the bed and behind the study chair where both earned and stolen treasure tends to surface. Nothing. Morgan went back to the kitchen floor and stared at a patch of tile with the kind of focus most dogs reserve for the refrigerator door.

My first thought was Captain. Captain has a system: He accumulates, relocates, and denies. But he wandered past the whole investigation with the loose, unbothered gait of a dog with nothing on his conscience, and I’ve watched him lie about smaller things than this, so I believed him.

The afternoon went on. We ended up at the pool with a couple of beers, the ordinary hour of the day when nothing is supposed to happen. Captain did his property tour, sniffing fence lines like a man checking on investments. Morgan sat at the far end of the pool and stared at the corner of the yard where the big evergreen throws its shadow. Every few minutes he’d glance toward the evergreen, then back toward the house, as though trying to reconcile two conflicting witness statements. My wife noticed before I did and said something about him being “very CSI today.”

When I called them in for dinner, Morgan went straight back to his floor investigation. Captain did not come.

I called twice. Nothing. And Morgan, who has never once in his life ignored the word dinner, stopped what he was doing and turned his head toward the door like he’d remembered something.

He was out the back steps in one motion, over the kneewall, and gone into the evergreen before I’d fully stood up. Two seconds later Captain came out the other side at the same dead run, jaw full of a mud-caked, saliva-soaked object that had clearly spent the afternoon buried in dirt and shade. Right behind him, matching him stride for stride, was Morgan; red fur and fury.

They came through the back door at a speed the back door was not built for, and ran straight into my wife, who had just stepped into the kitchen and had no context for any of it. What followed was brief. A bark from Captain, low and final, standing over the ruined femur like a man reading a verdict. Morgan stopped. Looked at the bone. Looked at his brother. Looked at me, like I might have a ruling to offer. I did not.

He walked to his bed, lay down, and did not get up again for the rest of the evening. Not sulking exactly, though it looked exactly like sulking. Just a golden retriever fully committed to being wronged.

Captain lost interest in the bone within half an hour, the way he loses interest in everything, and by then it was cold and re-muddied and unrecognizable as anything Morgan would have wanted in the first place.

I brought it to his bed anyway.

He looked at it, and then at me, with an expression I can only describe as, “This isn’t the same bone anymore, and we both know it.”