45ebf3c490593574dd454e5dfd5a5758

“Suit yourself. Like I said, I’ve got the whole thing locked in the cloud, ready to upload to my YouTube channel at a moment’s notice. Well, after I do some minor editing, that is.”

“You’re not seriously considering posting this stuff, are you?” asked Odelia.

“Oh, absolutely. Story like this? It’s going to go viral, dude.”

“It’s also going to make my life very difficult,” Odelia pointed out.

Frank Beaver shrugged. Clearly he wasn’t too concerned about that.

“Don’t post it, okay?” said Odelia.

“I won’t post it if you promise to give me an exclusive interview and explain to my viewers how you manage to talk to your cats. And I want to interview your cats, too, with you supplying the translation.”

“That is never going to happen,” said Chase.

“Then I’m very sorry,” said the vlogger.

“You can’t do this,” Odelia said.

“Look on the bright side: you’ll soon be America’s most famous small-town reporter.”

And as the guy walked away, giving me and Dooley two thumbs up, he had a big grin on his face the Cheshire cat would have been proud of.

24

Rufus was taking a well-deserved nap after just having gone for a walk with his human and his two new feline friends, when the hair at the back of his neck suddenly stood up, a clear sign someone was watching him. And when he opened one eye, he saw that his neck hairs hadn’t been mistaken: Harriet was staring straight at him, not looking like a new feline friend should.

“Rufus!” she cried. “Are you kidding?”

“Um… no?” he said tentatively. It was one of those questions it’s very hard to give the right answer to, he’d discovered, as it was a question Harriet liked to use a lot, and he still had to find an appropriate response.

“What were you thinking!”

“Um… I was thinking of my ball, actually,” he confessed. He often thought of his ball, now more than ever, since Brutus had gotten it into his head to try and catch it as much as he possibly could, which meant there was less playtime for Rufus, unfortunately.

“Smoochie poo, just leave Rufus alone,” said Brutus.

“No, I’m not going to leave Rufus alone,” said Harriet decidedly. “He has to learn that there are consequences to his actions.”

“What consequences? What actions?” asked Rufus, absolutely unaware of what he could possibly have done to deserve this harsh rebuke.

They were in the backyard, with Rufus lying in his usual spot on the paved stone that he considered his personal paved stone. It was nicely heated up by the sun, and had a good view of the backyard and those tweeting birds dipping into the fountain Ted had recently placed there. And of course his ball was nearby, just in case Ted decided to come out of the house and play around with it for a while—always a possibility.

“You stole my spot!” said Harriet.

“What spot?” asked Rufus, mystified.

“That spot you’re lying in—that’s my spot!”

“But…”

“I picked that spot and now you stole it. Get up!”

“But I don’t want to get up,” he said.

“Get up right now!”

And since Rufus was basically an easygoing dog, he did as he was told. All those Saturday mornings spent at the obedience school had drilled it into him that he had to listen to the voice of authority, and if there was any voice that was authoritative, it most definitely was Harriet’s.

“Thank you,” said Harriet. “Now move.” He moved, and Harriet lay down in the spot he’d just vacated. “I like this spot,” she said. “It’s the spot I chose for myself, and so from now on you will never steal this spot away from me, is that understood, Rufus?”

“Yes, Harriet.”

“Good. And one more thing. Did you eat your entire bowl?”

“I did.” He always ate his entire bowl. That was the point of having a bowl: you ate it all until it was empty, and then Ted or Marcie filled it up again. It was the circle of life.

“You can’t do that,” said Harriet.

“I can’t?”

“No, of course you can’t! You have to learn how to share, Rufus. Now I know you’re not used to sharing, at least not like me and Brutus, but if we’re going to live together you need to learn this very important part of living together with two other… dogs.”

Rufus narrowed his eyes. He still found it a little hard to accept that Harriet and Brutus were dogs now. They looked like cats, they behaved like cats, and so in his view they were cats. But apparently that was no longer the case.

“So from now on you’re going to leave half of your bowl uneaten, and Brutus and I are going to take turns eating what remains. That way we all get equal nourishment.”

“I don’t understand,” he said, because he didn’t.

Harriet sighed an exaggerated sigh.“Look, for some reason the Trappers have gotten it into their nuts that just because Brutus and I are new that we have to have the smaller bowls.”

“Oh, right,” said Rufus. He had noticed how Harriet’s bowl and Brutus’s bowl were much smaller than his, but had naturally assumed that this was because they were also much smaller animals. He was easily five times Brutus’s size, so he probably needed five times the amount of food he got.