Free Stay!: Keeper's Story by Lois Lowry Page B

this point, I had lived under the protection of humans and had never faced grave danger. The only similar situations in my memory were the confrontations with Scar so long ago. What had saved me the first time, when I was still just a pup, was my intuitive knowledge of how to address a superior when the odds were against me. The second time, the battle in the night, I was fortified in courage by the need to protect Jack; even then, it had been not a victory but a draw, from which I emerged bleeding.
    Now I was faced again with a fearful enemy—a pair, actually, of enemies—and I could draw no courage from the need to protect the little girl. She was merrily prancing about the room, unafraid, chattering to the growling creatures whose attention was entirely focused on me.
    Shameful though it is to admit it, the odds were against me, even though I was fully grown and had led a successful and financially lucrative life. There were two of them, and one of me. They were cats, and I am a dog.
    Carefully, moving slowly so that they didn't take my movement as a threat, I lowered my body to the floor. Then, still in slow motion, I rolled over to my back and exposed my belly to the beasts.
    This is the way a dog admits defeat. It was degrading. But it was absolutely necessary in order to survive, caught as I was in a small room with two predators.
    Frantically, I tried to create a conciliatory poem that I might present to them as a kind of homage, acknowledging their superiority, so that they would allow me to live.
Noble felines! O beasts supreme!
I hold you in ... ah ... extreme esteem.
    It wasn't good. I floundered, trying to find the words in rhyme to notify them of my clear inferiority and my desperate desire to survive. It was difficult to compose lying on my back; I had not attempted it before.

    They didn't seem to be listening anyway.
    To my amazement, the child, Emily, walked over to the bed where the wild creatures lay poised for attack. I watched her, looking upside-down from my abject, humiliating posture on the rug, with my legs waving in the air and my tail a useless appendage beneath me.
    "You silly old things," Emily said in her sweet voice. To my horror, she reached out her hand. She was within biting range of their alarming fangs.
    "He's just a dog," she explained, stroking them one by one. Still embarrassingly upended, I watched as their fur shrank to its previous sleek size. Their eyes closed. Their growls changed in tone and became reverberating purrs of contentment.
    Since no one had been listening anyway, I gave my poem some thought and presented a revised version, emphasizing my appreciation of the cats but alerting them as well to my own stature, certainly equal if not more than that.
Fur so fine! Eyes agleam!
You rival me in self-esteem!
    I righted my body and stood again, hoping that perhaps no one had noticed those few moments when I had prostrated myself in such a debasing way. I wiggled a bit and then rubbed my back against the side of the bed, pretending that something was caught in my fur, that I itched and therefore had briefly found it necessary to he upside-down on the rug.
    "Come say hello to Bert and Ernie," Emily suggested. She was sitting beside them on the bed, still stroking their throats; they had both arched their necks in a way that looked luxurious and self-indulgent. They ignored me completely.
    Warily, I leaned forward and touched my nose first to Bert, then to Ernie. Then I stood back, aloof, and yawned.
    A good yawn, precisely timed, says it all, I think.

Chapter 12
    A ND SO I TOOK UP RESIDENCE in a house with cats. We coexisted. Bert and Ernie were reserved rather than unfriendly. I never heard them growl again, and realized that their apparent hostility at our meeting resulted from the surprise of it. We conversed from time to time, but their voices had an irritating nasal quality that set my teeth on edge, and they were (like all cats) boring, self-absorbed, and somewhat