Free Invisible Beasts by Sharona Muir

been on my side where my Wolfie was concerned? We’d come a long way. I had trained him in basic obedience. And he had trained me, revealing a most un-Invie-like fondness for massage. He would fix on me a spangled brown gaze, and in a very eloquent way, fold his ears to expose the petting surface between them. If I didn’t respond, he would thrust his head into my hand, to stimulate it, exploiting a human impulse straight out of some painted cavern in my brain. Whenever I took the time to massage his whole spine, skull to tail, I surfaced from that drenching in animal softness, in likeness and alienness, with the giddy rush that is our vascular reward for petting a dog; the lowered blood pressure that is the upshot of thirty thousand years of mutual evolution. My heart would open down to its molecules. So we shaped each other, and were satisfied. Now, when I lit my fire and sat before it, my dog knew better than to steal my crackers. He took them from my hand and placed each cracker on the floor, to lick it, nudge it, give it some thought. Like his human, he had a contemplativepersonality. When he finished eating, a wolf’s shadow rippled through the firelight on the wall. Then my dog laid his head on my knee, curled his tail around my other knee, and deposited all his paws in my lap, as if for safekeeping. I ran a finger up his nose, and he shut his eyes. Whatever this invisible dog was, we were family. We were a pack.
    O NE WET SPRING MORNING , outside my house, a loud horn honked. A brown UPS truck was parked, the driver’s cap at a strange, stiff tilt.
    â€œMa’am!” he shouted. “I can’t come down with that attack dog loose.”
    â€œWhat? What?” As I stepped out, the rest of his words got scrambled in a gust of raindrops and an almighty din, a forceful, ground-ringing noise. An animal was performing a dance in the wet pollen on the driveway, a ferocious, leaping—it was—my God! My dog. He was a vision of tawny muscles and flashing teeth. He sounded like all German shepherds: his bark was law, authorized at state and federal levels. WOOF. My invisible shepherd was visible. And I’d never taught him “heel.”
    â€œWolf! Sit!” He paused long enough to throw me an incredulous look—“Sit,” in this crisis? The UPS guy blenched, handed me my package, and backed his truck off, with gingerly twists of his tires, followed by the reverberations that Wolf found necessary to add.
    â€œGood boy,” I said, finally. Wolf became a sphere ofcoarse mist. Then, with a proud grin, he licked my hand and trotted into the hostas. I was laughing. I sat down on the porch step, smacked the soggy oak pollen, and yelped with laughter. The riddle of the past year was finally answered, and like all good riddles, its answer was ridiculously obvious.
    The invisible dogs were pessimists, the cynics of dog-dom. They had no faith in pethood. For millennia, as long as dogs and people had shaped each other’s natures, the Invies had trained us. They trained us to disregard them while they scavenged in our homes. Our eyes registered their presence, our unconscious minds took note; still, we ignored them. Good animal trainers that they were, just as we had refined wolves’ natural hunting patterns, so the Invies had refined our natural penchant for inattentional blindness . For every yard dog licking its frozen chain with a torn tongue, or gasping away hours in the beating sun, an Invie lived in comfort through having trained a human to overlook its very existence. Obediently, we neglected them: we did not pay attention. They knew us better than we knew ourselves.
    But Wolf was the exception! He had stopped being invisible because he much preferred massage. He regarded me as a uniquely valuable pack member, well worth protecting against UPS and like carriers, and had cheerfully restored himself to human sight! To reverse millennia of blindness, all it took was a