by Kevin Hearne
The most important question in this life, I’ve heard it said, is whether you have the sausage to achieve your goals. Sausage being a metaphor for courage, in this case, instead of the many other things it could be, including actual sausage.
Okay, okay: I’ve never heard that said. I’m the one who said it—or at least thought it, because I can’t vocalize like humans do. Irish wolfhounds are okay at barking and howling, but speaking English, not so much. Druids can hear my thoughts, though, and my personal Druid agrees with me that sausage can be a metaphor, thereby making it the finest of all foods.
I’m equating sausage to courage because Atticus told me to think about the nature of courage, and I realized it was so much easier if I just thought about sausage instead. This is working out great and I can understand why humans like metaphors so much. I think about courage as sausage pretty much all the time, so I expect to be recognized as an expert on courage any minute now.
Apparently I’m going to need some courage because we’regoing to Australia and it’s on fire. Really on fire, Atticus said, not metaphorically.
I asked him through our mental link.
“Why? Because there’s a terrible drought. There are lots of fires and not enough firemen to put them out, so they need some rain to help them extinguish the flames. But the drought means there won’t be rain for weeks, or even months, and in the meantime all this habitat is being lost for Australia’s creatures.”
“Because we’re in a position to help, so we should.”
“We technically are. We’re in Tasmania and it’s considered part of Australia, even though it’s an island off the coast. We can get to the main continent without too much trouble.”
I knew that Atticus was leaving something out.
Starbuck said, sneezing at the end of his sentence. He’s my snorty Boston terrier buddy and he shares the mental link with Atticus too.
“We’re going to take a ferry and cross the ocean from Devonport to Melbourne. It’s nine and a half hours, and they will put you two in kennels for the journey. You can just sleep through the night.”
I had to ask for clarification on that because I’m not very good with time, except for two bedrock principles:
It keeps passing, and
There is no time like the present for a little something to eat.
Hours and months and seconds and weeks and minutes, however, tend to confuse me.
“Just one night,” Atticus assured me.
I’m a pretty big dog—pretty much the biggest—and have discovered through experience that most places haven’t planned for me to be there.
“Yes, they’ll be fine.”
Of course there was more trouble than that, though Atticus insisted it was all not too much. There were farewells to deliver to Inspector Rose Badgely in Launceston, who liked us a whole lot and made very high-pitched sounds for a human whenever she snuggled with us. She liked Atticus too, and he liked her back, but she made different sounds with him.
Starbuck and I overheard him explaining to her that he felt he had to go volunteer, and it was a tricky business because he couldn’t reveal that he was a Druid and bound to the earth, and he truly needed to help the elementals when they said they needed it. We’d been in Tasmania to prevent the Tasmanian devils from going extinct because of a contagious face cancer, for example, and while Rose knew about that, she didn’t know Atticus was actually curing them and helping them develop a resistance to it. She thought he was just counting the population, identifying diseased dens, stuff like that. Fighting wildfires was a completely different sort of thing. To Rose, it must have sounded like he was looking for an excuse to leave. She said these weren’t as bad as the fires of the Black Summer of 2020, whatever that was, and Australia always burned in the summer.
“I’ll be back when the rains come,” Atticus said.
“What are you gonna do, exactly?” she asked, her Australian accent tight with tension. “You’re not gonna be on the front lines, are you?”
“No, no. I can hardly use a shovel well with only one arm. But I can provide support in other ways.”
