Not finding anything else to eat on the ground, the animal leaped back into the creek, dove under the water, and was gone.
I stayed out of the creek for the rest of the day, not willing to try my luck with the underwater diving dog again. But the thoughts of her wouldn’t leave me.
Her species seemed to be naturally slim and sleek, but I doubted her ribs were meant to protrude that much or that her belly was supposed to concave that drastically, especially so close after giving birth.
I feared the animal had been starving, which crushed my heart. I knew way too well what it was like to be out there, hungry and alone. Except that the dog also had her puppies to feed.
Maybe it wasn’t smart on my part, and maybe Grat would be cross with me if he knew, but he wasn’t here. So, I took twice as much food from the cellar as I needed for my dinner, then left half of it by the creek, hoping the dog would come back and find it.
The next morning, I carefully made my way back to the creek and found that the food I’d left there was gone.
“Well, I hope you got it, mama dog,” I said, turning around to go make some tea and breakfast for myself.
A low growl stopped me in my tracks. Two familiar yellow eyes glared at me from the underbrush. My heart leaped with a burst of fear, then dropped into my stomach. I slowly lifted my hands in a calming gesture.
“I’m just going to the fire pit.” I tried to sound as calm and non-threatening as possible.
The dog didn’t kill me yesterday when she was hungry and I was a stranger. I hoped she’d let me live now that she’d gotten some food in her belly and hopefully realized where it came from.
“Don’t you see? I’m worth more alive to you than dead,” I said.
Moving slowly, I sidestepped the growling animal, giving her as much space as possible on my way to the fire pit. I set the kettle on the fire for the water to boil, then put a sausage and vegetables in the frying pan for breakfast.
From this distance, I couldn’t see the dog in the bushes, but I had a feeling she didn’t leave and was still watching me.
“You know what?” I spoke to the dog. “I can’t keep feeding you bread and sausage. I don’t think Grat would approve of that. I also don’t think you’d like my carrots and potatoes. How about I help you catch some fish today? So you can regain your strength and then hunt on your own again? Deal?”
After breakfast, I found a net in the cabin and stretched it across the creek, upstream from where I worked on the water wheel. By noon, we had about a dozen fish and a couple of frogs tangled in the net.
“Here you go, honey,” I called out into the bushes, shaking out the net in the same spot where I’d left the food the night before.
The dog was nowhere to be seen, however, and I didn’t know if she’d left to tend to her pups or if she’d been hiding nearby. But as soon as I stepped away from the fish and frogs on the ground, the dog’s flat, narrow head appeared from the tall grass by the creek.
Keeping her head low to the ground, with her ears flattened against her skull, the dog growled in warning before making a step forward.
“I won't hurt you.” I moved away a little to give her space.
One of the frogs leaped aside, and the dog lunged forward. Her jaws with blood-red teeth snapped open and shut, and the frog disappeared in her mouth.
I gasped, shocked by how fast it all happened.
“Well…you seem to be getting better already.” I pressed my hands to my chest, trying to calm my fast-beating heart while the dog made a quick meal out of the rest of my offerings. The moment she finished, the dog leaped into the creek again and was gone.
I didn’t see her for the rest of the day. I thought she'd come back for dinner. But when I put a few goose bones left from my dinner in the same place where I’d left her food before, she didn’t show up.
As I was cleaning the dishes after dinner, however, I heard the bushes by the creek rustle.
“Ah, there you are.” I smiled with relief, not looking up from my work.
I should be glad that the dog had left, hoping that she had recovered enough to hunt her own food instead of coming here and risking getting me in trouble with Grat upon his return. But I worried about her. I wished I knew where her puppies were, so that I could possibly help her with them too.
“What do you think about some goose bones?” I asked, turning toward the rustling. “You look like you have the teeth to crush them like candies.”
Instead of the dog, though, a chipmunk darted out from the bushes under the nearby trees. Its tail was up as the poor critter seemed to be running for its life.
Crashing through the underbrush, a bizarre creature leaped out onto the creek bank next. Mud-brown and perfectly round, it was the size of a human head with two long frog legs on the bottom and a pair of bulging eyes on the very top. It caught up with the chipmunk in three long jumps, opened its wide mouth set with long sharp teeth, and swallowed the chipmunk whole.
The trees around the clearing rustled and underbrush cracked, then a giant monster crashed through it. It was almost as big as the cabin and looked like a blob of mud roughly rolled into the shape of a toad with round bumps all over its back.
