Jared had been eyeing the squirrel most of the morning, waiting patiently for the small nervous bundle of fur to get closer. After several false starts when the squirrel danced back out of reach at the last second, the rodent came within what his sheepdog brain registered as "easy reach."
Jared lunged, throwing his bulky, less than graceful sheepdog form into a full-throttled chase across the grass. He chased the squirrel to the border of the yard, but with his prize almost won an invisible but powerful jolt of energy brought him to frustrated halt. He growled from the lingering and painful shock and at the squirrel, now chittering from a branch about eight feet over his head in a tree growing at the edge of the Henderson property.
"DamFukSquirrel," Jared thought irritably. "MeGetYou."
In less than 24 hours, his vocabulary had taken a precipitous dive that he didn't fully appreciate.
He produced a throaty growl and then heard laughter from behind him. He turned and saw the smallest of his human masters.
"I told you, boy, that you're never going to catch a squirrel," Alex said.
"Squirrel!" Jared's brain exploded with excitement. He might know few words with absolute certainty — squirrel was one of them. He was fixated on the furry interlopers seeing as they peppered his otherwise boring hours with something that provided focus for his scattered thoughts instead of needless worry about Cassie and his fake self or simply whether he might ever get back to normal.
His nose registered the reason for Alex's arrival before he even saw the dog dish in the boy's hands.
He forgot the squirrel. "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" Jared barked. "Now! Now! Now!"
He had pushed aside his morning hunger with the abortive squirrel chase, but now it came back with seemingly ravenous force. Alex laughed as the clumsy sheepdog tried to leap around him.
Alex was finally forced to sharply command, "Shaggy, sit!"
Jared, although he was quivering mass of coiled nerves, sat.
"That's better, boy," Alex said as he slowly lowered the dish to the ground.
The thoroughly uninviting appearance of the mound of gray meat might have turned the stomach of the former teenager once upon a time, but now as a dog he wolfed down the contents of the bowl in mere seconds and then turned, as always, with an expectant look to his small owner.
"That's all there is, boy," Alex said, noticing that as invariably happened, the dog had managed to stain the fur around his chin with some of the gelatinous gravy from the canned dog food.
"More?" Jared whimpered.
Alex smiled and reached into his pocket, prompting a new round of leaping and doggie dancing on the part of the sheepdog.
Holding the dog biscuit aloft, Alex reminded the dog that there was a bargaining part to the coming exchange.
"You gotta earn it with a trick, boy," Alex said.
Jared whimpered impatiently, but awaited the command.
"Roll over," Alex said.
Jared sent his body convulsively into a series of rolls on the grass at Alex's feet.
Alex laughed at the dog's enthusiastic display and tossed the biscuit into the air. Jared caught it in his jaws with a satisfying crunch.
"You're too much, Shaggy," Alex said, leaving the dog to munch contentedly on its easily earned treat. "I'll have to think of some more difficult tricks for you to learn."
Solitary again, Jared scanned for squirrels. Finding none in the vicinity, he sprawled on the lawn, chewed at some itchy spots in his fur and finished up by giving his balls a thorough tongue bath.
That killed all of about 50 seconds.
He whimpered at the thought of the long, intervening hours before anything else would happen.
"BeingDogSux!" Jared thought with an audible snort that stirred up the dust and then provoke a sneeze.
He licked at his balls some more because it felt really good.