Wolf had no desire to fight. He was as big as this monster and certainly, with his human brain, much cleverer; but scars from a dog fight would not look well on the human body of Professor Wolf, and there was, moreover, the danger of hurting the toddler in the fracas. It would be wiser to cross the street. But before he could steer the child that way, the mongrel brute had charged at them, yapping and snarling.
Wolf placed himself in front of the boy, poised and ready to leap in defense. The scar problem was secondary to the fact that this baby had trusted him. He was ready to face this cur and teach him a lesson, at whatever cost to his own human body. But halfway to him the huge dog stopped. His growls died away to a piteous whimper. His great flanks trembled in the moonlight. His tail curled craven between his legs. And abruptly he turned and fled.
The child crowed delightedly. “Bad woof-woof go away.” He put his little arms around Wolf’s neck. “Nice woof-woof. ” Then he straightened up and said insistently, “Tootootootoo. Die way,” and Wolf led on, his strong wolf’s heart pounding as it had never pounded at the embrace of a woman.
“Tootootootoo” was a small frame house set back from the street in a large yard. The lights were still on, and even from the sidewalk Wolf could hear a woman’s shrill voice.
“—Since five o’clock this afternoon, and you’ve got to find him, Officer. You simply must. We’ve hunted all over the neighborhood and—”
Wolf stood up against the wall on his hind legs and rang the doorbell with his front right paw.
“Oh! Maybe that’s somebody now. The neighbors said they’d— Come, Officer, and let’s see— Oh!”
At the same moment Wolf barked politely, the toddler yelled “Mamma!” and his thin and worn-looking young mother let out a scream—half delight at finding her child and half terror of this large gray canine shape that loomed behind him. She snatched up the infant protectively and turned to the large man in uniform. “Officer! Look! That big dreadful thing! It stole my Robby!”
“No,” Robby protested firmly. “Nice woof-woof.”
The officer laughed. “The lad’s probably right, ma’am. It is a nice woof-woof. Found your boy wandering around and helped him home. You haven’t maybe got a bone for him?”
“Let that big, nasty brute into my home? Never! Come on, Robby.”
“Want my nice woof-woof.”
“I’ll woof-woof you, staying out till all hours and giving your father and me the fright of our lives. Just wait till your father sees you, young man; he’ll— Oh, good night, Officer!” And she shut the door on the yowls of Robby.
The policeman patted Wolf’s head. “Never mind about the bone, Rover. She didn’t so much as offer me a glass of beer, either. My, you’re a husky specimen, aren’t you, boy? Look almost like a wolf. Who do you belong to, and what are you doing wandering about alone? Huh?” He turned on his flash and bent over to look at the nonexistent collar.
He straightened up and whistled. “No license. Rover, that’s bad. You know what I ought to do? I ought to turn you in. If you weren’t a hero that just got cheated out of his bone, I’d— Hell, I ought to do it, anyway. Laws are laws, even for heroes. Come on, Rover. We’re going for a walk.”
Wolf thought quickly. The pound was the last place on earth he wanted to wind up. Even Ozzy would never think of looking for him there. Nobody’d claim him, nobody’d say Absarka! and in the end a dose of chloroform— He wrenched loose from the officer’s grasp on his hair and with one prodigious leap cleared the yard, landed on the sidewalk, and started hell for leather up the street. But the instant he was out of the officer’s sight he stopped dead and slipped behind a hedge.
He scented the policeman’s approach even before he heard it. The man was running with the lumbering haste of two hundred pounds. But opposite the hedge, he too stopped. For a moment Wolf wondered if his ruse had failed; but the officer had paused only to scratch his head and mutter, “Say! There’s something screwy here. Who rang that doorbell? The kid couldn’t reach it, and the dog— Oh, well,” he concluded. “Nuts,” and seemed to find in that monosyllabic summation the solution to all his problems.
As his footsteps and smell died away, Wolf became aware of another scent. He had only just identified it as cat when someone said, “You’re were, aren’t you?”
Wolf started up, lips drawn back and muscles tense. There was nothing human in sight, but someone had spoken to him. Unthinkingly, he tried to say “Where are you?” but all that came out was a growl.
“Right behind you. Here in the shadows. You can scent me, can’t you?”
“But you’re a cat,” Wolf thought in his snarls. “And you’re talking.”
“Of course. But I’m not talking human language. It’s just your brain that takes it that way. If you had your human body, you’d think I was just going meowrr. But you are were, aren’t you?”
“How do you . . . why do you think so?”
“Because you didn’t try to jump me, as any normal dog would have. And besides, unless Confucius taught me all wrong, you’re a wolf, not a dog; and we don’t have wolves around here unless they’re were.”
“How do you know all this? Are you—”
“Oh, no. I’m just a cat. But I used to live next door to a werechow named Confucius. He taught me things.”
Wolf was amazed. “You mean he was a man who changed to chow and stayed that way? Lived as a pet?”
“Certainly. This was back at the worst of the depression. He said a dog was more apt to be fed and looked after than a man. I thought it
