You must be Oscar!
by Eleni Rosier

Some time ago I was married with a dog who had only known life as life was for a dog in Manhattan. Then we moved to Southborough, to a modest Cape with a huge fenced yard and our dog Oscar, in a new kind of ecstasy, took up hunting-by-night. No longer did he rush everywhere on a leash like a floppy overgrown puppy. He became the epitome of stealth. He stalked the perimeters of the place, in and out of the hemlock trees, the yews, the marshy edges. Midnight would come and I'd stand at the kitchen door and call him in a singsong way. "Oscar! Where's Oscar? Come on inside! Come to bed now!" No dog in sight. I'd go to the front door. "Where's my Oscar?" No Oscar, though my voice seemed to carry beautifully through the misty warm nights. I would read another story in the New Yorker, or make more imaginary shopping lists in a beloved gardening catalog, and try again from an upstairs window at 2 a.m., or 3. "Where's my Oscar?! Come to bed now!" Sometimes I'd see a glint of gray in the dark expanses when he'd streak by, nose to the ground like a pig hunting truffles.

"Oscar! Get your nose up and in this house!"

If I'd give up and go to bed, finally he'd come to a nearby window by standing on the bulkhead to the cellar door and mash his now-muddied nose back and forth against the screen to get in. This would occur to him first; it came as his second thought to throw his head back and chirp his chirp-like bark. I would walk with eyes half-shut to open the window, block his wild entrance, and towel him off all at the same time, but his eyes would be vivid with stories he'd love to tell.

And then at the end of that first long summer my husband and I stopped late one Sunday at a garage sale more than 1/4 mile down the road (say, across the street and ten houses away). There we met a few of the intervening neighbors, too, and revealed which house we'd bought. "Oh!" the owner smiled to my husband with intensified curiosity. "Then you must be Oscar!

You like to stay out in the yard at night . . .!"