Wild Country (The World of the Others #2)- Anne Bishop Page 0,64

shoot my boss,” Jana growled. “I thought about it, but I didn’t do it.”

Barb nodded. “Virgil can be difficult.” Then she brightened again. “Did you find a horse?”

Jana grinned. “I did.”

“If you’ve got a horse, you can put up with a lot of things.” Barb paused. “Your bed didn’t arrive, but the bookcases did.”

Now Jana laughed. “Well, there are priorities.”

“Let’s skip the sorting and unpacking tonight and go eat dinner. I’m starving, and we’ve both worked hard enough today.”

“You know something, Barb Debany? I like the way you think.”

CHAPTER 17

Thaisday, Messis 16

Virgil shook out his fur before trotting over to the town square to take a sniff around the spring. He hadn’t seen any of the bad dogs for a couple of days, but he’d caught the scent of dogs around some of the inhabited houses where dogs weren’t living with humans. He and Kane had followed some of the scents to a house on the edge of the new town boundaries—a house that had a small swinging door for animals. How foolish was that? If a dog or cat could get through the door, so could a lot of other animals. And they had. The Wolves were too big to squeeze through the door, but one of the Coyotegard easily fit and had ventured far enough into the house to confirm that quite a few animals besides dogs had entered. Besides scat, there were torn bags of dry animal food and spoiling human food that had been in the cupboards, as well as the bones of a couple of partially eaten critters.

Tomorrow Tobias Walker would help the ranch humans select some of the still-tame dogs to go live with them on the ranches. If the dogs couldn’t herd properly, they would be left at the house to guard the human females and bark a warning if strangers—two-legged or four—approached. Tobias Walker had also promised to take some of the cats that had potential to live in the barns and eat the mice.

Not many of the new humans in Bennett wanted pets, despite Barbara Ellen’s renewed efforts to find homes for the dogs and cats and birds.

He would deal with the pets—and her—when he had to. Right now, he had to keep the bad dogs out of his territory.

Virgil lapped some water from the spring, then headed for the livery stable. Deputy Jana’s first job each day was to ride the horse for an hour so that she would learn how to do the mounted deputy tasks. He didn’t understand why she didn’t already know these things, but everyone assured him that having horse and rider get acquainted in the corral was smart.

He listened to the words but also paid attention to the way the humans held their bodies and the way their smell changed while they were explaining, and he was sure they were doing something sneaky. Then again, if riding the horse kept Deputy Jana from yapping at him for the rest of the day, he’d pretend he didn’t know the humans were being sneaky until he figured out why they were being sneaky. And then he would decide who would feel his teeth.

The horse in the corral with Jana caught his scent and charged around the corral with the female wobbling in the saddle and hanging on to whatever she could grab.

That was not the correct way to ride the horse. Even he knew that.

Losing interest in the saddled horse, and wondering about the intelligence of the humans standing around the corral since they couldn’t figure out that this particular horse wasn’t smart enough to tell the difference between predators that would eat it and predators that would not, Virgil continued on to the other corral.

Most of the horses in that corral also started running and fussing, but the horse that was not meat pricked its ears after catching his scent, then walked over to the rails to greet him.

Virgil stood on his hind legs and extended his neck over the top rail. Horse and Wolf sniffed each other, confirming recognition.

Virgil didn’t expect an answer. The horse wasn’t any form of terra indigene and couldn’t reply. Still, he felt he should acknowledge the difference between the horse that was not meat and the rest of the animals in the corral.

Dropping to all four legs, he gave the ground around the corral a thorough sniff, then expanded his search area when he caught a scent. Two of the dogs had come close,