He looked up.
A muffled sound in the distance.
"What was that?" he said to himself, looking around.
He waited. Nothing.
An airplane?
It wasn't an airplane; he hadn't heard one of those in years.
It might have been a vehicle, perhaps a truck, but he really didn't think so...
He hadn't heard one of those in a long time, either. His eyes were burning from the sun and the dust. He held his breath.
Maybe it was some kind of bird.
A bird...
That reminded him of something.
A quote...was it H.G. Wells?
Or maybe it was Orson Welles? It was a Wells, he was sure of that; regardless, it was from "The War Of The Worlds", one of his favorite books of all time. One of the only books he still had; he refused to burn it, no matter how cold the winters got. Besides, there were still plenty of books to burn, when things got desperate. Still, he was the only person he knew that kept a book around, just for reading.
It was in the book after the Martians had invaded Earth and overthrown humanity, and the few survivors were wandering, looking for hope, any hope.
Two wretches were hiding under a hedge, trying to formulate a plan of survival. One, a cynical, battle-weary soldier, says to the other, a refined gentleman writer, after hearing an unexpected sound:
"You start to notice that even the birds have shadows, these days..."
He looked around. You start hearing all kinds of things when there's nothing left to hear.
He even thought that he had heard a dog once, a very long time ago.
***
It had sounded like a dog, anyways.
Just a single long, mournful howl, then a short, high-pitched yelp, and then...nothing.
He was pretty sure it was a dog; at least, that's what he'd hoped, even though the sounds' abrupt end almost certainly meant that it was no longer a dog.
He never was a dog person, but he had hoped it was a dog. He had prayed, prayed hard, that evening, that it had been a dog. He tossed and turned all night after hearing the sound. He found himself whispering in the dead of the night, "Good dog. Good doggie. Nice dog. That's a good dog..."
All of the things he thought that a dog person might say to a sad, stray dog.
"We could use a good dog around here," he kept repeating to himself.
It MUST have been a dog.
He was certain it was...
Anyway...
***
After waiting and listening a couple more minutes, he went back to his work. He carefully waded through the almost waist-high pumpkin patch, the broad leaves hiding the runner vines he was chopping off. The pumpkins kept overrunning the squash and cucumbers, and the zucchini was overrunning everything else so that it was getting hard to tell what was spreading where.
The late-summer heat was causing everything to proliferate quickly, so much so that the thinning and culling had become an everyday job. If this weather held, there would be lots of late-season produce to harvest and store, which was always a good thing.
