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and walked straight into a dog sniffing her sneakers. As I opened my mouth to call him, she stepped forward, and kept stepping, exactly where Wolf was not. I stared openmouthed, missing my cue about the nice sunshine we were having.
    â€œI’m so sorry, he isn’t trained yet,” I said. She looked puzzled. “The dog,” I added. “He’s new.”
    â€œYou got a dog? I’m glad he’s not out, I hate it when dogs get out.” She smiled, getting back into the car as Wolf tried to goose her.
    Then Mike, of Mike’s Raccoon Wranglers, came to install shields in my chimney. Wolf trotted out, tongue shaking like a long jelly, straight toward the braced, separated knees of an unsuspecting Mike, who surveyed my roof . . . and sidestepped, boots suddenly nimble. He unfolded his ladder with the motions, if not the conversation, of a workman avoiding a large dog.
    â€œSorry about the dog,” I said. Mike looked puzzled. “See the dog?” I asked. Still holding the ladder, with a slightly defensive air, Mike looked all around me. “Oh! Never mind,” I apologized rapidly, “I thought I saw—theneighbor’s dog out there, in the yard, but it was only—oh! Never mind, I must have seen the woodchuck.” Mike laughed and climbed the ladder. All the while, Wolf stood leaning on my legs, panting with pleasure. Conclusions framed themselves. But I knew invisible animals, and I knew people, and this was not the proper behavior of people around invisible animals. They should not be avoiding what they could not see.
    A LL MY LIFE I HAD KNOWN that there were plenty of invisible dogs around; now I faced the surprising fact that I’d never thought seriously about them. I had known that among the unleashed dogs passing me in the street, sniffing behind bushes, or posting liquid messages on trees, a goodly number were not visible to normal humans—but somehow, this had never provoked either wonder, or basic questions. I hadn’t paid attention! Perhaps the fault lay with my childhood bedtime stories, which were often about an invisible poodle named Tidbit, who had shyly but persistently dogged Granduncle Erasmus on his extensive travels through Europe, Africa, and what he’d called “the Orient.” At the bottom of my mind, all invisible dogs were Tidbit, whom I had outgrown, and about whom I had no more questions than I did about swing sets. Shame on me, because the basic questions were burning ones—and Granduncle Erasmus was no longer here to answer them.
    Fortunately, a rich cousin of mine (who wishes to remain anonymous) funds and administers a private archive of my family’s records. I visited this chilled, silent repository, and delved deeply into the papers of the invisible-beast spotters who had preceded me in our genealogy. I read till my eyes watered, taking notes. The papers went back centuries; the oldest ones, too fragile for handling, had to be viewed online. Not one of those diaries, legal documents, scholarly articles, newspapers, handbills, scrapbooks, broadsides, or letters (the most plentiful item) explained why people avoided a dog they could not see. On the other hand, I gathered a good deal of interesting information, and was able to piece together a partial portrait of invisible dogs; I call them Invies, for short.
    The most suggestive item was that Invies seemed to arrive in normal litters; I found no mention of their breeding true. A recessive trait, perhaps? Equal in interest was the fact that they were scavengers, lurking around dumps and households, in a gray area between wildness and domesticity. And they were quite timid. An Elizabethan ancestor—an irascible barber-surgeon who’d lived with a pack of invisible sheepdogs—described them succinctly as Cringeing Curs, tho Artful and eke Thievish . On rare occasions, Invies had formed attachments to my family’s invisible-beast spotters. Tidbit, for