As he finished repairing my hand, the doctor said, “So, in the future, maybe you should have more cats in your books and fewer dogs.”

After thanking him for his good work, I made one last pitch for him to join me in a conspiracy against the forces of law and order run amok. “Trixie was a CCI assistance dog, she retired young because of elbow surgery, she’s as sweet as a dog can be, and I hate the idea that she’s going to have a police record. You know, it is Christmas Eve.”

He smiled, shook his head, gave me a prescription, instructions, and a date for the removal of the stitches.

Gerda drove us home, and Trixie greeted us with much love, which we repaid with interest.

Using a terrific spot remover, we quickly cleaned up all the blood on the carpet, and then decided to present Trixie’s gifts to her, as planned, though later than expected. We were determined not to let her know that the terrible hammer of the law might come down on her at any time.

No child ever received gifts with more excitement and delight than Trixie did. The rustle of tissue paper in particular caused her to wriggle with anticipation. We played a little with each toy, then unwrapped the next one, encouraging her to sniff and paw at every package.

Before we retired for the night, we disposed of all the torn wrappings and ribbons and boxes, and we lined up the twenty-one unwrapped gifts on the L-shaped family-room sectional.

Every morning since she had been with us, Trixie followed the same routine. When we came out of the bedroom with her to take her on her first walk of the day, she raced down the back stairs and turned left into the kitchen, padding straight to the pantry, where her kibble was stored in a large airtight can.

On this first Christmas morning as a Koontz, however, she descended the back stairs with even greater haste than usual and turned right, not toward the kitchen but into the family room. As we watched, she went from one gift to the next, smelling each of the twenty-one, as if astonished to find that the previous evening had not been a dream and that all these toys were in fact hers. When she checked out the twenty-first and then looked at us, her grin was endearing.

I believe the ER doctor filed the report with animal control, as required, but I suspect he might have added some exculpatory comments. We never received a call from the authorities, and Trixie gamboled through the rest of her years, happily unaware that her spotless reputation had been at risk because of her dad’s lack of athletic prowess.

XI things that go boom

OUR FIRST JULY Fourth with Trixie, we lived in Harbor Ridge, where we enjoyed a panoramic view of Newport Beach all the way to the sea, northwest to Long Beach, and north to the San Bernardino Mountains. On a clear Independence Day evening, we could see four or five major fireworks displays, some nearby and others at a distance.

Generally speaking, dogs aren’t cool with fireworks. The pretty patterns of color and light don’t impress them, but the boom-bang-crackle-crash makes them nuts. Most memoirs about dogs have a chapter detailing how Fido, left alone on a July Fourth evening or during a big thunderstorm, did more damage to the house than would have a runaway logging truck.

In this matter, as in so many others, Trixie behaved differently from our expectations. When the fireworks started, we watched them from an upper-floor balcony, and our golden girl stood with us, intrigued. She even put her head between two of the balusters to have a better view of the spectacle. Her tail wagged when the sky filled with girandoles, palm trees, magnesium peonies, and other types of fireworks that at most hissed or crackled but did not boom. During the louder flash-bangs, her tail stopped wagging and she stiffened slightly, but she didn’t tremble or whimper.

Over time, she lost enthusiasm for skyrockets and Roman candles, but never became terrified of them. She trembled when the loud ones went off, but cuddling was sufficient to soothe her.

In southern California, we seldom experience pyrotechnic storms. Whether light or heavy, rain comes with subtropical languor. Thunder and lightning occur on average no more than once a year, though two or three years can pass without such a spectacle.

When she was younger, Trixie grew mildly irritated by thunder, but as she aged, she developed a fear of violent storms. I think it was less the noise than the combination of noise and night, because when once we had a daytime downpour with a lot of sky drumming, she was unnerved but not fearful, and she even stood at a big window to study the day, as if to determine the source of the sound.

One evening, however, we were hammered by the worst thunderstorm I’ve ever known. Even in the mountains of Pennsylvania, where rain seldom comes without cannons in the heavens, I never heard such cacophony. The deluge started before ten o’clock in the evening with a detonation that sounded as if the cosmos might be collapsing.

Gerda and I had gone to bed but were not yet asleep, and we sat up, startled, mistaking the thunder for another kind of explosion, until the sudden roar of rain followed it. Trixie shot off her bed and paced the room, agitated.

We switched on a lamp. A soft light sometimes soothed our girl.

Peals of thunder continued, low rolling rumbles suggestive of ominous war machines conquering territory in the distance, punctuated by tremendous cracks and crashes so vehement that the foundations of the world seemed to be under assault and giving way.

Trixie did not whine or growl. She did not shiver with fear. But she paced restlessly around the bedroom. Every time an exceptionally hard clap of thunder chased blast waves that vibrated in the window glass and trembled the walls, she went still and waited expectantly for some terrible consequence of the sound-then continued to pace.

We tried to get her to jump on the bed with us, but she wanted to keep moving, alert for some threat of which the thunder warned. When after a while the loud detonations stopped and there were only long low grumbles like some huge beast softly growling in its sleep, she returned to her bed but remained alert and nervous.

Either a series of storm cells harried the night or the same storm kept circling back to us. Each time it seemed that the rumbling sky would settle into silence, the booming began again, as bad or worse than the previous round of detonations.

Finally, after midnight, Trixie decided that being closer to her family was better than ceaselessly roaming, and she jumped onto the bed with us. We encouraged her to cuddle, but she sat at the foot of the mattress, facing the windows, which were covered by roll-down wood shutters.

The storm seemed about to crescendo, but the escalating tumult roared for hours. As the night dragged on, Trixie turned her back to the windows and hour by hour, always panting with anxiety, she inched up the bed, between Gerda and me. Flat on our backs, we reached up to scratch her chest, to touch her face, to stroke her sides, and once in a while she would lower her head to lick one of our hands or to rub her cold nose against our fingers in gratitude for our presence. We could not induce her to lie down, perhaps because she thought that she would be vulnerable if not standing or at least sitting. Just after four o’clock, she traveled as far as she could, her chest against the headboard, her nose against the wall.

If the thunder had not kept Gerda and me awake, Trixie’s fear and panting would have made sleep impossible. We had work that needed to be done when morning came, appointments to be kept; we were going to be shambling through our meetings as if we were the walking dead.