I was enjoying a peaceful weekend afternoon at my grandparents' summer house when the clatter of claws on the wood floor awakened me from my reverie. I looked up to see Barrett standing in the doorway to the living room in full alert mode. With her ears perked up, she stared at me, backing up a few steps and making an anxious noise that was somewhere between a whine and a grunt.

"What's wrong Lassie," I almost responded, "is Timmy stuck in the well?" (I should note here that Timmy never actually fell down a fell. I have no idea why so many people think he did.) While I may have been tempted to ignore her, this behavior was altogether different from Barrett's normal anxiety about not being fed or walked soon enough. She was acting more like she did the first few times she heard our baby son crying in his crib.

Getting up to follow her, I tried to imagine what could be wrong. It certainly wasn't an intruder, because no one was barking. Was Remy sick? Was the house on fire? The dogs and I were the only ones home, so as I followed Barrett through the kitchen, I started to get a little more worried.

When I rounded the corner into the back room, the source of her angst was immediately apparent in the kibble strewn across the floor. Someone's nose had gotten the better of her and tipped over the container holding my grandparents' dog food. The plastic bin was now resting on its side on the shelf with a small hill of kibble slanting from the near edge to the back upper corner. How the food left in the container managed to defy gravity and momentum remains a mystery to me.

Thinking back, I remembered hearing some sort of knock from the other side of the house a few minutes earlier, but I dismissed it as a door blowing in the wind, or a dog dropping a toy. So the series of events goes something like this: someone knocks over dog food…several minutes pass…Barrett comes to get me. How long did she stay there grazing on the food before her conscience got the better of her?

Maybe she'd like me to believe that she was innocent in all of this, and that her coming to get me was an act of tattling rather than of apology. If the dog that will eat anything, including old discarded coffee grounds, thinks her cute, dopey smile can convince me that she abstained from the surprise afternoon buffet, then her brain is even smaller than I had thought.