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country where Darwin makes the rules. I’ve been in enough places like that to know how they work.
    Alfred Hitchcock was one of those crow-raven hybrids you see around this piece of the coast all the time—too big for a crow, but without that classic thick raven’s beak. You couldn’t miss him, even at a distance. He had a white streak along one side of his head, like the fire-scar a bullet leaves when it just kisses you on the cheek as it goes by.
    He hadn’t shown up for a few days, but that didn’t worry Dolly. Though she loves all her animals, she doesn’t regard them as pets. “They have their own ways” is what she always says.
    It was Dolly who named him Alfred Hitchcock. “Look how he walks,” she said to me one day, pointing out behind the house. “See how dignified he is? Not raucous like the others. You never hear a peep out of him. He just paces back and forth, like he’s deep in thought.”
    I realized he did kind of look like that famous profile of Alfred Hitchcock, especially the way his head wobbled when he walked. Dolly had names for all the creatures who came to visit, and you could tell she thought about each and every one before she finally decided what to call them.
    Take Winston. He’s a chipmunk, but not one of those little things they have on the East Coast; this one’s damn near the size of a squirrel. Dolly named him because he had a stance like a bulldog. And he was fearless, too. Whenever he saw Dolly on the back deck, he’d rush right up and take a peanut out of her hand. Then he’d just sit on his haunches and strip away the shell casing, the way you’d sit and share a beer with a pal.
    Winston had a mate—Dolly called her Mrs. Churchill—and a whole family of little ones. They lived under one of the sheds in the backyard. The entrance to their den was marked by two jagged pieces of granite I put there, leaving just enough room between them to form a portal. It looked like they’d hired an architect to build it that way.
    And something was always going on back there. Like a couple of hummingbirds fighting it out over one particularly fine fuchsia bush. Those little guys are as territorial as wolverines, and they buzz-bomb each other almost too fast for the eye to follow. Or maybe a stray cat would come visiting. Big mistake. The mutt Dolly had rescued from the shelter spent a lot of time out there, too, in this little house I built for him. Any cat that padded into the yard would launch Rascal out of his doghouse door like a feline-seeking missile.
    I think that’s why we have so many birds around all the time—Rascal is hell-bent on turning the whole place into a cat-free zone. A dog is like a person: he needs a job and a family to be what he’s meant to be. Rascal always came inside for supper, and he’d stay inside until daybreak. He slept on this sheepskin mat I cut for him. I tried putting it by the back door, but Rascal kept dragging it over until it was just outside our bedroom, and finally I just left it there.
    Dolly also had herself a whole flock of jays. They were a lotlarger than any I’d ever seen. Out here, they’re called Steller’s jays—big-bodied thugs with black heads and high crests. Every morning, if Dolly didn’t get out there quick enough, they’d hammer on the back door with their beaks like a mob of crazed woodpeckers. And they’d keep it up until she went out with a little bucket of peanuts and just flung the whole thing into the yard.
    “Slopping the jays” is what she calls it, and that’s not being unfair to them; they do act like a pack of hogs. No manners at all, wings flailing, shrieking loud enough to empty a cemetery.
    Dolly doesn’t care how much noise they make, but she won’t let them fight. I know it doesn’t make sense, but the birds actually seem to mind her. Once, I saw a couple of the jays really get into it over a big fat peanut, leaping into the air and ripping at each other like spurred gamecocks. Dolly yelled,