I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them.

Dog Days

(July-August 2016)

1: Work to Be Done

With Dipper's help—and he became a great help as the days went on—Wendy succeeded in laying in a full winter's supply of firewood for the Shack by midday on Monday, July 25. The last step of all was ferrying the three cords of firewood—not a one-trip deal!—from her dad's lumber mill over to the Mystery Shack, offloading it, and stacking it on three simple frames knocked together from 2 x 4's.

These, by the way, were cast-offs from the mill—irregular, or too knotty in the wrong places, or a little bit warped, this and that. At any rate, Wendy and Dipper had built the frames together, each one nine feet long, three and a half feet wide, and four feet tall—just right to accommodate one cord of wood each. Four parallel rails running the length of the frame bases kept the firewood elevated above the ground, so it would dry quicker.

The two teens started the hauling after the Shack closed on Friday and managed two truckloads—about half a cord. Most of it was oak, with its distinctive, sour aroma, but they finished with a truckload of apple, which smelled tangy and nearly sweet. Then Sunday afternoon they did another cord and a half, more oak and some Douglas fir. The fir smelled best of all, Dipper thought, like balsam and with a distinct touch of tangerine. Wendy laughed when she caught him sniffing it. "Be careful," she teased. "I think that may be what got my dad hooked on logging!"

Finally Monday they had just one mixed cord, or four trips in the big pickup Wendy had borrowed from Dan, to worry about. It was pleasant, working together, but the hauling and toting and stacking were brute labor, gradually tiring even Wendy, who joked that she was normally lazy because she had to save up her energy for jobs like this one.

"You know," Dipper said, sweating as they offloaded and stacked the last pickup cargo of Douglas fir, "if I did this every day, I'd get in good shape!"

"Yeah, it's a great workout," Wendy agreed. "Better if you get paid for it, like Dad does, though!"

At noon, shucking off the thick leather gloves and wiping his face with a red bandana—hey, why not affect a logger's garb, since he was doing logger's work—Dipper looked at the three enormous stacks of firewood and felt a little glow of pride. "That ought to keep the Ramirezes warm all winter," he said.

Wendy was wearing blue denim overalls over her normal flannel shirt, and she'd tied a sweat band around her forehead. She took off her own gloves, stuffed them in the pocket of the overalls, and nodded her agreement. "Yep. And the logs'll be good and seasoned by December or January. OK, review time. If it should come on to rain, what do you do?"

"Cover each stack with a tarp and tie the tarp down to the hooks we screwed in," Dipper said. "And after the rain, take the tarp off."

"Right," Wendy said, grinning. "And when can you leave the tarp on permanently?"

"Soos will use the moisture meter to check the wood," Dipper said. "He'll read samples from the top row, middle rows, and bottom row of each stack. When all the readings are down to twenty per cent or lower, that's the time to put the tarps on permanently. How did I do?"

"Got an A," Wendy said, throwing her arm over his shoulder. "Whoo! Your shirt's soaking with sweat, Dip! Let's take a shower, have lunch, and then you can ride over with me to Casa Catastrophe to trade out vehicles. We got a lot of daylight left, and now we can do something fun."

"Oh?" Dipper asked, smiling. He expected they'd go out to the lake—the day was heating up, already at ninety by noon, and he was practicing swimming whenever he could and getting better at it. And he was always ready to hang out with his girlfriend when she wore one of her red bathing suits.

However, over lunch Wendy told him had a different idea in mind. "The NoGo GPS tracker I ordered came in on Saturday. You can help me install it in the Green Machine."

"Oh." Considerably less enthusiasm that time, although Dipper knew how important it was. Wendy's car, though it was very old, had been stolen when they'd driven over to Portland early in the month. The NoGo was a way Wendy and the police could use to quickly track down the 1973 Dodge Dart if it should ever be stolen again—and it might be, because Wendy had restored it to collector's standards, and some people would offer her upwards of thirty thousand for it. However, it was her first car, she'd invested her sweat in it, she'd learned every nut and bolt of it, and she meant to hang onto it.

The GPS was one way of helping her hang on, even if some bad dudes tried to rustle it. Wendy also was planning to install a kill switch, so no one could easily hotwire the car again. All that cost money, but she had invested literally years in getting the car in top shape, and she wasn't about to risk it again.

"Won't be too hard, man," Wendy said after lunch as they cleaned up their dishes. "Not gonna put in the kill switch today, just the GPS tracker. Couple hours, and then maybe we can take in a movie or something."

Mondays were their days off from work, and generally they did something in the afternoons or evenings—a movie, bowling (not Dipper's favorite sport, but it helped that Wendy was his favorite girl), or, rarely, hanging with some of Wendy's old posse when they were in town.

Thompson and Vanilla were now a serious item, though, talking marriage, and he was working as full-time manager of the movie theater, while she was in junior college, including summer school. The two of them didn't have a lot of spare time.

Lee and Nate had both moved out of town, going off to college, Lee to Reed in Portland, Nate to Clemeteka in Salem. Sometimes they were in town, but mostly not, and rarely ever together.

And Robbie and Tambry by now were almost an old married couple, he enrolled in Oregon State with a music major and a business minor, she at the same university enrolled in a degree program to become a junior-high teacher. Robbie still fronted Robbie V and the Tombstones, and the group had two albums out, which had both sold respectably, and they spent their summers touring the Pacific coast, from San Diego to Vancouver and points in between.

Tambry still found time to text Wendy about three or four times a week, often sending photos from gigs. The Tombstones had just moved from opening for bigger acts to being the bigger act, and one of the songs that probably would be a main feature on their next album—"Don't Think So," a sour and cynical ballad, sung in a deceptively sexy and soft tone, about how love stinks—that featured Tambry's vocals had broken into the top twenty for metal music. Nice, and Tambry was still her chatty old self when she texted or called, but—not the same as a visit.

As for Dipper—well, he always had found making friends difficult. Most of his good friends in Gravity Falls were older, or of different species. The townspeople wouldn't panic if Dipper and, say, a young Manotaur walked into the Arcade—but Manotaurs mostly found the town boring, except for the occasional hot-weather shower under a broken fire hydrant. He and Pacifica were friendly, but Pacifica was serious about a former vampire, so her hanging-out time had become restricted.

So Dipper and Wendy mostly had each other and Mabel and Teek. That was their little gang right now. At lunch, the four of them decided to head out to the mall in the evening, hang out, grab a meal, and maybe catch a movie or look for some other mischief to get into.

Anyway, Wendy and Dipper drove her dad's pickup truck over to the Corduroys' house. Wendy said the alterations to the Dart were just yard mechanics, so they didn't have to visit a garage. Dipper saw that she had repaired the minor damage the Dart had suffered—mainly an extracted entertainment system that had to be rewired and re-mounted, as well as a couple of minor scrapes suffered when the thieves had driven too close to a fence post or something. It was looking shiny and new—or as new as a fifty-plus-year-old car could look.

Wendy unpacked a rear bumper guard, steel tubing with three eight-inch oval rubber cushion pads that sported reflectors, and they installed that. Then she climbed inside the trunk, lying curled up on her side, and did a little creative rewiring from the driver's side tail light.

As she worked, Dipper asked, "Have you tested the GPS?"

"Oh, yeah," she said as she began to sort out the wires. "Rode around with it beside me in the front seat, and it worked perfect. Locates the car to within three meters, advertising said, and it was even closer than that when I checked it."

With Dipper holding a flashlight for her, Wendy carefully drilled a small hole, fed new wires through it, and then installed the boxy little GPS in the driver's-side cushion pad—which inside inch-thick walls of hard rubber held a red plastic reflector, like the other two pads, with no bulb, just the crisscrossed reflecting surface and a silvery backing.

Wendy unscrewed the lens, carved out a square in the flat inch-thick oval of rubber behind it, fitted the GPs in and cemented it in place, and then replaced the reflector. From the trunk side, she wired up the unit, secured the wires inconspicuously with silicone glue, and then put sealant on the hole she had made for the wires.

She and Dipper stepped back ten feet and admired her work. You couldn't tell the GPS was even there, and as Wendy said, if anybody saw the wires and ripped them loose, the GPS would still work for twelve hours on battery power alone.

"There we go!" she said, sounding satisfied. "When the engine's off, if the GPS battery falls under seventy per cent, a trickle charge cuts in until it's fully charged. When I start up, the electricity from the generator will run the GPS and bring the battery up to full charge. It kicks in and starts to send the ping when it senses motion, and now the Green Machine will be easy to find! How'd I do on time?"

"Hour and forty minutes," Dipper said. "It's two forty-five."

"Not too shabby. So now the hard-working mechanics can relax," Wendy said. She grinned wickedly and hip-bumped him. "Or not, whatever you want."

Dan and the boys were off somewhere on a serious logging job, and until six o'clock or so, Wendy and Dipper would have the house to themselves. For a little while they just chilled in the living room, sitting together on the sofa and listening to music. Dipper was at least as tired as he sensed Wendy was—their touching let them share each other's lows as well as highs—and he knew that if they got started, she'd oblige him, but she was pretty much at low ebb physically.

He had this thing. If they started getting, well, you know, handsy and all, he wanted her to enjoy it at least as much as he did. And now she was just a little too far over the weariness horizon to really get into it.

So they didn't make out. Hardly at all. In fact, they didn't even indulge in harmless mental teasing. And physically they did nothing very heated—well, it couldn't be, both of them so tired and the day was already too hot for that—but they enjoyed, in a sleepy way, some snuggling and smooching. And oddly enough for two teens who really loved each other, they simply fell asleep sitting on the sofa, listening to music and holding hands.

And, smiling, they dreamed each other's dreams.

That same afternoon a half-grown stray dog, chased away from a dumpster by humans and chased out of town by a couple of bigger, rougher dogs found himself atop the rounded grassy hill that overlooked the town. He curled up, hungry, and about the same time that elsewhere Wendy and Dipper dozed off, the dog went to sleep, the sun warm on his fur, the breeze up there on the hilltop keeping him from getting too overheated.

In sleep his stomach didn't cry for food.

And because below him lay an alien spacecraft, and because on his last visit Ford had idly flipped a switch that seemed to do nothing and had neglected to flip it back again, and because the dog happened to nap at the exact spot where a powerful, invisible energy pulsed form the device that Ford had inadvertently engaged, things began to happen. To change in odd ways. Silently.

The alien device burned itself out after a few hours.

The dog woke sometime after that, in the middle part of the night. His stomach ached for food.

And as he bowed and stretched, as waking dogs do, he thought, coherently: I am a dog. I . . . have no name. What is a name? It is something to be called. It is something a human would call a dog the human liked. A human who likes a dog protects the dog. I need a protector. And I need someone to protect. I . . . am a dog. And I am . . . smart.

If he hadn't been near starvation, he would have marveled more at the mysterious gift, or was it a curse, that had come to him while he slept. But hunger drove him. He got up and in the darkness trotted back to town. He paused to drink at a stream. Then his head came up, nostrils eagerly twitching.

Somewhere not far was food. It was not dog food. It was food for pigs, which he also smelled. The dog changed direction and soon found the spot where two grown pigs had their home near a human building.

He approached tentatively. The pigs woke up. They were not aggressive animals. They grunted sleepily as he edged into their sty. They did not object when the dog finished the scant remnants of their dinner.

They did not object when he lay down next to them, enjoying their warmth, the edge of his hunger barely blunted and far from satisfied.

And the dog thought, Some human takes good care of these pigs. Made them a place safe from the weather. Gave them food to eat. The pigs have someone.

Someone to protect them.

Someone I could protect.

The dog did not exactly make plans. But he waited for sleep and then for something that he sensed would happen.