There was an ornery little stray dog that lived in a runoff pipe outside the town of Storybrooke. When it rained too much the extra water from the river that ran beside the town of Storybrooke would flow into the pipe and soak the little dog to the skin without warning, but most of the time the place was hospitable enough. Nobody payed him much mind and that was the way the dog told himself he liked it.
The dog was small and gray and skinny and his matted fur was host to plentiful tangles, burrs, and fleas. He was a combination of several types of terrier and looked a bit like a cross between a miniature schnauzer and a Scottie dog if you peered really carefully, not that anyone actually did. The dog's appearance was completely unremarkable in any other way except for a pair of sorrowful, overlarge brown eyes which in some lights looked almost human.
The stray dog loved to horde things, which he collected inside the metal pipe that was his home or buried in the soft mud just below it. People in Storybrooke threw all sorts of beautiful, valuable things out and for the life of him the dog could not see why. Everything was useful in its own way if one just thought a bit about it, he reasoned; like the little chipped china cup he found behind the antique shop that he used to catch the rainwater he drank or the pair of ugly wooden puppets he liked to chew on before bed.
The only object he had in his entire horde that wasn't useful at all was the wavy metal knife with the fancy human writing on it. It made him feel funny whenever he looked at it, like he had just ate a whole field full of grass and was getting ready to throw it up. One day he took the knife in his mouth and trotted over to the muddy side of the drainpipe and dug a hole. Then he buried the knife deep, deep in the mud He slept better knowing it was hidden there, out of sight, but the thought that it was still there, somewhere deep underneath him, still troubled him for some reason he couldn't recall.
He couldn't remember where he'd gotten it from, just like he couldn't remember many other things from the misty origins of his early life. He had no clue what he'd been like as a pup or what his mother or father or siblings had smelled like. When he tried to remember his early days, all he recalled was the scent of wet sheep's wool and the repetitive creaking sound of some kind of wooden wheel. It was strange because there were no sheep in Storybrooke and no spinning wheels either and yet he was certain he recalled those things. Oddest of all he remembered having human hands, covered in furless skin tanned light brown from the sun, and the feel of thread moving through his fingers. He dreamed of being a human quite often, actually, and walking with human beings too, a pariticular dark haired boy and an auburn haired young woman, for instance, among houses that looked very different from any home he saw in the town.
It really was most peculiar.
