by Kij Johnson
The misformed howl, the hint of killing animals gathered to work efficiently together—it awakens a monkey-place somewhere in her amygdala or even deeper, stained into her genes. Adrenaline hits hot as panic. Her heart beats so hard that it feels as though she’s torn it. Her monkey-self opens her eyes to watch the dogs through pupils constricted enough to dim the twilight; it clasps her arms tight over her soft belly to protect the intestines and liver that are the first parts eaten; it tucks her head between her shoulders to protect her neck and throat. She pants through bared teeth, fighting a keening noise.
Several of the dogs don’t even try to howl. Gold is one of them. The howling would have defined them before the poisoned gift of speech, but the dogs have words now. They will never be free of stories though their stories may free them. Gold may understand this.
(They were wolves once, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million years ago. And before we were men and women, we were monkeys and fair game for them. After a time we grew taller and stronger and smarter: human, eventually. We learned about fire and weapons. If you can tame it a wolf is an effective weapon, a useful tool. If you can keep it. We learned how to keep wolves close.
(But we were monkeys first and they were wolves. Blood doesn’t forget.)
After a thousand heartbeats fast as birds’, long after the howl has decayed into snuffling and play-barks and speech, Linna eases back into her forebrain. Alive and safe. But not untouched. Gold tells a tale.
5. One Dog Tries to Become Like Men.
This is the same dog. There is a party, and people are eating and drinking and using their clever fingers to do things. The dog wants to do everything they do, so he says, “Look, I’m human,” and he starts barking and dancing about.
The people say, “You’re not human. You’re just a dog pretending. If you wanted to be human, you have to be bare with just a little hair here and there.”
One Dog goes off and bites his hairs out and rubs the places he can’t reach against the sidewalk until there are bloody patches where he scraped off his skin as well.
He returns to the people and says, “Now I am human,” and he shows his bare skin.
“That’s not human,” the people say. “We stand on our hind legs and sleep on our backs. First you must do these things.”
One Dog goes off and practices standing on his hind legs until he no longer whimpers when he does it. He leans against a wall to sleep on his back, but it hurts and he does not sleep much. He returns and says, “Now I am human,” and he walks on his hind legs from place to place.
“That’s not human,” the people say. “Look at these, we have fingers. First you must have fingers.”
One Dog goes off and he bites at his front paws until his toes are separated. They bleed and hurt and do not work well, but he returns and says, “Now I am human,” and he tries to take food from a plate.
“That’s not human,” say the people. “First you must dream, as we do.”
“What do you dream of?” the dog asks.
“Work and failure and shame and fear,” the people say.
“I will try,” the dog says. He rolls onto his back and sleeps. Soon he is crying out loud and his bloody paws beat at the air. He is dreaming of all they told him.
“That dog is making too much noise,” the people say and they kill him.
Linna calls the Animal Control the next day, though she feels like a traitor to the dogs for doing this. The sky is sullen with the promise of rainstorms and even though she knows that rain is not such a big problem in the life of a dog, she worries a little, remembering her own dog when she was a little girl, who had been terrified of thunder.
So she calls. The phone rings fourteen times before someone picks it up. Linna tells the woman about the dogs of North Park. “Is there anything we can do?”
The woman barks a single unhappy laugh. “I wish. People keep bringing them—been doing that since right after the Change. We’re packed to the rafters and they keep bringing them in, or just dumping them in the parking lot, too chickenshit to come in.”
“So—” Linna begins but she has no idea what to ask. She can see the scene in her mind, a hundred or more terrified angry confused grieving hungry thirsty dogs. At least the dogs of North Park have some food and water, and the shelter of the underbrush at night.
The woman has continued, “—they can’t take care of themselves—”
“Do you know that?” Linna asks but the woman talks on.
“—and we don’t have the resources—”
“So what do you do?” Linna interrupts. “Put them to sleep?”
“If we have to,” the woman says, and her voice is so weary that Linna wants suddenly to comfort her. “They’re in the runs, four and five in each one because we don’t have anywhere to put them, and we can’t get them outside because the paddocks are full. It smells like you wouldn’t believe. And they tell these stories… .”
“What’s going to happen to them?” Linna means all the dogs, now that they have speech, now that they are equals.
“Oh, hon, I don’t know.” The woman’s voice trembles. “But I know we can’t save them all.”
(Why do we fear them when they learn speech? They are still dogs, still subordinate to us. It doesn’t change who they are or their loyalty.
(It is not always fear we run from. Sometimes it is shame.)
6. One Dog Invents Death.
This is the same dog. She lives in a nice house with people. They do not let her run outside a fence and they did things to her so that she can’t have puppies, but they feed her well and are kind, and they rub places on her back that she can’t reach.
At this time, there is no death for dogs. They live forever. After a while One Dog becomes bored with her fence and her food and even the people’s pats. But she can’t convince the people to allow her outside the fence.
“There should be death,” she decides. “Then there will be no need for boredom.”
(How do the dogs know things? How do they frame an abstract like thank you or a collective concept like chicken? Since the Change, everyone has been asking that question. If awareness is dependent on linguistics, an answer is that the dogs have learned to use words, so the words themselves are the frame they use. But it is still our frame, our language. They are still not free of it.
(Any more than we are.)
It is a moonless night and the hot wet air blurs the streetlights so that they illuminate nothing except their own glass globes. Linna is there though it is very late. She no longer attends her classes and has switched to the dogs’ schedule, sleeping the afternoons away in the safety of her apartment. She cannot bring herself to sleep in the dogs’ presence. In the park she is taut as a strung wire, a single monkey among wolves; but she returns each dusk and listens, and sometimes speaks. There are at least fifteen dogs now, though she’s sure more hide in the bushes, doze, or prowl for food.
“I remember,” a voice says hesitantly. (Remember is a frame. They did not “remember” before the word, only lived in a series of nows longer or shorter in duration. Memory breeds resentment, or so we fear.) “I had a home, food, a warm place, something I chewed—a, a blanket. A woman and a man and she gave me all these things, patted me.” Voices in assent: pats remembered. “But she wasn’t always nice. She yelled sometimes. She took the blanket away. And she’d drag at my collar until it hurt sometimes. But when she made food she’d put a piece on the floor for me to eat. Beef, it was. That was nice again.”
Another voice in the darkness: “Beef. That is a hamburger.” The dogs are trying out the concept of beef and the concept of hamburger and they are connecting them.
“Nice is not being hurt,” a dog says.
“Not-nice is collars and leashes.”
“And rules.”
“Being inside and only coming out to shit and piss.”
“People are nice and not nice,” says the first voice. Linna finally sees that it belongs to a small dusty black dog
sitting near the roots of an immense oak. Its enormous fringed ears look like radar dishes. “I learned to think and the woman brought me here. She was sad but she hit me with stones until I ran away and then she left. A person is nice and not nice.”
The dogs are silent, digesting this. “Linna?” Hope says. “How can people be nice and then not nice?”
“I don’t know,” she says because she knows the real question is, How can they stop loving us?
(The answer even Linna has trouble seeing is that nice and not-nice have nothing to do with love. And even loving someone doesn’t mean you can share your house and the fine thread of your life, or sleep safely in the same place.)
7. One Dog Tricks the White-Truck Man.
This is the same dog. He is very hungry and looking through the alleys for something to eat. He sees a man with a white truck coming toward him. One Dog knows that the white-truck men catch dogs sometimes, so he’s afraid. He drags some old bones from the trash and heaps them up and settles on top of them. He pretends not to see the white-truck man but says loudly, “Boy that was a delicious man I just killed, but I’m still starved. I hope I can catch another one.”
Well, that white-truck man runs right away. But someone was watching all this from her kitchen window and she runs out to the white-truck man and tells him, “One Dog never killed a man! That’s just a pile of bones from my barbeque last week, and he’s making a mess out of my backyard. Come catch him.”
The white-truck man and the barbeque person run back to where One Dog is still gnawing on one of the bones in his pile. He sees them and guesses what has happened, so he’s afraid. But he pretends not to see them and says loudly, “I’m still starved! I hope the barbeque person comes back soon with that white-truck man I asked her to get for me.”
The white-truck man and the barbeque person both run away and he does not see them again that day.
“Why is she here?”
It’s one of the new dogs, a lean mastiff-cross with a limp. He doesn’t talk to her but to Gold, but Linna sees his anger in his liquid brown eyes, feels it like a hot scent rising from his back. He’s one of the half-strays, an outdoor dog who lived on a chain. It was no effort at all for his owner to unhook the chain and let him go; no effort for the mastiff to leave his owner’s yard, drift across town killing cats and raiding trash cans, and end up in North Park.
There are thirty dogs now and maybe more. The newcomers are warier around her than the earlier dogs. Some, the ones who have taken several days to end up here, dodging police cruisers and pedestrians’ Mace, are actively hostile.
“She’s no threat,” Gold says.
The mastiff says nothing but approaches with head lowered and hackles raised. Linna sits on the picnic table’s bench and tries not to screech, to bare her teeth and scratch and run. The situation is as charged as the air before a thunderstorm. Gold is no longer the pack’s leader—there’s a German Shepherd dog who holds his tail higher—but he still has status as the one who tells the stories. The German Shepherd doesn’t care whether Linna’s there or not. He won’t stop another dog from attacking if it wishes. Linna spends much of her time with her hands flexed to bare claws she doesn’t have.
“She listens, that’s all,” says Hope: frightened Hope standing up for her. “And brings food sometimes.” Others speak up: She got rid of my collar when it got burs under it. She took the tick off me. She stroked my head.
The mastiff’s breath on her ankles is hot, his nose wet and surprisingly warm. Dogs were once wolves; right now this burns in her mind. She tries not to shiver. “You’re sick,” the dog says at last.
“I’m well enough,” Linna says.
Just like that the dog loses interest and turns back to the others.
(Why does Linna come here at all? Her parents had a dog when she was a little girl. Ruthie was so obviously grateful for Linna’s love and the home she was offered, the old quilt on the floor, the dog food that fell from the sky twice a day like manna. Linna wondered even then whether Ruthie dreamt of a Holy Land and what that place would look like. Linna’s parents were kind and generous, denied Ruthie’s needs only when they couldn’t help it, paid for her medical bills without too much complaining, didn’t put her to sleep until she became incontinent and began to mess on the living-room floor.
(Even we dog-lovers wrestle with our consciences. We promised to keep our pets forever until they died, but that was from a comfortable height, when we were the masters and they the slaves. It is said that some Inuit groups believe all animals have souls, except for dogs. This is a convenient stance. They could not use their dogs as they do—beat them, work them, starve them, eat them, feed them one to the other—if dogs were men’s equals.
(Or perhaps they could. Our record with our own species is not exemplary.)
8. One Dog and the Eating Man.
This is the same dog. She lives with the Eating Man, who eats only good things while One Dog has only dry kibble. The Eating Man is always hungry. He orders a pizza but he is still hungry so he eats all the meat and vegetables he finds in the refrigerator. But he’s still hungry so he opens all the cupboards and eats the cereal and noodles and flour and sugar in there. And he’s still hungry. There is nothing left so he eats all of One Dog’s dry kibble, leaving nothing for One Dog.
So One Dog kills the Eating Man. “It was him or me,” One Dog says. The Eating Man is the best thing One Dog has ever eaten.
Linna has been sleeping the days away so that she can be with the dogs at night, when they collect. So now it’s hot dusk a day later, and she’s just awakened in tangled sheets in a bedroom with flaking walls: the sky a hard haze, air warm and wet as laundry. Linna is walking past Cruz Park on her way to North Park. She has a bag with a loaf of day-old bread, some cheap sandwich meat, and an extra order of French fries. The fatty smell of the fries sticks in her nostrils. Gold never gets them anymore unless she saves them from the other dogs and gives them to him specially.
She thinks nothing of the blue and red and strobing white lights ahead of her on Mass Street until she gets close enough to see that this is no traffic stop. There’s no wrecked car, no distraught student who turned left across traffic because she was late for her job and got T-boned. Half a dozen patrol cars perch on the sidewalks around the park and she can see reflected lights from others through the park’s shrubs. Policemen stand around in clumps like dead leaves caught for a moment in an eddy and released according to some unseen current.
Everyone knows Cruz Park is full of dogs—sixty or seventy according to today’s editorial in the local paper, each one a health and safety risk—but at the moment very few dogs are visible and none look familiar to her, either as neighbors’ former pets or wanderers from the North Park pack.
Linna approaches an eddy of policemen. Its elements drift apart, rejoin other groups.
“Cruz Park is closed,” the remaining officer says to Linna. He’s a tall man with a military cut that makes him look older than he is.
It’s no surprise that the flashing lights, the cars, the yellow caution tape, and the policemen are about the dogs. There’ve been complaints from the people neighboring the park—overturned trashcans, feces on the sidewalks, even one attack when a man tried to grab a stray’s collar and the stray fought to get away. Today’s editorial merely crystallized what everyone already felt.
Linna thinks of Gold, Sophie, Hope. “They’re just dogs.”
The officer looks a little uncomfortable. “The park is closed until we can address current health and safety concerns.” Linna can practically hear the quotation marks from the morning briefing.
“What are you going to do?” she asks.
He relaxes a little. “Right now we’re waiting for Animal Control. Any dogs they capture will go to Douglas County Humane Society. They’ll try to track down the owners—”
“The ones who kicked the dogs out in the first place?” Linna asks. “No one’s going to want these dogs back, you know that.”
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br /> “That’s the procedure,” he says, his back stiff again, tone defensive. “If the Humane—”
“Do you have a dog?” Linna interrupts him. “I mean, did you? Before this started?”
He turns and walks away without a word.
Linna runs the rest of the way to North Park, slowing to a lumbering trot when she gets a cramp in her side. There are no police cars up here, but more yellow plastic police tape stretches across the entry: caution. She walks around to the break in the fence off Second Street. The police don’t seem to know about the gap.
9. One Dog Meets Tame Dogs.
This is the same dog. He lives in a park and eats at the restaurants across the street. On his way to the restaurants one day, he walks past a yard with two dogs. They laugh at him and say, “We get dog food every day and our master lets us sleep in the kitchen, which is cool in the summer and warm in the winter. And you have to cross Sixth Street to get food where you might get run over, and you have to sleep in the heat and the cold.”
The dog walks past them to get to the restaurants, and he eats the fallen tacos and French fries and burgers around the Dumpster. When he sits by the restaurant doors many people give him bits of food. One person gives him chicken in a paper dish. He walks back to the yard and lets the two dogs smell the chicken and grease on his breath through the fence. “Ha on you,” he says, and then goes back to his park and sleeps on a pile of dry rubbish under the bridge where the breeze is cool. When night comes he goes looking for a mate and no one stops him.
(Whatever else it is, the Change of the animals—mute to speaking, dumb to dreaming—is a test for us. We pass the test when we accept that their dreams and desires and goals may not be ours. Many people fail this test but we don’t have to, and even failing we can try again. And again. And pass at last.