The Dogs
I once lived with a whole lot of dogs.
I don’t recall their breed, which is strange, because we were close, and spent so much time together. I loved those dogs, and they loved me. There were dozens of them, each one bright white like freshly fallen snow. I spent my days warm and comfortable in a room with a fireplace, not seeing anyone. The dogs did ask to be let out, but I never once saw them doing their business—which was also strange, but at the time I assumed that they were modest and had set up some kind of toilet area away from the cabin. I didn’t like beds, so I slept standing up, leaning against the windowsill. The dogs would gather around me at night like an overcoat, leaving only my mouth and eyes exposed. I enjoyed drowsily gazing at the fire, drifting to sleep, with the heady feeling of being engulfed by the mass of dogs.
At the time, I had some work that I could do holed up in the cabin. It involved sitting at the desk in the attic from morning to night, peering into a magnifying glass, tweezering tiny pieces of paper of innumerable colors: work too mind-numbing for most people even to contemplate. For many years, come winter, I’d take several weeks’ worth of food and water and hide myself away in that cabin, which belonged to someone I knew.
The cabin consisted of a high-ceilinged living room, a small bedroom, and an attic, but that was plenty of room for me. When I first reached the isolated cabin, having driven inexpertly over the narrow, winding mountain roads, I was still on my own. I remember dropping the keys and struggling to pick them up again while still holding all my luggage, because the bulky scarf that covered half my face prevented me from seeing my hands. Autumn had just ended. Toward the beginning of my stay I’d definitely gone to sleep alone, looking out the window each night and feeling as if I were at the bottom of a deep sea. I don’t recall when the dogs started living there.
I loved all the dogs equally. At first, I tried naming them one at a time, but I didn’t get very far. I’d never actually liked naming things. I was content just looking into the glossy black of their eyes, which shone as though they’d been fired in a magic kiln. It wasn’t as if the dogs called me by name, after all. But this got to be a little inconvenient, so I came up with names to try out on some of them. I lined up the dogs in front of the fireplace and told them to bark if they heard a name they liked. Then I held up the collars I’d fashioned and, looking into their eyes, called out the names one by one.
“First up, Early Morning.”
Heh heh heh heh.
“The Day the Appliances Arrived.”
Heh heh heh heh.
“Pastrami.”
Heh heh heh . . . Yap!
The dog stuck his tongue out deferentially. I placed the collar marked PASTRAMI around his neck.
“The World.”
Heh heh heh heh.
“Takeout.”
Yap! Yap yap!
The dogs took care of their own meals as well. I surreptitiously let them out in the mountain woods, so they probably hunted animals as a pack. Once when I went for a walk among the trees, I found what looked like a bird’s skull at the bottom of a tree. I slipped the skull into my coat pocket and, when I returned to the cabin, I threw it at the dogs where they lay lounging. “Boo!” I shouted. The dogs didn’t really react, but I thought that must be because they were ashamed that I knew they’d been eating birds. They never let me see them feed. What I did see them doing was drinking plenty of the very cold water that I got from the well behind the garage. I tried warming up milk and putting it out for them so they didn’t catch a chill, but they wouldn’t touch that. The ice-cold water seemed to energize them.
One day, I drove down the mountain to replenish some food supplies and came across a knot of people from the town, puffed up in woolly hats and down-filled jackets and gathered by the roadside.
I slowed down to see what was going on. Through the open car window I heard a voice saying something about a dog. My heart skipped a beat. The dog curled up in the passenger seat next to me began to raise his head as if he had sensed something, so I said, “Hush,” and held his round head down in my hand. He’d come nosing around my feet as I was getting in the car, so I’d brought him along.
The dogs’ heads just fit in the palm of my hand, and I was always moved by how their little skulls were wrapped in soft fur. This helped me stay calm on this occasion too, and I quietly rolled up the car window and slipped past the townspeople. Perhaps a dog had caused some kind of problem. In the supermarket, I kept my scarf wound twice around my neck as usual, hiding half my face, to discourage the staff from approaching me. But when the shop assistant from the fruit-and-vegetable section looked into my basket and casually remarked, “Stockpiling All-Bran again?” I plucked up my courage and asked, “Has something happened in town?”
The man looked a little taken aback—probably because I’d spoken at all. “A five-year-old boy’s gone missing,” he whispered.
“A child? Was it a kidnapping?”
“Kidnapping? No, nothing like that would happen around here.”
“Then what?”
“Maybe he fell into the valley when his mother took her eyes off him.”
The bantering air of familiarity that had arisen between me and the shop assistant became unbearable, so I hurried away with my cart. The dog, who’d apparently been asleep at the foot of the passenger seat, looked up at me blearily, and I gave his head a stroke.
I swung by the gas station. There was an elderly attendant there who would always try to strike up a conversation with me. I found it a bit of a trial, but it was the only gas station in town.
I didn’t keep in touch with anyone. I’d always considered my only strengths to be that I was completely content not to talk to a single soul all day and that I had a high tolerance for monotony. The exception was the phone call I got once a week from a certain man. Of the few people I’d met over the years, he was the only one I felt I could still confide in. We had no romantic feelings for each other, simply a relationship where we could say what we honestly thought. When I heard his voice, my shoulders would let go of some of their tension, like the knot in a firmly tied silk scarf loosening deep inside a forest, far from where people are. His speech was distinct, like an oiled egg popping out of his mouth.
There was no doubt he was a misanthrope, like me, but unlike me he had enough courtesy and presence of mind not to let it show. He was the one who let me use this cabin, and would always joke that it was because he wanted me to pursue the life he couldn’t. We often put our opinions to battle on the subject of whether it was better to distance ourselves from civilization or immerse ourselves in it, and when we tired of that we could hang up without a hint of awkwardness. He had a family. After our phone calls, I felt relieved at having fulfilled some minimal quota of human interaction, and comforted by the thought that he seemed to be making steady progress in the kind of life that was my “road not taken.”
There wasn’t a set time for our phone calls, but on that day, like on others, I had a premonition that made me look up from my magnifying glass. I must have been engrossed in the work—though I’d barely had a sip of my hot milk, five hours had passed since I’d come up to the attic. I put my tweezers down on their stand and got up from the chair, checking that none of the tiny pieces of colored paper were stuck to my hands or clothes. Above the desk there was a window with two layers of glass, and I could see several dogs running around in the snow outside.
I descended the ladder with the empty thermos and mug in one hand, and was warming up some more milk when the phone rang. Stirring the aluminum saucepan with a spoon, I reached over with my other hand and slowly lifted the receiver.
“Hey,” he said. “I hope you’re not suffering from isolation fatigue.”
No, I said, and asked whether he wasn’t suffering from socializing fatigue, to which he responded that of course he was.
“You settled in your burrow? Anything giving you trouble?”
I told him about mountain life
—the hair dryer blasting out air that was unbelievably cold, the paths that got buried in snow despite constant shoveling, the front door that I had to hurl my body against when it jammed, the hunks of snow that fell into the fireplace and sent ash flying everywhere.
He said, “That’s why I never go there in winter. I don’t know how you stand it. After living like that, are you really going to want to come back down when spring comes?”
I informed him I’d been down to the town just that day, thank you very much, then asked him never to speak of spring again, because I didn’t want to think about it. That brought the afternoon’s events back to mind, so I told him about the huddle of townspeople I’d come across. “There might have been some kind of incident down there.”
“An incident? Wonder what, in such a nowhere town.”
I was reluctant to tell him more. I didn’t want him to latch on to it and start looking it up in the papers or on the internet. I stopped stirring the saucepan and looked over to the dogs stretched out in the living room. Sprawled on the rugs like white sausages, they acted unconcerned, but I could tell they were a little unsettled by my being on the phone, like a jealous boyfriend. I guess my demeanor changed slightly during these phone calls. It occurred to me that I could ask him about them. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? They might have been his dogs.
“Hey, about those little white fellows,” I said.
“Those ones?” he asked.
“Yeah. They’re doing really well.”
There was a pause. “Oh,” he said. “Here, not so much, but I did spot some of those little white fellows by the road today. Although maybe they weren’t so white. Most of them are black now, with all the gravel and the dirt.”
“Is that so?” I wondered whether black dogs were really more common in cities.
“Plus, the black fellows aren’t doing so well. All melting and deformed, more or less on their last legs.”
I cut off his laughter. “You really don’t know?”
“Know what?”
He wasn’t playing dumb. But for some reason now, I didn’t find it strange in the slightest that he didn’t know about the dogs. One of them came up to me and pressed his fluffy coat against my shin. I knelt down and rubbed his sides as if I was giving him a good scrub, and just said, “I’ll tell you next time.”
“Sure,” he replied, as though to say he was used to my crotchety ways.
After that, we chatted about nothing in particular, and I got through two mugfuls of hot milk. As we were about to hang up, he asked whether I’d seen the weather forecast. I reminded him there was no civilization up here, and he told me, laughing, that a fierce chill would be invading over the weekend.
I decided to follow the dogs in secret when they went out to play in the woods. Once I was holed up in my workroom with the thermos, they knew I wouldn’t be back out for a few hours, so they would start to disperse. They each had a favorite spot. Some liked to be just outside the door to my workroom, and others to lie on the clothes strewn around the bedroom and the living room, but most seemed to be happier outside.
I put on sunscreen to protect against snow burn, and some mirrored sunglasses and an anorak, and left the house. I traced the dogs’ footprints through the bare trees, reveling in my afternoon stroll. Picking up a branch that I liked the look of, I drew meandering lines in the bright snow as I walked, occasionally swapping the branch for another when I encountered a better one.
The dogs’ prints were almost always all in a bunch. They were basically toddling along the least arduous path. Every so often, a set of tracks diverged from the rest, but then shortly came back to rejoin the group. I thought they must hunt as a team, like wolves.
Before I knew it, I was on a path that I’d never been on before. I looked over to a clump of trees and saw one dog peeking through them from behind a bank of snow. His eyes were wide, and he was only visible from the nose up. I waved my branch number five, which was curled like a spring, removed my sunglasses, and said, “I followed you. Is everyone over there? May I join you?”
The dog got lightly to his feet and barked. Then he turned on his heels and ran off. I advanced into the clump of trees through knee-high snow, calling after him, “Should I not have come?” Feeling like a parent secretly checking on whether my children were doing their homework, and suppressing a grin, I looked out from behind a great tree.
I was astonished to see where they were: on a large frozen lake. I hadn’t known it was here, but there the dogs were, stepping with a practiced air across the lake, which was big enough to hold several games of baseball at once. It was as if a ready-made dog park, sculpted by nature, had suddenly appeared before my eyes.
The dogs seemed to have no idea I was behind the tree, and were scattered in all directions. I tried to get closer to see what they were up to, but the ice at the water’s edge was thin, and far too treacherous. I stayed where I was and squinted at the dogs beginning to jump up and down. At first, they only jumped up about as high as they were tall. Gradually their time in the air seemed to increase, until they were jumping so high that they could have cleared the head of a person standing. It seemed that they were each trying to make a hole in the ice. Their front paws made digging movements, trying to break through the surface. Before long, each dog succeeded in making its hole, and jumped swiftly into the water. When the last one had dived in, they were nowhere to be seen. It was as if they’d melted away.
One of them poked its head out of its hole in the ice and sounded a short, sharp cry. It’s drowning and calling for help, I thought in alarm, but in the next moment another dog stuck its head out of the freezing water in a different spot and made the same birdlike cry. More and more dogs popped their heads out from the ice, repeating the cry. It dawned on me what was going on. Swimming as a pack, the dogs were forming a large circle under the ice. And, using their cries, they were slowly closing the circle toward its center. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. I walked around the lake, and when I found an area where the ice seemed thick enough to hold me, I leapt onto it. Using my gloves like windshield wipers, I scraped away the frost and peered through the ice.
The only thing I could see was gray muddiness at the bottom of the lake.
I made my way back to the cabin alone, picturing the dogs gracefully chasing fish through clear water.
That weekend, I woke to the morning I’d always wished for. Every last thing in the world seemed to have frozen over. The All-Bran I kept in the cupboard was in clumps so hard it was like eating hail, and seeing the icicles protruding from the roof I felt like I’d been transported overnight to a grotto filled with stalactites.
Once I’d put on as many layers as I could, shivering all the while, I took an empty bucket and shovel and headed to the garage. The dogs scampered around me, keeping close to my feet as if to hurry me along. By the time I reached the garage, taking three or four times longer than usual, sweat was pouring out of me as though I were in a sauna.
I made sure the generator’s battery indicator was green. I checked how many liters of diesel fuel were left, then decided to dig out some more snow tools. I discovered some emergency tubes of chocolate, years past their use-by date. Finally, I took some old, dusty blankets and went around to the back of the garage. I looked down into the well, and a solemn chill plastered my face. The extreme cold had formed a miniature ice rink in there.
“What shall we do?” I asked the dogs behind me. “Can’t get you any water.”
The one with the collar marked PASTRAMI tried to climb up onto the well, scrabbling with his paws. “Get off!” I told him, and decided to do what I could about the frozen pulley at least.
I brought out a chisel and a mallet from the garage, and as I pounded like a blacksmith with all my might, the frozen rope finally started to give. I took hold of the rope with both hands and gave it a hard tug, and the layer of ice that had formed over the mechanism came away with a clatter as the pulley quickly began to tu
rn.
That was when it happened. Pastrami leapt up onto the well, somehow got into the bucket, and disappeared down the hole, looking pleased with himself.
“Pastrami!” I shouted, but it was too late. He was yapping and rolling around in anguish at the bottom, having slammed onto the thick ice. Frantic, I worked the rope, raising and lowering the bucket that had fallen with him, trying to get him to jump back in it, but the bewildered dog could hardly stand up. “Go get help!” I called to the dogs crowded behind me. I heard the footfalls of several dogs running off. I leaned into the well and stretched my arm down, shouting, “Pastrami! Pastrami!” but the yapping cries reverberating up the well were overwhelming and I couldn’t keep my eyes open.
When I came to, I was slumped by the edge of the well. Pastrami’s cries had ceased, as had the sound of his forepaws scraping at the ice.
“What should I do if an animal jumps into the well?” I asked. The power lines had gone down under the weight of snow, and it was late at night before I got through to him on the phone.
“Animal in the well?” he said, a little sleepily.
“Yeah.” I was wrapped in old blankets from the garage. I’d tried to keep my mind occupied all afternoon, chopping firewood and doing other things, but when night fell, I suddenly felt completely drained, and found myself unable even to stand up. The dogs had stayed close by me through the day, like watchdogs.
“Actually, I did find something like a weasel drowned in it once.”
“Was it winter?”
“Summer.”
“Then that’s a different situation.”
“I think I got someone from the town to get it out. I could give you the number. What is it? A raccoon?”
I told him that I couldn’t really tell because it was all the way at the bottom. He suggested it might be dangerous, and that I should just put the cover back on and leave the animal there. Wolves sometimes prowled the area looking for food, he said. He would come by with his family on his next day off to take care of it. My mind kept replaying Pastrami trying to jump up into the well bucket, and I was terribly tired, so I told him that I wanted to go to bed now. “If you ever feel in real danger . . . ,” he began, then went on to tell me how to unlock the cupboard in the bedroom, which he’d never let me touch before. The emergency hunting rifle was hidden in there. I told him I had no need for such a thing, and hung up.
The Lonesome Bodybuilder Page 13