An Oath of Dogs

by Wendy N. Wagner

  The sound stopped. Standish held her breath. The things could be right outside, waiting for her to feel comfortable enough to come out of her sanctuary. She had no idea how smart they might be. Or how many there might be. One leather bird was small, but it was strong enough to knock her down.

  Maybe they were what happened to that poor bastard out there.

  Hattie wriggled a little, her claws digging through Standish’s tough work jeans. They couldn’t stay in here forever. She had to come up with a plan, a way to fight off the leather birds. She wished she had something more powerful in her pocket than just her stupid pepper spray.

  She did have her hand unit. They were a long way from the receiving tower, but she might get a signal out here. She could call for help. Brett would come. And he had an air bolt gun.

  She wriggled her hand toward her pocket. She had to twist herself slowly and quietly away from the wall to reach her side, and her elbow turned at an awkward angle. She could just feel the zipper pull. Her fingertips pinched closed on it at the same moment she realized the zipper pull should be on the other side of her pocket. She dropped it and patted the side of her coat, feeling the cold teeth of the zipper hanging open like the dead man’s skull. Standish choked back a cry of rage.

  She’d left the zipper undone. She’d checked for her pepper spray and then she’d left her fucking zipper undone. She wriggled her hand into her pocket, feeling around the inside desperately, but it was no good: the hand unit, the pepper spray, both were gone. She was trapped inside the tree with no way to call for help and nothing to fight off the creatures.

  Something rustled outside the crack, and claws clacked on the trunk overhead. The leather birds had found her.

  HUGINN, Day 87

  Vonda finally told everyone that she is expecting, so we women all got together to make her and Orrin a celebration quilt. It was strange, seeing all the familiar faces gone so pale and thin. We tried to have fun like we would have back on Earth, but it wasn’t the same. Maria Sounds has a cough that won’t go away, and Orrin’s mama shakes too bad to do any of her fine stitching.

  Matthias says not to worry. We replanted the communal field, and he says he’s seen sprouts in it. I’d feel more relaxed if I could just sit down and be with him for a few minutes every day. But he is always busy with Orrin and Shane and Mr Perkins. They are hard-working men, always building, cutting wood, setting the boundaries of our new world.

  I am terribly lonely, but I suppose I won’t be for long: we’re bringing the dogs out of cryo. It will be so good to have my Soolie to walk with! He is a good, good dog.

  I’d be happier if it weren’t for the reason. Last night I went out to the barn to give our first defrosted calf a bottle and found the poor thing on the ground, a leather bird perching on its body. I beat the leather bird off, but the calf was already unconscious from blood loss. The cut on the calf’s neck looked as neatly sliced as a knife wound.

  The leather birds never used to come around our fields, but ever since our hunt, they’ve been getting closer and closer. It’s like they’re punishing us for attacking them.

  I can’t help but be frightened of the things, but soon I’ll have Soolie to help protect us.

  PETER PICKED up the black unit from where it lay in the gravel and turned it over in his hands. He’d seen Standish’s UTV parked at the end of the road, and now he’d found what had to be her hand unit. He’d come to the far corner of Sector 12 because he’d hoped to find a few untouched stands of candelabra trees, and instead he’d run into a secret road and Standish’s personal effects.

  He’d have to go looking for her, of course. She was new to the forest; she could get hurt. The woods weren’t safe for even an experienced woodsman like Dunc. Did she even know about red death puffballs or Judas grass? She could be dead right now.

  Peter hurried down the road, hoping he’d find Standish on its relative safety. Not that he could understand what it was doing out here. The Believers had held Sectors 13 and 14 for the past hundred plus years, and they didn’t need roads. They’d never developed the land — just held onto it in case their community expanded. He didn’t know why they’d sold after all these years, but the deal had only gone through a few months before Duncan went missing.

  And if the road was that new, he would have been the first to know. Engineering would have known better than to put in a road without getting a biological consult. The company wasn’t going to bulldoze a single centimeter of dirt until they determined there was no value in the stuff. Any organism on the planet could be a gold mine in botanical pharmacology or some as-yet undiscovered applied technology. He had the company breathing down his neck for quarterly reports on that shit.

  Just ahead, the road widened into a big graveled turnaround, probably created to park heavy equipment or even serve as a base of operations. He’d seen plenty of these set-ups on Huginn — a logging company would bulldoze a new road, send in a team of foresters, and then assess the area. Half the towns on the planet had started out like that clearing.

  “Hattie!” a woman shrieked in the distance, and the fear in her voice cut through his thoughts like a chainsaw through a rotten trunk. The dogs, he thought, already reaching for the air horn on his belt as he broke into a run.

  He hit the trail at the end of the road and sped up, following it on instinct. “Standish!”

  She didn’t answer. He had no idea where she was. He pushed himself faster, glad he hadn’t given up running after all these years. “Standish!”

  The rustling behind him spun him around. Just a leather bird. Had he passed her somehow? He spun around, skidded on a crushed opal puffball, and left the path.

  There, a broken fern.

  There, another smashed puffball.

  He was on her trail. He could see the leather birds ahead now, landing on the branches of an exceptionally large horsetail tree. Its multiple trunks spread open in the largest candelabra he’d seen around Canaan Lake.

  A leather bird made its warning sound, a low croaking deep in its chest that was nothing like the sounds they used to navigate. Peter took a step backward as he realized the creature faced him, threatened him. And then he realized how many, many leather birds there were on this tree. He had never seen so many in one place.

  There was nothing birdlike about the ones moving up and down the tree trunk; they clung to it like badly designed dinosaurs, pulling themselves along with their clawed wingtips and spiky toes. Their spade-shaped heads looked too large for their bodies.

  One moved lower, toward a crack in the base of the tree. It followed another creature that had already found the gap. The first leather bird rushed into the gap, and then a dog yipped.

  Peter raised the air horn and squeezed the trigger.

  Leather birds launched into the air, reeling, twisting, the aerial equivalent of staggering. One hit the neighboring tree and fell to the ground, stunned. Peter ran to the hollowed tree.

  “Standish!”

  Hattie squeezed out of the tree, a brown shape clamped in her mouth. Peter swiped at the thing. The dog whipped it out of his grasp.

  “Thank God you’re here.” Standish crawled out backward, talking fast. “There were so many of them—”

  “Hattie, give it to me,” Peter ordered. He grabbed the limp tail of the leather bird.

  Hattie growled.

  “What the fuck?” Standish scrambled to her feet. “What’s wrong with you, man?”

  “They’re poisonous.” He tugged on the tail. “Shit, we’ve got to get it out of her mouth.”

  “Hattie, drop it.” Standish frowned at the dog. “Drop it.”

  The dog looked at her for a moment. Peter crouched down, ready to grab the dog if he had to. But finally, Hattie placed the leather bird on the ground. It lay still.

  “Do you have any water?”

  Standish grabbed the pack lying beside the tree. A green slick of leather bird dung ran down one of the straps. She grabbed the water bottle from the front pocke
t. Hattie pawed at her mouth.

  “We’ve got to rinse out her mouth,” Peter ordered. He put his hand out to the dog, unsure of its response. Hattie had seemed like such a calm, friendly dog, but he didn’t trust any dog that growled at him.

  Standish fussed with the dog for a minute, and Peter watched them both closely. Something had taken a gouge out of Hattie’s muzzle. Standish seemed better off. Fresh blood showed on her ear and her neck was covered in scratches. A little blood had smeared across her jacket collar. Standish finished rinsing out Hattie’s mouth and wiped off the dog’s lips and tongue with her sleeve. The dog sat through this indignity calmly, happily, even. When Standish poured a little of the water into a collapsible bowl, the dog licked her cheek as if everything was normal.

  He forced himself to take a deep breath. After what had happened to Rob McKidder, he had to admit he was the last person to think clearly on the matter of dogs. Hattie was well-trained. For all he knew, part of her training involved food and strangers. He’d seen the dog at a bad moment, that was all. The growling meant nothing.

  He sat down on the needle-littered ground. “I’m glad I found you.” He held out the hand unit. “You could have been in real trouble without this.”

  She hugged the device to her chest. “I’m so glad you did.”

  “Maybe you should stay out of the woods until you’ve been out with some experienced people. There are a lot of things you need to know to live out here, and—”

  She cut him off. “I found something.” She got to her feet. “You’ve got to see it.”

  “What?” She was already hurrying away, and he had to stretch his legs to catch up with her. She was taller than him by at least four centimeters. “What did you find?”

  Instead of answering, she looked back at him. “Are we safe? From the leather birds?”

  “Yeah, we should be fine. They’re super territorial.”

  “Territorial. Sure.” Standish went silent, her eyes on the ground, looking for tracks, and she realized she’d come off the trail at yet another point, a place much closer to the turnaround spot. She took another step and then stopped. “There. Look.”

  He followed her pointing finger. For a second, he couldn’t make out anything beyond the clumps of pseudo-ferns and an oddball patch of rock-eater lichen.

  Then he saw the yellow boots.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus.” He lurched forward. “Oh, Duncan, oh, sweet Jesus, Duncan.” He dropped to his knees beside the body.

  “It’s him?” Standish hunkered down beside him, her hand on his shoulder.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, wishing he could open them and not see the ugly yellow work boots. “He always wore that brand. Said they had better arch support.” He opened his eyes unwillingly. “Oh, Duncan,” he whispered.

  He reached out and touched the red-and-blue plaid sleeve. “Was it the dogs or the puffballs that got you?” he whispered. “You always said you were safe out here. I agreed.” He gave a dry bark that wasn’t quite a laugh. “We were fucking idiots.”

  “Peter.”

  “No, we were. We came here because it was supposed to be this beautiful, magical wilderness, and it killed him, it killed Duncan. We’re so fucking stupid!”

  Standish shook him, hard. “Peter. Look!”

  She pointed to Duncan’s chest, where the last three centimeters of a silver rod stuck out of the worn plaid fabric.

  “An air bolt.” Peter shifted the body a little. The bolt didn’t emerge from Duncan’s back, but he could picture the line it must have made in Dunc’s body. The bolt had penetrated just below the collar bone and traveled down and diagonally through the thoracic cavity. Its cruelly pointed tip had probably caught someplace in the contours of his vertebrae.

  “An air bolt?”

  He sat back on his heels, rubbing his hands on the crushed ferns beneath him. “It wasn’t Huginn. Somebody killed him.”

  We all want to be unique. We cleave to the tiny things that define us as individuals. We rejoice in everything that marks us as beings different from all others, delighting in our free will. I believe that is what allows us to bring wrongdoing into the world.

  — from MEDITATIONS ON THE MEANING OF EVIL, by MW Williams

  CHAPTER TEN

  HUGINN, Day 102

  This week we built our house! As a work crew, we’ve gotten faster and faster at building barns and simple houses — after all, this is the third house we’ve built, and we’ve got lots of outbuildings — but I never get tired of stepping inside a new, fresh-smelling home. Being dry is a thing of beauty!

  Of course Matthias barely got a minute to enjoy the new place. He carried me over the threshold like a real gentleman and we spent the night sitting next to our own fire, eating dinner by ourselves. It felt strangely quiet after taking communal meals for so long. We’ll still be eating in the mess tent most nights, since we’re still sharing food stores. I can’t decide if that will be nice or sad. It was good to have my husband all to myself, no matter how brief.

  Today I’ve stolen away for a few minutes to unpack my one crate of personal items. The crate looks smaller here on Huginn; it’s half the size of the box of tack the Ohio Believers community sent along. (Not that I begrudge the space that box took up. I’ve been studying leatherwork and so has Vonda Morris, but neither of us has half the talent we need to match Earth-quality gear.)

  Soolie is over the moon to smell everything that comes out of the box. How strange it must be to be a dog and wake up one morning someplace so different from where he fell asleep! For him, no time has passed since the morning I gave him two sleeping pills in a bit of minced beef. For me, it’s been a little more than a year. Even with most of that spent in cryo, I know where the time went. For that, I suppose I’m lucky to be a human.

  I have a few more minutes before I need to get back and prepare the midday meal. I think I will take Soolie into the woods and cut a horsetail sapling for some kind of shelf. Right now my house is four plain walls and a floor. There’s no place to put treasures like my grandmother’s clock or the book of recipes my mother put together for me.

  Although to be honest, I’m not sure I want to look at that recipe book. We’re down to lentils and rice in the stores, and if I even look at the names of some of Mother’s dishes, I think I will cry.

  HATTIE SQUEEZED her head and chest between the seats so she could put her paw on Standish’s leg. Standish glanced at Peter to see if he minded the damp dog, but he sat slumped in the passenger seat, his cheek pressed against the window and his eyes hollowed out.

  Standish started the rig and turned it around with care. Hattie wriggled until her front half rested on Standish’s lap, and the rest of her squeezed into the floor space. The smell of dog and horsetail fronds filled the vehicle. Hattie rubbed her muzzle on Standish’s damp and muddy knee, leaving behind streaks of saliva. She hadn’t stopped drooling since she’d bitten that leather bird.

  “Peter? Is Hattie going to be OK?” She glanced over at him. His head bounced against the glass as they hit a rough patch in the road, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Peter?”

  He didn’t lift his head. “Yeah, I think. She didn’t eat any of it, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Yeah, she should be fine.” He went silent again, and Standish drove on in silence.

  They pulled up in front of the police station. Standish opened her door and jumped down. Peter didn’t move.

  “We have to go to the sheriff, Peter,” she said. She thought of all the people who had used that same gentle voice with her: the nurses in the hospital trying to change the dressings on her face after the crawler accident, kindly bartenders at closing time; a half-dozen therapists and psychologists. Her memory brought up a sudden flash of Dewey, her hair fuchsia at that point, standing in the kitchen doorway, tears spilling off her fake eyelashes. She pushed the memories away and walked around the truck to throw open Peter’s door. She wasn’t a gentle person.

  “Get out.”
/>   He blinked at her stupidly. His brain had hidden someplace beneath his grief, and ordinary words were not going to bring it up to the surface. All this time, he had hoped that Duncan was still alive. She saw that now. Before, he had seemed to mourn and move on, but he hadn’t really. He hadn’t let sadness touch the inside of him.

  She shook his shoulder, hard.

  “I am not going to let you just sit in the fucking car while I go talk to the sheriff. You are going to go in there with me and help Duncan.” She grabbed his knees and spun him to face her. “You got it?”

  “OK.” He blinked again, but there was a little bit of intelligence in his face now. He slid to the ground and managed to stay upright.

  It wasn’t until they were standing inside a warm dry room that Standish realized how wet and filthy they really were. The woman behind the desk — a middle-aged woman with black hair pulled back in a neat French braid and her uniform neatly ironed — looked them from head to toe.

  “You two need some coffee? Maybe a bowl of water for your dog, Ms Standish?” She got up and headed toward the coffee station in the corner without waiting for an answer.

  “We found a body in the woods,” Standish blurted.

  The woman cocked her head. “Cream? Sugar?”

  “A body,” Standish repeated.

  “It was Duncan,” Peter said. He took a few steps toward the yellow plastic chair beside the desk and then sank into it. “We found Duncan. And he was murdered.”

  The woman pressed a mug into his hands. “Tell me everything, Peter.”

  “Sheriff, it…” He stopped, swallowing down a lump in his throat. “Standish, you tell her.”

  So this was Sheriff Vargas. Somehow Standish had pictured a woman with short hair and muscles bulging out of her sleeves, not this school principal-looking lady. She took a deep breath. “I was hiking with my dog,” she began, because it was easier than admitting she’d gone out looking for Duncan Chambers’ secrets. “We got chased by some leather birds, and then I fell over a dead body.”