The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs

by The New Yorker Magazine

  “I don’t know. Yeah. Yeah, I am.” He’d been reading lately. About dogs. Half a shelf of books from the library in their plastic covers—behavior, breeds, courting, mating, whelping. He excised a piece of steak and lifted it to his lips. “Did you hear the Leibowitzes’ Afghan had puppies?”

  “Puppies? What in God’s name are you talking about?” Her face was like a burr under the waistband, an irritant, something that needed to be removed and crushed.

  “Only the alpha couple gets to breed. You know that, right? And so that would be the husky and the Leibowitzes’ Afghan, and I don’t know who the husky belongs to—but they’re cute, real cute.”

  “You haven’t been—? Don’t tell me. Julian, use your sense: she’s out of her mind. You want to know what else Bea said?”

  “The alpha bitch,” he said, and he didn’t know why he was telling her this, “she’ll actually hunt down and kill the pups of any other female in the pack who might have got pregnant, a survival-of-the-fittest kind of thing—”

  “She’s crazy, bonkers, out of her fucking mind, Julian. They’re going to have her committed, you know that? If this keeps up. And it will keep up, won’t it, Julian? Won’t it?”

  THE COMMON ROOM AT MIDNAPORE

  At first they would take nothing but raw milk. The wolf pups, from which they’d been separated for reasons both of sanitation and acculturation, eagerly fed on milk-and-rice pap in their kennel in one of the outbuildings, but neither of the girls would touch the pan-warmed milk or rice or the stewed vegetables that Mrs. Singh provided, even at night, when they were most active and their eyes spoke a language of desire all their own. Each morning and each evening before retiring, she would place a bowl on the floor in front of them, trying to tempt them with biscuits, confections, even a bit of boiled meat, though the Singhs were vegetarians themselves and repudiated the slaughter of animals for any purpose. The girls drew back into the recesses of the pen the Reverend had constructed in the orphanage’s common room, showing their teeth. Days passed. They grew weaker. He tried to force-feed them balls of rice, but they scratched and tore at him with their nails and their teeth, setting up such a furious caterwauling of hisses, barks, and snarls as to give rise to rumors among the servants that he was torturing them. Finally, in resignation, and though it was a risk to the security of the entire orphanage, he left the door to the pen open in the hope that the girls, on seeing the other small children at play and at dinner, would soften.

  In the meantime, though the girls grew increasingly lethargic—or perhaps because of this—the Reverend was able to make a close and telling examination of their physiology and habits. Their means of locomotion had transformed their bodies in a peculiar way. For one thing, they had developed thick pads of callus at their elbows and knees, and toes of abnormal strength and inflexibility—indeed, when their feet were placed flat on the ground, all five toes stood up at a sharp angle. Their waists were narrow and extraordinarily supple, like a dog’s, and their necks dense with the muscle that had accrued there as a result of leading with their heads. And they were fast, preternaturally fast, and stronger by far than any other children of their respective ages that the Reverend and his wife had ever seen. In his diary, for the sake of posterity, the Reverend noted it all down.

  Still, all the notes in the world wouldn’t matter a whit if the wolf children didn’t end their hunger strike, if that was what this was, and the Reverend and his wife had begun to lose hope for them, when the larger one—the one who would become known as Kamala—finally asserted herself. It was early in the evening, the day after the Reverend had ordered the door to the pen left open, and the children were eating their evening meal while Mrs. Singh and one of the servants looked on and the Reverend settled in with his pipe on the veranda. The weather was typical for Bengal in that season, the evening heavy and close, every living thing locked in the grip of the heat, and all the mission’s doors and windows standing open to receive even the faintest breath of a breeze. Suddenly, without warning, Kamala bolted out of the pen, through the door, and across the courtyard to where the orphanage dogs were being fed scraps of uncooked meat, gristle, and bone left over from the preparation of the servants’ meal, and before anyone could stop her she was down among them, slashing with her teeth, fighting off even the biggest and most aggressive of them until she’d bolted the red meat and carried off the long, hoofed shin-bone of a gaur to gnaw in the farthest corner of her pen.

  “I really appreciate this …”

  And so the Singhs, though it revolted them, fed the girls on raw meat until the crisis had passed, and then they gave them broth, which the girls lapped from their bowls, and finally meat that had been at least partially cooked. As for clothing—clothing for decency’s sake—the girls rejected it as unnatural and confining, tearing any garment from their backs and limbs with their teeth, until Mrs. Singh hit on the idea of fashioning each of them a single tight-fitting strip of cloth they wore knotted round the waist and drawn up over their privates, a kind of diaper or loincloth they were forever soiling with their waste. It wasn’t an ideal solution, but the Singhs were patient—the girls had suffered a kind of deprivation no other humans had ever suffered—and they understood that the ascent to civilization and light would be steep and long.

  When Amala died, shortly after the wolf pups had succumbed to what the Reverend presumed was distemper communicated through the orphanage dogs, her sister wouldn’t let anyone approach the body. Looking back on it, the Reverend would see this as Kamala’s most human moment—she was grieving, grieving because she had a soul, because she’d been baptized before the Lord and was no wolfling or jungle bhut but a human child after all, and here was the proof of it. But poor Amala. Her, they hadn’t been able to save. Both girls had been dosed with sulfur powder, which caused them to expel a knot of roundworms up to six inches in length and as thick as the Reverend’s little finger, but the treatment was perhaps too harsh for the three-year-old, who was suffering from fever and dysentery at the same time. She’d seemed all right, feverish but calm, and Mrs. Singh had tended her through the afternoon and evening. But when the Reverend’s wife came into the pen in the morning Kamala flew at her, raking her arms and legs and driving her back from the straw in which her sister’s cold body lay stretched out like a figure carved of wood. They restrained the girl and removed the corpse. Then Mrs. Singh retired to bandage her wounds and the Reverend locked the door of the pen to prevent any further violence. All that day, Kamala lay immobile in the shadows at the back of the pen, wrapped in her own limbs. When night fell, she sat back on her haunches behind the rigid geometry of the bars and began to howl, softly at first, and then with increasing force and plangency until it was the very sound of desolation itself, rising up out of the compound to chase through the streets of the village and into the jungle beyond.

  GOING TO THE DOGS

  The sky was clear all the way to the top of everything, the sun so thick in the trees that he thought it would catch there and congeal among the motionless leaves. He didn’t know what prompted him to do it, exactly, but as he came across the field he balanced first on one leg and then the other, to remove his shoes and socks. The grass—the weeds, wildflowers, puffs of mushroom, clover, swaths of moss—felt clean and cool against the lazy progress of his bare feet. Things rose up to greet him, things and smells he’d forgotten all about, and he took his time among them, moving forward only to be distracted again and again. He found her, finally, in the tall nodding weeds that concealed the entrance of the den, playing with the puppies. He didn’t say hello, didn’t say anything—just settled in on the mound beside her and let the pups surge into his arms. The pack barely raised its collective head.

  Her eyes came to him and went away again. She was smiling, a loose, private smile that curled the corners of her mouth and lifted up into the smooth soft terrain of the silken skin under her eyes. Her clothes barely covered her anymore, the turtleneck torn at the throat and sagging across one clavicle,
the black jeans hacked off crudely—or maybe chewed off—at the peaks of her thighs. The sneakers were gone altogether, and he saw that the pale-yellow soles of her feet were hard with callus, and her hair—her hair was struck with sun and shining with the natural oil of her scalp.

  He’d come with the vague idea—or, no, the very specific idea—of asking her for one of the pups, but now he didn’t know if that would do, exactly. She would tell him that the pups weren’t hers to give, that they belonged to the pack, and though each of the pack’s members had a bed and a bowl of kibble awaiting it in one of the equitable houses of the alphabetical grid of the development springing up around them, they were free here, and the pups, at least, were slaves to no one. He felt the thrusting wet snouts of the creatures in his lap, the surge of their animacy, the softness of the stroked ears, and the prick of the milk teeth, and he smelled them, too, an authentic smell compounded of dirt, urine, saliva, and something else also: the unalloyed sweetness of life. After a while, he removed his shirt, and so what if the pups carried it off like a prize? The sun blessed him. He loosened his belt, gave himself some breathing room. He looked at her, stretched out beside him, at the lean, tanned, running length of her, and he heard himself say, finally, “Nice day, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t talk,” she said. “You’ll spoil it.”

  “Right,” he said. “Right. You’re right.”

  And then she rolled over, bare flesh from the worried waistband of her cutoffs to the dimple of her breastbone and her breasts caught somewhere in between, under the yielding fabric. She was warm, warm as a fresh-drawn bath, the touch of her communicating everything to him, and the smell of her, too—he let his hand go up under the flap of material and roam over her breasts, and then he bent closer, sniffing.

  Her eyes were fixed on his. She didn’t say anything, but a low throaty rumble escaped her throat.

  WAITING FOR THE RAINS

  The Reverend Singh sat there on the veranda, waiting for the rains. He’d set his notebook aside, and now he leaned back in the wicker chair and pulled meditatively at his pipe. The children were at play in the courtyard, an array of flashing limbs and animated faces, attended by their high, bright catcalls and shouts. The heat had loosened its grip ever so perceptibly, and they were, all of them, better for it. Except Kamala. She was indifferent. The chill of winter, the damp of the rains, the full merciless sway of the sun—it was all the same to her. His eyes came to rest on her where she lay across the courtyard in a stripe of sunlight, curled in the dirt with her knees drawn up beneath her and her chin resting atop the cradle of her crossed wrists. He watched her for a long while as she lay motionless there, no more aware of what she was than a dog or an ass, and he felt defeated, defeated and depressed. But then one of the children called out in a voice fluid with joy, a moment of triumph in a game among them, and the Reverend couldn’t help but shift his eyes and look.

  (Some details here are from Charles MacLean’s The Wolf Children: Fact or Fantasy? and Wolf-Children and Feral Man, by the Reverend J. A. L. Singh and Robert M. Zingg.)

  | 2002 |

  “Now play dead.”

  DOGTOWN

  BEN McGRATH

  If you find yourself on the service road of the Major Deegan, in the shadow of the Cross Bronx Expressway, between the train tracks and the Harlem River, and you hear loud barking interspersed with the crowing of roosters, do not be alarmed. Follow your ears (and the flies) to the chain-link fence, and, while noting the “No Trespassing” and “Beware of Dog” signs, introduce yourself politely to whoever might be sitting nearby, at the entrance of what appears to be a canine shantytown—plywood huts, wire cages, tarps, and assorted vehicles packed into half an acre near the base of High Bridge.

  The land belongs to the New Tabernacle Baptist Church, which for the past eleven years has run a kind of nonprofit kennel club for urban hunting dogs, carrying on a local, word-of-mouth tradition that dates to around the Second World War. A New Tabernacle volunteer named Lewis Jones (everyone calls him Lou) serves as the chief groundskeeper, tending to, among other things, a charred mound of beer cans that passes for a waste-disposal system. Fifteen dog shanties house about fifty beagles, coon hounds, and Italian mastiffs. At one point, the kennel had an official name—the Highbridge Hunting Club—but its charter has lapsed. The dogs’ owners do not pay rent, although donations to the church are encouraged.

  One afternoon last week, a man named Peppy (Lou calls him Lucky) was sitting on a rusty bench while facing a pen full of mastiffs that were pawing aggressively at the gate. “These are guard dogs,” he said. “The rest are bird dogs, rabbit dogs.” (Lou says that the mastiffs are for “hunting the big game, like lions and tigers.”) A few roosters wandered around freely, speaking their minds. Peppy had on a green T-shirt with a picture of a snarling dog and the words “Remington Steel: We breed with overseas methods.” He said that he’d been raising dogs in the Bronx for almost two years—an arriviste. “There’s not too many places in the city you can keep dogs,” Peppy said. “If you’re into hunting, you heard of this place.”

  Soon, Peppy’s business partner, Ross, arrived, carrying a couple of boxes of syringes, for applying tick and flea repellent. The two men opened the nearest padlock and began attending to their pooches, the most stubborn of whom was named Isabella. A couple of albino cats prowled the perimeter. The roosters kept crowing. “Cats came, I guess, because of the rats,” Ross said. “See, the rats will come to try to eat the dog food.”

  “Got rats down here about the size of an arm,” Peppy said. “Cats eat the rats.”

  “I guess it’s just a nature thing,” Ross said.

  And the roosters? “That’s old hunting tradition,” Peppy said. “It’s a Southern thing.”

  Guests are not common, and the conversation proceeds at a languid pace. “The A.S.P.C.A. comes down sometimes,” Peppy said. “Sanitation comes by to see that it don’t smell.” Occasionally, someone from a rowing club upriver will wander by, having beached at a wet-weather discharge station near the Metro-North rail yards.

  “One guy approached us—he wanted to bring some pits,” Ross said, referring to pit bulls. “We try to steer clear of that.”

  “He might be Michael Vick-in’ it,” Peppy said, referring to the Atlanta Falcons quarterback, who has been indicted on charges of helping to run a dogfighting ring. (Last week, Vick pleaded not guilty.) Peppy and Ross’s dogs don’t fight, they said, but they do compete. Ross used to breed “Rotts”—Rottweilers. Now he prefers Cane Corsos, a variety of Italian mastiff. “They’re the No. 1 guard dog in the world,” he said. He also enters them in events organized by the Protection Sports Association. “You got ‘weight pull,’ ‘hard catch,’ ” he said. Then he described an event in which a man hides behind a tepee and, on command, a dog charges and lunges for the man’s arm. Isabella paced and drooled.

  A recent visitor, still bewildered upon leaving such a place (the nearest subway stop is twenty-five minutes away on foot, across multiple highways), tried recounting his experience—the hounds, the roosters, the cats, the tepee—to Joseph Pentangelo, a local A.S.P.C.A. official. “You sound like you went to Oz,” he said, and added, “You’re not allowed to own roosters in New York City.” He wasn’t aware of the New Tabernacle kennel, but he mentioned that the week before he’d been called to retrieve a horse that had got loose on Pelham Parkway. “This guy appeared to be squatting, keeping it as a pet,” Pentangelo said. “He’d made this stable using the box from a delivery truck, and then he fashioned a corral out of wire and police barricade and pickle barrels.”

  | 2007 |

  FANCIERS

  GEORGE W. S. TROW

  Right this minute (if you will join us in the historical present), we are in the Eugenia Room of Sardi’s. What a treat. Not many actors physically in sight, although plenty of ghosts. Instead, we see dozens of dog fanciers (members of the Dog Fanciers Club), wonderful and exciting pictorial representations of dogs displayed on stands, a f
ew pieces of dog sculpture standing on their own, and, above all these (like classical busts in a Grinling Gibbons room), pictures from what we have come to think of as Sardi’s Permanent Collection—i.e., the real stuff. We start with one of Michael Redgrave, by Don Bevan. “Dear Sardi’s, I am happy to be here among my friends” is the inscription.

  The dog fanciers also seem to be happy to be with one another. Their club has been in existence for about thirty years. It used to meet at various restaurants, even at the old Statler, but for the last fifteen years it has met exclusively at Sardi’s. For a time, the dog fanciers just talked about dogs—American Kennel Club rules and things like that—but three years ago Howard Atlee, the club president, decided that their meetings needed what he calls “event identity,” and so now they have an annual show of dog art, and judge the art, and the winning artists receive five hundred dollars and are invited to donate their objects to the Dog Museum, in St. Louis. In order that this story won’t be threaded through with unnecessary suspense, we can say that the winners this year are Stumped, by Harry C. Weber, which is a bronze sculpture of two Jack Russells writhing around in the wilderness; Champion American Bull Terrier, by Babette Joan Kiesel, which is a straightforward portrait; The Party, by Jodi Hudspeth, which is a bronze sculpture of three Yorkshire terriers having a kind of birthday party, with a gift box and dog bones and a ball and another small thing, maybe a book, in the foreground; and Autumn Beauty, by Stephen J. Hubbell, which is an oil on canvas of a debonair English setter.

  O.K. Now we’re back in the Eugenia Room. After looking up at Michael Redgrave, we walked cautiously around. We admired a piece of sculpture called Sighthound, by Kathleen O’Bryan Hedges, from Great Falls, Virginia. Sighthound was very thin and silvery. Then we heard another piece being described as “Matissey” and “Cézanney,” and we kept right on going. We talked to Mr. Atlee. “Most people have a picture of a dog, even if they don’t have a dog,” he said. We have no idea if this is true. Mr. Atlee looked just like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird as he said it. We were told that Ellen Fisch, who lives in Hew-lett, Long Island, and has painted a portrait of Ranger, the Queen Mother’s Welsh corgi, and presented it at Clarence House, was there. But we didn’t meet her. We did meet Mrs. Edward L. Stone, a distinguished-looking woman, who was one of the judges.