This week we bring you “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change” by Kij Johnson.
This story depicts a world in the aftermath of “The Change,” a mysterious event whereby all domesticated mammals spontaneously gain near-human intelligence and the ability to speak. It was shortlisted for the 2007 Nebula Award for Best Novelette and the 2008 World Fantasy Award—Short Fiction.
Our soundtrack is produced with a soundtrack of arrangements of various songs by The Pixies.
Story Excerpt:
North Park is a backwater tucked into a loop of the Kaw River: pale dirt and baked grass, aging playground equipment, silver-leafed cottonwoods, underbrush, mosquitoes and gnats that blacken the air at dusk. To the south is a busy street. Engine noise and the hissing of tires on pavement mean the park is no retreat. By late afternoon the air smells of hot tar and summertime river bottoms. There are two entrances to North Park: the formal one, of silvered railroad ties framing an arch of sorts, and an accidental little gap in the fence back where Second Street dead-ends into the park’s west side, just by the river.
Enjoy the show! (Full story printed after the jump)
Drabblecast 407 – The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change
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The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of
North Park After the Change
by Kij Johnson
North Park is a backwater tucked into a loop of the Kaw River: pale dirt and baked grass, aging playground equipment, silver-leafed cottonwoods, underbrush, mosquitoes and gnats that blacken the air at dusk. To the south is a busy street. Engine noise and the hissing of tires on pavement mean the park is no retreat. By late afternoon the air smells of hot tar and summertime river bottoms. There are two entrances to North Park: the formal one, of silvered railroad ties framing an arch of sorts, and an accidental little gap in the fence back where Second Street dead-ends into the park’s west side, just by the river.
A few stray dogs have always lived here, too clever or shy or easily hidden to be caught and taken to the shelter. On nice days (and this is a nice day, a smell like boiling sweet corn easing in on the south wind to blunt the sharper scents), Linna sits at one of the faded picnic tables with a reading assignment from her summer class and a paper bag full of fast food. She waits to see who visits her.
The squirrels come first and she ignores them. At last she sees the little dust-colored dog, the one she calls Gold.
“What’d you bring?” he says. His voice, like all dogs’ voices, is hoarse and rasping. He has trouble making certain sounds. Linna understands him the way one understands a bad lisp, or someone speaking with a harelip.
(It’s a universal fantasy, isn’t it? —that the animals learn to speak and at last we learn what they’re thinking, our cats and dogs and horses: a new era in cross-species understanding. But nothing ever works out quite as we imagine. When the Change happened, it affected all the mammals we have shaped to meet our own needs. They all could talk a little, and they all could frame their thoughts well enough to talk. Cattle, horses, goats, llamas. Pigs. Minks. And dogs and cats. And we found that, really, we prefer our slaves mute.
(The cats mostly leave, even ones who love their owners. Their pragmatic sociopathy makes us uncomfortable and we bore them, and they leave. They slip out between our legs and lope into summer dusks. We hear them at night, fighting as they sort out ranges, mates, boundaries. The savage sounds frighten us, a fear that does not ease when our cat Klio returns home for a single night asking to be fed and to sleep on the bed. A lot of cats die in fights or under car wheels but they seem to prefer that to living under our roofs, and as I said, we fear them.
(Some dogs run away. Others are cast out by the owners who loved them. Some were always free.)
“Chicken and French fries,” Linna tells the dog, Gold. Linna has a summer cold that ruins her appetite and in any case it’s too hot to eat. She brought her lunch leftovers, hours old but still lukewarm: half a Chik-fil-A sandwich and some fries. He never takes anything from her hand, so she tosses the food onto the ground just beyond kicking range. Gold likes French fries so he eats them first.
Linna tips her head toward the two dogs she sees peeking from the bushes. She knows better than to lift her hand suddenly, even to point or wave. “Who are these two?”
“Hope and Maggie.”
“Hi, Hope,” Linna says. “Hi, Maggie.” The dogs dip their heads nervously as though bowing. They don’t meet her eyes. She recognizes their expressions, the hurt wariness: she’s seen it a few times on the recent strays of North Park, the ones whose owners threw them out after the Change. There are five North Park dogs she’s seen so far. These two are new.
“Story,” says the collie, Hope.
2. One Dog Loses Her Collar.
This is the same dog. She lives in a little room with her master. She has a collar that itches, so she claws at it. When her master comes home, he puts a leash on the collar and takes her outside to the sidewalk. There’s a busy street outside. The dog wants to play on the street with the cars, which smell strong and move very fast. When her master tries to take her back inside, she sits down and won’t move. He pulls on the leash and her collar slips over her ears and falls to the ground. When she sees this, she runs into the street. She gets hit by a car and dies.
This is not the first story Linna has heard the dogs tell. The first one was about a dog who’s been inside all day and rushes outside with his master to urinate against a tree. When he’s done, his master hits him because his master was standing too close and his shoe is covered with urine. One Dog Pisses on a Person. The dog in the story has no name, but the dogs all call him—or her: she changes sex with each telling—One Dog. Each story starts, “This is the same dog.”
The little dust-colored dog, Gold, is the storyteller. As the sky dims and the mosquitoes swarm, the strays of North Park ease from the underbrush and sit or lie belly-down in the dirt to listen to Gold. Linna listens, as well.
(Perhaps the dogs always told these stories and we could not understand them. Now they tell their stories here in North Park, as do the dogs in Cruz Park a little to the south, and so across the world. The tales are not all the same though there are similarities. There is no possibility of gathering them all. The dogs do not welcome eager anthropologists with their tape recorders and their agendas.
(The cats after the Change tell stories as well but no one will ever know what they are.)
When the story is done and the last of the French fries eaten, Linna asks Hope, “Why are you here?” The collie turns her face away. It is Maggie, the little Jack Russell, who answers. “Our mother made us leave. She has a baby.” Maggie’s tone is matter-of-fact. It is Hope who mourns for the woman and child she loved, who compulsively licks her paw as though she were dirty and cannot be cleaned.
Linna knows this story. She’s heard it from the other new strays of North Park: all but Gold, who has been feral all his life.
(Sometimes we think we want to know what our dogs think. We don’t, not really. Someone who watches us with unclouded eyes and sees who we really are is more frightening than a man with a gun. We can fight or flee or avoid the man, but the truth sticks like pine sap. After the Change, some dog owners feel a cold place in the pit of their stomachs when they meet their pets’ eyes. Sooner or later they ask their dogs to find new homes, or they forget to latch the gate, or they force the dogs out with curses and the ends of brooms. Or the dogs leave, unable to bear the look in their masters’ eyes.
(The dogs gather in parks and gardens, anywhere close to food and water where they can stay out of people’s way. Ten blocks away, Cruz Park is big, fifteen acres in the middle of town. Thirty or more dogs already have gathered there. They raid trash or beg from their former masters or strangers. They sleep under the bushes and the bandstand and the inexpensive civic sculptures. No one goes to Cruz Park on their lunch breaks anymore.
(In contrast North Park is a little dead end. No one ever did go there and so no one worries much about the dogs, yet.)
3. One Dog Tries to Mate.
This is the same dog. There is a female he very much wants to mate with. All the other dogs want to mate with her too, but her master keeps her in a yard surrounded by a chain-link fence. She whines and rubs against the fence. All the dogs try to dig under the fence, but its base is buried too deep. They try to jump over, but it is too tall for even the biggest or most agile dogs.
One Dog has an idea. He finds a cigarette butt on the street and puts it in his mouth. He finds a shirt in a dumpster and pulls it on. He walks right up to the master’s front door and presses the bell button. When the master answers the door, One Dog says, “I’m from the men with white trucks. I have to check your electrical statico-pressure. Can you let me into your yard?”
The man nods and lets him go in back. One Dog takes off his shirt and drops the cigarette and mates with the female. It feels very nice, but when he is done and they are still linked together, he starts to whine.
The man hears and comes out. He’s very angry. He shoots One Dog and kills him. The female tells One Dog, “You would have been better off if you had found another female.”
The next day after classes—hot again, and heavy with the smell of cut grass—Linna finds a dog. She hears crying and crouches to peek under a hydrangea, its blue-gray flowers as fragile as paper. It’s a Maltese with filthy fur matted with twigs and burrs. There are stains under her eyes and she is moaning with the terrible sound of an injured animal.
The Maltese comes nervous to Linna’s outstretched fingers and the murmur of her voice. “I won’t hurt you,” Linna says. “It’s okay.”
Linna picks the dog up carefully, feeling the dog flinch under her hand as she checks for injuries. She knows already that the pain is not physical. She knows the dog’s story before she hears it.
The house nearby is massive, a graceful collection of Edwardian gingerbread work and oriel windows and green roof tiles. The garden is large, with a low fence just tall enough to keep a Maltese in. Or out. A woman answers the doorbell. Linna can feel the Maltese vibrate in her arms at the sight of the woman: excitement, not fear.
“Is this your dog?” Linna asks with a smile. “I found her outside, scared.”
The woman’s eyes flicker to the dog and away, back to Linna’s face. “We don’t have a dog,” she says.
(We like our slaves mute. We like to imagine they love us and they do. But they are also with us because freedom and security war in each of us, and sometimes security wins out. They love us. But.)
In those words Linna has already seen how this conversation will go, the denials and the tangled fear and anguish and self-loathing of the woman. Linna turns away in the middle of the woman’s words and walks down the stairs, the brick walkway, through the gate and north toward North Park.
The dog’s name is Sophie. The other dogs are kind to her.
(The story is, that when George Washington died, his will promised freedom for his slaves, but only after his wife had also passed on. A terrified Martha freed them within hours of his death. Though the dogs love us, thoughtful owners can’t help but wonder what they think when they sit on the floor beside our beds as we sleep, teeth slightly bared as they pant in the heat. Do the dogs realize that their freedom hangs by the thread of our lives? The curse of speech, the things they could say and yet choose not to say, makes that thread seem very thin.
(Some people keep their dogs even after the Change. Some people have the strength to love, no matter what. But many of us only learn the limits of our love when they have been breached. Some people keep their dogs. Many do not.
(The dogs who stay seem to tell no stories.)
4. One Dog Catches Possums.
This is the same dog. She is very hungry because her master forgot to feed her, and there’s no good trash because the possums have eaten it all. “If I catch the possums,” she says, “I can eat them now and then the trash later, because the they won’t be getting it all.”
She knows that possums are very hard to catch, so she lies down next to a trash bin and starts moaning. Sure enough, when the possums come to eat trash, they hear her and waddle over.
“Oh, oh, oh,” moans the dog. “I told the rats a great secret and now they won’t let me rest.”
The possums look around but they don’t see any rats. “Where are they?” the oldest possum asks.
One Dog says, “Everything I eat ends up in a place inside me like a giant garbage heap. I told the rats and they snuck in, and they’ve been there ever since.” And she let out a great howl. “Their cold feet are horrible!”
The possums think for a time and then the oldest says, “This garbage heap, is it large?”
“Huge,” One Dog says.
“Are the rats fierce?” says the youngest.
“Not at all,” One Dog tells the possums. “If they weren’t inside me, they wouldn’t be any trouble even for a possum. Oh! I can feel one dragging bits of bacon around.”
After whispering among themselves for a time, the possums say, “We can go in and chase out the rats, but you must promise not to hunt us ever again.”
“If you catch any rats, I’ll never eat another possum,” she promises.
One by one the possums crawl into her mouth. She eats all but the oldest, who is too tough and stringy to be worth it.
“This is much better than dog food or trash,” she says.
(Dogs love us. We have bred them to do this for ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million years. It’s hard to make a dog hate people though we have at times tried, with our junkyard guards and our attack dogs.
(It’s hard to make dogs hate people but it is possible.)
Another day, just at dusk, the sky an indescribable violet. Linna has a hard time telling how many dogs there are now, ten or twelve perhaps. The dogs around her snuffle, yip, bark. One moans, the sound of a husky trying to howl. Words float up: dry, bite, food, piss.
The husky continues its moaning howl, and one by one the others join in with drawn-out barks and moans. They are trying to howl as a pack but none of them know how to do this, nor what it is supposed to sound like. It is a wolf-secret and they do not know any of those.
Sitting on a picnic table, Linna closes her eyes to listen. The dogs out-yell the trees’ restless whispers, the river’s wet sliding, even the hissing roaring street. Ten dogs, or fifteen. Or more. Linna can’t tell because they are all around her now, in the brush, down by the Kaw’s muddy bank, behind the cottonwoods, beside the tall fence that separates the park from the street.
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.”
“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.
(A slave is trapped, choiceless and voiceless, but so is her owner. Those we have injured may forgive us, but how can we know? Can we trust them with our homes, our lives, our hearts? Animals did not forgive before the Change. Mostly they forgot. But the Change brought memory, and memory requires forgiveness, and how can we trust them to forgive us?
(And how do we forgive ourselves? Mostly we don’t. Mostly we pretend to forget.)
At noon the next day Linna jerks awake, monkey-self already dragging her to her feet. Even before she’s fully awake, she knows that what woke her wasn’t a car’s backfire. It was a rifle shot and it was only a couple of blocks away and she already knows why.
She drags on clothes and runs to Cruz Park, no stitch in her side this time. The flashing police cars and caution tape and men are all still there but now she sees dogs everywhere, twenty or more laid flat near the sidewalk, the way dogs sleep on hot summer days. Too many of the ribcages are still; too many of the eyes open, dust and pollen already gathering.
Linna has no words, can only watch speechless; but the men say enough. First thing in the morning the Animal Control people went to Dillon’s grocery store and bought fifty one-pound packages of cheap hamburger on sale, and they poisoned them all and then scattered them around the park. Linna can see little blue styrene squares from the packaging scattered among the dogs.
The dying dogs don’t say much. Most have fallen back into the ancient language of pain, wordless keening. Men walk among them shooting the suffering dogs, jabbing poles into the underbrush looking for any who might have slipped away.
People come in cars and trucks and on bicycles and scooters and on their feet. The police officers around Cruz Park keep sending them away—”A health risk,” says one officer: “Safety,” says another—but the people keep coming back, or new people.
Linna’s eyes are blind with tears. She blinks and they slide down her face, oddly cool and thick.
“Killing them is the answer?” says a woman beside her. Her face is wet as well but her voice is even, as though they are debating this in a class, she and Linna. The woman holds her baby in her arms with a white cloth thrown over its face. “I have three dogs at home and they’ve never hurt anything. Words don’t change that.”
“What if they change?” Linna asks. “What if they ask for real food and a bed soft as yours, the chance to dream their own dreams?”
“I’ll try to give it to them,” the woman says but her attention is focused on the park, the dogs. “They can’t do this.”
“Try and stop them.” Linna turns away tasting her tears. She should feel comforted by the woman’s words, the fact that not everyone has forgotten how to love animals, but she feels nothing. And she walks north, carved hollow.
10. One Dog Goes to the Place of Pieces.
This is the same dog. She is hit by a car and part of her flies off and runs into a dark culvert. She does not know what the piece is, so she chases it. The culvert is long and it gets so cold that her breath puffs out in front of her. When she gets to the end there’s no light and the world smells like metal. She walks along a road. Cold cars rush past but they don’t slow down. None of them hit her.
One Dog comes to a parking lot which has nothing in it but the legs of dogs. The legs walk from place to place but they cannot see or smell or eat. None of them are her legs, so she walks on. After this she finds a parking lot filled with the ears of dogs, and then one filled with the assholes of dogs, and the eyes of dogs and the bodies of dogs; but none of the ears and assholes and eyes and bodies are hers, so she walks on.
The last parking lot she comes to has nothing at all in it except for little smells like puppies. She can tell one of the little smells is hers, so she calls to it and it comes to her. She doesn’t know where the little smell belongs on her body, so she carries it in her mouth and walks back past the parking lots and through the culvert.
One Dog cannot leave the culvert because a man stands in the way. She puts the little smell down carefully and says, “I want to go back.”
The man says, “You can’t unless all your parts are where they belong.”
One Dog can’t think of where the little smell belongs. She picks up the little smell and tries to sneak past the man but the man catches her and hits her. One Dog tries to hide it under a hamburger wrapper and pretend it’s not there but the man catches that, too.
One Dog thinks some more and finally says, “Where does the little smell belong?”
The man says, “Inside you.”
So One Dog swallows the little smell. She realizes that the man has been trying to keep her from returning home but that the man cannot lie about the little smell. One Dog growls and runs past him and returns to our world.
There are two police cars pulled onto the sidewalk before North Park’s main entrance. Linna takes in the sight of them in three stages: first, she has seen police everywhere today so they are no shock; second, they are here, at her park, threatening her dogs, and this is like being kicked in the stomach; and third, she thinks: I have to get past them.
North Park has two entrances. Linna walks down a side street and enters the park by the little narrow dirt path from Second Avenue.
The park is never quiet. There’s busy Sixth Street just south, and the river and its noises to the north and east and west; trees and bushes hissing with the hot wind; the hum of insects.
But the dogs are quiet. She’s never seen them all in the daylight but they’re gathered now, silent and loll-tongued in the bright daylight. There are forty or more. Everyone is dirty now. Any long fur is matted. Anything white is dust-colored. Most of them are thinner than they were when they arrived. The dogs face one of the tables, as orderly as the audience at a string quartet, but the tension in the air is so obvious that Linna stops short.
Gold stands on the table. There are a couple of dogs she doesn’t recognize in the dust nearby, lying flat with their sides heaving, tongues long and flecked with white foam. One is hunched over; he drools onto the ground and retches helplessly. The other dog has a scratch along her flank. The blood is the brightest thing Linna can see in the sunlight, a red so strong it hurts her eyes.
The Cruz Park cordon was permeable, of course. These two managed to slip past the police cars. The vomiting one is dying.
She realizes suddenly that every dog’s muzzle is swiveled toward her. The air snaps with something that makes her back-brain bare its teeth and scream, her hackles rise. The monkey-self looks for escape but the trees are not close enough to climb and she is no climber, the road and river too far away. She is a spy in a gulag. The prisoners have little to lose by killing her.
“You shouldn’t have come back,” Gold says.
“I came to tell you. Warn you.” Even through her monkey-self’s defiance, Linna weeps helplessly.
“We already know.” The pack’s leader, the German Shepherd, says. “They’re killing us all. We’re leaving the park.”
She shakes her head, fighting for breath. “They’ll kill you. There are police cars on Sixth. They’ll shoot you however you get out. They’re waiting.”
“Will it be better here?” Gold asks. “They’ll kill us anyway with their poisoned meat. We know. You’re afraid—”
“I’m not—” Linna starts but he breaks in.
“We smell it on everyone, even the people who take care of us or feed us. Even you. We must leave.”
“They’ll kill you,” Linna says again.
“Some of us may make it.”
“Wait! Maybe there’s a way,” Linna says and then: “I have stories.”
In the stifling air, Linna can hear the dogs pant even over the street noises. “People stories are only good for people,” Gold says at last. “Why should we listen to yours?”
“We made you into what we wanted; we owned you. Now you are becoming what you want. You belong to yourselves. But we have stories and we learned from them and maybe they will help you. Will you listen?”
The air shifts, but whether it is the first movement of the still air or the dogs shifting, she can’t tell.
“Tell your story,” says the German Shepherd.
Linna struggles to remember half-read textbooks from a sophomore course on folklore, framing her thoughts as she speaks them. “We used to tell a lot of stories about Coyote. The animals were here before humans were, and Coyote was one of them. He did a lot of stuff, got in a lot of trouble. Fooled everyone.”
“I know about coyotes,” a dog says. “There were some by where I used to live. They eat puppies sometimes.”
“I bet they do,” Linna says. “Coyotes eat everything. But this wasn’t a coyote, it’s Coyote. The one and only.”
The dogs murmur. She hears them work it out: Coyote is the same as This is the same dog.
“So. Coyote disguised himself as a bitch so that he could hang out with a bunch of other females just so he could mate with them. He pretended to be dead and then when the crows came down to eat him, he snatched them up and ate every one. When a greedy man was keeping all the animals for himself, Coyote pretended to be a very rich person and freed them all so that everyone could eat. He—” She pauses to think, looks down at the dogs all around her. The monkey-fear is gone. She is the storyteller, the maker of thoughts. They will not kill her, she knows. “Coyote did all these things and a lot more. I bet you’ll think of some too.
“I have an idea of how to save you,” she says. “Some of you might die but some chance is better than no chance.”
“Why would we trust you?” says the mastiff-cross who has never liked her, but the other dogs are with her. She feels it and answers.
“Because this trick, maybe it’s even good enough for Coyote. Will you let me help?”
We people are so proud of our intelligence, but that makes it easier to trick us. We see the white-truck men and we believe they’re whatever we’re expecting to see. Linna goes to U-Haul and rents a pickup truck for the afternoon. She digs out a white shirt she used to wear when she ushered at the concert hall. She knows clipboard with printout means official responsibilities, so she throws one on the dashboard of the truck.
She backs the pickup to the little entrance on Second Street. The dogs slip through the gap in the fence and scramble into the pickup’s bed. She lifts the ones that are too small to jump so high. And then they arrange themselves carefully, flat on their sides. There’s a certain amount of snapping and snarling as later dogs step on the ears and ribcages of the earlier dogs, but eventually everyone is settled, everyone able to breathe a little, every eye tight shut.
She pulls onto Sixth Street with a truck heaped with dogs. When the police stop her she tells them a little story. Animal Control has too many calls these days: cattle loose on the highways, horses leaping fences that are too high and breaking their legs—and the dogs, the scores and scores of dogs at Cruz Park. Animal Control is renting trucks now, whatever they can find. The dogs of North Park were slated for poisoning this morning.
“I didn’t hear about this in briefing,” one of the policemen says. He pokes at the heap of dogs with a black club. They shift like dead meat. They reek; an inexperienced man might not recognize the stench as mingled dog breath and shit.
Linna smiles, baring her teeth. “I’m on my way back to Animal Control,” she says. “They have an incinerator.” She waves an open cell phone at him and hopes he does not ask to talk to whoever’s on the line because there is no one.
But people believe stories and then they make them real. The officer pokes at the dogs one more time and then wrinkles his nose and waves her on.
Clinton Lake is a vast place, trees and bushes and impenetrable brambles ringing a big lake: beyond that, open country in every direction. When Linna unlatches the pickup’s bed, the dogs drop stiffly to the ground and stretch. Three died of overheating, stifled beneath the weight of so many others. Gold is one of them but Linna does not cry. She knew she couldn’t save them all but she has saved some of them. That has to be enough. And the stories will continue. Stories do not easily die.
The dogs can go wherever they wish from here, and they will. They and all the other dogs who have tricked or slipped or stumbled to safety will spread across Kansas, the world. Some will find homes with men and women who treat them not as slaves but as friends, freeing themselves as well. Linna herself returns home with little shivering Sophie and sad Hope.
Some will die, killed by men and cougars and cars and even other dogs. Others will raise litters. The fathers of some of those litters will be coyotes. Eventually the Changed dogs will find their place in the changed world.
(When we first fashioned animals to suit our needs, we treated them as though they were stories and we the authors, and we clung desperately to an imagined copyright that would permit us to change them, sell them, even delete them. But some stories cannot be controlled. Perhaps we started them but they change and they are no longer ours, if they ever were. A wise author or dog owner listens and learns and says at last, “I never knew that.”)
11. One Dog Creates the World.
This is the same dog. There wasn’t any world when this happens, just a man and a dog. They lived in a house that didn’t have any windows to look from. Nothing had any smells. The dog shit and pissed on a paper in the bathroom, but not even this had a smell. Her food had no taste, either. The man suppressed all these things. This was because the man didn’t want One Dog to create the world and he knew it would be done by smell.
One night One Dog was sleeping and she felt the strangest thing that any dog has ever felt. It was the smells of the world pouring from her nose. When the smell of grass came out, there was grass outside. When the smell of shit came out, there was shit outside. She made the whole world that way. And when the smell of other dogs came out, there were dogs everywhere, big ones and little ones all over the world.
“I think I’m done,” she said, and she left.
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