by Emily Brewes
The sun was about two-thirds of the way across the sky, which I estimated gave us an hour or two to find a better place to spend the night. I didn’t think that humans spending a mere three decades Underground was enough to repair the damage that we’d done to the climate, but the weather seemed to be holding for the time being. Even if a storm swept across right then, driving us to the valley floor and drowning us in a flash flood, it had been worth it. The struggles, the loss — even the brand on my face.
I figured I might never make it back to the farm, but at least I’d lived like a human being the last of my days. Before this, I’d never realized how soul-crushingly awful it was to live Underground.
Buried alive.
I took a deep breath and soaked it all in.
Just a few more minutes, I thought. Then we’ll make our way back to the road and carry on.
IN MY DREAM, I wake at midnight, beneath a bloated orange moon that looms near the horizon. Doggo is nowhere to be seen. In my panic to find him, I nearly fail to notice the young woman standing in the waist-high grass. She is tall and looks strong. Backlit by the moon, her face is in deep shadow. Only the merest glint of her eyes can be seen. She’s dressed in animal skins and old camouflage hunting gear and holds a spear that looks like it’s made from a hockey stick.
“Hi,” I say stupidly. “Nice spear.”
I’m met with silence. Her only reaction is to shift her weight forward onto the balls of her feet. Some instinct tells me this is not good.
“Want some krill?” I offer, pointing to the pot on a fire I swear I put out hours ago.
She turns. Exposed to the light, I can see she’s pulling a face.
“I hate krill,” says a deep voice that is rough from disuse.
Against every shred of my will, hope lights a tiny flame in my belly. In spite of its heat, I feel my limbs go dead and cold.
I say, “Olivia? Is that you?”
If it is, I’ll never know, because the dream ends there.
I WOKE UP TO SEE it was too late to safely find shelter elsewhere. The sun had set behind us. Though there was still light in the sky, the ground had become too shadowed to move far or quickly. I cursed myself for not having grabbed a flashlight from the Canadian Tire, then thought that even if there’d been any left, they were more than likely all corroded or discharged — well beyond use, anyway.
At least some aspects of scrapping had turned out to be a useful skillset. I could count on one hand the viable batteries that had been salvaged by anyone on the heap. Valuable, sure, but rare enough to not bother looking for. Like a winning lotto ticket, or the Holy Grail.
We could’ve tried to pick our way back to see if there were any candles or oil lanterns, but I suspected all of those things were also long pillaged by pilgrims headed Underground. There was nowhere to go but onward.
I reached down to rouse Doggo, only to find him gone. Panic rose sharply enough that I bit down on my own tongue, hard enough to hurt but not to bleed. I felt around in the grass for the wetness of blood, the sharpness of broken bone, the softness of a freshly dead body, but found none.
Maybe he’d felt the call of the wild and run away. Off to reconnect with his roots as an Albanian low wolf, hunting snack creatures and failing to lick his butt. Or, more likely, he had felt the call of nature and wandered off to take a dump.
“Doggo!” I called loud enough for him to hear me if he was nearby but not so loud as to attract night-hunting predators. “Hey, bud! C’mere, Doggo!”
I picked up my pack. It’d been rifled but not torn. I didn’t think much of it beyond taking a moment to thoroughly and righteously curse Doggo for his gluttony.
“Fucking cock ass shit! I thought we talked about this.” To the night, I called out, “Doggo, you greedy prick! Get back here!”
I became heedless of danger. I was well pissed off, and worried about Doggo, and cranky from the rumble in my belly, and angry at the generations who’d spent their time pointing fingers at one another instead of saving the world, and resentful of all the years I’d wasted cowering in a hole.
“Doggo! Jesus H. Murphy, get your furry butt back here now!”
I reached the roadside having only stumbled twice. There was a twitch in the grasses off to my right that I caught from the corner of my eye. Could’ve been Doggo, could’ve been a bear. A coyote. A lion descended from the ones released from the zoo. I took a moment to watch, holding as still as I was able. The movement continued unabated, suggesting the clumsy step of an elderly wiener dog rather than the soft stealth of a wild animal.
If only I could whistle. “Doggo?” I hissed, “That you?”
The movement turned to make a beeline for my position. The closer it got, the more certain I was that it was Doggo. Or at least that it wasn’t a bear. As it got closer, something about it called to mind a wagging tail and an idiot grin.
“Food Bringer!” crowed Doggo to the deepening night. “I am victorious!” His voice sounded strange, like he had something in his mouth.
“For fuck’s sake, Doggo!” I chided him, though I couldn’t disguise the relief I felt to know he was okay. “Don’t go running off like that.”
He busted through the grass looking pleased as punch. His muzzle was dark with dirt — or possibly blood. In his teeth was an enormous rat that was still squirming.
“Now I am the Food Bringer!” he declared, his words somewhat muffled by his prize.
I reached down to take it from him, but he turned his head.
“Look,” I told him. “If you’re the Food Bringer, that means you have to share.”
He started to growl, but it turned into a whine.
“Hey, buddy. It’s me. It’s okay.” I stood on tiptoe to scout the area in what remained of the light. An abandoned car could just be seen up the road a way. I figured we could hunker down in there, use the cooking pot as a fire pit, and roast the rat.
“C’mon. You carry it over there, then I’ll cut it up for cooking.” The thought raised my gorge a touch, so I added, “I’ll even give you the biggest piece.”
Doggo seemed happy enough with this arrangement to wag his tail weakly. Still, he was clearly torn between his loyalty to the Food Bringer and the instinctual drive to hunt, kill, and devour. As we picked our way along the ruins of the highway, I wondered how I could help my furry friend strike a balance between those two extremes.
When we got to the car, Doggo gingerly lowered his kill into my outstretched hand. It continued to squirm a bit, which struck me as odd. Maybe he hadn’t made the kill at all but found a bloated specimen chockablock with maggots.
I braced myself for maximum squickage as I flicked open the knife I had been clever enough to look for — and find — at the Canadian Tire. Doggo leapt into the passenger seat and watched hungrily with his paws hooked over the ledge of the open window. Great, I thought. An audience.
After a few shallow breaths intended to psych me up, I drew the razor-sharp blade across the belly of the beast. For a few heartbeats, I wasn’t sure if what spilled forth was better or worse than I’d anticipated. At least a dozen bloody pink jellybean babies kind of oozed onto the hood of the car, which I’d used as a butcher block. She might have been preparing to give birth, or been in the midst of it, when Doggo caught her. That explained more than a little.
I didn’t exactly relish the thought of eating the adult rat, let alone boiling up a pot of its blind, hairless babies. So, I decided to give them all to Doggo and make do with their mother. He happily obliged by devouring the litter with lip-smacking relish.
“More?” he inquired.
“You’ll have to wait. I’m going to cook up the rest for me. You can have whatever’s left.”
I anticipated that most of it would be left. Hunger, at this point, had been relegated to a back burner while throat-constricting squick was coming to a simmer.
“Take a nap,” I advised Doggo as I stripped the fur from the rat’s body. “I’ll wake you when I’m done.”
“Yeah, bud,” I assured him. “You knocked this one out of the park.”
I’D LIKE TO RECOUNT that something strange and terrible happened the following morning. That all of my teeth fell out, or that I came unstuck in time, or that Doggo turned into a luck dragon. Instead, when the first spears of new dawn thrust over the eastern horizon, I was overcome with the desire to run. A sensation like panic settled over my shoulders, a cold blanket draped on my skin. Only it felt distinct from true panic. A rising energy, yes, but not the brittle judder of a racing heart, of thoughts spiralling out of control. More like a surge. A great wave, building and curling but never breaking. Despite my limited experience of the sensation, it was similar to my memory of lust.
I wanted to run, not away or toward. Just fleet-footed leaping, barely touching the land as I passed. There and gone again; a shadow, a mystery, a ghost. I longed to forget the thoughts of mankind, to step out from beneath the weight of humanity’s sins and disappear.
The gentle movement of Doggo’s belly beneath my hand as he breathed returned me to the here and now. We were still in the car. It smelled of cold ashes, dampened by a night’s exhalations. Once Doggo had crunched the bones and sinew of the spit-roasted rat, no evidence of her life remained. Her only monument would be the steaming pile Doggo was destined to leave shortly after we took up the road once more.
I tried not to put myself in that creature’s place, because the past can’t be changed. And were it not for her sacrifice, we’d have both gone hungry. Even so, the old dark half pushed its thumb into my empathy centres and I was there, albeit briefly. In the dark, alone and in pain. Maybe not even knowing what was happening to me, only sure that I needed shelter. Safety. And then came this snarling thing of teeth and slobber that reached into whatever hole I’d found. It grabbed me by the middle and pulled me out. Clawing and biting, after one sharp shake, it was all over.
“Thanks, brain,” I grumbled under my breath.
Looking down at Doggo, I couldn’t imagine that ravening beast, though I knew it was there. Behind his dopey face, his idiot grin, and lopsided ears lay a wolf in wait. Even having glimpsed it, I couldn’t quite make it be real.
He was only Doggo, and he was my friend.
The dog breath, though! The combination of exhaled humidity and general stink was getting to me as the air in the car became warmed by the sun. The windows were fogged, so it was impossible to scout the area from inside. There were no manual cranks on the doors, as there had been in my dad’s old Datsun truck. There was a leaky sunroof, which we had propped open while the fire was going. Since we’d be moving on, there was no good reason not to bust it off its hinges and crawl up onto the roof. It would allow me to make sure we weren’t gonna get jumped by man or beast as soon as we opened the doors.
The air was getting colder day by day, so the wheel of the year was almost certainly turning to wintertime. I wondered what winter would be like, or if it hadn’t changed much in thirty-five years. Dampness was pervasive, weighing down the tops of the tall grasses with dew. As the sun warmed this water away, it smelled like my grandmother’s kitchen at Christmas — my dad’s mother — as she boiled a pot of wheat and honey. I had hated eating the stuff, but the smell reminded me of comfort. Of home.
I scanned the flat ground nearby, then squinted out to where it rose up in monolithic cliffs of pink granite. It reminded me of when the old two-lane of Highway 11 was being bypassed. The new set of four lanes had been cut straight through the stone, which was tinged the colour of rare beef by iron deposits. At intervals, the rough faces were striped by the striations of holes drilled for blasting.
Things looked clear, so I slipped back into the car to let Doggo out. He remained fast asleep, which was odd. I would have expected him to notice my absence and begin licking himself out of worry. When I put my hand on him to give him a gentle shake, his shoulder was hot to the touch.
“Hey, Doggo. You still alive?”
His eyes creaked open. They were kind of lopsided, like he was drunk, and he couldn’t seem to focus them. I took his head in my hands. “Hey, buddy, here I am.”
“Mmpf,” he grumbled as his eyes went crossed and rolled heavenward.
Keeping my tone light, despite the knot of worry snaking through my gut, I said, “You’re not looking too good. How d’you feel?”
In reply, he made a series of burps or hiccups, which culminated in him barfing a bunch of bones and rat guts all over the car seat and me. It was the worst reek I could remember smelling. It made me gag, nearly enough to throw up myself. Thankfully, I was able to keep my gorge down long enough to get the door open. Once I got a deep whiff of sweet morning air, I promptly coughed up what little was in my stomach.
Reaching back into the car, I scooped Doggo into my arms. His whole body was shockingly hot and limp as a noodle. Picking him up was like trying to cradle a furry rubber sack half filled with custard.
All I could think to say was “Gonna be okay, Doggo. Gonna be a-okay!”
I assured myself it was nothing serious. Could be he’d just had a bad reaction to so much meat, since he was used to krill and chitin. Or maybe I’d given us both food poisoning from uncooked rat. Only I didn’t feel poorly, apart from some lingering disgust, and his fever seemed high. I vaguely recalled reading something about how dogs’ heat tolerance was lower than humans’.
He felt so hot to me, I wondered if he was totally done for.
No. None of that defeatist talk, I decided. With much effort, Doggo raised his head from my shoulder and licked my cheek. He only ever tolerated being carried, and face-licking was his polite way of asking to be put back on the ground.
I shifted his weight so his front paws curved around the back of my neck. “Hold on, bud. I saw some cottages down by the water. We’re gonna motor over there so we can hunker down till you’re feeling better.”
“Better. Better,” he mumbled, delirious. “Good dog, Food Bringer.”
“That’s right, bud. You’re a good dog.”
Doggo wasn’t exactly heavy, but he was a good ten kilos of long dog. Scrapping had kept me in decent shape, but the weeks of semi-starvation and sickness had taken their combined toll on my muscles. Every dozen steps or so, my body begged to lay down its burden. To just plain lie down. Then I thought of Doggo, how hot and limp he felt, and how his breath was starting to rasp ragged in my ear. So every time, I sucked in a lungful of cool morning air and willed myself to keep going.
Back when I was in school, I’d joined the cross-country running team. The coach was a sturdy woman from the prairies. Her dark curly hair was most often contained by a red woollen toque with the logo Calgary ’88 stitched on the front. She would inform us, “It’s all about hustle, folks! You can run fast, or you can run long, but if you don’t keep those buns motoring, you’ll never cross the finish line.”
“Hustle, kid,” I breathed as we chugged along. “Hustle, hustle, hustle.”
My arms, legs, lower back, and abdomen felt lit on fire when we finally broke through the treeline into the cottage’s once-cleared patch of land. Closer to, it looked pretty run to ruin, but the roof was blue powder-coated steel with the merest suggestion of rust at its edges. As long as the walls didn’t fall over, it would keep the weather off and the wolves out.
We’d just made it across the yard when I panicked. I thought Doggo had stopped breathing. I laid him down on a partially disintegrated deck long enough to check for signs of life. He’d tricked me like this even when he wasn’t sick, because his belly barely moved as he breathed, and he slept soundly as a fricking log. Tension mounted until I felt on the near edge of screaming, frustrated that I couldn’t find what I was looking for. Then Doggo looked googly eyed at me as though nothing was wrong at all.
“Hey,” I mustered, scratching his head. “Thought I’d lost you.”
“Where did you
last have me, Food Bringer?” His voice was so quiet, I could hardly hear him over the gentle chatter of the nearby river.
“Yeah. Food. Right. I’ll get you settled, then boil up some soup.” What I would put in the soup remained to be seen, but that was another problem for Future Jesse. In that moment, I looked for someplace soft to put Doggo and maybe something warm to drape over him. Is that right? Should I cool him down instead?
The cottage door wasn’t locked. Inside smelled old and empty, like too much dust and not enough life, but otherwise not unpleasant. Nothing had died or taken a dump in there, at least not recently enough to make its olfactory presence known. It was one large room, apart from a closed-off corner that probably had a bed in it, and a much smaller one in the opposing corner along the same wall. A closet, maybe. Possibly a washroom.
In the main room was a sitting area with a wood stove. I gratefully set Doggo down on the seat of an armchair. Off came my coat and I laid it over him. Then I pulled the chair close to the stove and used all the skill at my disposal to set a fire in it. Which was to say not much skill at all. Building a fire outside on the ground is completely different from building a fire in a stove. In a stove, there are settings to contend with, parameters to manage and balance. It’s more science than art.
I made sure the flue was open and adjusted the intake choke to its widest setting. Inside the stove was mostly clean. There was no need to dig out a bucketful of ashes first. Then I had only to find some wood to burn. There was likely no outdoor wood pile that had survived this long. I grabbed the hatchet from the stove side and went after the big oaken table in the kitchen area. The varnish on it wouldn’t smell too nice once it caught, but I was starved for choice. And even once I got it into small enough pieces to fit though the stove door, I’d still need kindling.
