The Heart of Dog

by Doranna Durgin

  Silent dragon's laughter warmed Aleyku more than the breaking dawn. A good start, he decided, breaking into a gentle run downhill. A good start to the pack a wolf and a dragon would build.

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  After the Fall

  by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  I grew up with dogs. My parents always had dogs. Even though I have cats now, mostly because I lived in apartments for so many years, I still spend a lot of time with our neighbors' many dogs. Dogs are grand.

  ----------

  To understand the entire story, we have to start at the beginning—and the story starts, ironically enough, with my very first memory.

  I am three, a small three, especially for a boy whose male relatives are all six-two and two-hundred and thirty pounds of solid muscle. If you look at pictures from the time (and there's no reason why you should), you'd see a wisp of a child, hair so blond it's almost white, skin so white it's almost pale. Even in photographs taken in full sunlight, I tended to disappear, almost as if I were a ghost instead of an actual living boy.

  The memory is mostly sensation: me on my back in the cold spring grass, a weight pressing down on my shoulder, hot drool dripping onto my face as I screamed and screamed and screamed. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the terror—the absolute conviction that this monster on top of me, teeth barred, claws scraping my fragile skin, is going to eat me—that the powerful jaws, so close to my face, are going to open, taking me inside with a single gulp.

  If you hear the family tell it, the truth is less dramatic: our new neighbors, Sissy and Arnold Kappel, are holding a barbecue in the back yard. My father has just mixed the drinks—his specialty even now—when Michael Kappel, the six-year-old who resents being told to play with me, chases the family's Great Dane across the yard.

  I run, and the dog thinks I'm playing. He chases me, tongue lolling, barking happily, with Michael Kappel—already on his way to being the neighborhood bully—scurrying nimbly behind.

  I head for our house, for the safety of the back door, when the dog pounces, knocking me down. His paws are on my shoulder, his tail still wagging, as he licks my face.

  The parents don't come over right away because they think my screams are cries of joy, just Peter's delight at his first introduction to a dog.

  A dog, mind you, who weighs six times what I weigh; a dog who, when he stands on his hind legs, is nearly as tall as my mother was; a dog who, five years later, is put down for biting a toddler so badly that the poor kid never regains the use of her hand.

  ~~~

  The story continues—college, graduate school, assistant professorships, until I finally amass enough experience to be offered tenure. Fortunately, I was offered tenure at a university I love, in Montana, a state I adore.

  During those years, I had grown into my heritage, reaching six-two at sixteen, just like my grandfather, and father before me. Unlike them, however, I remained whip-thin—"rangy," the women out West called it—and my pale skin had become sun-baked, leathery, and tough. When I put on a cowboy hat, I looked like an icon of the American West.

  Such a man needs a dog, or so the locals believed, and everyone tried to foist off their newest puppy or a particularly well-behaved hound. I smiled politely but didn't go near the animals, claiming allergies I didn't have so that I wouldn't risk showing the fear that I felt every time a dog got too close to me.

  Montanans believed their dogs were their best friends, silent companions who forgave everything. It wasn't unusual to see grown men, hat pulled low over their forehead and toothpick in their mouths, driving their four-by-fours, one arm resting on top of the steering wheel and a big dog—generally a collie, a lab, or some other kind of hunting dog—sitting in the passenger seat beside them.

  I happened to wear cowboy boots and faded denims to class, and I had bought an old farmhouse just outside of Missoula, but I wasn't a cowboy any more than I was a Westerner. The dog attack incident had happened in Upstate New York, and my parents, still cosmopolitan socialites, wondered what made their son, with his Ivy League education and all his bright shiny promise, head off for parts unknown the moment Yale sent him his embossed Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card.

  No one understood me and I thought that was great. I thought that was the way life should be.

  ~~~

  That June—the month everything changed—I attended five weddings, two in the space of a single weekend, was invited on and turned down three separate hiking adventures, and broke up with six women in six months. Spring in that part of Montana lingers damn near into July, and one cool sunny day, I decided to leave my home study, where I was examining two new statistics books, sent to me so that I could see if I wanted to upgrade the text for the fall course.

  Reading about numbers was pure joy for me, but that afternoon, with the sun beating into the double-hung windows decorating my corner office, I felt restless. I decided to pull on my boots and walk the property to see what kind of presents the winter storms had left me.

  I had twenty acres, much of it sporadically cultivated. I let one of my neighbors use a section as a garden, and rented out another section to the neighbor on the other side for his mother's double-wide.

  The rest I wandered when I could. Over the years, I had worn a small hiking path along the property's edge. The path went in and out of a large stand of pine, and one entire area cascaded down to a creek that I shared with yet a third neighbor.

  No one could understand why I didn't have a garden, or start a small tree farm, or keep horses so that this beautiful land wouldn't go to waste. But over the years, I'd come to appreciate my solitude, and having twenty acres all around me didn't feel like isolation, it felt like protection.

  I put on my hiking boots and thick jacket, and started my hike.

  The birds had returned full force, and the sun made them sing. I heard a variety of song as I passed in and out of the trees. The air was fresh, carrying on it a hint of pine, the crisp clearness of the creek, and a faint tang I could only identify as spring. The path was still spring-muddy, with deep pockets of rain water and mush along the edges. If I wasn't careful, I would find myself up to my ankles in muck.

  No tree limbs had fallen, but in several areas, the rains and heavy spring run off had washed entire sections of the path away. I went around, over, above, whatever got me past, and as I walked, found myself thinking about the texts I'd been reading.

  Statistics wasn't my favorite subject. I preferred the classes I taught to my graduate students, classes in theory and equations so pure that contemplating them made me feel more than human.

  Statistics and its cousin probability were the workmanlike courses of the advanced math student, classes that attempted to define the world we lived in, not rise above it.

  The professors who had written the two texts I was reading seemed to revel in that world, loving the way that numbers defined it, the way that the path defined the boundaries of my land. Unlike the path, though, the numbers didn't wash away. They formed a permanent barrier, a fence or a rock wall, something that outlined the edges of the world and wouldn't let us see past it.

  Perhaps that was what I did not like about statistics. I appreciated definition, but I liked my mind to roam free, to explore possibilities that human thought hadn't entirely considered. One of my Ph.D. students once claimed that she believed people who studied mathematics—taking it to its outer edges—learned to think differently than the average human. At some point, she said, the mathematician's mind reformed, becoming something greater than it had been before.

  I liked the theory and had never forgotten it. She had taken her Mathematics Ph.D., taught for a year or two, and decided that wasn't enough. The last I had heard, she was attending Divinity School, continuing her quest for the great beyond.

  When she left, she had given me permission to build on the theory, and I toyed with it, especially on walks like this one, where the air was so fresh,
the sunlight so bright, the birds so loud, that part of me assumed this world couldn't be real. Sometimes I felt like it was a fevered dream, conjured by a delusional mind, in search of something better.

  I hadn't been looking—and I stepped on a washed out area, my foot seeking purchase where there was none.

  I tumbled forward, my leg still extended. When it finally hit the earth, my ankle buckled beneath me, and I landed with a thud on my side. The breath slammed out of my body, and for a stunned moment, I felt like I had when the Great Dane stood on me, airless, frightened, about to die.

  My weight forced the mud to move again, and a tiny avalanche of dirt, water, and rock carried me down to the creek. I grabbed at anything, my fingers finding mud so deep that it felt like a river.

  A boulder caught me at the very edge of the creek. My back slammed into it, sending a rocketing pain up my spine.

  But my breath came back, knocked into me, apparently, the way it had been knocked out. I gasped like a drowning man who had been dragged into the air.

  I sat up, dizzy, drenched, caked in mud. The creek, swollen with spring run-off, passed two feet below the boulder. If I hadn't hung up here, I might have fallen in, get swept away, and drowned for real.

  I'd fallen on slides before, and knew the best way out of them was to move horizontally across until I found solid ground. I wedged my hands behind me, pushing myself up, and felt a tug on my left leg.

  My boot was caught between two smaller rocks, shoved in at an impossible angle by the force of my fall. I pulled, but couldn't get the boot free.

  Then I leaned forward and tried to wedge it out.

  That didn't work either.

  My teeth were chattering from the cold, my fingers already red beneath their muddy surface. Staying out of the creek was lucky only if I could get back to the house to get warm. If I was trapped here, even on this sunny day, I could die of exposure, thanks to my wet clothes and the icy temperatures deep in the mud.

  The thought made my numbing fingers more nimble, and I dug the muck out of my boot laces, struggling to untie them. I parted the eyelet, wiggled the tongue. A cool breeze found my foot and I hadn't realized until then how warm that foot felt, as if it were somewhere different than the rest of me.

  I tugged again, planning to slip my foot out of the boot, then grab the boot and head across the slide on my escape back to civilization.

  But my boot wasn't the thing that was caught. My ankle bones were wedged between those rocks, shoved in by the force of my fall, or perhaps by some odd movement of water and slime, and nothing I could do, it seemed, would set me free.

  No one knew I had gone for a walk. No one even knew the route I normally took. This path was so isolated that the only footprints on it were mine, even though the mud had clearly been part of it since the last storm weeks before.

  The neighbor's garden was on the opposite side of the property, and the double-wide was near the road, at least ten acres and a ridgeline away.

  I had no appointments, nothing to do until the following week, when summer school started. I rarely answered my phone so my friends—who were probably more accurately termed acquaintances—wouldn't think anything amiss if I failed to talk to them for days.

  Not even my parents, who called once a week just like they had done since I'd gone to college, would find my silence unusual. Sometimes I would take trips and forget to tell them I'd be out of town.

  It was just me, the mud, and the creek below. And the sun, disappearing behind the Bitterroots quicker than I ever could have imagined.

  ~~~

  He appeared on the boulder at twilight. He looked like I always thought Puck should look, tiny, square, dark, his eyebrows slashing his forehead, his lips permanently turned up in mirth.

  He had wings, thin as gauze and almost invisible in the dimming light, and as he peered down at me, I felt even colder, as if through his vision alone he could steal my soul.

  He wasn't real and that didn't scare me. I accepted it as part of my experience, a delusion brought on by pain, exposure, and trauma.

  "Your path brought you here," he said.

  "Of course it did," I snapped. I was cold, hungry, and more than a little angry—at myself, at him, at being forced to see imaginary creatures simply because I had not been paying attention.

  "Not the path you fell from," he said. "The path you walked every day of your life."

  The last thing I needed was for an hallucination to spout New Age crap at me. "You gonna get me out of here?"

  "It's not my job to free you."

  Because he wasn't real. But there was a slight chance that he was. An ever so slight chance, but one I had to take advantage of. "All you have to do is climb down here, help me move the rocks that are holding my ankle."

  "Rocks that broke your ankle, and no, I can't."

  Because I had made him up, of course. Although he shook his head slightly, as if he'd heard my thought. His voice, when he continued, sounded slightly indignant.

  "They're rock outcroppings, part of the layer of rock underneath. They will not move."

  "Then help me dig my way out."

  "They narrow into a V. Removing the mud will not help you."

  He was merely confirming what I had learned during my long afternoon, my fingernails broken and bleeding from the force of my lessons. But I didn't want to hear his answers. At least, not spoken aloud.

  "Then go to the road, flag someone down. Get help."

  He leaned back and smiled. A slow small smile. "Even if your people could see me, they wouldn't believe me."

  Strange that I did. Perhaps it was part of the experience. Perhaps I was unconscious. I certainly accepted this fantasy creature as if he were part of a dream.

  But that didn't stop me from trying to save myself. "If you don't help, I'll die here."

  He shrugged, and his wings glistened. They weren't transparent as I had initially thought. They were iridescent.

  "It was your choice." His voice rumbled.

  "I didn't chose to walk some life path," I said. "Things happen."

  "Do they?" He turned his head toward me. The movement was not human. It was insect-like; his entire head swiveled so that he could see me more clearly.

  "Yes, of course they do. I didn't plan to fall today. It just happened."

  "Because you forgot to watch where you walked, something people have warned you about often." He squatted, his hands dangling between his knees.

  "That's an easy prediction to make," I said, not trying to hide my sarcasm. "Everyone gets warned about that."

  "And most people heed. You never have. You prefer to analyze, think of statistics and numbers and equations as if that makes you different. As if that makes you special."

  A chill ran through me, making my shivers grow. He was guessing. Of course he was guessing. What else would a mathematician, who had just finished reading statistics texts, be thinking about?

  "You haven't heeded anyone's advice," he said. "You have gone along, ignoring everyone. And now you shall be ignored. Forgotten, even in death. They won't find you for nearly a month, you know."

  That sounded likely. I supposed, if I had known the average time it took to find someone missing in the woods—someone whose movements were known—and then add to it the number of days it would take before someone realized that I was missing—

  "But we can change that," he said.

  Had he been speaking? I hadn't noticed. Concentration was becoming difficult. My shivering had grown worse. Wasn't that a sign that hypothermia had set it?

  "Change what?"

  "Your time of death, if you want."

  I squinted at him. The sun had nearly disappeared. All I could see was his outline, dark and foreboding.

  I wasn't sure if I believed him, but I wasn't sure if my belief mattered. I had a hunch he would do what he wanted to, whether I liked it or not.

  "Why would you change my time of death?"

  He shrugged again and I wished I could se
e his face. "Why not?" he said, and vanished.

  ~~~

  Actually, he didn't vanish. Everything vanished. The woods, the creek, the cold. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in an ancient station wagon, the radio blaring ZZTop. A piece of plastic dug into my back. The seat was ripped, even though I had no idea how I knew that.

  The station wagon was parked in front of a church. The building was large and gaudy, with a white cross rising from the center like a malformed spire. The land around me was flat and the streets carved into blocks.

  Even, uniform blocks, covered with houses—all decked out in ticky-tacky and lined up in a row.

  I shivered again. Or for the first time. I wasn't certain.

  I had no idea how I had gotten here, or if this was yet another hallucination. I must have been pretty far gone—and that had happened fast, hadn't it?—in order to be unconscious and dreaming.

  A woman came out of the church. She wore a gray knit dress with a flared skirt and a pair of low-slung pumps that matched the cheap purse she carried over her arm. Her brown hair swung in rhythm to the skirt, and my breath caught.

  She looked familiar.

  She smiled when she saw me, and then she jogged down the last part of the sidewalk. When she got to the car, she pulled the passenger door open.

  "Well?" she said as she got in. "Aren't you going to ask me how it went?"

  I couldn't remember her name, but I did remember her voice, telling me that mathematics reshaped the brain, that human thought could reach beyond the mundane—

  "Aren't you?" she asked again, her smile now gone.

  "How'd it go?" I tried to make myself sound interested.

  She reached forward and shut off the radio. "I don't know how you can stand that stuff."

  I couldn't. At least, not now. Or then. I knew what was going on. I'd seen it in countless movies and now my brain had chosen to recreate the plot, perhaps as a way to ease my pain in dying.

  "…and are you listening?" she asked.