The Wilds

by Julia Elliott

  In the middle of the playground, two gape-mouthed fighters were hurling themselves at each other—a liver-colored pit bull against a spotted mastiff. I could hear the clack of their teeth. The dogs growled, retreated, and flew together again, lifting a cloud of orange dust. Dr. Vilkas stood two yards from them, squinting into his camera. When the dust cloud dispersed, the triumphant pit bull was dancing around the fallen mastiff. But then the creature stopped cold, sniffed the wind, and looked right at me. As though fired from a cannon, it flew toward my portable, leapt over a stunted juniper, and landed in the sad little place right below my porch where my children had spit a thousand loogies.

  The dog snarled at me. When it opened its rank maw, I gasped at the sight of its jumbled teeth. Its slimy bug eyes watched me. Breath flowed from the beast in thick wheezes. The animal growled. I fingered the keys in my pocket, backing toward the door. The children, watching this spectacle from within, yelled and pounded on the windows. And Dr. Vilkas scrambled toward me, holding some object in both hands, his camera, I thought, figuring he’d film my disembowelment.

  I dropped my keys, heard them clatter against the wooden porch and bounce onto the ground. The pit bull’s neck hackles shot up. Its gums quivered. The creature sprang three feet into the air, then fell on its side, flopped around in the dust, and rolled into a motionless heap.

  “You okay?” Dr. Vilkas stood beside the dog.

  “Did you kill it?”

  “Stunned it with a portable electrode dart.” Dr. Vilkas waved his newfangled aluminum gun. “The animal will revive in five to ten minutes.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t kill it.”

  “Really?” He smiled. “You know it’s illegal to shoot them with real guns.”

  “I know. Actually, my . . . I mean, someone I know bought a tranquilizer gun.”

  Dr. Vilkas fixed me with his mismatched eyes. His gaunt cheeks were scruffed with faint stubble. He had a beautiful mouth, wide and full. He stooped to pluck my keys from the ground.

  Sirens took the air again and the dogs started howling. The pack scrambled east, as though fleeing the sun. The fallen pit bull let out a little croak and twitched its hind legs.

  “Better get inside your classroom,” said Dr. Vilkas, “before this beast revives.”

  I slipped back into my portable, where the children had turned off the lights to see better.

  They cheered for me. Girls pressed in to hug me, wet-eyed, smelling of french fries and imitation designer perfumes.

  I found my husband on the back stoop, hunched over his new tranquilizer gun, three beer cans methodically crushed and stacked at his feet, ready to be boxed and hauled to the scrap-metal recycling center.

  “You’re almost an hour late,” he said.

  “Emergency meeting,” I said. “The dogs came back to school today.”

  For some reason, this made my husband frown.

  “You left three lights on. The kitchen faucet was dripping. You forgot to padlock the garbage cans.”

  “We had a meeting before school and one after—about the new safety procedures. And then the dogs came, so the meeting was delayed.”

  “I needed you here. I wanted to run through the drill.”

  “Drill?”

  “With the cages. Remember? We’ve got to get the fallen dogs into cages within twenty minutes. That’s how long the tranquilizer darts last, on average, and for some of the larger species, who knows what our window of op will be.”

  “Why don’t we run through it now?”

  “Because it’s dusk. The dogs always show up at dusk, or else after midnight. Haven’t you noticed that?”

  My husband was sporting hunting chaps. He wore his new HexArmor bite-proof gloves, purchased on the Web from a veterinarian supply emporium. He’d bought a pair of dog-kicking boots, with treads for running and steel toes, and I’d seen him practicing, kicking logs, smashing the snouts of invisible monsters. But now he slumped on the bottom step—all dressed up for our drill, and I’d stood him up.

  I patted his scalp. I sniffed the air for whiffs of wild dog. My husband, perpetually congested from allergies, could never smell the animals coming, could never sense the bustle in the air, the electromagnetic hullabaloo that made my spine buzz and brought a pleasant fizzle of panic to my heart, even before the animals tumbled into my field of vision like a promise kept.

  “The dogs won’t come tonight,” I said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Feminine intuition.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I think I may have a more developed vomeronasal organ than you do.”

  (I smiled as I said this, but I half believed it.)

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “Pheromone detector, a throwback organ maybe, deep in the nose.”

  Some people had sensitive ones, moist and throbbing and bristling with neurons, while other people’s were all dried up, almost nonexistent.

  I opened the sliding glass door.

  “It’s like half the population has lost its sense of smell,” I said.

  “The air conditioner’s on, you know.”

  “But it’s getting cool. Why don’t we open some windows?”

  “How many times do I have to explain? We live on low land. Moisture breeds mold and mildew. This house was not designed for the open air. In this humidity, without air-conditioning, it would rot away in no time. Do you know what that would do to our property value?”

  “It would plummet?”

  For some reason, this made me laugh. I knew all about humidity and its effects on our house—this was one of those conversations we had over and over for ritualistic, perhaps even religious, purposes. My husband kept a humidity meter posted above the kitchen bar, and sometimes, when he felt especially restless, he’d roam the house at night with his integrated, probe-style thermo-hygrometer, sticking its supersensitive bulb under chairs and beds, sliding it into drawers and cabinets, sometimes crawling into our shower to monitor subtle changes in the closed-off air. Snorting to himself, he’d jot data in his notepad. I’d even seen him thrust the bulb into his own nostrils and ears, smiling slyly, the way he used to when our love was a living creature, breathing in the room with us.

  I closed the sliding glass door. I went to check my e-mail.

  There was a message from our principal with an attachment that contained a list of experts willing to make classroom visits. I scrolled to the bottom of the page, where I discovered the e-mail address of Dr. Ivan Vilkas, evolutionary ecologist and forerunner in the burgeoning field of de-domestication.

  Dr. Vilkas was scheduled to visit my world history class. My students fidgeted and fussed. Whispery agitation erupted in problem areas. Gobs of slobbered paper flew from certain mouths, smacked against the napes and cheeks of certain targets. It was a hot muggy day, our air-conditioning system on the blink. And the children’s sweat smelled peculiar, as though spiked with new combinations of minerals. Their lips looked redder than usual. Most of the kids needed haircuts. And Jebediah Jinks would not stop mumbling biblical gibberish—he might’ve been speaking in tongues for all I knew. Girls snorted and giggled. And an ugly plot seemed to be brewing among the football players—they whistled ostentatiously, cracked their beefy knuckles, and smiled.

  We were discussing an archaeological excavation in Iran, where a tomb containing both human and canine remains had been discovered, the dog skeleton curled in a jar, the man buried with daggers and arrowheads.

  “This means that he was an important man,” I said. “And that the dog was probably a pet.”

  “Or he might have eaten it,” said Rip Driggers. “My daddy says Chinks eat dog. Maybe they eat mutts in Iran too.”

  “But why would they put a dog skeleton in a jar?” asked Tammy Harley.

  “Maybe it was a cooking pot.” Rip snorted.

  “Gross,” said Tonya Gooding. “You’re one sick puppy.”

  “And you’re a biatch,” snapped Rip. “Ruff-ruff.”


  “Watch the language,” I said. I could no longer send Rip outside to calm himself. The principal’s office was swamped these days, delinquents clogging the hallway outside his lair. All I could do was move troublemakers to unpleasant areas of the room, make them clean the dry-erase board, deny them time on our virus-wracked Dells.

  Just as it began to rain, Dr. Vilkas arrived, his knock quick against my hollow aluminum door. I found him grinning on my little porch, spattered with drops, clutching his laptop and a tangle of cables.

  “PowerPoint presentation,” he said, tapping his computer.

  “It’s that guy,” said Rufus Teed.

  “I saw you on television!” said Tonya Gooding.

  We had thirty-five minutes left until the class ended and my planning period began, so we hustled to get his laptop hooked up to my digital projector. As we searched for the right cable, rain beat against the flat, tar roof of my ancient portable. The children murmured and sniggered and pinched each other. Cryptic underground smells oozed up from the vents. Dr. Vilkas asked me to cut the lights, and I stood in the humming darkness with my arms crossed over my breasts.

  “Well, now,” he said, flashing his first slide (a diagram of the canine nasal system). “We don’t have much time, so I’m going to jump right in.”

  Dr. Vilkas rubbed his palms together and smiled at the students, his chin receding.

  “While the human nose contains about five million scent receptors,” he began, “the average dog snout boasts over two hundred million.”

  After pausing to let the drama of his opener sink in, he launched an incomprehensible lecture, describing the receptor neurons and olfactory epithelium of the vomeronasal organ, its dark, squishy, fluid-filled sacs, its mucus-slaked cellular microvilli, which absorbed innumerable odor molecules. As he descended deeper into thickets of technical jargon, his sentences became endless, his accent heavier.

  The children could not take their eyes off the odd man. One by one their mouths popped open. They sat stock-still in their cramped desks. By the time the bell rang, Dr. Vilkas had not progressed past his first slide. Rather than darting from their chairs, the students filed out slowly, glancing back at the evolutionary ecologist before slumping out into the drizzle.

  We stood alone in the dark room.

  “I had a film I wanted to show them,” Dr. Vilkas said.

  “That’s too bad,” I said. “I would have loved to see it.”

  “Well, you could. I mean, we could watch it right now. If you’re free.”

  The classroom smelled pungent, with a trace of something coppery that I could almost taste. Who knew what chaos of desperate, pheromonal signals my poor caged students pumped out, day after day, in our dank little portable as the beauties of the world glimmered beyond their reach in the mythical places they watched on screens. We sat in their tiny desks toward the back of the room, in the territory of the football players, where a turbulent energy still seemed to hover.

  The film, a montage of hundreds of individual canines caught in the act of sniffing, had no sound. We watched one silent dog after another thrust its snout toward this or that reeking object: a pile of dung, a dead cat, a battered Nike tennis shoe. We watched dogs take long, contemplative whiffs of each other’s anuses. We saw them snorting hectically at each other’s genitals. Male dogs patrolled invisible borders, adding their own messages to the mix. Female dogs snuffled their fragrant nurslings. Old dogs nosed their bodies all over for signs of doom.

  Halfway into the film Dr. Vilkas started talking about the different kinds of pheromones: territorial scent markers creating boundaries, alarm pheromones warning of looming dangers, male sex pheromones conveying the special genotype of each species, female sex pheromones announcing optimum fertility, and then there were comfort pheromones, released by nursing females to calm their worried young.

  “The world is a tempestuous tangle of significant odors,” said Dr. Vilkas. “And humans are blunt-nosed fools.”

  “Is it possible for us to pick up some of the dogs’ messages?” I asked him. “Without knowing what we’re picking up?”

  “We don’t really comprehend the human vomeronasal organ,” he said. “Scientists are just beginning to understand a little about human pheromones, how they give us very particular impressions about each other.”

  The film ended and the room went dim, gray storm air glowing outside the windows.

  “Sometimes,” I said, “before a dog pack appears, here at school or at my house, I get this special tingling feeling.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. In my brain, my spine. The nervous system, I guess. I don’t know if I really smell anything at this point.”

  “Very interesting,” he said, rising from his desk. “I have an appointment, but I’d like to talk more about this . . . phenomenon. We could . . . I don’t know.”

  “Meet somewhere?”

  “Yes, we could do that.”

  Dr. Vilkas walked to the media cart and closed his laptop.

  “Like for coffee, maybe,” I rasped.

  “Or maybe we could conduct some tests, scientific experiments with the dogs.”

  Dr. Vilkas dropped one of his cables and picked it up, put it down on the media cart, shook my hand with his hot hand, tucked his laptop under his army jacket, and walked out into the rain.

  “Late again,” said my husband, who held a baggie of fetid meat in his hand, bait for the new leghold traps he’d positioned in shallow trenches around our yard. We were standing behind the garage, beside our new aluminum garbage cans, a hot spot for canine activity.

  “The dogs,” I said.

  “Did they come to school today?” he asked.

  “No. But we had another meeting. Working out the kinks of certain safety procedures.”

  “What kinds of safety procedures?”

  “Rabies prevention.”

  “Which involves?”

  “You know, detection. Symptoms. Vaccination. Rabies is a virus.”

  “Duh.”

  “And we’ve got something this Saturday, something on crowd control.”

  “I thought you were going to help me install the electric fence.”

  “An electric fence won’t keep them out.”

  “How do you know? Intuition?”

  “No. Actually, a dog expert who spoke at school said so.”

  Suddenly I felt very alert. Wind blustered through the trees, shaking drops from leaves. Something zinged up my spine. I thought I smelled Fritos.

  “I know you think I’m crazy, but I feel like they’re coming,” I said. “I really do.”

  “It’s too early. They always come at dusk.”

  “At school they usually come in the afternoon. I’m going inside.”

  “Plus, they’ve never come when it’s this wet out,” my husband called after me.

  I was jogging toward our house. The mist felt good on my skin. I thought I heard my husband laughing at me, or maybe I heard a braying dog. By the time I reached the back porch, they were already streaming into our yard. My husband yelled, ran around the side of the garage, scrambled into the closet where he kept his power tools, and shut the door. He was safe, so I could laugh triumphantly on our back steps, one foot from the door but still outside in the electromagnetic air, my head thrown back, my neck muscles rippling, a long liquid howl shooting out of my throat.

  The dogs didn’t plunder or linger, but tumbled right through, a stinking river of fur and clamor that flowed around our side yard, dipped down into the gulch that had just been cleared for a vinyl-sided mini-McMansion, and disappeared. I couldn’t tell whether they’d gone west or east, and with my heart still thudding, I ran inside to e-mail Dr. Vilkas.

  “A fluid progression?” said Dr. Vilkas.

  “Yes, beginning at the crown, dropping to the top of my nape, moving down my spine, and then, well, from the coccyx to the pubic bone, an, um, quivering in between.”

  “In between?”

&nb
sp; Dr. Vilkas was smirking. I’m not sure if he believed me, and perhaps I did exaggerate, but he was also tipsy, slurping exotic liquid from something called a Scorpion Bowl—gin, rum, vodka, grenadine, orange and pineapple juice—a drink that’d arrived with a flaming crouton afloat in the middle of it, making him giggle and rub his palms together. There was a straw for each of us, and I’d taken more than a few nervous sips. We sat alone, deep in the interior of the Imperial Dragon, a strip-mall restaurant with several windowless rooms, the inner room a jungle of plastic vines with two golden bulldogs cavorting by a miniature waterfall. We dined in a gilded gazebo. Pentatonic lute tunes flowed from speakers. The air-conditioning, set low, smelled moldy.

  Dr. Vilkas tore a chicken wing apart and gnawed gristle from bones. The way he hunched over his food reminded me of a praying mantis, his face an uncanny blend of ugly and beautiful. He had long eyelashes and greenish temple veins. Soft lips and sunken cheeks. And then there were his eyes—one a crisp arctic blue, the other a woodsy green—burning above his receding chin.

  “It could be a reaction to the overwhelming flurry of pheromones the dogs put out. Have you always been this sensitive?”

  “Sort of, but this is different—like something in my brain’s opened up.”

  “Is there any chance you’re pregnant?”

  For some reason, in this red-lit, windowless room, with Dr. Vilkas’s head hovering two feet from mine, the word pregnant, applied to my own body, evoking my invisible husband, uttered with a guttural dip toward the word’s heavy, eggy letter g, brought a hectic flush to my face.

  I wondered if Dr. Vilkas would’ve asked this question in the businesslike bustle of a coffee shop, or at school, in the fluorescent brightness of my portable.

  “No,” I mumbled. “I mean, probably not. I seriously doubt it. Though I guess it’s not impossible.”