Frantically he clawed his way up the familiar handholds. To the Cohort, it must have appeared childishly easy to ascend, but Mal had had much practice, so that when he came to the ledge he thrust himself into the air and over the lip in one smooth motion.
Mal lay where he had hidden the day he had fought the lion, breathing as silently as he could manage. He could hear the Cohort continuing their chase, arriving at the base and awkwardly scrabbling at the steep rocks, sending stones bouncing down to the ground.
Mal closed his hand on his spear. He knew from experience that a club might not complete the task.
The nearest of them was panting loudly, and Mal pictured his progress, knew where he was, could hear him when he stopped just below the ledge, puzzling it out.
Mal rolled to his feet, lifting the spear. The Cohort was looking up at him when Mal threw his weapon and hit him in the throat.
This time they did shout.
Mal did not wait to confirm the kill. He leaped up the last distance to the top of the rocky bluff and ran to the smoke hole entrance, quickly descending and landing lightly near the fire.
Lyra was holding Dog on the leash and stared at Mal with wide, terrified eyes. He held a hand over his mouth: silence. Then he crawled quickly to the ground-level entrance and slid back out into the sun.
His spear lay where he left it, next to the club. He picked up both weapons and peered around the rocks.
The Cohort he had killed lay faceup, the spear still pointing skyward. Another was climbing cautiously upward, holding a club, while the third stood with spear ready, watching for Mal to appear again.
Mal stepped out, taking his time, drawing his spear back. When he let fly it was with all of his strength, and the Cohort fighter screamed when the stone point pierced his back. He stumbled forward, dropping his spear, falling to his hands and knees.
Mal switched his club to his woman’s side hand. Now there was just one of them.
The Cohort on the wall reacted instantly, leaping away from the rocks and landing heavily on the ground. He rolled and came up clutching his club, crouching and looking in all directions.
When he realized Mal was alone, he smiled.
* * *
Dog seemed to sense Lyra’s terror. The wolf was whimpering and struggling against her embrace, while Lyra put her face in the soft fur, wetting it with her tears.
“Please remain, Dog, remain,” Lyra whispered, using the command Mal taught her.
When she heard a man scream, Lyra put a hand to her mouth. Was it Mal? Dog was almost frantic, now, pulling against her rope. Lyra regarded the wolf with wide eyes, nodding decisively. “You are right, Dog,” she said.
* * *
Mal mimicked the Cohort’s crouched stance, his club ready. What was needed, he decided, was a feint, get the Cohort to flinch, then swing the club hard and down. Even if the Cohort dodged, the club would hit his shoulder, with force enough to break bones.
For that to work, Mal needed to work his way forward, and a quick lunge was out of the question. He took a tentative step. The Cohort, seeing his withered leg, smiled again, a malevolent baring of fangs in the blackened face.
The man Mal had speared from behind was still on his hands and knees, breathing harshly and struggling to stand back up.
The man with the club came forward. Mal feinted and then raised his club and his blow was blocked! Gasping, Mal threw himself to the side, taking a solid hit in the ribs. His breath left him in a yell and he fell to the dirt. The Cohort stepped forward.
A streak of black and grey flashed past Mal’s vision and Dog was there, her massive jaws closing on the Cohort’s arm, breaking the bone and shaking the club free. With a harsh scream, the Cohort punched at Dog with his free hand.
Mal groped for a weapon, for the spear the Cohort had dropped, and saw Lyra with it. She ran past him, spear pointing out, and put all her weight behind the thrust to the Cohort’s gut.
Clutching his ribs, Mal staggered to his feet. Dog was still savagely tearing at the now lifeless Cohort. “Dog. To me! To me, Dog!”
Dog stopped her assault. Panting, drooling, she trotted to Mal and sat, her eyes wild. He put a trembling hand down on her head to calm her.
The other Cohort had stopped trying to rise and had fallen back to the dirt, his breathing raspy and labored. With a gurgle, he became motionless. Lyra turned to Mal, shock in her eyes. He went to her, Dog at his heels.
When he held her in his arms, she was shaking. Dog whimpered and pressed against them both, and they stood like that for a long time.
“Mal!”
Mal and Lyra whipped their heads up. The Wolfen men were returning, a woman with them—running, of course. Mal again put a hand on Dog’s head. “All is good, Dog. These are friends. Remain. Remain.”
The three Wolfen slowed when they crossed the stream and approached the flat area with the three dead Cohort. They appeared astounded.
“We came to warn you of Cohort in the area. You did this, Mal? Fought these three by yourself?”
Mal shook his head. “This is Lyra. She is … she is my wife. She fought as well.”
The Wolfen stood looking at the dead as if unable to believe what they were seeing. Dog yawned anxiously, still panting.
“In our tribe, our best hunter is also a woman,” Cragg said. “This is Denix.”
“And Dog,” Lyra said. “She helped, too. Together we are a Kindred hunt, and Mal is the master. The Dog master.”
Silex looked at Dog’s mouth, the blood there. Then he glanced up at Lyra with a smile. “Dog master,” he repeated. “Just so. An apt term. Dog master.”
After they buried the dead, the five people, different creeds, Kindred and Wolfen, ate reindeer meat together by the fire.
* * *
Dog was tense and restless until night fell and her man and the woman took her to the cave. She could smell the other humans out by their fire, but now it was as it should be, with her man lying on the mother-wolf thing, the woman next to him. Dog did not fear any harm from the woman.
The events of the day were deeply disturbing to Dog, so she climbed over to the man and put her head on his chest, the way she had slept when she was a puppy. His hand came down to rest on her head.
“All is good, Dog.”
She understood that her name was Dog and knew the sound “good” as praise. She had pleased her man.
The woman, too, made sounds, though nothing Dog could recognize.
“I love you, Mal.”
“I love you, too, Lyra.”
Sighing, Dog felt the tension leave her. They were in the den, safe and together, the way they were meant to be. She closed her eyes and soon fell fast asleep.
PRESENT DAY
Professor James K. Morby met his friend and longtime collaborator Bernard Beauchamp in the small coffee shop just down the street from Morby’s hotel. The two men drank strong coffee from delicate china cups, watching idly as people strode briskly past on the sidewalk. Each man kept drifting from the conversation, wandering among his own thoughts. Jean Claude, the graduate student thirty years younger than either of the two PhDs, sat at the table respectfully. Both professors had uneaten pastries on the small plates in front of them, making Jean Claude tense. He did not know if it would be impolite to ask the men if they were going to eat the sweet rolls, but he yearned to snatch them up and bolt them down as quickly as he had finished his own.
“You are all packed, then, Jim?” Beauchamp asked nonchalantly.
“What? Oh yes, yes. All ready to go. Sorry. I’m feeling oddly … deflated.”
“Deflated? Je ne comprends pas très bien ce que ca veut dire.”
“I just mean to say that I always believed we would find her. The wolf, the first dog. I knew it. And now that we have … I have completed a quest, a purpose, and I am not sure what I will do to replace it.”
“So your work is finished?” young Jean Claude asked. He found a sliver of almond he had neglected to eat and put it in hi
s mouth.
The other two men smiled at him. “Not finished, no,” Morby replied. “I will never be finished. But there is only so much we can guess from the fossil record. All of my work, in the end, comes down to nothing more than an educated guess. Would you like my roll, Jean Claude?”
“Well, perhaps … if you are not going to eat it.”
“You have been staring at it the way my dog watches me carve meat,” Beauchamp observed wryly.
Morby’s eyes crinkled as he passed over the pastry. “For just a moment, let’s picture it, Jean Claude. The climate is changing, vast sheets of ice preparing to storm the continent. The human race clings to a fragile existence, not even enough of us in all of Eurasia to fill a football stadium. The Neanderthals are, for reasons we still do not understand, slowly dying out. And then one tribe, one group of people, one person, manages to tame a wolf. Think how it must have changed everything!”
Jean Claude frowned as he chewed, swallowing before he confessed his doubt. “I am not sure why, Monsieur Professor, a dog would change everything.”
Morby nodded. “That is because you are thinking of it as a pet. Try, instead, to regard the wolf as a technology. From hunting—did the wolves kill rabbits and bring them back to their masters? To defense—what predator would take on a man being escorted by a couple of wolves? And finally to war—I do not buy it that early humans lived in Utopia, never fighting other tribes. No, the wolves were a disruptive technology.” Morby grinned over the term. “It is as Dr. Temple Grandin says, animals make us human.”
Jean Claude nodded thoughtfully, cutting his eyes to Beauchamp’s uneaten pastry.
“You should know, Jean Claude, that not everyone agrees with this conclusion,” Beauchamp observed, passing his pains suédois à la cannelle to the younger man without comment. “Our friend here has been rather derisively refuted by our peers.”
Morby took a sip of coffee, something like resignation in his eyes. “Current thinking in our field is that we rose to the top of the food chain ahead of the Neanderthals because we were more collaborative. Naturally, we are so narcissistic we believe the collaboration was with our own kind, and not with another species. Not with Canis lupus.”
“What I would give to be there, to see the game change, with these wolves,” Beauchamp remarked almost wistfully.
“You are right, it was a game changer.” Morby nodded. “The dogs didn’t just help us, they saved us! From that point on, as we evolved, advanced, we did it with the dogs by our side. That’s why we love them, and they love us—our fates became inextricably bound together, dogs and humans, each needing the other. Humans who didn’t bond to the dogs were less likely to survive. They were evolving us! And meanwhile we bred them—the wolves who did not like us or care for our discipline were not allowed to reproduce. We eventually took over all aspects of natural selection, so that today we have boxers and bulldogs, dachshunds and Dobermans, lapdogs and Labradors. But what we didn’t realize was at the same time, they altered our species’ destiny. Up until the dogs, we lived our brutish lives as just another species of animal, subject to the whims of the environment, scrabbling for survival in the dirt. But then, with domesticated wolves, we began to see things differently. We began to look at other creatures and wonder if we might tame them, too. And if we could manage animals, what about plants? We began to see ourselves not as subjects of nature, but masters of it!”
Morby’s face was alive now, his melancholy completely gone.
“But then what happened?” Jean Claude wanted to know. “I know eventually the Neanderthals vanished, though some of them mated with humans. And I know that after a time we domesticated other animals as well. But when the first dog came … what happened next, right then, when they were completely new? When the game was changing, as Professor Beauchamp said?”
Professor Morby finished his coffee and set the delicate cup down on its saucer. “You always ask the right questions; I wish I had you in my class, Jean Claude. Yes, that is precisely what I, too, would like to know. For the first time, wolves were our companions, so treasured and loved we buried them next to us in our graves. This had never happened before, but suddenly, there they are, man and wolf together. Everything was different. Yet titanic changes do not happen easily. There must have been conflict, doubt, setbacks. There were no dogs, and then there were dogs. So,” Morby smiled, “as you ask. What happened next?”
AFTERWORD
I was scanning the newspaper for some good news one day (as in, “Author Cameron Wins Everybody’s Favorite Person Award”) when I came across a simple statement that had such profound implications I could barely comprehend them all. Around 30,000 years ago something extraordinary happened: a wolf became a human’s companion. In other words, it was the birth of the first dog.
The article seemed to imply that it was all pretty easy and routine—one day, a wolf, the next day, a dog. But I believed it was such an astounding development in the history of both species, I just had to find out more.
This all happened a little before I was born, so I spent hours and hours doing research on this time period, talking to paleontologists, reading books and articles, even checking out Wikipedia. The era is called the Upper Paleolithic, and it’s striking just how brutal life was for those early humans. As primates, we’d been happiest in the northern forests, but now glaciers were advancing like an invading army, shoving us out onto the plains, where we could be easily hunted as meat by animals of tooth and claw and speed. We had no agricultural sciences, no ranching, but lived opportunistically, chasing food and hoping to catch it before some other predator, or starvation, brought us down. We were competing for many of the same resources not just with lions and other killers, but with Neanderthals, who were stronger and faster and maybe even smarter.
But while I could picture all that, I simply could not come up with a scenario that explained how a wolf became a pet.
I spent a lot of my research time looking into the canine-side of the equation as well. Wolves back then were far more likely to see us as a food source than they do in the current era—the ones who hunted us have historically been killed off. Over time, our actions influenced the evolution of Canis lupus away from aggression and toward elusiveness, so that today, attacks on humans by wolves are rare (and met with lethal retaliation). But 30,000 years ago, we were dinner to these animals. Would we really invite a pack of wolves to come join us by the fire and sing campfire songs? That would be like inviting cannibals to lunch and asking them who they would like to eat.
And our own food supply was scarce enough to suggest we would hardly have wasted it feeding another species. Wolves were, after all, competing for the same prey, hunting the same herds. When I was a child, I didn’t even want to share food with my sister. If people were starving, would we really have tossed meat scraps to our competitors?
So how did we natural enemies become such good friends that I allow one of their descendants to sleep in my bed, nearly shoving me off the mattress each night?
Evolution is a long process. I promise you no wolf pack gave birth to a Labrador who ran over to the Cro-Magnon camp to retrieve tennis balls. Yet what human tribe would have the patience to lure a wolf pack closer and closer to an intimate relationship? No, for this to occur the evolutionary path took an extraordinary shortcut. One person must have had the time and the will to domesticate one wolf.
The Dog Master is a work of fiction based on an indisputable fact: dogs are our companions, their fates inextricably bound to ours. To write it I had to envision a unique human, an extraordinary circumstance, and a wolf whose ancestors had an unusual affinity for Homo sapiens.
That was just the first challenge. The domestication of wolves took place in the most dramatic and dangerous time in human history—the dawn of the last Ice Age. Yet humans almost certainly had no comprehension of the scope of devastation coming their way—they knew local weather, not global climate. The speed of the ice’s advance was, well, glacial. They were invo
lved in the sweep of history, a resurfacing of continents, an extinguishing of many species, a cascade of life-threatening challenges, and yet all they would have been aware of was their own situation. The days might be colder, the hunting more scarce, the fruits slower to ripen, but to them it would portend only further and immediate hardship in a world already designed to be cruel. As an author, the best I could do to set the story’s stage was allow the characters to react to their individual situations and let the reader draw more grand conclusions.
And here’s what we can say for certain about any specific individual human being in this extraordinary time in our history: nothing.
There’s no written record. Cave paintings provide some insight, and the sciences of archaeology and geography contribute much, but in the end we don’t know. Were the people of the time warlike, or peaceful? What was family life like? How did the tribes function? Who were these people? Were any of them kleptomaniacs? Did they have stand-up comedy?
With no manuscripts to study, I could only speculate on what a conversation might be like between two members of the Kindred. I wanted to give the reader a flavor of how their language might have worked, but I was writing in modern English, so all I could do was suggest, through formal sentence construction and an incorporation of vaguely foreign-looking names, that these humans of the Upper Paleolithic were capable of complex statements and had a sophisticated vocabulary, but that it was different from the way we speak today. My choices hopefully convey my artistic choices, but I was aiming for mood and nuance, and in no way presuming to reconstruct how humans would have communicated. For all I know they would say “LOL” to each other.
I am not alone in having to guess: as I read what experts had to say about this particular era, I was struck by how current theories attract consensus and controversy, and how some dogma, accepted in the past, has fallen into disfavor. If you asked me to examine a skull from thousands of years ago and come to a scientific conclusion, the best I could do would be to say, “I think this dude is dead.” But through a lot of hard work by dedicated men and women, we have very complex explanations for a lot of the fossil puzzles from long ago. Explanations which are, of course, impossible to prove.
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