An Oath of Dogs

by Wendy N. Wagner

  MUNINN SAT heavy in the corner of the sky, but the dogs did not need light for this work. They knew all they needed to know of digging and dirt and the rich smell of the things humans hid beneath the earth, and their muscles had trained themselves to the task. The pack leader’s mouth filled with slaver. Even through twenty centimeters of damp clay, his exquisitely tuned nostrils picked up the scent of rancid flesh.

  Claws hit wood and one of the dogs made a frustrated growl in the back of its throat. This was the hardest part.

  All around them, the eyes of the blonde saint fixed themselves on the dogs, and the crosses leaned in closer. The dogs were careful not to brush into any of these things. The big brown boxer lookalike still bore a scar on its flank from coming up against a cross. The image stood out black and hairless, like a grill mark on meat. The dogs remembered the smell of the brown dog’s flesh burning, the bitter nasty stink of it. They remembered and they learned from it.

  Wood crunched and splintered. Nothing could withstand the will of the pack, not for long. Their strength was terrible.

  They dragged the body from the grave. The shroud proved tougher than the usual fabric, some sort of artificial stuff the dogs associated with the people who came from outside, the people who were not of the lake or its mysteries. It tasted bad and cut their tongues. They tugged and ripped and clawed at it until the body came free, its burial finery still neat. The bag of entrails slipped out of the bottom of the shroud and hit the ground with a squelch. The stench of rot gases filled the air.

  The others fell upon the broken bag and the pack leader let them feast. This they could have. This he could allow.

  The part of him that sat in the back of his mind, the part of him that was not instinctive or sensate but rather some slippery other that the dog mostly ignored, prodded at his dog mind. There was another reason for this trip to the graveyard. They had not waited for the faithful to leave off their vigils beside the grave, to grow tired of their nightly rounds of the cemetery, to abandon this body to the ground, simply to devour it as they usually would.

  He barked and the others stopped. Gore and mud streaked their muzzles. Their eyes glinted in the faint light of the moon. The pack leader sank his teeth into the stiff leather of the dead man’s boots and tugged. The cords of the dog’s neck stuck out. The man was slender and hollowed, but it was no easy task to pull him across the broken ground and through the maze of crosses and saints. The others hurried to help.

  He was their leader. They had to help him.

  They dragged the man down the slopes of Mount Hepzibah, loose bits of him sloughing away as his body jolted over stones and button ferns and along the pavement. The other part of the pack leader’s mind urged him to take the body farther and farther, beyond the point where the dogs had brought down the man nearly a moon cycle before, past the places of food smells, all the way to the quiet building that faced the bad air place.

  The body looked flattened and battered as it lay on the steps of the quiet building. The dogs backed away from it. There was something bad about the dead man. They had forgotten it while he had been under the ground, growing fragrant and tender, but now they remembered. There had been an evil smell about him, a smell that called to them like the scent of fresh meat or the sound of the leader’s howl, and so they had followed the bad man into the town and cut him down like anything else that threatened their pack.

  The leader rubbed his muzzle on the ground and then trotted away from the bad man and the bad air place. His tail bobbed above his back like a happy flag. They had done good work.

  They ran into the woods where the branches shrouded them from the light of Muninn and the wind and mist scoured the smells from them. They ran until the other parts of their minds went silent and they were only dogs and the trees were only trees and the creatures flying above were only birds.

  HUGINN, Day 197

  He’s back. My Matthias has returned to me.

  The group never made it to the spaceport. They climbed the mountain at the north end of the lake and began the trip west, but found the way cut off by a steep ravine. They followed it north for kilometer after kilometer, looking for a way to cross. Its banks, Matthias told me, were as steep as the walls of a house, the surface naked rock in most places. The ravine finally began to narrow, and they found a spot where a big candelabra tree had fallen and made a kind of bridge. No one liked the look of it, but it was the best path they’d found yet, and Craig Thomas and Alex Perkins went out to cross it. Perkins went first. Something about those long dark days in the woods had broken him down, and he was eager to get to the spaceport, eager to get away from us and this place.

  Perkins had always been afraid of heights, Matthias explained. He wanted to go first so he could get the crossing over with. When the tree snapped in the middle of the ravine, he fell in perfect silence. Matthias saw his face. The man was so scared, he told me, his eyes were welded open and his mouth fixed in an “o” of pure fear. He couldn’t have screamed. He was frozen in terror.

  The screaming started for real about a second after Perkins dropped. The tree hadn’t broken clean; no, it split into threads and pieces, and Craig Thomas’s leg went down between two long shards of wood as the back half of the tree slid down the bank and caught on the rocks. He would have fallen to his death if he hadn’t gotten caught in that tree, but it wasn’t any kind of favor. The men roped up the broken trunk so it wouldn’t finish its plunge, and they fought to drag Craig up to solid ground.

  None of them had eaten in a day and a half, when the last of my sawdust bread ran out, and where they found the strength to lift both Craig and that big tree, only God knows. I imagine He granted it to them. But as the tree swung up, its roots smashed down, clubbing Bill Ferguson over the head. He dropped hard and cold as stone, and Matthias thought he might be dead. Craig was screaming, Bill was knocked out, and Perkins was gone.

  They turned back. What else could they do? They still had another forty or more kilometers of rough country between them and the spaceport, and two of their men were hurt too badly to walk on their own. Plus, they were out of food.

  I held Matthias in my arms as he told me all this. His shoulders shook as he cried. The proud man who brought us here is gone, and only this thin, sorry creature has been left behind. I know he thinks that we will all die and that it is all his fault.

  Cheyenne Taylor can’t get out of bed any longer. If I can bring myself to leave Matthias’s side, I will go to her and see if I can tend her, but I know there’s not much I can do. What she needs is food and rest and hope, and I can give her none of these things. So I will sit here with my sleeping, broken man and listen to the rustling wings of the leather birds outside our cabin window. I do not know if it is a worse sound than the distant howling of the dogs.

  PETER’S first thought upon awakening was of the specimen boxes he’d dropped off at the office. Today he would build two terrariums, one with only tree scooters and one with a mix of scooters and caterpillars. He should really set aside a few of the caterpillars to study on their own, but he wanted to focus on their interactions with the tree scooters. He had no guarantee any of the creatures would live outside of their natural environment. But he would make as many observations as he could and learn as much as possible.

  Terrarium construction filled his head as he walked down Main Street, eager to get to his office.

  “Don’t go any farther,” someone called, and he recognized Lou by his dreadlocks and his blue security jacket. Not by his voice, which had gone high and tight and shaky.

  “Lou? Everything all right?” He took a few steps forward.

  “Oh man, you shouldn’t see this.”

  But it was too late. The pile of black rags on the front steps had already caught Peter’s eye. It could have been garbage, but he knew it wasn’t; his stomach turned over and he found himself taking another, unwilling, step forward. He couldn’t look away from the body’s cowboy boots.

  “Is that Rob McKidder?”<
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  Lou gave a kind of stifled sob. Peter remembered how much the man had cried at the funeral. “Lou, you shouldn’t look at that.” Peter turned him away from the bloated, tattered thing, but couldn’t resist glancing back at the battered corpse.

  It was bad enough the dogs had killed Rob in the first place, but to dig him up and display him like this — Jesus.

  Standish walked up the street toward him and gave a wave. “Hey, Peter. What’s going on?”

  “Standish, don’t—”

  But of course she had already passed him by, curiosity drawing her to trouble like a cat to a bowl of poisoned tuna. She spun around, nearly knocking Peter down, her hand clamped over her mouth.

  Peter hadn’t noticed the smell before, but now the stink wafted toward him, heavy and rank. He put his arm around her shoulder. “Come on, let’s get away from that. The police wouldn’t want us to get too close.”

  In the background, Lou’s hand unit buzzed and Peter heard the muffled tones of a conversation. He thought he recognized Deputy Wu’s voice, but he wasn’t sure.

  “Did the dogs do that?” Standish pulled Hattie closer to her. He was glad to see the dog was on a lead today.

  “Probably.” He put his sleeve over his nose to draw a deep breath. “It’s what they do. Dig up the dead and eat them.”

  “He wasn’t eaten, though.”

  “I know. Let’s go to the Mill Cafe and have a cup of coffee until all this is taken care of.”

  They walked toward the restaurant. The first-shift rush would start in a few minutes.

  Standish stopped beside the front door. “Why Rob? Why kill him? Why dig him up again? Why not eat him?”

  He waited for the door to open and a woman in coveralls to pass them by. “They’re just dogs, Standish. Does it matter why they do things?”

  “Are they really just dogs?” she asked, and he urged her to the nearest booth. He could see Rob’s figure stretched out like some mummified Christ figure, the sun winking on the silver tips of his boots, and found he couldn’t answer her question.

  MUNINN AND WODIN still lay behind the horizon, and in the dark it seemed as if the horsetails had pulled themselves closer to town. The trees’ shadows wrapped the streets in secrets. Anything could be hiding in those patches of blackness: a dog, a murderer, a flock of leather birds. Standish felt for her pepper spray and hurried toward Main Street. She wished she’d just waited for Peter to finish up with his terrariums before she headed to the bar.

  But every time she turned back to her filing or desk tidying, Rob McKidder’s body appeared in her mind’s eye as if the image had been glued onto the backs of her eyelids and now flashed itself every time she blinked. Blink: teeth marks in the shiny black leather of his boots, one of the silver medallions at the ankle half-ripped away. Blink: the moist patches on the side of the cheek where the skin had worn off, revealing the yellow pearls of fat beneath. Blink: the smart little mustache above lips shriveling away from black stitches, the mouth never to speak again.

  What she wanted the most was to talk to Dewey. Now that she was committed to getting Songheuser by the balls, she needed every last piece of dirt she could get on those bastards — even whatever Dewey was hiding. But Dewey wasn’t returning her calls. Maybe Standish could have stayed at the office if she’d had Dewey’s light-hearted banter to distract her from the creepy shit happening in this town. As it was, she’d had to go to the bar.

  She picked up her pace and was nearly running when she hit the front door. Hattie gave a yip as the door slammed shut on the fluff of her tail.

  “Oh God, Hattie, I’m sorry.” Standish freed the dog’s plumed tail. “Are you all right?” Tears welled up in her eyes. The tail looked fine, no hair loss or anything, and she was nearly goddamn crying. This town was getting to her.

  “You need a drink, Standish?”

  It was Belinda’s day off. She couldn’t remember the name of the little man behind the bar, but he obviously knew hers. She nodded. “Tequila?”

  “It’s Ganymede rotgut, but we got it.” He measured out a double and reached for a jar. “Lime powder with that?”

  “Neat.” She picked up the glass and waited for the liquor’s perfume to hit her. She’d never been able to resist tequila. Just the smell of it made her mouth water.

  She closed her eyes and tossed it back. For a second, she was twenty-eight again, bad-mouthing the miners at a bar on a space station whose name she couldn’t remember. The tequila tasted like sex pressed up against a dumpster, like a nose bleed running down the back of her throat, like the dust lining an air duct separated from the black of space by only a few centimeters of hull. She hadn’t had tequila since she’d arrived on Huginn.

  “Another?” the bartender asked.

  The warm sense of Hattie sitting next to her leg stopped her. “Maybe later.”

  She turned to face the room. The bar was half-full tonight, but she recognized most of the faces. The loggers and mill workers were staying away, but the office crowd was drinking. They had known Rob McKidder, worked with him closely. Just thinking about him getting torn up out of the ground had made them need the company of others.

  “We should have patrolled the cemetery another week,” someone said.

  “He’d been in a fridge for a week and thoroughly pickled,” his buddy countered. “We couldn’t have known.”

  “There was already a cross on his grave,” a woman added. “I thought that kept them safe.”

  Standish passed the little knot of speakers and caught a glimpse of Brett’s broad shoulders beside the pool table. That was what she needed. Not more tequila, but a warm body and a soft bed to while away the rest of the night.

  “Brett!” she called out.

  He turned around, and the look on his face stopped her in her tracks. “What’s wrong?”

  “You had breakfast with Peter Bajowski this morning? What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “What?” She took a step backward, confused and startled.

  “Everybody saw you at the Mill Cafe. Sitting there as cozy as a couple of tree scooters under a fern. You want the mill to blow up?”

  Standish drove her finger into his chest, no longer confused but pissed. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Bajowski worked for those ecoterrorists at Jawbone Flats.”

  “Oh, come on. There was just one guy. One bomber. There isn’t some vast conspiracy to destroy lumber production on Huginn. There’s just one nutjob with a grudge.”

  He shook his head. “You’re stupid if you think that’s the case. All those peace, love, and beautiful vista types on Earth are sending their biggest troublemakers here to turn Huginn into one big national park, just like on Earth — and Bajowski’s one of them. It’s a matter of time before he shows his stripes.”

  “You’re insane! Bajowski is a paperpushing nerd who wouldn’t know how to build a bomb if he wanted to. Which he wouldn’t, because all he cares about are stupid little mushrooms and caterpillars and shit. He’s harmless.”

  “That’s what he wants you to think.”

  “Bajowski is my friend and I trust him. And you’re an idiot, Brett.” She marched out of the bar.

  It had gotten darker while she’d been inside. She pulled the pepper spray from her pocket and picked up her pace. Hattie pressed herself against Standish’s leg, but even with her comforting presence, the street lights seemed half as bright as usual. Standish broke into a run, her boots slipping in the mud. She couldn’t make it home quickly enough.

  She slammed the door behind her and flipped the deadbolt, leaning against the door as she caught her breath. The printed door felt flimsy, the deadbolt more symbolic than a deterrent to anything that wanted inside.

  The dogs were out there, and they knew where she and Hattie lived. A canister of pepper spray wouldn’t do much against a whole pack of them.

  She shoved the couch in front of the door. It wasn’t much of a barricade, but it was better than nothing.


  A flash of metal on the floor caught her eye, and she stooped to pick up the square of tin that had somehow gotten kicked under the couch. The necklace Chameli had given her. The blue-gowned saint looked at her with quiet, resigned eyes. The Believers put figurines of her in the cemetery, Standish remembered. She slipped the leather lace over her head. The metal was cool against her skin for a moment and then unnoticeable.

  Standish sank onto her bed and pulled her knees to her chest, her eyes fixed on the barricaded door. Her hand crept into her pocket for her unit. It took her a second to dial.

  “Standish? I thought you were going to the bar.” Peter’s avatar filled the screen, but she could easily picture him making his puzzled face.

  “It didn’t go so great. You want to cook some food together? I’ve got a box of produce in my fridge.”

  “Sure. I’ll be done here in half an hour or so. You have any beer?”

  She reassured him on the state of her supplies and hung up, marginally comforted. Knowing Peter, a half an hour probably meant something closer to forty-five minutes. She kicked off her boots and reached for the diary on the nightstand. If she had to kill time, she could at least learn more about the history of Huginn. She opened to the first page and tried again: “Last month’s Prayer Breakfast brought in the final thousand dollars we needed to finish paying our passage on the Roebuck.”

  The metamorphic nature of Huginn seems more pronounced in Canaan Lake, affecting people in even the first wave of settlement. Primary sources from that time are rare, but the notebooks of MW Williams contain this suggestive quote:

  I pushed my people, my caterpillars, hard. They believed in my vision for them, treading along blindly, chewing their rations and hoping that the skies of Huginn would someday be welcoming to their wings. But we proud caterpillars did not become butterflies, flying in the light of the wholesome sun. We metamorphosed into moths. Dark creatures. We came to this moon and became things of the moon.

  What did Williams mean? Was this a metaphor or was he actually implying those early settlers experienced a physical metamorphosis? It’s impossible to be sure. What we do know is that more than two dozen people died that first winter.