Dogchild

by Kevin Brooks

  That was partly why hede acted a little strangely when Ide told him I was going to write about my rehumanization, but I dont think that was the only reason. Hese a very self-effacing man, and he knows how much he means to me, and how much I admire and respect him for making me what I am. Without Starry I would have been nothing. And its hard enough for him to hear that from me. The idea of it being committed to words that might one day be read by the rest of the world – if there ever is such a thing – is something that fills him with dread. But while I cant ignore that, I also cant ignore the truth. If Ime going to tell my story, Ime going to tell it as it is.

  It took a very long time for Starry to rehumanize me, and for the first few months of his mentorship he did little more than just be with me 24 hours a day. He didnt try to change me or teach me anything – not in an obvious way anyway – he was just there in the stone building with me, all day and all night, week after week, month after month. He talked to me all the time, not expecting me to understand at first, just letting me get to know his voice, and very gradually I began to understand what he was saying. I still vocalized as a dog most of the time – barking, yelping, whining, howling---sometimes snarling and growling – but I also found myself beginning to mimic some of the sounds that Starry was making. Simple words – food, drink, good, bad, yes, no. I didnt sound very human at first, but Starry could understood what I was trying to say, and he was so patient and rewarding that it wasnt too long before we were capable of holding basic conversations. And it was once wede reached that stage that the teaching process began.

  Starry taught me how to behave like a human – how to eat and drink, how to wash, how to carry out my bodily functions, how to walk as humanly as possible. He taught me that I wasnt dog, I was human. I was the same kind of creature as him.

  I remember quite vividly the day he brought a looking-glass into the building – an almost-intact full-length mirror in a rickety wooden frame. He didnt say anything to me as he carried it in, he just leaned it up against the wall, stood in front of it, and let me see his reflection. He then gestured for me to join him. When I went over and stood beside him and stared at myself in the glass, the figure I saw – small and weak, stooped and bewildered – triggered something deep inside me, and all at once I let out a howl of rage and launched myself at the mirror, lunging openjawed at the throat of my reflection. The glass smashed, slicing open my face, and as the blood gushed from my shredded lips I threw myself down onto the shards of broken mirror and tore into them with uncontrolled savagery, ripping apart both the beast Ide become and the beast that had been taken away from me.

  Starry grabbed hold of me, throwing his arms round my chest and dragging me away from the broken glass, and although I turned my fury on him – snarling wildly, clawing at his face and biting his arms – he didnt let go. He just kept his arms clamped tightly around me, silently enduring my attacks, until eventually I began to tire and the madness within me started to fade, and then everything inside me just went, and I slumped like a dead thing in Starrys bloodsoaked arms.

  I looked up at him and tried to say sorry.

  Thurru, I grunted. Um thurr---

  Its okay, Jeet, he said softly. Dont worry. Everythings going to be all right.

  My eyes were wet. I didnt know why.

  Ide never cried before.

  No one knows for sure how many dogchilds have been put through the rehumanization process since our people settled here around 10 years ago, but from what I can tell – mostly from talking to Starry – 9 have been rehumanized, and at least the same number, if not more, have died during the process. 5 of those who survived were before my time – before I was taken back from the dogs – and of those 5, not one is still with us.

  2 of them died from unknown diseases.

  One disappeared – its generally assumed she either went back to the dogs or died trying.

  And the other 2 simply faded away – one aged 14, the other aged 16 (the oldest known dogchild).

  In the time Ive been here, 4 dogchilds (including me) have survived rehumanization, and another 5 – that I know of – have died during the process. The other 3 survivors – 1 male, 2 female – are all roughly the same age as me. The male, Mose, is physically very capable – strong, tireless, a good Worker and an excellent Fighter – but hese never learned to speak at all, and one of the females, Prendy, has an extremely limited vocabulary. She can just about make herself understood, but thats all. The other female, Chola Se, can talk as well as me. Ive never actually spoken to her – although Ide very much like to – so I dont know if she can read and write, but Ide be surprised if she can. Reading and writing is a very rare ability among our people, and if it wasnt for Starry Ide be illiterate too.

  He believed that in order for me to become human it wasnt enough to simply learn the basics of human behavior, I had to learn how to use my mind. And, to him, that meant learning how to express myself, both verbally and in writing.

  Words are the keys to the world, he told me.

  I didnt understand him at the time, and even now Ime not entirely sure what he meant, but I had – and still have – so much faith in him that I never questioned his ways. I never complained when he spent hours and hours every day, for weeks and months and years, teaching me how to speak and read and write. There was very little reading material to learn from – the scant remains of a few ancient books, fragile scraps of yellowed pages – and writing materials were just as scarce. We had 2 very precious pencil stubs, and Starry had scoured the town for every scrap of useable paper he could find, which wasnt very much. But it was all we had, so we had to make the most of it. We also used anything else we could lay our hands on – bits of charcoal, wooden boards, sharpened flints, the bare stone walls---

  Starry taught me everything he knew.

  He told me about his father, who was one of the very last Storytellers, and his grandfather, who was both a Storyteller and a Poet. It took me a while to understand what a story was, and why people used to tell them and listen to them, and I found it even harder to grasp the idea of poetry. No matter how many times Starry tried to explain it – he even wrote some poems himself to show me what he meant – I just couldnt seem to make sense of it. It was, I suppose, just a step too far for the dog in me to take.

  And that was the thing. However much I learned, however human I became – and however deeply I buried my past – my dogness was still there. Underneath it all, it is what I am.

  It might seem as if our people spend an inordinate amount of time and effort in rehumanizing dogchilds – often with little or no success – but the process serves a purpose. We have a very small and ever-dwindling population, so every addition to our number is incredibly valuable, a precious asset in our fight for survival, and our survival is all that matters.

  Its gone midnight now. My heads emptied out and I need to sleep.

  Here is the where and what of my world.

  The town.

  Apart from Eastside, which is mostly in ruins – the houses and buildings reduced to piles of rubble, the narrow streets scarred with age-old bomb craters – most of the town is in reasonably good condition. The majority of the old stone buildings are still standing, and while most of them are at least partially derelict, theyre more than adequate to provide homes of a sort for all of us.

  The great stone wall that protects the north side of town is about 600 feet long, 60 feet high, and 8 feet thick. The 5 watchtowers that line the wall rise another 30 feet above it, and each one is topped with a fortified turret, providing an allround view for the armed Fighters who man the towers 24 hours a day. The watchtowers are known as the West End, West, Central, East, and East End Towers.

  There used to be a huge wooden door in the middle of the wall – which according to Starry was 4 inches thick and reinforced with bands of steel – but when it became obvious that it was too dangerous for our people to venture out beyond the confines of the town, the door was removed and the opening was blocked in, makin
g the wall completely impregnable.

  The cliffs and the sea.

  The cliffs that stretch along the coastline either side of town are between 300 and 500 feet high, which means that if the Dau want to attack us from the south they have to climb down at least 300 feet of sheer rock then somehow cross the sea to the beach. Its not an impossible task, but even if they managed to make the climb, theyd never survive the crossing. However they tried to do it – on rafts or floats, even in boats – the monsters of the deep would get them---the jawfish, the wailfish, the eels, the great black squid.

  The sea is no place to die.

  The Dau know that.

  Nomansland.

  The only realistic way the Dau can get to us, and our only way of getting to them, is across the emptiness of Nomansland. Apart from a few jagged hillocks, Nomansland is just a flat expanse of harsh black glassrock, a barren strip of desert where nothing grows and nothing moves. Even the constant heat haze that hovers above the surface barely even shimmers. It just hangs there, motionless, like a mirror of black mist in the sun.

  The Dau and the war.

  The Dau compound is situated just half a mile away from us on the other side of Nomansland. It covers an area of about 25 acres and has evolved over the years from a temporary encampment of tents and wagons and trenches into a sprawling conglomeration of wooden buildings and fortifications. Unlike the town, the Dau compound isnt guarded by a wall, and it doesnt have the protection of the cliffs or the sea either, but although the Dau could probably construct a wall or a fence of some kind if they had to, the simple truth is that they dont need one. They have enough Fighters to guard their entire perimeter 24 hours a day, and because they outnumber us so heavily they know weare probably never going to launch a fullscale attack on their camp anyway.

  Which is why they know that all they have to do is wait.

  It wasnt always like this.

  When Starry was rehumanizing me, hede often tell me stories about how things were when the Long Walk finally came to an end. Hede tell me about the day our people first discovered the ancient walled town perched on a tiny peninsula that eventually became our home – telling me how empty it was, how devoid of all life---no people, no dogs, no birds, no rats – and hede tell me what he remembered about the weeks and months that followed, as the Dau settled into their stronghold on the other side of Nomansland and a war of attrition began – the Dau bombarding the town with heavy artillery almost every day, our Fighters shooting back with rifles and machine guns, theirs replying with heavier machine-gun fire and mortars---

  It was a living hell, Jeet, Starry told me. People were dying every day, the town was being reduced to rubble---and it went on for months and months.

  But eventually the Dau ran out of artillery shells, and both sides used up their stocks of small arms ammunition, and thats when things began to change.

  Our people and the Dau learned very quickly how to manufacture gunpowder (saltpeter, charcoal, sulfur) and make replacement shells for rifles and handguns (using recycled shell cases and handcast lead), but although these handmade bullets were good enough to kill – just as they are today – they were far less powerful than authentic ammunition, so long-range combat became a thing of the past and the war evolved into a series of skirmishes and raids. But even though some of our early raids on the Dau were relatively successful, we soon learned that the losses we incurred outweighed any gains we made from our occasional victories, and after a time most of the raiding was carried out by the Dau against us, rather than the other way round. Theyd send out small war parties of up to 20 Fighters, usually at night, and theyd try to breach our wall or find some other way in. Most of the time they failed, but every now and then theyd manage to break into town and kill a few of us – or steal some of our females – before making a rapid retreat. But like us, they eventually realized they were paying too high a price for too few successes, and although their raids didnt completely die out, they became a very rare occurrence.

  It was at that point, Starry told me, that the Dau finally realized they didnt actually need to do anything to destroy us. All they had to do was keep us under siege and wait.

  For some unknown reason, females on both sides were becoming more infertile as the years went by, and the death rate of both populations was outstripping the birth rate – which is why females of breeding age became so highly prized. So both populations were slowly declining. But the Dau realized that because they had 5 times as many people as us, our people would either die out completely or wede become too small a force to defend ourselves long before the same happened to them. And they also had the added benefit of not being so cut off from the surrounding area as us, which meant they could hunt the land with relative ease, which gave them a much better diet than us.

  Food.

  Weare almost always short of food. Since the wall was blocked up and hunting trips outlawed, weve had to rely solely on the food we can produce ourselves, which is fairly limited, and whatever we can take from the sea and the beach. Our basic diet consists of fish and shellfish (mostly crabs), meat and eggs from our precious birds, cornbread (made from the small crop of corn our Farmers manage to grow), and various nuts, fruits, and vegetables (which again are provided by our Farmers). Once in a while a great wailfish or jawfish gets washed up on the beach – and very occasionally other sea creatures too, weird and terrifying beasts that presumably live in the ocean depths – and when that happens, everyone gets to work as quickly as possible, before the dead beast starts to rot in the heat. The carcass is immediately butchered and stripped of everything – meat, blubber, skin, bones – and the meat is cooked and salted and dried, and in some cases theres enough to keep us all fed for weeks. But thats a rarity, and most of the time our food is rationed – by Van Hesse the Grocer – and weare always hungry for more.

  Even when food is extremely scarce though, we dont eat towndogs or their pups – in fact, the killing and eating of towndogs is strictly forbidden. This isnt because the townspeople care for the dogs, or even like them, because they dont. The dogs might live their whole lives in close proximity to humans, but they generally have very little, if any, contact with them. The people need the dogs as guards – to raise the alarm at the faintest sign of danger – and the dogs need the people for the food they provide, but thats as far as it goes. Theres no social interaction. The humans dont offer friendship, and the dogs dont seek it.

  Water.

  One more crucial difference between us and the Dau is that they have an unlimited supply of fresh water, and even if the small river that runs along the north side of their camp was to dry up, theyd still have access to the scarce streams and pools of the Deathlands. All we have is our spring – a small shallow pool that lies in the shadows of the West End watchtower.

  And now even thats drying up.

  The Deathlands.

  Beyond the town and the Dau encampment – to the north, the east, and the west – lies the endless expanse of the Deathlands. No one knows its true extent, but the dog in me knows every inch of the Deathland territory that my pack used to roam, an area of at least 50 square miles. I know the vast stretches of glassrock desert. I know the towering Black Mountains, with all their canyons and trails and streams and ridges and valleys. I know the plains. I know the young forests, growing up through the graves of their ancestors. I know the watering holes, the caves, the animal trails, the snake pits, the thornfields, the trees where the eagles nest. I know the skies, and what they mean. I know the wind, the air, the feel of the earth at my feet. I know it all. Its in me, part of me, its where Ime from. No matter how forgotten it is – how forgotten it has to be – my life in the Deathlands is still my life.

  I dont know what time it is now, but I can feel a very faint rise in the temperature and I can smell the breaking dawn in the air. Ive been writing all night. The tiredness I felt earlier has gone though, and even if I felt like sleeping – which I dont – I know theres no point now. The new day is already begi
nning, and I still have so much to tell.

  Our people.

  Today, tonight, there are 156 of us.

  This is who we are and what we do.

  Our leader.

  Weare led by our Marshal, Gun Sur, and his second-in-command, Deputy Pilgrim. Gun Surs authority is absolute. Hele take advice from his Deputy and the Council, and hele confer with the Fighter Captains on matters of security, but every decision that has to be made is ultimately made by Gun Sur alone.

  The Council.

  A committee of 6 men and women, mostly Olders, whose purpose is to advise on important concerns and make recommendations on matters of justice when necessary. The Council is directed by Deputy Pilgrim.

  Fighters.

  All ablebodied males become Fighters at the age of 12. When, and if, they reach 30, theyre either reassigned to other duties or kept on as Senior Fighters for another 5 years. All Fighters are compulsorily retired at the age of 35. An old man is too much of a liability as a Fighter – too slow, too weak, too dull-sensed.

  Fighters have various everyday duties. Some man the watchtowers, some guard Gun Sur, others patrol the town and the perimeters or take the Youngers for Fighter training. Every one of them has to be ready at all times to defend the town against any form of attack and to carry out whatever actions Gun Sur demands.