Fifteen Dogs

3. ATTICUS’S LAST WISH

Olympus, the city, lies atop Olympus, the mountain. Much more than that cannot be said because it is, as any city is, a correlative of the minds that made it. Travel through Olympus would be a revelation of the imagination that conceived the city. That imagination being divine, no human language can express it. In English — if one must speak English — Olympus is best encompassed by the words nothing and nowhere, though it is something and somewhere, and he whose mind Olympus best mirrors, Zeus, father of the gods, was unhappy with his sons.

For a number of reasons, Hermes and Apollo had tried to keep their wager secret. The other gods being gods, this was not possible. For one thing,p the strangeness of the dogs was immediately obvious to all who cared about such things. The why of their strangeness was unknown, but the who was clear. Hermes spent most of his time on earth and Apollo was fascinated by earthly things. So the brothers were pestered as to their motives. After a while, they grew tired of denying they’d had anything to do with the dogs and admitted that they had wagered on the deaths of the fifteen. In so doing, they sowed a kind of frenzy among the gods, all of whom immediately made wagers of their own.

When Zeus discovered what his sons had done, he sent for them.

— How could you have been so cruel? he asked.

— Why cruel? asked Apollo. Mortals suffer. What have we done to make their suffering worse?

— He’s right, Father, said Hermes. Wipe them out if you don’t want them to suffer.

— They suffer within their own bounds, said Zeus. These poor dogs don’t have the same capacities as humans. They weren’t made to bear doubt or to know that their deaths will come. With their senses and instincts, they’ll suffer twice as much as humans do.

— You’re not suggesting humans are brutes, are you? asked Apollo.

Hermes laughed.

— The only thing certain about humans is their brutishness, he said.

— You two are worse than humans, said Zeus.

— There’s no need to insult us, said Apollo.

— Be grateful I’m not going to punish you. The damage has been done. But I don’t want you interfering with these creatures anymore. You’ve done enough. Leave them whatever peace they can find.

From that moment, all the gods knew Zeus’s will and, for the most part, abided by his edict. They did not interfere with the dogs. Interference, when it came, came from an unexpected quarter: Zeus himself. Taking pity on his favourite, Atticus, the father of the gods intervened in the life of the dogs.

+

Contrary to Benjy’s impressions, Atticus was thoughtful, sensitive and, to an extent, altruistic. He was a committed leader, capable of — or prone to — instinctive decisions. More: he could put aside thought in the service of forceful action. But in quiet moments his sensitivity sometimes led him to reconsider his own behaviour. In other words, Atticus had a conscience, and it was this that led him to what some would call faith.

Not long after the night in the veterinary clinic, Atticus came to believe that the canine was dying in him, that this was a tragedy, that the loss of the old ways would prove disastrous. This naturally led him to consider what it was that made him a dog. Was it his senses? Perhaps. But then he still had his senses. Was it something physical? Yes, it was in the way he felt as he ran, as he drank water, as he dug the ground with his claws. But his physical self, too, was unchanged. In fact, as he catalogued the things that made him a dog, Atticus changed his mind. The canine was not dying in him or in the eleven with him. Rather, it was being obscured by the new thinking, the new perspectives, the new words. These needed to be pushed aside, like curtains before a necessary vantage.

In the early days, Atticus had had his vivid memories of the previous life to guide him. In those days, memories of the previous life were a lure to them all. Some were, naturally, more devoted to the life that had been. It had been easy to discover who was willing to fight alongside him for a return to old ways: no strange language, no twisting thoughts, the senses alive. Once the pack had rid itself of threats to this ideal — once they had killed or chased off Majnoun, Athena, Bella, Prince and Bobbie — Atticus was satisfied that they could live as dogs ought to live. In the aftermath of the cleansing, the pack followed Atticus’s precepts:

1. No strange talk. This above all because, to his dying day, Atticus disliked what he remembered of the dog who disappeared:

In the sunny world, with its small

things moving too fast,

I shy away from light

and in the attic cuss the dark.

2. A strong leader (that is, Atticus himself)

3. A good den

4. The weak in their proper place

Of the killings, only one troubled Atticus’s conscience: the killing of the Duck Toller, Bobbie. He, the twins and Max had been so filled with fervour for the old life that they had behaved in a way that was not in keeping with the canine. They had killed the Duck Toller in a frenzy of which he was, in retrospect, ashamed. Worse: the death of the smaller dog was a signal that he — that they — had overlooked something important: the sanctity of the echelon. This became clear when the two smaller dogs fled.

On the morning that Benjy and Dougie went missing, Atticus had a presentiment of the problems the pack would face. With a kind of symmetry, Atticus and Benjy — the top and the bottom dog — came to the same thought from different ends of the spectrum: the weak were, after all, of more than passing importance. Something was ‘off’ without the two on the lower rung. There was now an emptiness at the bottom, so to speak. They were, unexpectedly, in need of weakness. Atticus was the biggest and strongest of the dogs that remained. Frick and Frack, together, might have had a chance against him, but the brothers would suffer if they challenged him, and all of them knew it. On the other hand, it would have been unthinkable to use either Frick or Frack as low dog. The brothers were unnaturally close and neither would have accepted a diminished position. That left Rosie and Max.

If they had truly become dogs again, Rosie would have been the obvious candidate. She was not necessarily the weakest of them, but she was female. And this was, to the males, a mark against her. But Rosie had become important to Atticus, the smell of her something he wanted for himself alone. His own feelings confused and humiliated him. Rosie was not in heat. It wasn’t that he wanted to fuck her. It was something unnameable and unfamiliar, a perversion for which the dogs had no name.

(Though Atticus had a developed sense of transgression, he did not have a notion of ‘sin.’ If he had, he might have accepted that his feelings for Rosie were — by his own thinking — sinful. They were transgressions against the canine. And yet, how comforting. At times, he and Rosie sat together by Wendigo Pond, away from the others, and used the forbidden language. Had they been caught, Atticus would have insisted they were innocent, that his conversations with Rosie were not, as they had been with Majnoun, deeply reasoned. She was something like a confidante or a lieutenant. Nothing more. So he might have said, but in his heart Atticus knew that his feelings were not innocent. They were sexual and they were unclear.)

So Max became low dog.

Except that Max was not co-operative. The dog felt he deserved status, having helped the pack rid itself of undesirables. Atticus understood Max’s unhappiness, but the pack had changed and Max would have to change with it or suffer the consequences.

Except that Max made them all suffer the consequences. He would not allow himself to be mounted. He had to be attacked, threatened, bitten. Frick and Frack would work in tandem, one holding Max by the neck while the other mounted him. Atticus had an easier time of it. He was pack leader, and Max, though resentful, accepted that it was Atticus’s right to mount him whenever he liked. The real problem was Rosie. The German shepherd was just strong enough to impose her will, but Max fought her because he could not stand to be mounted by one he was convinced he could overcome.

Because it sometimes took too long for Rosie to mount Max, Atticus would growl and threaten, nipping at Max’s ears to get the dog to submit. This was not the way true dogs did things, though, and they all knew it. Max had every right to contest his status. Why should Atticus intervene? In the end, the disappearance of the smaller dogs was a disaster for all of them. Their mornings began warily and their evenings ended on the same wary note.

It was during this time that Atticus began to pray.

He already had a notion of what an ideal or pure dog might be: a creature without the flaws of thought. As time went on, he attributed to this pure being all the qualities he believed to be noble: sharp senses, absolute authority, unparalleled prowess at hunting, irresistible strength. Somewhere, thought Atticus, there must be a dog like this. Why? Because one of the qualities his ideal canine possessed was being. An ‘ideal’ dog that did not exist could not be truly ideal. Therefore, the dog of dogs, as Atticus conceived it, had to exist. It had to be. (Atticus imagined this dog existing without red; that is, without the colour the dogs had gained with their change in thinking.) More: if Atticus’s pure dog existed — as it must — why should it not feel his longing for guidance? Why should it not find him?

Atticus followed his feelings. He humbled himself before his pure dog. He found a place away from the den. It was on the other side of Grenadier Pond, among the tall grass and trees. He cleared the ground of leaves and, every evening, he brought a portion of the things he had caught or scavenged. Every evening at the same time: mice, pieces of bread, bits of hot dog, rats, birds, whatever he had saved from his share of the pack’s food. And, speaking the forbidden language, every evening he asked for guidance from the one leader he was prepared to follow.

The gods are compelled by rhythm — as is the universe, as are all the creatures in it. And so, Atticus’s regular prayers and repeated ritual at length caught Zeus’s attention. The father of the gods heard the dog’s wishes and was moved by its sacrifices and faith. Appearing to Atticus in a dream, Zeus took the form of a Neapolitan mastiff: his coat rumpled as the skin of an elephant, his jowls a grey cascade. And Zeus spoke to Atticus in the new language of the pack.

— Atticus, said the god, I am the one to whom you sacrifice.

— I knew you would come, said Atticus. Tell me how I may be a better dog.

— You are no longer a dog, said Zeus. You are changed. But you are mine and I pity you your fate. I cannot intervene in your life. I have myself forbidden it. But I will grant you a wish at your death. Whatever you wish for at the moment before your spirit ascends, I will grant.

— But, Great Dog, what good is a wish if I must die for it?

— I can do no more, said Zeus.

And at these words, the father of the gods turned to ash in Atticus’s dream and drifted above a bright green field where a thousand small, dark creatures ran.

In the months that followed, Atticus maintained his shrine and continued to speak to Zeus, comforted that the Great Dog had heard his pleas, grateful for what he imagined to be the god’s attention. His prayers did not prevent the tragedies that beset the pack, however. First, Frick and Frack wounded Max and he (Atticus) was forced to finish the dog off. Then, Frick, Frack and he himself killed the small dog (Dougie) on his return. An accident: the bigger dogs were fired by blood lust, angry for the trouble the dog’s departure had caused. (Atticus asked Zeus’s forgiveness for this transgression, but, really, it was something of a miracle that they had not killed Benjy as well. In the grip of what felt like instinct but was only anger, they might have killed any number of dogs. The lesson, painfully acquired with Bobbie, then learned again at Dougie’s death: violence has reasons that reason itself cannot know.) Finally, there came the poisoning.

On the pack’s first foray into the garden of death, Atticus followed Frick and Frack into the garden, convinced the ground’s bounty was a gift from the one who’d come to him in a dream. His first premonition of death came while he was eating a piece of chicken: flesh that tasted as certain dog toys smell. It was not the way anything should taste, but it also tasted of chicken and it was good. Shortly thereafter, death stepped out from behind its curtain. Atticus’s nose began to bleed. He could not drink enough water. His insides burned. He had eaten more than the others. His symptoms were the first to appear.

It was after his second feast in the garden of death that Atticus knew for certain something was not right. Though he couldn’t tell how his pack had been done, he knew it had been. Some thing or some being had got to them. And he, their leader, had done nothing. So, while the others made their way back to the coppice to die, Atticus went to his shrine. By then, thirst was like a fire that ravaged the kindling of his bones and sinews. Death was on him and he knew it.

With his last words, Atticus asked that the one responsible for his pack’s demise be punished. Then, the dog died, ever-faithful, filled with the hope that his unseen enemy would suffer at the hands of his god.

+

Having escaped Majnoun’s anger, Benjy did not know where to go or what to do. He had imagined himself living with Miguel, Nira and Majnoun, staying and mastering human language. Though he knew otherwise, he convinced himself that Majnoun had overreacted, that his (that is, Benjy’s) manoeuvring — his courting of Miguel’s favour, for instance — had been innocent or, at worst, experimental. As far as Benjy was concerned, he hadn’t given Majnoun cause to bite him. Majnoun would come to his senses and allow him back. He was certain of it, but, in the meantime, where would he stay?

It was spring, the third week in April. There was still snow on the ground, especially in tree-shaded yards and in High Park. It was not the worst time to find oneself outdoors. During the day, the streets were dry and warm. Benjy, of course, knew the area around the park well. If he stayed in Parkdale or High Park, there would be dogs to be avoided but he could usually spot those quickly, so he was not afraid. (The white dogs with black spots were the worst. It wasn’t so much their aggression; other dogs were sometimes even more aggressive. It was that they were — without question — the stupidest creatures on earth, and that was even if one included cats. It was useless to try reasoning with them, whatever language one chose. Worse, you could never tell when one of them would come at you. It was not in his nature to hate other dogs, but Benjy disliked Dalmatians the way some humans dislike men named Steve or Biff.)

He was at the corner of Fern and Roncesvalles, trying to decide where he should go, when a ruddy-faced old man bent down and scooped him into his arms, saying

— Who’s a pretty doggy? Who’s a pretty boy?

This was most unpleasant. Benjy squirmed as if he were helplessly sinking into a pond of foul-smelling wool. From out of a pocket in his overcoat, the man extracted a biscuit that smelled of sugar, fish, carrots, lamb and rice. Suspicious, but captivated by the smell of the biscuit, Benjy stopped wriggling. He sniffed at the biscuit again, taking in the hints of salt, canola oil, rosemary, human sweat and apple.

— What is it? Benjy asked, speaking English.

As if it were natural for dogs to address him, the old man said:

— It is a biscuit. I was told dogs like them. Do you not want it?

Sniffing again at the air close to the biscuit, Benjy decided that the thing was what the man said it was: food. He took the biscuit from the man’s hand and, crunching it with the teeth on one side of his mouth, he allowed himself to eat what was, in the end, a memorable treat.

— Thank you, said Benjy.

The man put him down and absent-mindedly rubbed the fur along his back.

— You’re welcome, he said. I’m glad you liked it. I’ve got to go, now, Benjy. See you later.

It was a moment before Benjy realized the man had used his secret name. Did the human know him, then? He looked in the direction the man had gone and, almost instinctively, followed him. This was not as easy as it should have been. In Benjy’s experience, the humans that smelled as the old man had — that is, of wool, sugary urine, sweat and some indefinable decay — were slower than others. Not this one. He walked quickly. Then, too, it was a busy day along Roncesvalles. There were any number of obstructions: women with baby strollers, other dogs, and — worst of all — ambling humans who were always a threat to step on you or kick you out of the way. Then there were the distractions: post boxes, lampposts, garbage bins, telephone poles, the sour milk and roast chicken smell of the Sobey’s, the raspberry jam from a bakery, the sausage and cheese from the delis along the street … so many things that made you want to stop and smell them. Keeping up with the man was a task. Yet, Benjy did keep up, the grey of the man’s pants — the colour of ash — always before him.

The old man — Zeus in mortal guise — walked south to the end of Roncesvalles, crossed the street on a diagonal and stepped onto the waiting streetcar. Abandoning caution, Benjy followed and jumped onto the streetcar just as its doors were closing. He easily found the old man — who was sitting at the back — and stood up to put his paws on the man’s leg. As if it were unexceptional to be importuned by a dog, the old man helped Benjy up onto the window seat.

Benjy’s feelings were mixed. He was not used to streetcars and he found their motion and noise disconcerting. (He had last been on a streetcar years previously, with his mistress, and he had not at all enjoyed the ride.) But then, there was the old man beside him: a peculiar presence but kindly, and if there was one thing Benjy knew, it was that kindness could be exploited. In the end, though, the thing that settled him down — or distracted him from his disquiet — was the window. It was open just enough for him to stick his snout through and take in the scented districts of Queen Street: from the musty oleo of Parkdale, past a bridge that smelled as if it were made of pigeon shit, past grasses and urine-saturated posts, past boutiques that exhaled dust or perfume or the smell of new cloth, back to old neighbourhoods, sumac trees and maples; the fishy-mineral lake a constant, intoxicating emanation. It was all intoxicating; so much so that Benjy was in Leslieville before he knew it and before he realized that the old man was no longer beside him, had disappeared god knows when.

Though the streetcar was not full, someone must have complained about Benjy, because at Woodbine, just past a place that smelled of human shit (in all its lovely complexity, but adulterated by something that reminded him of a garden of death), the streetcar’s driver strode toward him.

— Whose dog is this? the man asked the air.

You could tell he was not friendly.

Benjy jumped down from the seat before the driver could grab him. He scampered to the front of the streetcar and, the doors being open, tumbled down the steep steps and into what was, in effect, a new country: unknown, a little frightening. Walking past a gas station, he went south, instinctively heading toward the lake.

It wasn’t long before he was on the beach. The trees were still skeletal, their just-budding leaves like lime-green nubs. This time of year especially, a dog couldn’t help himself: one just needed to bite something. It was as if one’s teeth had desires of their own. So, snapping up a supple and tough twig, Benjy set off along the shore with no destination in mind, the sand stiff and cold beneath his paws.

Of the fifteen who’d been changed by Apollo, Benjy was the dog who had best made peace with the new way of thinking. Essentially selfish, he used his intelligence almost uniquely to serve his own wants, needs, desires and whims. He was not often troubled by pointless speculation. Yet, there were moments when, in a manner of speaking, his intelligence took on a mind of its own. Now, for instance, looking out at the great expanse of water, Benjy wondered why it was there. Why should this bluish, non-land be? And how far did it extend?

These thoughts reminded him, briefly, of the dog who had disappeared:

The leaves, they run like mice,

while birds peck at the ground.

The wood has rotted in its bin.

The grim axe has come round

But Benjy’s mind was soon on to other, more important things. What would he eat and where would he stay for the night? If the humans here (beside this stretch of the endless water) were at all like those near High Park, he would surely find one to take care of him. Biting down on the tough stick, he continued along the beach, heading east.

Happy, Benjy was too distracted to notice a mutt who cautiously approached. By the time he saw the dog — and was almost overcome by panic, because he could not immediately read the dog’s intent — the mutt was all over him, jumping up and down, sniffing at his anus and genitals, barking like one about to die of pleasure.

— You are the small dog from my pack! said the mutt, tail wagging madly.

At those words, spoken in a language only one of the fifteen could have understood, Benjy recognized the dog who had disappeared. That is, Prince. (How unpredictable life is, thought Benjy. I was just thinking about this dog.)

— Dog who was gone, where have you been? Benjy asked.

— He remembers! cried Prince. You remember our way of speaking!

His joy surpassing his capacity to express it with words, Prince began to run in wide circles around the beagle, tongue lolling out. It was as if he were chasing the delight that animated him. Benjy knew what Prince’s running meant, of course, but he did not share the feeling. He had lived through strange times with Majnoun and, before that, with the pack he had killed off. That Prince was a member of that nearly extinct group did not make Benjy glad.

— Dog, he said, stop running.

— I have been in exile for so long, cried Prince, I thought I’d lost our language.

— Our language isn’t important, said Benjy. The human language is what matters.

— The human language? asked Prince. It is all noise. Do you speak it?

— I do, said Benjy. I will teach you what I know, if you like.

— Perhaps a few words, if you like, said Prince without enthusiasm.

Benjy walked toward the lake, taking in the tang of it. What did it matter, he thought, if the dog clung to his ignorance.

— Where have you been? Benjy asked.

Prince had been many places since they’d last seen each other, but none of the places he’d been was as significant to him as the place he’d fled (High Park, the coppice) or the pack from which he’d been driven.

— What has happened to the other dogs? Prince asked.

With little emotion, Benjy gave him a severely truncated version of events. The others were all dead, he said, all poisoned by some unknown hand. And he himself had barely escaped with his life. In this way — brutally, with no mention of Majnoun — Prince learned of his pack’s devastation.

O, what it was to be swept so suddenly through such a range of feelings! From joy to despair in a matter of moments. Prince sat up and keened. And his cries were such an unfettered expression of grief that even the humans in the distance stopped to listen.

— We are the last, said Prince.

— Yes, said Benjy. It is all very sad. But tell me what has happened to you.

Benjy was not curious about Prince’s fate. What he wanted to know was whether or not Prince had learned anything useful. Prince, garrulous by nature, answered Benjy as best he could. But having just been devastated by the knowledge that he’d lost almost all of those who spoke his language, his heart was not in it.

+

After following Hermes out of the coppice, Prince began what was, unbeknownst to him, a long trek east. He hadn’t wanted to abandon his pack or lose the thing that mattered so much to him: the new language. He thought to remain in the park, avoiding the others until time had passed and their rage had quelled, but it was as if an undercurrent drew him farther and farther from the den.

To begin with, that winter, he was adopted by a family in Parkdale. He was happy, but when the spring came he lost them as he chased after a squirrel in a neighbourhood he did not know. The loss was not painful. He did not look for the family again. For a time, he was fed by a human whose breath and ear canals smelled of rancid fish. The rancid human lived east of Parkdale. Farther east still, in Trinity-Bellwoods, he was attacked by a German shepherd and then taken in by a sympathetic human who fed him until his wounds healed. She had smelled of a breeze coming in off the prairie and he would have stayed with her, but, after a time, she stopped letting him in.

From there — south of Dundas and Manning — he was abducted. That is, he was lured into a vehicle driven by adults but filled with young humans. He ended up somewhere far north of the lake: off Avenue Road, south of Eglinton. Prince was, fundamentally, good-natured. He was curious about the world and all that was in it, but here the younger humans would not let him alone. There was always some child — breath smelling of sugar and summer berries — draped around his neck like a kerchief of monkey. Despite this, he would have stayed on. In most ways, the humans were kind. The one way in which they were not, however, was in the leash they chose for him. It was a choke chain that he could not look at without feeling trepidation.

Most of the leash was black leather. The leather had a clip that fastened onto a metal ring. The metal ring was attached to a silver chain made of metal links that was itself fastened to a metal ring. Once around his neck, the silver chain either hung loosely or, when pulled, constricted and strangled him. This was not only unpleasant in itself, but, when he was occasionally attacked by other dogs, he had to choose between strangulation (as the human tried to hold him back) or defence. That is, he was either bitten or choked. This turned walking with the humans into a daily source of anxiety. And so, feeling that he would go strange if he stayed, Prince opened the front door for himself one night and wandered off.

After Avenue and St. Clair, he again drifted east, going from this plate of food to that treat, staying sometimes in people’s yards, scavenging for food in back alleys and behind restaurants. Moving across the city while sniffing out the lake, which was, when the wind was right, like a tantalizing hint of mineral and algae, a hint quickly lost in the congeries of city smells.

Having moved across Toronto in a rough parabola (from High Park not far from the lake north to Eglinton then south and east to the Beach below Victoria Park and Queen), Prince would have been hard-pressed to say what the city was. Not its dimensions — which did not interest him — but its essence. Certainly, it had a particular heft in the mind. It was different from Ralston, where he’d been whelped and where his first and still-beloved master had lived. Ralston was ‘home.’ It was an ache within him and always would be.

Toronto was, above all, a place for humans, their warm dens and unpredictable moods. It reeked of them: from the pleasing musk of their genitals and arses to the sweet, compound fragrances that clung to them. They were the city’s hazard and its sanctuary, its sense and its point. But what Prince loved about the city, the reason it was the setting for most of his poems, was the way it smelled. Whatever else he might be feeling or thinking, there was always some distracting smell to consider: humans, of course, but so much more, from the rotting carcasses of small animals around Grenadier Pond to the mouth-watering emanations from curry houses around Danforth and Victoria Park. A dog would have to be dead not to appreciate the sheer variety of the city’s reeks.

At this point, bored by Prince’s account of his travels, Benjy said

— Yes, yes, but where do you sleep and what do you eat?

— I do not sleep in any one place, said Prince. I know of a number of dens where the humans feed me and let me stay inside.

— Are these dens nearby? asked Benjy. I am hungry.

— One is near, said Prince. Shall I take you?

— Will the humans feed me?

Prince thought about it for a moment. He’d never brought another dog with him to any of the places he knew, but then he had never encountered one of his pack mates out here by the lake. One of his pack mates? The last one and, so, the most important, worth more to him than all the humans together.

— I do not know why they would not feed you, he said.

And he led Benjy on a longish trek to a house near Rhodes and Gerrard.

The house in question was small and rickety, looking a little like it might tip over. It was white (or whitish), its porch trimmed in a grandmotherly blue. Though it was late afternoon, Prince said

— They are not awake this early. We will have to wait.

Which they did, lying side by side on the porch. As they waited, Prince recounted more of his time away from the pack, his impressions of the city, interrupting his narrative to speak one of his newer poems:

With one paw, trying

the edges of the winter pond,

finding its waters solid,

he advances, nails sliding,

still far from home.

While listening to Prince, Benjy experienced a feeling he rarely felt: boredom. He knew no word for boredom, but the feeling was accompanied by a nearly palpable desire to have Prince stop talking. It was not that Prince was in the least offensive. It was that nothing the dog said was of use to Benjy. Besides, he hated the trouble it took to understand some of the words. He felt relief when the screen door screeched and a human stepped onto the porch. It was a man, tall and imposing, his hair black.

He lit a cigarette and then, seeing the dogs, he called out:

— Clare! Your dog brought a friend!

Then dimly, from inside the house:

— What?

— Your dog! It brought another dog with it!

The screen door screeched again and out stepped a short woman in a pink terrycloth robe: hair as dark as the man’s, eyes outlined in kohl. She took a drag on the man’s cigarette, then reached down to pat Prince’s back.

— Hi, Russell, she said. Hi, boy! Where you been?

Prince flinched at her touch, a ripple travelling along his flanks.

— You see that? said the man. He’s got fleas.

— He doesn’t have fleas! Leave him alone!

Having so recently observed a human couple ‘up close’ and having spent time learning the rudiments of their language, Benjy assumed he understood the dynamic between the humans before him. More: he saw an opportunity to make a place for himself. So, when the female had finished asserting that Prince had no fleas, Benjy suddenly got up on his hind legs, put his front paws together as if he were praying and recited the beginning of Vanity Fair:

— Eye’ll tuh pro-sent sendry wass een eets teens an un-shy-nee ore-ning een June …

That was as far as Benjy got before he blanked, but he had made an impression. Though they had trouble with the dog’s accent, the couple recognized the rhythms of speech. They looked at Benjy in wonder, as if he were an impossibility. A good ten seconds passed before the man said

— What in the fuck was that?

— I don’t know, said Clare. Is he talking?

Suddenly and with unexpected grace, the man picked Benjy up by the scruff of the neck and, with Benjy’s snout near his own nose, asked

— Do you talk?

Benjy could, of course, in his limited way, talk. What he could not do was speak while his neck was learning the weight of his arse. He struggled in the man’s grip, increasingly uncomfortable, managing only a kind of half-bark, half-plea.

— Put him down, said Clare. How’s he going to talk if you’re strangling him?

— This is how dogs are supposed to be picked up, said the man.

But he put Benjy down.

Prince, who’d jumped off the porch, called to his pack mate.

— Let’s go, he said. The big human is not always good.

But Benjy sat at the man’s feet, tail wagging expectantly.

— You see? said the man. I didn’t hurt him.

— Yeah, but you scared Russell, said Clare.

— Who cares? asked the man. I bet this one does tricks.

To Benjy, he said

— Roll over!

Which Benjy did.

— Play dead! the man said.

Which Benjy did.

— Dance!

Which Benjy did, getting up on his hind legs and turning in neat circles.

— Talk! said the man.

And once again, Benjy recited as much as he remembered of Vanity Fair.

— The little fucker’s gold, said the man.

Though she had affection for ‘her’ dog, Clare agreed. It was almost as if the beagle understood them. Beyond that, the dog was compact and adorable. Much of her affection for Russell was transferred to Benjy on the spot.

— He must belong to someone, she said.

— No, said Benjy. No, no, no!

— You heard him, the man said laughing. He doesn’t belong to anyone. Besides, possession is nine-tenths of the law.

— You think we should keep him?

— Don’t see why not. He hasn’t got tags. What’s your name, boy? Can you say your name?

— Benjy, said Benjy.

— Henny? asked Clare.

— Benjy, said Benjy again.

— Benny it is, said the man.

He opened the screen door to let Benjy into the house. Prince climbed tentatively onto the porch, intending to follow his pack mate in.

— No, not you, said the man.

He stuck his foot out to block Prince’s way. Nor did Clare object. She yawned and went in after Benjy, closely followed by the man, who closed both doors after him. In this way, as suddenly as he’d regained a pack mate, Prince lost the dog he believed was the last to share his language. Over the months that followed, he returned regularly to the house. On occasion, he was chased away. On occasion, he sat on the porch waiting to be let in, hoping to speak with Benjy. As it happened, however, this was the last he saw of the small dog with floppy ears.

+

The man’s name was Randy. This Benjy learned quickly because Randy taught him to say it. And the man was delighted when, in mere hours, Benjy mastered the r.

Randy would say

— Hey! Clare! Look what I taught him …

Then Benjy would speak the name, rolling the r as if beagles were French.

— Rrr-andy.

The humans would laugh, and Benjy — who had no idea why the name provoked such pleasure — would look at them with his head tilted to one side. Something in the sound of the name must have been potent because, later, when Randy grew tired of the game, he would ask not

— What’s my name?

but

— How do you feel?

The answer

— Rrr-andy

would set the humans laughing as obstreperously as before.

They were, Benjy thought, strange, and over the months he spent with them, he got to observe the strangeness up close. But there were also ways in which they were unexceptional. When they wanted food, they ate. When they were thirsty, they drank. Their den, naturally, was arranged to satisfy these needs at once. When they were in the kitchen, they were never more than a step or two from food or drink. The fridge was — as all fridges are — remarkable in that respect. This one was a wide, tall block of celadon: unavoidable or, better, unmissable. Once its door was opened, it exhaled fat, sweet and spices. Other nooks were just as enticing. The high cupboards, for instance, seemed to be made of coconut, sugar, flour, salt and vinegar. And then there was the room where the humans bathed and applied chemicals to themselves. The bathroom was fascinating, it being astonishing to watch the already pale beings applying creams to make themselves paler still. Was there something about white that brought status? If so, what was the point of drawing black circles around their eyes or red ones around their mouths?

But if the bathroom was astonishing and the kitchen admirable, what was the word for the bedroom? Here, the two were at their strangest. The bedroom had its pleasures, of course. It was where the three of them — Benjy, Randy, Clare — slept. It was where they were a pack, where Benjy felt most as if he belonged. In the beginning, he was relegated to the foot of the bed, but after a while, he slept closer to the middle, ending up most mornings comfortably lodged between the humans. And so, the bedroom was also the room where the smells human bodies made were most pungent.

What was strange about the bedroom was neither the room nor the sensual there-ness of its human occupants. What was strange was copulation. The humans had — every now and again — what was called ‘sex.’ (Why they needed a name for something so obvious was beyond Benjy’s understanding. Why name it, when its necessity was clear to all concerned?) The coupling was not confusing. The ritual that accompanied coupling was what Benjy found odd.

First of all, Randy and Clare kicked him off the bed whenever they were about to have sex. If he got anywhere near them when they were aroused, one or the other would treat him as unkindly as they could: kick, slap or hit. While they had sex, he was not wanted, so he kept his distance, observing them from a corner of the room. He would jump onto the wicker chair beside the chest of drawers. From there, he got the best view.

In the real world, in the world of kitchens, bathrooms, televisions and biscuits, Randy was so obviously the leader that it made no sense to respect Clare. Benjy would lie on her lap while she watched television, lick her face to catch any scraps of food that might linger there, put his head above hers when she was lying down. With Randy he was cautious and much more attentive. Randy was like most high-status beings: he hit out when he was displeased. (The only time Benjy tried to jump up on his lap, Randy pushed him away so hard Benjy flew against a table leg.) He was, at least to Benjy, intimidating.

In the bedroom, however, things were not so clear-cut. Most of the time, Randy fucked Clare. There was nothing unusual about that. It was his prerogative and, really, Benjy would not have been offended if Randy had fucked him as well. But then there were those sessions that smelled of cow. During these, Randy would wear black leather (with parts of himself exposed) and plead while Clare struck him with a riding crop. Most remarkably, it was then she who would penetrate Randy. More: Randy’s pleadings were, in the bedroom, as pathetic as Clare’s sometimes were in the real world, yet both of them seemed to desire these moments during which Clare was fully and admirably dominant while Randy was, to Benjy’s thinking, contemptible.

Benjy, a student of dominance, naturally understood that pleasure — the pleasure taken by Randy and Clare in these sessions — changed the equation between beings. As Randy actually enjoyed the moments when he was dominated, it could not mean that he had ceased to be pack leader. Nor could Clare’s pleasure in the bedroom give proof that her status had changed elsewhere, that he (that is, Benjy) should now respect her. Yet, something about seeing Randy vulnerable could not help but influence Benjy’s feelings about the man. He began to think less of Randy from the first time he saw him in leather and thought progressively less of him on each occasion thereafter.

In effect, Randy and Clare’s love life created a kind of vacuum in Benjy’s imagination. He could not decide who was actually pack leader. That being the case, he wondered why the leader should not be him. So, after a while, he would not come when Randy called, would not repeat Randy’s name, would not immediately submit to Randy’s will, running beneath the bed or sofa rather than doing what he was asked to do, peeing on Randy’s pillow to let Randy know who was in charge. The result? Randy — not a particularly sensitive man nor one with a deep love for animals — grew tired of Benjy, despite the beagle’s intelligence, despite Benjy’s obvious talents.

Clare’s affection was more durable, but only just. Once Benjy ceased doing what he was told to do (dance, roll over, speak …), it occurred to her that they had overestimated his abilities, that the dog was less intelligent than ‘Russell,’ her dog, the one Randy had chased away and now would not let in. Clare took care of Benjy, though, buying him food and petting him when he allowed it.

Naturally, this all contributed to Benjy’s feeling that he was in control.

+

In total, Benjy spent six months with Randy and Clare, neither a long time nor a short one.

In the weeks immediately preceding his death, his life was just this side of perfect. He had the run of a house. Clare worked during the day on most days. Randy stayed at home but spent much of his time in the living room before the television, out of Benjy’s way. When he remembered Benjy or if Benjy prompted him, he would put food down in a bowl — human food, mostly — or let him out the front door so Benjy could relieve himself on the lawn. Otherwise, Benjy was left to his own devices. This was more than a dog of his size and stature could have hoped for: food, a den with humans he could manipulate or evade, and an outside world that was not threatening. If it is possible to grow feral through an excess of civilization, then Benjy grew feral. Ignoring his instincts, abandoning his natural caution, confusing self-indulgence for dominance, losing himself in the twists and turns of his own calculations, he lost sight of the true indicators of dominance.

Randy and Clare should not have been a puzzle to Benjy. They were not complex. What they were was inconsiderate, crooked and above all selfish. In a word, they were very like Benjy himself. When, five months after taking Benjy in, Clare lost her job, the two were three months in arrears on their rent. Randy refused to work at anything that did not involve his ‘profession.’ (He thought of himself as a musician, though he was actually, from time to time, a roadie. In fact, he did not like music and, being almost proudly shiftless, he had been fired by every band he had ever managed to work for.) Clare, peeved, refused to look for work until he did. Their impasse was unpleasant and tense, but the two agreed on one thing: they would abandon the house rather than pay the rent they owed. In the middle of an October night, taking only what they wanted — and what would fit in their Pontiac Sunbird — they would leave Toronto for Syracuse, where Randy’s brother lived.

And so, Benjy’s death began sotto voce. The trees had changed colour. Along Rhodes, the leaves on the branches that hung over the street were orange and yellow. Nothing unusual about that. Clare was home during the day, but that was no threat to Benjy’s routine, so he thought nothing of it. Randy and Clare began to put things in cardboard boxes, but the things they packed held no significance for Benjy, so he was unimpressed. A tension crept into Randy’s and Clare’s voices. Benjy noticed the change in their demeanour, but as he now thought himself pack leader, it would have been beneath him to acknowledge the shift.

To their credit, on the night they stole away, Randy and Clare tried to take Benjy with them. They had quietly loaded the Sunbird with pots, pans, clothes and lamps. Around one in the morning, when they were ready to leave, they tried to coax Benjy out from under the bed. He refused to follow them. Clare pled their case, but Benjy did not respect Clare. In fact, he was deaf to any counsel but his own.

— Leave the little twerp right there, said Randy. We’ve got to go.

— We can’t leave Benny. He’ll starve.

— No, he won’t. Menzies’ll find him. Besides, I’m tired of his pissing on the pillows.

Clare sighed.

— Stupid dog, she said.

They left the light on in the kitchen. They put down a bowl of water and a bowl of pasta and tuna for the dog. Then they left for their new lives. Clare wept as they walked away from what had been, for five whole years, their home.

The sound of Clare’s crying troubled Benjy’s dreams. He felt something of her emotion and, roused from sleep, he lifted his head and breathed in. All smelled as it should have and the house was quiet, so he settled back into a dream of quick rats.

The following day, Benjy woke early. Sometime in the night, he had climbed onto the bed. Had he noticed the humans were not there with him? He certainly noticed in the morning. He was alone at the head of a bed without sheets, the light of an autumn morning coming through the now uncurtained bedroom window. He jumped down and cautiously explored the house, the only sounds being the loud hum of the fridge, the clicking of his nails on wood (bedroom, living room, dining room), linoleum (kitchen), ceramic tile (bathroom). There were also the sounds from outside: cars, mostly, and distant voices.

For the first time in a while, Benjy called out Randy’s name.

— Rrr-andy!

The sound did not quite echo, but it held in the air a little longer than usual. It was as if words persisted when there were no humans around to hear them. He was not upset. Randy and Clare had not got his permission to leave. They would return. He ate a few bites of pasta and tuna, drank from his water bowl, then returned to the bed. He peed in the place on the bed where Randy’s pillow should have been before going back to sleep.

That was, more or less, how the first days passed. Benjy slept, padded about, drank from his bowl (and then the toilet), waited. The days were measured by the slowed passage of time, by darkness and by light. But as time passed, he grew more and more hungry. The first morning, Benjy had been less than thrilled to find pasta and tuna in his bowl. He’d nevertheless eaten every bit by the end of the day. By the end of the second day, he had licked the bowl so clean there was no hint of tuna left on the porcelain. From that moment, the house became a place in which to search for food.

The fridge, so fascinating when Randy or Clare opened it, was inaccessible to him. He understood how the door opened. He could put his paw on the magnetized strip — the indentation — between the body of the fridge and its door. What he could not do was open the door. He could not get a proper angle or produce the necessary torque when standing directly in front of the door. The kitchen cupboards were at first as inaccessible as the fridge, but Benjy hit on the idea of pushing a chair over to the counter. He jumped onto the chair, then onto the countertop. Standing up on the countertop, he was able to open the cupboard doors. Little good that did him, though. He could smell a number of things, but the bottom shelf of the cupboard was all he could reach. For all his trouble, the only things he managed to knock down were an opened bag of uncooked macaroni and a can of mushroom soup.

He ate the macaroni at once but the can of soup was no more than a toy to bat around.

The third and fourth days were dire. All speculation about dominance or dignity stopped. He understood at last that he had been abandoned — he knew it — and although the thought wounded him he put it aside. There was still water when he flushed the toilet. That was good. But he grew desperate for something solid. Remembering words that Majnoun had taught him, words that humans always responded to (said Majnoun), Benjy went to the front door and cried out.

— Help me! Help me!

For what seemed like days, he cried the words out. He spoke the words clearly and he was heard by a number of pedestrians. Unfortunately, circumstances conspired against the dog. To begin with, it was Halloween. Along Rhodes Avenue, a number of houses were done up in ghastly fashion. There were pumpkins on ledges, witches and zombies on lawns and porches. Some of the witches cackled as one approached them. Some of the zombies groaned loudly and moved their outstretched arms up and down. Given all that, Benjy’s high-pitched calls for help were not alarming. Of those who heard his cries, a good number took his words for a witty reference to an old film in which a man is transformed into a fly.

It would have been better had Benjy simply barked. The sound of a dog in distress would not have amused anyone.

Other circumstances worked against him as well. Mr. Menzies, the landlord, had been called away to Glasgow, where his aging father had undergone heart surgery. The last thing on his mind was the property on Rhodes. It would be weeks before he so much as thought about it again. And finally: it being autumn, mice throughout the city were searching for winter homes. For every mouse that found a home, there were many more that found death in the sweet-tasting poisons left in corners or hidden in places a mouse might be forgiven for thinking safe. Before he had been called away and before Randy and Clare left without paying him back rent, Mr. Menzies had traps containing warfarin put down in mouse-tempting places throughout the house: behind appliances, in heating vents, in the cupboards beneath both the kitchen and the bathroom sinks. In principle, the traps were safe for domestic animals. Though the smell of the poison was alluring — like peanut butter, bacon and fried fish — there was no way for a cat or dog to open the black, plastic containers to get at the poisoned pellets. The traps should have been doubly safe, where Benjy was concerned, because something in their smell reminded him of a garden of death.

Desperately hungry at last, however, he opened the door to the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink. The cupboard smelled of chemicals and decay: soap, acids, rust, mould and grime. In amongst the chemical smells was a hint of peanut butter and fish skin. And it suddenly — or conveniently — occurred to Benjy that the smells of death came not from the plastic trap but from the tins, bottles and cans around it. If he could get the black container out, he would find the remains of a meal that had, by happy accident, been left under the sink.

As it happened, getting the trap from under the sink was not difficult. He burrowed amongst the bottles and cans, his sense of smell leading him to the black plastic container. What took time was deciding how best to open the thing. He could hear the ‘food’ rattling around inside. He could smell sustenance, but shaking the container did nothing. He was resourceful, however. After some thought, he dropped the trap from the kitchen counter, letting it fall to the floor. He did this only once. The box flew open and half a dozen pellets scattered like pink insects over the linoleum floor.

Benjy ate every one of the pellets. He waited, felt hungry still, then licked the floor where the pellets had touched. He was grateful that he had found food, strange-tasting food though it had been. He then repeated the process with the trap beneath the bathroom sink. After eating those, he drank water from the toilet and went to sleep on the bed.

True pain came late the following night. Benjy knew at once that he had made a mistake and that death was on him. His knowledge came from the strangeness of the agony: as if a fire were moving deliberately through the den of his body, searching for kindling. Also: his thirst was beyond appeal or satisfaction. His instinct was to stay still and hide from death. But he was driven to drink from the toilet, and this he did until he was too weak to stand up on his hind legs, too weak to drink.

The ‘great cold’ had come for Benjy. The death he experienced was as terrible as that suffered by Atticus, Rosie, Frick and Frack. And yet, in the midst of his terrible end, he experienced a stillness from which, in a manner of speaking, he could see beyond life and pain, beyond the world itself to a state that promised relief from suffering. As he died, bleeding from the nose, on the white tile floor of the bathroom, Benjy experienced a moment of hope that was not transcendent or mystical, but, rather, very much in keeping with his character. From the moment he was whelped, Benjy had been calculating, a schemer. But like all schemers he held within him the vision of a place or a state beyond schemes, where schemes were unnecessary because he was safe.

Benjy’s greatest wish was for a place where the echelon was clear to all, where the powerful cared for the weak and the weak gave their respect without being coerced. He longed for balance, order, right and pleasure. It was this place that Benjy glimpsed as he died, and the glimpse brought him solace. Were it meaningful to speak of death as a state of being, one could say that Benjy died into hope itself.

In any case, he went to that place from which neither dogs nor men return.

+

Zeus had fulfilled Atticus’s final wish. Benjy died a death as painful as Atticus’s had been. Being the god of justice, however, Zeus had granted Benjy the same degree of hope that Atticus had had at his death.

All of this was no doubt interesting to some god somewhere, thought Hermes, but it was annoying. Had Benjy died happy or not? Thanks to their father’s interference — and it was no use chiding him for it, either, there being no recourse from Zeus’s will — the answer was not as clear as it might have been. Benjy’s beatific vision of balance, order and right complicated matters. Apollo, of course, was certain that the dog had not died happy.

— Hope has nothing to do with happiness, Apollo had said

and there was no refuting that. Most of those who lived or died unhappily were as hope-filled as those whom the gods had favoured. Hope was a dimension of the mortal, nothing more. As he and Apollo discussed Benjy’s death, however, it occurred to the god of thieves that he had not been clear-sighted when he’d dictated the terms of his and his brother’s wager. The problem was death itself. No immortal could think of death without yearning for it. That yearning was, no doubt, what had led Hermes to imagine a happy death without being sufficiently clear as to the nature of the happiness.

— I think, he said to his brother, that we should broaden the definition of happiness. It would be generous of you to include hope or …

Apollo cut him off.

— Are we suddenly human that we need to argue about words?

Hiding his thoughts, Hermes said

— No

but for the first time in all this business, he experienced something surprisingly like resentment.