Page 81 of Blacktail

“She…she said…” the dog gasped, “ ‘Get…away…from…my…Babykins.’ ”

“What? What the hell is a babykins?” Blacktail asked, still not understanding.

“It’s me,” he spat. “It’s what she calls me. It’s…”—here the little dog coughed up an amazing amount of blood—“it’s my name.”

Blacktail backed up a step farther and regarded Mercy, who still had not run. As he watched, the beagle—Babykins, Blacktail thought, that’s his name—pulled himself over to be close to her in their final moments. Blacktail heard a faint, wet grinding. His ribs. The absurd little dog whose courage had no bottom stifled a moan as he moved. He did not cry out.

As Blacktail saw them together, a memory floated to the surface of his mind. It was his first real memory, his oldest memory, the memory of his mother’s death. He remembered the crack of gunshots. He remembered the icy burst of fear pulsing from his guts at the sound. He remembered branches whipping at his face as he moved through the woods, remembered the sound of his own scream when he crested the hill and smelled his mother’s blood. He remembered entering his childhood den and seeing them there, seeing how his mother had tried to shield her puppies with her body, how she had died with her tongue a little way out, died still trying to clean his sister’s wound.

He remembered looking on this with a terrible species of wonder, unable to comprehend the mind of the monster that would destroy such love.

Blacktail crouched low on his haunches, then sprang up and crashed through the wall of House. He landed nimbly on his feet, shook the blood from his fur, and bounded back into the forest, leaving the survivors to the stewardship and mercy of their god.

At dawn he lay down to sleep, but the shame he felt kept him awake until the sun was high in the sky. When at last he did sleep, he heard no voices calling out to him.

He did not dream at all.

Chapter 7

The Fire of God

i

o lord, receive me in my penitence

Chester was fairly sure he would be dead by sundown, tomorrow afternoon at the latest. He was not disturbed by this; on the contrary, the prospect came as a great relief. His damnation was entering its third season, having endured the winter when he feared he might die, and the spring when he came to realize that the true horror was that he would not die soon enough. Now summer was upon him. The Starving Rocks, as he had come to call this desert, was nearing the end of its long meal.

i offer thanks for my time here

Chester pried one eye open, looked down the length of his body, shuddered a bit, and closed it again. When he last saw snow fall, it was through a window in House, the den of his mistress, with chewtoy between his paws and a fire warming his butt. There had been a half-eaten bowl of food-rocks gathering dust in the food room. He had had occasion to reflect on that detail many times. Back in those days he mostly disdained the food-rocks, taking his meals instead from the paw and dish of the two-legs he considered to be his life mate. Even now, with his starvation nearly finished, those foods still had the power to call a trickle of drool from the side of his mouth—fat roasts, dripping with grease and still warm from their time in the hot-box, or salty bacon, or perhaps just the wet, homey comfort of gravy-from-the-metal-rock-thing. The fact that he would be willing to trade his tail and paws for even a single one of the food-rocks he had once disdained was only a taste of the rich ironies he had happened on while treading the long path of his death.

Chester had eaten nothing at all for two months.

In the month before that he had done better. Two days after his damnation began, he caught a mouse and gobbled it down whole. A week later he came across the half-eaten corpse of some desert beast and fell on it with a will, thinking then, in what he now recognized as his boundless naivete, that he had been hungry. Not so. Had he been hungry, he would not have walked away with morsels of meat still clinging to the bone. Had he been truly hungry he would have eaten the bones themselves and licked the dirt underneath besides. Hell, he had discovered, is hunger.

for without it i would have died blind to my sin

Perhaps a half month after that, he came upon a small pack of men wandering among the Starving Rocks. He followed their trail for a time. One of them, a kind-smelling female that reminded him of his two-legs, had given him a handful of some crunchy thing. The flavor was not particularly pleasant, but as he had come to discover, flavor is not a big concern after the third day or so. Later that afternoon she had given him another. That night he slept just beyond their circle of firelight. He had dreamed that she would accept him into her pack, as his two-legs once had. He dreamed that he would once again have chewtoy between his paws and a fire warming his butt.

But the next morning when he came to beg for breakfast the woman wasn’t around. When the male she had been with saw Chester he beckoned. “C’mon, buddy. Closer. Closer still.” Chester could smell the meat. He crawled forward, wanting to hope. His stomach rumbled. His tail twitched. The man threw boiling fat in his face.

Hell is also burning.

The pain had been beyond description, beyond imagination. His face and muzzle seemed on fire, or swarmed by a thousand stinging bees. For many days he had been able to do little but scream. Somewhere in this time the fur on the left half of his face slid off and lay before him in the sand. Chester sniffed at it for a moment, thinking of how the meals of his two-legs smelled when she took them from the hot-box, steaming and succulent, then gobbled it down, hating himself but unable to stop. That moment was the beginning of his understanding, the awakening of his faith, the first breath of his prayer.

i have forsaken the craft of my fathers

In time the burns healed enough for him to function. He tried to hunt, of course—his mother had told him stories of the days when all dogs hunted for their meals, and he knew such things were possible—but despite that first lucky mouse he never caught the knack of it. Few creatures lived among the rocks. Those that did tended to be small and quick. Back when he still had the energy, he tried to chase them, but at the last second they always bolted into some damn hole. The only thing in this desert more plentiful than rocks was prairie dog holes.

He never caught one of the little bastards, not even once. In time the prairie dogs realized this. They began to make a game of it, darting over him in his sleep and calling out taunts from within their burrows. They took to calling him the Furry Cactus because he was so slow.

Every few days he heard the voices of men. Sometimes women. Sometimes both. He stayed far away.

He first saw the outline of his ribs toward the end of summer. He grew desperate, and of course, desperation is the mother of craft. That night he lay still on a warm rock, breathing slow and regular, but careful not to truly sleep. When the prairie dogs started their game he surprised one of them, dashing after a fat one named Sliderpaw. The chase was short but very close, ending with Sliderpaw diving into a nearby hole perhaps a paw-length ahead of Chester’s snapping jaws.

Inside the burrow, the prairie dogs shared a good laugh at Sliderpaw’s expense, for of course they all thought Chester was a joke. Chester could hear them quite clearly. They sat just inside the hole, laughing about how if Sliderpaw hadn’t farted at the exact right moment he would sleep now in the belly of the Furry Cactus.

There was little point in bantering with them. He had concluded that around the same time he realized it was futile to try to dig them out of their holes. But his frustration was such that he could not stop himself from snapping, “The Furry Cactus will sleep now. If any would like to try another go, please do. I think I’m getting the hang of this fine game.”