Andevery

By W. Gregory Stewart

...and every dog, his day

Professor Shad Lesenweiter lay on his back, and he lay still. He lay very, very still.

And as he lay so, motionless upon pine needles and dirt--and smelling these commingled with his own sweat, and the heat of the day--he looked up at the left eye and the left ear of a gray wolf. He did not have to strain to take in this limited lupine inventory, and he did not have to look far--the wolf had Shad's throat between its massive jaws, and was standing with a certain tense patience, as though waiting for Shad to make the next move.

Or contemplating a move of its own.

The wolf stood as still as Shad lay, and a long moment passed.

(Shad would not remember until later that he never noticed the warm, deep, ketotic breath of the carnivore. He never smelled wolf, never at all at the time, even though afterwards he would be able to remember that damp canine scent perfectly.)

Suddenly the wolf released the man's throat, snapped its jaws in Shad's face a time or two, and then turned and trotted away, tossing its head first left and then right as it did so, and back, as though batting with its nose at invisible but nevertheless annoying butterflies.

Shad rolled over on his side, moved to his knees, and slowly stood up. From a distance, the wolf looked at him, its attention momentarily arrested by the motion--then it walk-trotted off at an angle to a bowl of water beneath a pine tree and began to drink.

Shad brushed himself off, ran his fingers through his thinning blond hair, and walked to the gate of the fenced enclosure in which he and the wolf had had their recent encounter. There, quietly and quickly, he let himself out, closing and locking the gate securely behind.

A small crowd of students had been standing along the fence on either side of this gate to watch the professor and the wolf-- now they gathered at the gate, where they gave Shad an admiring round of applause.

Shad smiled and raised his hands in mock victory. When the clapping had quieted, Shad spoke.

"Ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors, honorable wolves. When I entered that enclosure, I violated the wolf's territory. My presence matched a pattern in the wolf's repertoire--encroachment upon his space. However, I, or really, my presence, was perceived not as a threat per se, but as a challenge. More patterning there as well, due to the essential nature of the wolf, to the hardwiring of the wolf (if you will allow me the corruption of computerese), whose natural environment really offers nothing to threaten him, not even man. Anymore.

"And for a challenge, whether by another wolf or a by a human, there are certain pre-defined situational responses available. Certain behavioral responses--stimulus-response patterns.

"So when I got down on the ground and bared my throat, and when I let the wolf take my throat in his jaws, I was matching one of those patterns and making one of those responses--I was sending out a message. To the wolf, that message was my resignation from any contest of dominance. Period. The bared throat meant submission--and so no challenge. Or at least no continued challenge.

"And as you saw, the wolf at that point lost interest in the whole encounter. He had proved his point, so to speak--and moved on. He didn't need to kill me--I had already withdrawn from his arena. I just wasn't worth any further effort..."

Shad hung his head in mock shame, then shook it, mock-ruefully-- behind him, the wolf looked up from its water bowl. The wolf looked at Shad, and it looked away. Then it walked over to another tree--an oak--and lay down at its trunk, curled up and went to sleep.

"The point of all this is that certain messages can be passed between species. Perhaps more precisely I should say that certain species-specific behavioral responses can be triggered by appropriate behavior originating from non-related species, and even from non-related forms. After all, what you saw would not have been nearly as surprising if it had been a Cocker spaniel in there instead of a human."

The group of students gathered around Shadrack Lesenweiter nodded--they took his point.

A hand was raised. Shad smiled. "Yes?"

"What you're describing is behavioral keying, right? More stimulus response than anything like real communication, or linguistic communication?"

Shad nodded. "That's right. Here, in this case, it certainly looks like a simple stimulus response chaining. Many canines raised entirely outside of the influence of any other of their kind will still respect the message of the supine form and the bared throat. So there could've been no modeling, right? It would have to be hardwired."

The student nodded, and Shad continued.

"On the other hand, in different social species, the dolphin, it's generally been accepted that there is real language, real communication above and beyond any innate behavioral predisposition. And among elephants we find the actual transmission of culture across generations. But that's going to be part of next week's material, so let's let that go until then, if you don't mind."

The student, not really sure if there were any way to change the decision if she had minded, nodded. "Sure thing, sir."

"Well, then. Until next week. And don't forget-- unit quiz on Monday."

Left alone at last, Shad turned his attention back to the wolf in the enclosure. He looked at it admiringly--a Canadian gray, wild just last week. Wild still, really--and so all right, then: captive a week.

He shook his head. Normally, he would not have attempted the demonstration with an animal still acclimating to its new existence, and quite likely confused beyond anything it had ever known before.

Then he shrugged. Whatever. The wolf had released him, as he had believed--no, as he had known--that it would. Shad had followed the patterns, and so the wolf had followed the patterns.

He looked up at the sky through the pines, at the dance of blue and cloud just beginning to color with the crimson imminence of the day's end. He smelled the air--pine lingered there, and dirt, but his nose was clear his normal hay-fever. He smiled at the thought--and suddenly remembered the smell of the wolf that he hadn't noticed before.

He shrugged again.

Then he walked back to the dirt parking circle, pushed his six foot frame into his Yugo, and drove home.

It was Friday. He would have an early night--there was work to get to in the morning, and get to it he would.

Shad's alarm went off at 06:00 am, but it didn't wake him. He had already entered that pre-alarm stage of semi-wakefulness so many professionals use to ruin the last hour of what could have been--and should have been--a good night's sleep.

Coffee. Then a shower. Then more coffee.

Finally, as awake as he could get--and as ready--he sat down at his PC on the table by the window in his bedroom.

And for a while, that's all he did--sat.

Somehow, he wasn't motivated this morning.

Somehow, he couldn't believe that what the world needed him to do just then, at just that moment, was to start another chapter in another proposed text book on behavioral psych.

"You have commitments," he told himself.

"I'll get to them," he answered.

"Think how much better you'll feel when you've gotten it done," he tried.

"I feel pretty good right now, not getting it done..."

He continued sitting awhile doing nothing, having arrived at an impasse with himself.

Then he sighed, flipped the ancient PC on, and waited while it noisily powered up. "Crankily cranking," he thought.

He inserted a 5 1/4 inch floppy (the real floppy, he always thought--the floppy floppy),d a document and began reviewing.

Shad Lesenweiter preferred to do research. He enjoyed the work, the discovery, the adventure--and despised the necessity of publication. Once he found a fact, well--that was good enough for him. Left on his own, he might tell someone what he had found out--and he might not. He certainly would not go through the effort of publication.

But Academia required certain other effort on his part, and since Academia was his bread and was his butter and was the bed in which he ate these, dropping crumbs, he had grudgingly agreed to this text book when the head of the his department had approached him. Rather heavy-handedly, actually--tenure had been questioned.

Still--here he was, waiting to get started and staring into his back yard above and past the PC on the table by the window in his bedroom...

Outside, Reggie van Gleason, his Alsatian, was industriously digging yet another hole to bury yet another bone. (He preferred Alsatians to German shepherds, Shad always joked. Usually, no one laughed.) Come to think of it, lately Reggie had been doing a lot of bone burying lately, and creating a lot of garden-variety havoc. Never seemed to chew them, that Shad could see. Just buried them.

Sometimes Reggie would unearth a gopher in his diggings. Thereafter would ensue jolly pursuit, much barking, and the ultimate demise of yet another denizen of the dirt--huzzah.

Shad watched idly as the dog finished the current yard renovation project.

What was...? Odd. He'd never noticed before, but the holes of the bone sites seemed to be following some kind of pattern. Or at least the fresh scars along the back fence formed some kind of pattern. This was interesting. (Actually, anything would be more interesting right now than what he was doing...)

Shad quickly sketched a rough approximation of his back yard and marked off the little bone graves on this sketch. From the camphor tree in the middle of the yard, and running west along the back fence, each new hole had been dug half again as far as the distance between the previous two holes.

First hole--a yard from the tree.

Second--4 1/2 feet from the first.

Third--almost 7 feet from the second.

Fourth--a little over 10 feet from the third.

Altogether, there were six holes along the fence. Within minutes, tape measure in hand, Shad was out in the backyard in a bathrobe, measuring and satisfying himself that there was indeed a pattern, a relationship of distances, one hole from a next.

The pattern was there.

But that was just for the holes along the fence. In the yard, older scars seemed to follow some kind of pattern as well--at least, he thought he was able to force these into some kind of a pattern...and then he laughed at himself. But he was having a good time with it--and he was ignoring the damned text book. So he continued.

Occasionally he stumbled when his foot broke through the ceiling of a gopher tunnel. He allowed himself some very creative cursing at these times--and pleased himself with the results. Shad made a note to get some more traps, and flood the tunnels again.

Let's see, yard scars, yard scars--yes. He could start at one nearest the camphor tree and if he looked, find another a yard away. From that one, he could find still another 4 1/2 feet away, and so on. The relationship held.

The relationship seemed to hold. Huh!

But he couldn't be sure without knowing when the bones had been buried relative to each other. To that end, he marked and labelled every trace of a hole on his crude map of the backyard.

Then he began to dig up the bones and label these.

Reggie just stared from his dog house on the back porch. Occasionally, he would lift his head and growl a sort of heartfelt complaint. Then he would drop his head again. And stare.

Resentfully.

Two hours later, Shad had dug up every bone associated with a detectable yard scar. (Not every hole had a bone; some of these may have been gopher-related sod damage.) He had color coded his yard map to show the holes for which the pattern held, using different colors to differentiate each cluster. For one set, he used a yellow marker; for another set, pink. And blue. And green and orange, as well.

It was all getting a little compulsive, he thought.

Compulsive--but fascinating, as well. Pattern recognition was one of the abilities on which he prided himself--and he had recognized pattern here. Then he laughed at himself, out loud - somehow, he had managed to impose patterning upon an undisputably random process. There is a danger in overtraining--pretty soon everything fits nicely into your set of expectations. Or not so nicely, but you know how to squeeze it...

Even so--it was nearly noon, and he hadn't committed a single new word to print. He had gotten a good bit of cardio-vascular benefit from his digging, and the yard looked like Saturday night in a prairie dog town after a bar mitzvah. All in all, a fine effort, he thought. A fine effort. And possibly one worthy of celebration.

He called up a friend, and made plans for lunch.

He showered and dressed, said goodbye to Reggie, and kept those plans.

Mary Alice Janeway, Ph.D, was already waiting at Mario's when he arrived. They had been friends from their undergraduate days, then divergent post-grad planning had forced them both to set the relationship aside for a while, but now--both somehow back at the same university--they had been able to pick up where they had left off, as good, good friends--none better--and maybe a little more.

Shad looked at Mary Alice. Her eyes had been amber for a number of years now--but he could remember when she had worn blue lenses. Sandy brown hair, and the warmest smile he had ever known--Shad had always loved her smile.

He smiled back, he hoped as warmly.

After being seated, they ordered beer and pizza. They talked while they waited.

"So, what have you been up to, Shad?"

He laughed. He told her about pattern recognition, digging up the yard, finding bones--he told her about his dog's singular disapproval.

She laughed. "Those must be some bones, Shad--but that's more my field, isn't it?" Mary Alice called herself a paleodontist; actually, she studied gnaw, cut and wear patterns on bones associated with early human settlements in order to develop a fuller picture of early culture.

"You're right, Mary Alice," Shad said. "You're absolutely right. Maybe you'd like to come over tonight and see what kind of pattern you can fit my bones into?"

She smiled. "Are you cooking? It's do-able if you're cooking."

Shad was cooking.

That night, Mary Alice arrived at Shad's at 7:00 pm. As she approached the front door, she heard a dog howling. Or whining--anyway, something somewhere between the two.

A few seconds after she had dropped the heavy wolf-headed brass knocker on the door, a frazzled Shad appeared.

"Hey, come on in. I'm sorry--things are a bit of a mess. Reggie has been crying all afternoon and frankly I'm about ready to throttle him. Do you know how to throttle? He's making me crazy."

Mary Alice stepped inside. From the entryway, she could see the dining room. And the dining room table. It was covered with bones.

She sniffed the air--there was no smell of cooking. "What, ah...what's for dinner, Shad?"

At least Shad had the good grace to look a little sheepish. "I figured we could order something in. Look, come here--there's something I want you to see." He led her into the dining room. He gave her a magnifying glass. He gestured at the various piles of bones, inviting her to inspect any bone she wished.

She rolled her eyes, picked up a nearby bone and looked at it while Shad rambled.

"I was thinking about lunch, about what you said--your specialty, remember? Well, I started looking at the bones. I was just trying to see if there was any way I could determine what order they'd been buried in. Then I started to notice Reggie's chew marks. I--God, I wish that dog would shut up!--I began to notice patterns, groups of unique chew marks that repeated, and regular spacings, and intervals--I got intervals here, Mary Alice. Don't I? Tell me what you see."

Mary Alice looked up from the bone she was inspecting with a puzzled look on her face. She put that bone down, and picked up another. And then another.

"I've never seen anything like this, Shad. These're certainly gnaw marks, tooth marks--heck, they're your dog's, right?--but I'd still like something better than a magnifying glass. Because I think you're right--they're certainly spaced, regularly spaced. Repeating patterns seem a little unlikely to me, but obviously I haven't looked at enough of these to know that. What are you thinking?"

He laughed hollowly. "I'm not thinking much of anything right now--not with that racket going on out there." He jerked a thumb in the direction of the back yard. "But it seems impossible, doesn't it? The patterns, I mean?"

Mary Alice wanted to shrug; instead, she just looked at him.

"Ok," he continued, excited to the brink of nervousness. "Let me tell you what I'm think--I think the dog is maybe writing on these bones. I think the marks could be intentional and intelligent. Maybe he's documenting his views of current affairs as seen through the eyes of a disenfranchised canine American--maybe he's writing an autobiography. Hell, I for all I know, he's writing about me--whatever, this has got to be language. It's too regular--too intentional. There's no way it could happen by accident--just look at it."

Mary Alice felt suddenly very sad and very, very tired. "Zoo animals frequently exhibit repetitive behavior just out of boredom. Well, some think boredom--some think that it's a kind of aberrant behavior brought on by a lack of environmental stimuli. Maybe Reggie's been bored, and he's been chewing those bones in a highly repetitive fashion..." Her voice trailed off. She could see that Shad wasn't buying it--she wasn't buying it herself, as much as she wanted to. Actually, she just got here--she wasn't sure what to buy.

She tried a different tack. "You know what I think, Shad? I think that text book's been getting to you. You're seeing things as they ain't, you know? And then you get a little annoyed at the dog, and all of a sudden he's in the middle of some kind of conspiracy of one. Why don't you ask for an extension on the damned book and get away for a while?"

He smiled at her, wanly. Weakly. He nodded. "You're right, of course. It's ridiculous. I've been letting the whole thing sit too long--and I guess it got to me, subconsciously. Patterns, patterns everywhere, and all that..." He shook his head. "Damn fool dog didn't even housebreak very well, and now I'm accusing him of committing English Comp 1-oh-1. Hah."

Shad suddenly snapped his fingers. "I promised you dinner--how about out? I need to get away from that racket for awhile, and you've got to be hungry. What would you like?"

For his sake, she tried to shake the mood she had fallen into. She suggested a basic burger place in the neighborhood. One with a liquor license.

They went, they ate, they drank. And in time, Shad was laughing at himself, and Mary Alice was laughing with him. They both felt better.

And Shad slept more soundly that night than he had believed he might.

The next morning, Shad got up early--again--for another go at word processing. Again. And again, he had no heart for it. Time weighed as ever heavily, on the uninspired.

Getting up for a cup of tea to augment his earlier coffee, Shad passed the dining room. In the dining was the table, on the table were the bones, and somewhere among the bones was a reason not to go back to the word processor...

All right. Yesterday he had let regular patterns half-convince him that his dog was writing--something--on bones. By chewing some character set into/onto the bone itself. He laughed out loud at the thought--he had very nearly convinced himself of this.

Well. Perhaps it was understandable--the gnaw marks seemed so intentional and so organized and so patterned... and he was a finder of patterns. And that gawd-awful whining all day long - he hadn't been able to keep a straight thought.

Hah. And hah.

Still...

There were the gnaw marks. If nothing else, it was interesting.

He began to systematically note and catalog the marks. Since he had not been able to see anything on or about the bones themselves that would him date them, he went on the assumption that the yard patterns he thought he had seen were legitimate, and grouped them that way to begin; within these groupings, he took the bone with a yard to the next and none before as first.

Each bone contained five groupings of markings. Some of these marks were simply clusters of striations, while others were gouges into the bone itself--but identical gouges; he recognized 3 types.

Shad had gotten this far when Reggie began barking at the back door. Bark, whine, bark, howl, bark, bark, bark at the back door. Shad pinched the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes briefly, and shook his head tightly.

He went to the back door,d it--invited the dog in. But Reggie was not interested in coming in. Neither, it turned out, was he interested in eating. And he had plenty of water, already.

No, apparently what the dog wanted was for the man to follow him out into the yard. And so the man did this thing.

Once he had reached the camphor tree, Reggie ran from bone excavation to bone excavation, growling, looking at Shad, whining.

Shad shook his head and went back inside, back to the pile of bones. Outside, Reggie began to growl at the back door in a threatening manner. Shad recognized the pattern--it was a pre-challenge announcement.

Just when he figured he was a little off-center on all this, that damned dog had to go and make him think... well, what?

He was off-center, he concluded. Reggie was just a little peevish that all his bones had been dug up. For crying out loud, what else could it be?

"Man's best friend," he muttered to himself. "And biggest pain."

He spent the rest of the day trying to analyze the markings, trying to find a place for them--and their patterns--in a context of intelligence.

That night, he did not sleep well. He might have slept well, but the dog kept growling and yipping and occasionally barking at all of Shad's key sleep-entry points.

It was a long night.

The next day, before class, Shad looked up an old friend of his, Shelby Carmichael. Shelby did something arcane and academic in the Native Languages and Philology Research Library.

"I've found some old bones with some curious markings, Shel. I just wondered if you could look at them. I'm not sure if they're meaningful or not, and I, uh..."

Shad didn't need to finish the sentence--his friend had taken the folder Shad had proffered and was already thumbing through Shad's renderings.

"No photographs? Maybe one of the actual bones?" An expectant face--red-cheeked and a bit pudgy--peered at Shad over wire-rimmed glasses; Shad was forced to shake his head.

"No, I'm afraid that's it for now. I can't release any of the material just yet, I'm afraid, and uh, oh--you know."

Shelby nodded. And Shad was relieved. He had not wanted to come in with a pile of old soup bones, shank bones and so forth and ask an old friend to read those. He was hoping that his sketches of the markings would suffice.

And apparently they would.

"Nothing I've seen before, not that I recall. Can I have these for a while?"

Shad nodded. Truth to tell, he was happy to be free of it all, for a while.

After chatting up this and that, they made arrangements to meet for lunch on Friday.

Until Friday, these are the things that happened: Mary Alice saw Shad for lunch once and dinner once, and bones were not mentioned--for this she was grateful, and by this, relieved; Reggie's noise level did not fall off, but neither did it increase; Shad finished--actually finished--another chapter; and the gardener left Shad a nasty note, complaining about gophers and Shad's own landscape architecture, in that order.

Then, and altogether too quickly, it was Friday.

"Shad, have you been travelling?"

"No--why?"

"Well, I think I've found something, but unless you got your bones back east, it doesn't make much sense. You didn't, did you? Get this stuff back east?"

"No. Why--what do you have?"

"Well, each of your markings corresponds with a Taminole Indian glyph. It's a fairly unique form--some of the words are like chunks gouged out of the recording medium, others are simple line arrangements, and so on. Here, look."

Shelby Carmichael pulled a large volume from the even larger valise on the floor beside the table. Shad moved away his tuna sandwich to make room for the tome. Hed it to a book-marked page--yes, some of these were his markings.

Shad was stunned. Yes--he had asked a friend to research the damn things; but no--he hadn't expected to have anything turn up. Indeed, this exercise had been intended to close the door on the whole thing. "Nice markings, Shad, really nice--but meaningless." That's what he had been hoping to hear--that his bones were apparently patterned but pointless.

No such luck.

"Who are the Taminoles?"

"Well, they were associated with the Seminoles. Territory a bit north, some overlap, very similar customs. Big animal worshippers, though, the biggest.

"And that's very interesting, that is. They believed that animals gave them all things--food and skins, of course, but human form as well, and intelligence, and--well, theirs was a very simple creation myth. The Master of all Beasts was likewise the Master of Man, and spoke the tongues of all creatures. And he lived underground, Hades-like.

"This Master gave the Taminoles their language, their writing, their customs, and so on, and the Taminoles prayed to him and worshipped him--just like all animals prayed to him and worshipped him. Sometimes the animals would be blessed. And sometimes the Taminoles would be blessed. It all depended on the god's mood at the time... Or so they believed. A semi-standard package, actually."

"Semi-standard?"

"Yeah. Usually any kind of overlord animal, or animal god, is going to be pretty big, elephant sized at least. Any descriptions that have been gleaned of the Master of all Beasts corresponds with only one thing, which ain't too big at all. Pretty insignificant, really--a worm lizard. Little pink earthwormy looking thing, a legless lizard up to a foot and a half long. Rhineura floridana. 'He is scaled and legless, He is the serpent the color of dawn, and His are the roads underfoot.' That sort of thing. Only thing like that in the area is the worm lizard.

Shad interrupted. "Whoa, Shel--why do you know this? Aren't matters herpetological a little outside of your area?"

Carmichael smiled a warm, smug little smile. "My boy keeps snakes and lizards, all that. Works a little at the zoo in the reptile house too. Not bad for ten.

"So anyway. One day they just disappeared; folks call it the aboriginal Roanoke. Now, this happened just last century, so there was some pretty accurate and reliable information about where their villages were, populations, and all that--the Federal agencies went looking for them, but they were gone. All gone, all of them. Everywhere. Just as they were starting to convert to an agricultural life on their new reservations. By all reports, it was as if the earth had swallowed them up. "Needless to say, it got a lot of play in the tabloids of the time, especially given the idea or a bunch of little worm gods undermining villages to let them sink to the center of the earth. A yellow paper field day. Interesting foot note, don't you think?

"Anyway. We can read this. It kind of wanders, and whoever wrote it really didn't pay any attention to grammar--but, yeah, we can read it. Here."

"What's this?"

"The translation--isn't that what you were looking for?"

Shad nodded, looking at the words, and trying not to get dizzy.

When he got home that afternoon, Shad went right to the bedroom closet, pulled an old brown duffel bag off the top shelf,d it, removed a shoe box,d that and took out a hand gun, a .22 revolver. This was the legacy of a burglary and a brief flurry of home security activity some years earlier; it had been regretted ever since.

But now--finally--he needed it. Though not so much for a burglary, Shad thought, as a mutiny.

He set about looking for shells--also hidden away to the point of pointlessness, home security-wise.

Finally he found them. Then he took his home security system into the bedroom. Sitting at a table by the window, he loaded the gun while looking out into the yard. He saw Reggie, growling at the ground, threatening either gophers or grass. He stared coldly at the dog.

Shad put the loaded gun down on a pine nightstand by the bed and pulled the translation out of his shirt pocket. He unfolded it and put it down on the table. For perhaps the fiftieth time that day, he read it, bone by bone, as it were, in the order he had given it to Shelby to translate.

day is good food is good sun
sun above the one above
the one above brings bone
day is good bone is good sun
the one above of hurtful noise
day is good food is good sun
the one above of hurtful noise
the one above must go
a thing is known must be
day is good the one is bad
food is good the one is bad
the one above is bad
the one above must go must die
the one above must die
the one above will die and day is good
the one above will die
the one above must die
the one will die

It went on. But obviously, he, Shad, was the 'one above' Reggie. That interpretation fit too many different patterns to be wrong--dominance in the man-dog social structure, for starters. And Shad lived in the house, elevated above the yard. And even simple physical height made him the 'one above'.

'Hurtful noise', he supposed, was when he had yelled at the dog--for whatever reason. Now the dog was planning to kill him? It seemed a bit excessive. Still, one could never truly know what to expect from a disenfranchised canine American...

Through all of this, however, somewhere in the back of his mind, there was a corner of sanity that didn't believe a bit of it. Dogs writing in the ancient language of animal worshippers, himself about to put his own dog down because of it...

Things were happening, way too fast and way too strange.

But even that sane corner recognized the maxim of 'better safe than sorry'. And the evidence...

So, regrettable as it might be, even his sane corner agreed that the dog had to go.

Outside, Reggie's interminable racket continued. If he'd had neighbors at all close, he'd've been ticketed by now, sure. But the lots were large out here, and the homes far apart--and now the semi-isolation was going to work for him; it was likely that no one would here the gunshot. He wasn't concerned about legalities--but it would have marked him in the neighborhood if anyone knew that he shot his own dog for no reason he'd ever want to share.

He knew those patterns, too.

As he walked out of the bedroom to the kitchen, he thought he saw something out of the corner of...damn!

Some kind of a rat was climbing down the dining room table. Apparently it had been drawn to the bones--there was a pile of them on the floor. Well, time for cleaning up later.

Right now an unpleasant job awaited him.

As he crossed the kitchen for the back door, he suddenly heard Reggie scream. A scream is not a usual sound for a dog--he ran to the door.

In the late afternoon light, it appeared to him as though the ground beneath Reggie were erupting,ng, loosening--swallowing the poor creature. Reggie continued to scream... for a bit. Then the dog collapsed.

And then the dog was silent.

Shad watched as the roiling darkness beneath the disappearing beast separated, splitting off into individual clumps of darkness. He watched as--well, it looked like gophers, damn BIG gophers--he watched as the dark masses defined themselves as gophers and he watched as the gophers ran and scampered about the yard. He watched as god-dammit-gophers devoured his dog--no, that wasn't true. They weren't eating the dog--they were biting pieces off the dog and spitting them out...

He watched as a group of gophers gnawed on Reggie, on a leg of Reggie, watched as they worked a bone with their chisel-like teeth and dragged the bone over to the back door, watched as they left the bloody bone, marked and patterned at his feet.

Gophers.

He looked down at the bone--he did not pick it up. The individual marks were familiar--he'd read the marks and their interpretations enough by to actually read a little on his own-- but not their arrangement--here were new sentences:

the one below
the one below
the one above the one above must die
the one below above
bone good bone good
the one above the one above must die

He stared as a dark mass swarmed out of the yard and over the yard, a tide of gophers rising up to the back door and in.

He braced himself to leap over them, but as he did so, the house shifted beneath him, and the floor dropped, and he fell.

The one above the one above squeezed off all 6 shots before rolling over on his back and baring his throat.

The gophers had never seen this before, and they didn't know the pattern. And since they didn't know what Shad expected them to do, they ad libbed.

So Shad never saw the gray-pink serpent that had chased the gophers up out of the ground, never saw it break turf and leap skyward like a breaching whale, clods of dirt dropping from its scales, never saw the mass of it writhe against a sudden-clouded sky--never saw anything in the end but gopher teeth and angry gopher eyes.

And as his world turned darkly red, as his agonies gave way to the dulling knowledge that death was near and now, Shad never saw the gophers turn en masse to face the great length of twisting reptile, never saw them nod and...and bow, as if giving thanks and obeisance.

Shad never saw the gophers pray.

And of course, in the end, he never even noticed their breath...

About the Author.

Back to the top of this page.