Robert Calder - The Dogs

"What for?"

"Your buddy might have made it, but you didn't, and you're under arrest six ways from Sunday. Get 'em out!"

Floyd Tyndall was the tracker. He was seventy years old, stoop shouldered to the approximation of a hunched back, and nearly blind in his right eye. He carried a Marlin.32 Special, his favorite deer gun, the one he'd taken the second and third largest trophy bucks in the state with. He was a right-handed shooter, and hadn't been able to switch when he'd begun to lose the use of his right eye more than a decade ago. So he'd had crazy-looking stocks made for his long guns, with wide curves setting them to the right of the barrel line, and telescopic sights mounted inches out to the left of the breech. He still butted the guns to his right shoulder but now he sighted through his left eye, and he could shoot just about as well as ever.

He'd spent an hour leading the three sharpshooters over the first quarter mile of track and they were growing impatient.

Officer Laughlin said, "Hell, they'll be in the next state before we even make the first ridge. They're going straight along the stream, why don't we just haul ass after them?"

"That's where they've gone so far," Tyndall said. "It don't mean that's the way they kept goin'."

"It's the easiest and most logical way."

"For you, but you ain't a dog. I don't think."

Half an hour later they were still edging up the stream and Laughlin's fellow officers agreed with him.

"Well, you boys just charge on up ahead," Tyndall said. "Me, I got to hang around here because I haven't seen no sign at all for a while and your mouth running don't help me one little bit."

The officers looked down. They were on stoney ground and couldn't make anything out. Embarrassed, they went silent and followed Tyndall like subdued schoolchildren while he went into the water and across to the other bank, then came back again and shuffled in widening circles muttering to himself. After a little while he stopped and pinched something off a nettle.

He held it up for the troopers. "Ain't deer hair, nor raccoon, nor fox, nor anything you run across in the woods very much. Offhand, I'd say it's from the undercoat of a dog." He rubbed the gray, downish stuff between his thumb and forefinger and let it fall.

Minutes later he had the track again, which angled severely away from the stream.

In the early evening they came upon a clearing. There were dog droppings in the woods around it, paw prints all over, gnawed bones, pressed-down beds in the grass.

"See, this here stream," Tyndall said, "is a feeder into the one they were following at first. About the third or fourth, I'd reckon. If we'd of went bustin' on ahead we'd be standin' someplace God don't even know about scratchin' our butts and figurin' there wasn't a dog around nowhere and we'd best be headin' back before it gets dark."

"Yeah… well." Laughlin resented the old man for making a dummy of him.

"Well we found it, sure, but I still don't see any dogs, and it is going to get dark soon."

Tyndall swiveled his head, looking into the brush and up the rises.

"Don't know much about dogs and their habits, but they're around all right.

They're watchin' us right now."

Instinctively, the officers raised their guns. They looked about. "How do you know?"

"This much sign, it means they been livin' here a spell. Now a creature like a wild dog's supposed to be, he wouldn't stay in a place this close to people unless he had to. So you got to figure that what those two kids said about a pup, it means there's a she-dog with the pack and she has got a litter, right close to us now, and the pack's been bedded here waitin' for 'em to get old enough to travel. And that means, with the pups still too young, the pack's got to stay with 'em, the she-dog anyway. So then you got to figure further that they smelt us and heard us comin' awhile back, and they're hidin' somewhere in these woods, maybe even up by that outcrop there watchin' to see what we're goin' to do."

"How do we find them?"

"We don't. They come to us. Now you boys just split up and stand around the edges here. Keep a sharp eye."

The policemen took positions. Tyndall began quartering the clearing.

He paid special attention to the ground around stumps and half-buried boulders.

Crr-ack! A rifle spat. Crr-ack! "There, there! A brown dog, it was right up by that twisted spruce!"

The policeman was jabbing his arm. "There, right the rel I saw it."

"Did you hit it?"

"I don't know. Jesus Christ, let's go, Tyndall."

"Calm down." Tyndall moved his eyes across the woods. "You wouldn't've seen it unless it wanted you to. It'll show itself again in a bit. But not in the same place, and only for a second. You ain't likely to get a good shot off."

"Jesus, what are you talking about?"

Tyndall was enjoying himself. He didn't like these so-called marksmen.

Maybe, their rifles resting on sandbags, they could pick off a criminal through a window at 500 yards, but they weren't worth a tinker's dam for this.

"One gets me twenty that's the she-dog. And what she's doin' is teasin' you. She wants to draw you off from the pups. She'll get you runnin' after her and she'll show you a little hide every now and then to keep you all hot and bothered, and then when she's led you a couple miles away, she'll just disappear and you'll be left all alone with your rifle in one hand and your pud in the other. Just stand tight.

She'll come again."

Ten minutes later she did. She drifted out of a bush across a short, open space to a dense stand of saplings, seventy yards up the slope.

Laughlin fired three quick sloppy shots. One of the other officers put two more into the saplings.

"Well, this isn't going to do," Tyndall said. "You boys just aren't snap shooters One of you give me your flashlight." He pushed through brush to the base of a stone escarpment. "Spotted the den before.

Didn't want to do this, but I guess we got to get you an easy shot somehow." He lowered himself to his knees, pampering his creaky joints. "You boys make sure nothin' comes flyin' onto my back," he warned.

He stretched out, thumbed the light and pushed his head into the den.

Four pups huddled at the bottom. Their ears were flat against their skulls in fear, their eyes bright discs in the flare of the flashlight.

They climbed atop each other and showed him their teeth and snarled.

"Now don't you worry," Tyndall said, squirming in and stretching an arm forward. "No one's goin' to hurt you. Go easy now."

He closed his hand around one of the pups' forelegs. The pup jerked and barked and bit at him. Pulling the pup out, he said, "Ouch! Cut it out.

Come on, stop it." But he didn't mind, he wasn't angry at the pup.

He got a grip on the loose skin over the pup's shoulders, so it couldn't reach him to bite. It began to caterwaul. The pups in the den raised their voices. Tyndall hurried to the center of the clearing. "Get around me," he said, "and watch like you never did before. I don't know what's comin', but something' sure as hell is."

He didn't want to, but he pinched the pup and shook it.

It set up a great racket. Tyndall's eyes darted around the foliage. He held his breath.

At the Treehouse, the bitch had chewed through the rope, picked her pup up in her mouth and trotted into the woods. The pups in the den were wailing when she reached them. They swarmed over her. She soothed them with her tongue until they quieted. Then she brought the big one, Loki, the one who had been taken, outside again. The others tried to follow. She drove them back down. Loki had recovered most of his equilibrium; he'd inherited his sire's character.

Orph was pacing the clearing in a fire of agitation. They could not stay here. This was understood by all. A den, once discovered, was no longer a place of safety and succor to the pups. It became a trap.