Julia Elliott - The Wilds

Sirens took the air again and the dogs started howling. The pack scrambled east, as though fleeing the sun. The fallen pit bull let out a little croak and twitched its hind legs.

“Better get inside your classroom,” said Dr. Vilkas, “before this beast revives.”

I slipped back into my portable, where the children had turned off the lights to see better.

They cheered for me. Girls pressed in to hug me, wet-eyed, smelling of french fries and imitation designer perfumes.

I found my husband on the back stoop, hunched over his new tranquilizer gun, three beer cans methodically crushed and stacked at his feet, ready to be boxed and hauled to the scrap-metal recycling center.

“You’re almost an hour late,” he said.

“Emergency meeting,” I said. “The dogs came back to school today.”

For some reason, this made my husband frown.

“You left three lights on. The kitchen faucet was dripping. You forgot to padlock the garbage cans.”

“We had a meeting before school and one after — about the new safety procedures. And then the dogs came, so the meeting was delayed.”

“I needed you here. I wanted to run through the drill.”

“Drill?”

“With the cages. Remember? We’ve got to get the fallen dogs into cages within twenty minutes. That’s how long the tranquilizer darts last, on average, and for some of the larger species, who knows what our window of op will be.”

“Why don’t we run through it now?”

“Because it’s dusk. The dogs always show up at dusk, or else after midnight. Haven’t you noticed that?”

My husband was sporting hunting chaps. He wore his new HexArmor bite-proof gloves, purchased on the Web from a veterinarian supply emporium. He’d bought a pair of dog-kicking boots, with treads for running and steel toes, and I’d seen him practicing, kicking logs, smashing the snouts of invisible monsters. But now he slumped on the bottom step — all dressed up for our drill, and I’d stood him up.

I patted his scalp. I sniffed the air for whiffs of wild dog. My husband, perpetually congested from allergies, could never smell the animals coming, could never sense the bustle in the air, the electromagnetic hullabaloo that made my spine buzz and brought a pleasant fizzle of panic to my heart, even before the animals tumbled into my field of vision like a promise kept.

“The dogs won’t come tonight,” I said.

“How do you know that?”

“Feminine intuition.”

“Whatever.”

“I think I may have a more developed vomeronasal organ than you do.”

(I smiled as I said this, but I half believed it.)

“What the fuck is that?”

“Pheromone detector, a throwback organ maybe, deep in the nose.”

Some people had sensitive ones, moist and throbbing and bristling with neurons, while other people’s were all dried up, almost nonexistent.

I opened the sliding glass door.

“It’s like half the population has lost its sense of smell,” I said.

“The air conditioner’s on, you know.”

“But it’s getting cool. Why don’t we open some windows?”

“How many times do I have to explain? We live on low land. Moisture breeds mold and mildew. This house was not designed for the open air. In this humidity, without air-conditioning, it would rot away in no time. Do you know what that would do to our property value?”

“It would plummet?”

For some reason, this made me laugh. I knew all about humidity and its effects on our house — this was one of those conversations we had over and over for ritualistic, perhaps even religious, purposes. My husband kept a humidity meter posted above the kitchen bar, and sometimes, when he felt especially restless, he’d roam the house at night with his integrated, probe-style thermo-hygrometer, sticking its supersensitive bulb under chairs and beds, sliding it into drawers and cabinets, sometimes crawling into our shower to monitor subtle changes in the closed-off air. Snorting to himself, he’d jot data in his notepad. I’d even seen him thrust the bulb into his own nostrils and ears, smiling slyly, the way he used to when our love was a living creature, breathing in the room with us.

I closed the sliding glass door. I went to check my e-mail.

There was a message from our principal with an attachment that contained a list of experts willing to make classroom visits. I scrolled to the bottom of the page, where I discovered the e-mail address of Dr. Ivan Vilkas, evolutionary ecologist and forerunner in the burgeoning field of de-domestication.

Dr. Vilkas was scheduled to visit my world history class. My students fidgeted and fussed. Whispery agitation erupted in problem areas. Gobs of slobbered paper flew from certain mouths, smacked against the napes and cheeks of certain targets. It was a hot muggy day, our air-conditioning system on the blink. And the children’s sweat smelled peculiar, as though spiked with new combinations of minerals. Their lips looked redder than usual. Most of the kids needed haircuts. And Jebediah Jinks would not stop mumbling biblical gibberish — he might’ve been speaking in tongues for all I knew. Girls snorted and giggled. And an ugly plot seemed to be brewing among the football players — they whistled ostentatiously, cracked their beefy knuckles, and smiled.

We were discussing an archaeological excavation in Iran, where a tomb containing both human and canine remains had been discovered, the dog skeleton curled in a jar, the man buried with daggers and arrowheads.

“This means that he was an important man,” I said. “And that the dog was probably a pet.”

“Or he might have eaten it,” said Rip Driggers. “My daddy says Chinks eat dog. Maybe they eat mutts in Iran too.”

“But why would they put a dog skeleton in a jar?” asked Tammy Harley.

“Maybe it was a cooking pot.” Rip snorted.

“Gross,” said Tonya Gooding. “You’re one sick puppy.”

“And you’re a biatch,” snapped Rip. “Ruff-ruff.”

“Watch the language,” I said. I could no longer send Rip outside to calm himself. The principal’s office was swamped these days, delinquents clogging the hallway outside his lair. All I could do was move troublemakers to unpleasant areas of the room, make them clean the dry-erase board, deny them time on our virus-wracked Dells.

Just as it began to rain, Dr. Vilkas arrived, his knock quick against my hollow aluminum door. I found him grinning on my little porch, spattered with drops, clutching his laptop and a tangle of cables.

“PowerPoint presentation,” he said, tapping his computer.

“It’s that guy,” said Rufus Teed.

“I saw you on television!” said Tonya Gooding.

We had thirty-five minutes left until the class ended and my planning period began, so we hustled to get his laptop hooked up to my digital projector. As we searched for the right cable, rain beat against the flat, tar roof of my ancient portable. The children murmured and sniggered and pinched each other. Cryptic underground smells oozed up from the vents. Dr. Vilkas asked me to cut the lights, and I stood in the humming darkness with my arms crossed over my breasts.

“Well, now,” he said, flashing his first slide (a diagram of the canine nasal system). “We don’t have much time, so I’m going to jump right in.”

Dr. Vilkas rubbed his palms together and smiled at the students, his chin receding.

“While the human nose contains about five million scent receptors,” he began, “the average dog snout boasts over two hundred million.”

After pausing to let the drama of his opener sink in, he launched an incomprehensible lecture, describing the receptor neurons and olfactory epithelium of the vomeronasal organ, its dark, squishy, fluid-filled sacs, its mucus-slaked cellular microvilli, which absorbed innumerable odor molecules. As he descended deeper into thickets of technical jargon, his sentences became endless, his accent heavier.