Julia Elliott - The Wilds

The children could not take their eyes off the odd man. One by one their mouths popped open. They sat stock-still in their cramped desks. By the time the bell rang, Dr. Vilkas had not progressed past his first slide. Rather than darting from their chairs, the students filed out slowly, glancing back at the evolutionary ecologist before slumping out into the drizzle.

We stood alone in the dark room.

“I had a film I wanted to show them,” Dr. Vilkas said.

“That’s too bad,” I said. “I would have loved to see it.”

“Well, you could. I mean, we could watch it right now. If you’re free.”

The classroom smelled pungent, with a trace of something coppery that I could almost taste. Who knew what chaos of desperate, pheromonal signals my poor caged students pumped out, day after day, in our dank little portable as the beauties of the world glimmered beyond their reach in the mythical places they watched on screens. We sat in their tiny desks toward the back of the room, in the territory of the football players, where a turbulent energy still seemed to hover.

The film, a montage of hundreds of individual canines caught in the act of sniffing, had no sound. We watched one silent dog after another thrust its snout toward this or that reeking object: a pile of dung, a dead cat, a battered Nike tennis shoe. We watched dogs take long, contemplative whiffs of each other’s anuses. We saw them snorting hectically at each other’s genitals. Male dogs patrolled invisible borders, adding their own messages to the mix. Female dogs snuffled their fragrant nurslings. Old dogs nosed their bodies all over for signs of doom.

Halfway into the film Dr. Vilkas started talking about the different kinds of pheromones: territorial scent markers creating boundaries, alarm pheromones warning of looming dangers, male sex pheromones conveying the special genotype of each species, female sex pheromones announcing optimum fertility, and then there were comfort pheromones, released by nursing females to calm their worried young.

“The world is a tempestuous tangle of significant odors,” said Dr. Vilkas. “And humans are blunt-nosed fools.”

“Is it possible for us to pick up some of the dogs’ messages?” I asked him. “Without knowing what we’re picking up?”

“We don’t really comprehend the human vomeronasal organ,” he said. “Scientists are just beginning to understand a little about human pheromones, how they give us very particular impressions about each other.”

The film ended and the room went dim, gray storm air glowing outside the windows.

“Sometimes,” I said, “before a dog pack appears, here at school or at my house, I get this special tingling feeling.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. In my brain, my spine. The nervous system, I guess. I don’t know if I really smell anything at this point.”

“Very interesting,” he said, rising from his desk. “I have an appointment, but I’d like to talk more about this. . phenomenon. We could. . I don’t know.”

“Meet somewhere?”

“Yes, we could do that.”

Dr. Vilkas walked to the media cart and closed his laptop.

“Like for coffee, maybe,” I rasped.

“Or maybe we could conduct some tests, scientific experiments with the dogs.”

Dr. Vilkas dropped one of his cables and picked it up, put it down on the media cart, shook my hand with his hot hand, tucked his laptop under his army jacket, and walked out into the rain.

“Late again,” said my husband, who held a baggie of fetid meat in his hand, bait for the new leghold traps he’d positioned in shallow trenches around our yard. We were standing behind the garage, beside our new aluminum garbage cans, a hot spot for canine activity.

“The dogs,” I said.

“Did they come to school today?” he asked.

“No. But we had another meeting. Working out the kinks of certain safety procedures.”

“What kinds of safety procedures?”

“Rabies prevention.”

“Which involves?”

“You know, detection. Symptoms. Vaccination. Rabies is a virus.”

“Duh.”

“And we’ve got something this Saturday, something on crowd control.”

“I thought you were going to help me install the electric fence.”

“An electric fence won’t keep them out.”

“How do you know? Intuition?”

“No. Actually, a dog expert who spoke at school said so.”

Suddenly I felt very alert. Wind blustered through the trees, shaking drops from leaves. Something zinged up my spine. I thought I smelled Fritos.

“I know you think I’m crazy, but I feel like they’re coming,” I said. “I really do.”

“It’s too early. They always come at dusk.”

“At school they usually come in the afternoon. I’m going inside.”

“Plus, they’ve never come when it’s this wet out,” my husband called after me.

I was jogging toward our house. The mist felt good on my skin. I thought I heard my husband laughing at me, or maybe I heard a braying dog. By the time I reached the back porch, they were already streaming into our yard. My husband yelled, ran around the side of the garage, scrambled into the closet where he kept his power tools, and shut the door. He was safe, so I could laugh triumphantly on our back steps, one foot from the door but still outside in the electromagnetic air, my head thrown back, my neck muscles rippling, a long liquid howl shooting out of my throat.

The dogs didn’t plunder or linger, but tumbled right through, a stinking river of fur and clamor that flowed around our side yard, dipped down into the gulch that had just been cleared for a vinyl-sided mini-McMansion, and disappeared. I couldn’t tell whether they’d gone west or east, and with my heart still thudding, I ran inside to e-mail Dr. Vilkas.

“A fluid progression?” said Dr. Vilkas.

“Yes, beginning at the crown, dropping to the top of my nape, moving down my spine, and then, well, from the coccyx to the pubic bone, an, um, quivering in between.”

“In between?”

Dr. Vilkas was smirking. I’m not sure if he believed me, and perhaps I did exaggerate, but he was also tipsy, slurping exotic liquid from something called a Scorpion Bowl — gin, rum, vodka, grenadine, orange and pineapple juice — a drink that’d arrived with a flaming crouton afloat in the middle of it, making him giggle and rub his palms together. There was a straw for each of us, and I’d taken more than a few nervous sips. We sat alone, deep in the interior of the Imperial Dragon, a strip-mall restaurant with several windowless rooms, the inner room a jungle of plastic vines with two golden bulldogs cavorting by a miniature waterfall. We dined in a gilded gazebo. Pentatonic lute tunes flowed from speakers. The air-conditioning, set low, smelled moldy.

Dr. Vilkas tore a chicken wing apart and gnawed gristle from bones. The way he hunched over his food reminded me of a praying mantis, his face an uncanny blend of ugly and beautiful. He had long eyelashes and greenish temple veins. Soft lips and sunken cheeks. And then there were his eyes — one a crisp arctic blue, the other a woodsy green — burning above his receding chin.

“It could be a reaction to the overwhelming flurry of pheromones the dogs put out. Have you always been this sensitive?”

“Sort of, but this is different — like something in my brain’s opened up.”

“Is there any chance you’re pregnant?”

For some reason, in this red-lit, windowless room, with Dr. Vilkas’s head hovering two feet from mine, the word pregnant , applied to my own body, evoking my invisible husband, uttered with a guttural dip toward the word’s heavy, eggy letter g , brought a hectic flush to my face.