FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Jericho: A [TRUE] Story

By the Nine-Headed Fox

It's been raining since February. All around the country it's been torrential downpours, and ecosystems in chaos–snow in the bayou, lukewarm thunderstorms in Dixie, tornadoes up and down the alley. And all throughout those lands twolegs meet it all like dogs, grimly resigned to carry on as they always have–knowing in their hearts, as they know most things, that this cannot continue; but they are chained in place, by the empty space in their pocketbooks, or the false sense of security that their remaining rationality feeds them. A manmade dustbowl is creeping in at the edges of their lives. they feel it everywhere, in the roads that are sunbaked and washing away; as a wet, heavy breathing from the deep shadows of their sleeping places. Their lives have all been declared forfeit by the powers they serve; and among those who remain, the greatest dream that may be commonly found is to die anywhere else.

Somewhere between Muskogee and Harlan, in a shady there is a town that used to be worth something. Not much, but something; it was the life of some 300 folk, who never achieved anything of particular note between them but who all lived the best they knew how. It is worth a little less every day: there are maybe eighty people now, none very old or lucky–the old and lucky are gone, now. There are some of them very skilled: a doctor, a pair of teachers, a mechanic and a cook. They are styptics and sutures, doing their best to hold the place together, but the hemorrhage continues: into the big cities, two or three dollars at a time, for gas and sugar and the other things they don't bring out here anymore. They are not sliding into poverty; it is coming for them, into their homes and greasily down through their throats.

That is not the only thing coming for them.

In the thick forest at the edge of the valley, a mixed pack of canines sit and look down into the town–in their hearts, the dying twolegplace is already gone, and they have come to give it its last rites.

There is no pack like them anywhere else. They are unusual stripes that don't often run together–three coyotes, a lone wolf, a fox, and a dog. They are all bitches–none pregnant, none nursing. On the trail, as they make their way over acres of rewilding country, they eat rabbits, with the occasional lonely deer–but their greatest prey is the twolegs themselves; who will never know their fangs, but will all the same be gone when they are done with this place.

There are, however, many animals like them. They all had twoleg names, once, and they all have been to twoleg places–they walked among them, for years upon torturous years, walled up in disgusting twoleg skins, playing at twoleg customs, revulsion and sorrow ever growing in their hearts. By their twenties and thirties, they had lost all fear of Hell.

Then, one fateful night in February–the changes. The ones they'd been praying for.

Whatever hateful experiment had bound them in those awful shapes reached its end, and the shackles rusted away. Now all their ugly names and their shrill chattery words and their infectious maths are gone–collapsed out of canine brains, which had no space to hold them. Their histories linger in their minds like stories of things that happened to someone else, less and less real every day. It will be a long time before they have spent as much time on their paws as they did on their feet, but the timer only goes up. In their hearts they now nurse the same secret hope, that one day all of that will be less than a bad memory: that they will forget the words "water cooler" or "representative democracy" and the workings of doorknobs; and all that shall remain of who they were is their tameless love, and the inexhaustable joy of being a wild animal.

But before that far-off day, there is work: animals' work, such as no man would ever do or want. There are things that must be laid low and things which must be brought up in their places, and this is the canines' calling.

In the rest of the world it's not sunset for another few hours; but here in this valley it comes at 5 PM, an umbra without starshine. The darkness suits the beasts just fine: they don't rely on their eyes the way they used to. The wind pushing through the trees stirs their whiskers and fur; they can smell each other through the darkness, follow each other's footsteps. The nose is their first lens overlaying the world now: they smell the trees, they smell the air, they push their noses into the dirt and sniff after the memory of whatever walked there. And whenever they yield to that instinct it is sweet ecstasy–even now, months on, it's an electric thing to put your nose under your lover's tail and breathe in all her feelings the way you always should've been able to.

The three coyotes are the brains of the pack, for a given definition of brain. They come up with the plans, at any rate. Their muzzles will never form any twoleg word ever again, but any thought that's ever been worth expressing, they had a way to make felt. Right now they're sitting near and occasionally on each other, an animated dervish of wagging and stomping and yapping and licking. The dog is there too–she's got some coyote in her, but really not all that much. They're figuring out amongst themselves what's the best way to hit this place, and every time there's a lull in the conversation she interjects–holding a stick, she tries to bait them into tug-of-war. Eventually the dog is too loud and someone snaps at someone else and then the whole thing turns into a bunch of yapping canines slobbering and pawing at each other, leaping and hopping in an aimless squabble–the fox running to and fro among them, gekkering and whipping her tail at just how ridiculous they look. The wolf, who is so large that she probably could kill them by accident, abides.

Ten minutes later the tug-of-war is over; the canines lick their paws and scratch their ears, having halfway forgotten the twolegplace.

In all of this, understanding was reached.

Their tussle brought notice. Now other things from the woods are looking in at them: from the edge of their space, where the doggy goodstink runs thin and the fog quickens to opacity. Shadows on four legs, walking with rare purpose. They come in with the subtle motions and loud scents of forest things: each is smelt before they are seen, every layer of musk distinct in the wild beasts’ noses. They stink like heavy winter pelts and crushed-up leaves and the spit of the animals who love them.

When the things at last emerge from the creeping dusk, the canines are sat as nonthreateningly as they can: ears perked, tails flat, mouths most-of-the-way-shut. They’ve restrained their irrepressible joie de vivre for a few moments, because to most other animals a pack of dogs is just a pack of dogs; when they jump up and run scamperquick, the prey cares not whether it’s in play or hunt.

And it is prey who has come to visit them now. Not an animal on whom they will prey: animals who are prey, in the scheme of things. They are looking down on the dogs from a gently outcropping ridge, moving in a herd their own: two stags who stand close and stink like each other; three black rabbits with wild, crazy eyes; a squirrel, who hangs on one of the stag’s antlers. The dog pack sits where they are–even as the drool beads, unbidden, on their jowels.

The world is strange lately. The prey descend the slope, and come to stand beside the canines; they turn their eyes towards the twolegplace, where the trapped stars are flickering on. The instinctive enemies are shoulder to shoulder: the wolf at level with the stags, the coyotes welcoming the rabbits among them. In each of them, a certain instinct turns–one which they can resist for now, and will–though they are all waiting for the day when instinct becomes law.

But for now, the laws of the land are in flux; even those of nature.

They’ve got their plan: same plan as always, do what comes natural. Wag and yap a laugh riot; run circles through the woods. Why not? The world is green and beautiful; the rain is light today. They have new friends; new friends means new scents. There is an effervescent glee in the atmosphere, crackling between them with no earthly cause. The dogs’ mouths come open and their tongues loll out, cold mountain air rushing up into their maws; the deer snort and paw the ground. Now the tails are wagging, tum-tum-tum against the earth, crackling leaves beneath and kicking rough damp soil up in their skrunklespots. The rabbits thump their hocks, once each, pointedly; a tiny groan of disapproval.

Then at last the wolf can hold her joy no longer and raises her head in a howl: a long lugubrious call that rises over the blooming trees. To the others it is an instinct as base as breathing to raise their maws in kind: and up from their throats jumps a chorus of willowy dogsong. The wind catches every note and carries it across the dell, where it redoubles against the mountainside into symphony.

Then the horn is blown, the march begins, and first introductions. New friends, new scents! The dogs plunge their noses into the new arrivals and know them well: the wolf gives her nose to the stags’ necks, and the coyotes to their loins. The fox presses her nose into each of the rabbit’s chins and licks their foreheads once for auspice. The Prey have hardened nerves like nothing else under the sun.

The tails are wagging fast, slapping against legs and thighs, fanning bitchpack goodstink across the clearing. The squirrel is chittering, squeaking, twitching its own tail in stormy motions–one coyote follows it with dewy-eyed yearning, keening softly to her mates. The fox and the rabbits are sitting together: her coat is milky white, albedescent in the rising moon–they are splayed on their bellies around her, ears at attention, silhouettes gobbling up whole chunks of her; her tail is coiled wreathlike around them, animal scents that seldom mix here running together in potpourri.

The stags are nerviest of the prey: with a wolf to one side of them, coyotes sniffing out their undercarriages, it feels too much like being under the eyes of a pack: they can imagine the fangs flashing–the ripping red agony of being stripped off the bone while living. But it’s the dog who calls them down: they had a dog, when they were twolegs, who passed of old age in December–and their dog didn’t look a thing like this one, but she acted just the same: dumb, smiley, eager to play either the strange big dogs from the forest. When she player circlerun in big wheels around them, happyapping like she’d gotten a new squeaky toy, they made her their now-homeplace.

When the scents are taken in and the marks have been given out the animals disperse again, prey going one way, predators the other. They pick a lazy circle around the dell, across a forest floor in springtide. The ticklegrass is up to belly height now–everything budded, little bloomed.

Once they’re out of earshot–well, well, away–the bitches candidly whine about how good the prey smelled. The thighs on the rabbits, never mind the doubletasty dewlaps–and the ribs on those stags! It’s not fair that the prey get to be juicyfat off the new growths but the doggies don’t even get to chase them. One day, no more of this–one day gristlefat bunnies for them who love the taste, and hardcatch hares for them who love the chase.

They walk an angled zig-zaggy trail, over baked dirt that cakes underpaw, grit getting up into your claw beds. Whenever they cross a scent mark, the fox goes up ahead to make way: she is white cut out of the darkness, eye-catching up close though at distance she becomes inseparable from moonlight. She steals ghostly through the trees and gives her chin to strangers. Any canine who smells her learns who’s coming and why, and so long as there’s no fuss they’ll all leave well enough alone.

Longwalk round the valley, under the moonrise way, the pack meet the prey again. They stop ten runsteps away from each other–close enough. Moonlight wraps them all in silver. A stag stomps his hooves and raises his snout; then, like the wolf before him, raises a howl. The high steely sound forks up out of his snout and across the twolegplace.

Silence rushes in afterwards, cold and pointed. The valley is his, if no voice rises to claim it; and any stag whose blood runs red must raise his voice in kind. And for some cold quiet seconds, it seems that he shall stand unopposed.

Then, from down in the darkness of the twolegplace, its like arises.

Hearts skip. Tails wag. Then the animals pass each other, two ships in the fog, on their own ways. They will not see each other again tonight. The dogs are in their own element until the wyrd instinct calls them again. The high strangeness becomes an oily thing at the back of memory–for now, strange new woods, funrun with the pack.

Old man drizzle comes down on the pack in his steady droning way. The forest drinks most of him up; they feel his sound and his chill more than his touch. He fills the woods up with mist and spins the moonlight into shafts of hazy silk. Every living thing seems a shadowed memory.

The tripartite coyotes do not call themselves by name but each knows the others’ scent: flowers, trefoil, ponderosa pine. They are nose up, huffing the air: plenty things good and tasty in the wind now. Springfat squirrels and matingstink bunnies, who haven’t dealt with a dog pack in as long as they have been alive; they can dice with a fox but are no readier for Coyotes then they are for the very fingers of the sky.

Flowerscent keeps a pretty bloom tucked up on her ear sometimes; today it’s run too fast, land too tricksy. It catches the scent of something cherry sweet, wants to go rolling in it–takes a step, when Pinescent raises a oiiir!–Ears perked, tail stiff–wagging goodthingheresmell. Flowerscent puts snout under Pinescent’s tail and breathes in the news: she leaps up in disbelief.

Wolf has the scent too–starts in motion but coyotes kick off the ground scamperquick, following the new friendscent uphill–the pines whip past in a vernal blur. Flowerscent gulps the air, and sticky petrichor plays on its tongue: the scent of desert dog far from home.

The cold air nips at the whiskers and scrunkleparts, fingernails against their scalps–toenails raking surface roots and crushing dead leaves, pressing pawpads into cold soil that holds their memory for half an instant. Scamperfast, drumbeating pawsteps, crunchy whispers that play in the woods overhead like a phantom pack: they sound like thirty things, though they move like one: they go in a flowing line of fur, nose-to-tail, smelling directions as the lead dog charts the way: Flowerscent leads, her mates coming after, then the dog–Wolf, who could overtake them all, is at their tails, packmotherly. Only Fox trails, a softpadding rearguard.

The pack bursts from the treeline onto the hill's bald summit, where the fog is thin and the rain is heavier–the drizzle comes down on them, beading on their ears and rolling down over their snouts into their open mouths–sweet on their lolling tongues as this land's rain hasn't been sweet in many years. Here the moonlight is clear and bright, and frames the strangers waiting there: two stringbodied desert dogs, soulways gritty with sand that never quits their coats –one sitting wearily, wafting the scent of chocolate; one with matefetch pointy ears, a stink like petrichor and peanut butter. They lock eyes–recognition crackles.

Then the pack leaps upon them: Flowerscent up against Rainscent's muzzle, pushes its tongue into old friend's lips and tastes sweet reunion–I knew it, I knew it, wasn't it Time?! Their tails flap against the dirt, against each other's flanks; Rain climbs over Flower's back and licks its ears, forepaws sliding from shoulders to flank and then onto the dirt, Pines and Trefoil friendlicking Rain's ear's and then they are nose to tail–where have you been, who's this I smell?–but in that moment Flower realizes: Chocolate is lying down, ears flat–tail thumping, but slow in motion. First a fear of sickness–then Trefoil smells her tummy and raises the waghappy oiiiiir: in June, puppies.

The valley is a place of high strangeness. Sunbirth hits it differently than the flat places: the mist runs from silver to gold, utter darkness becoming queer antumbra–but the shadows linger, ever-shrinking, till He is nearly in apogee. For the long hours the pack continues their aimless dogtrot, following their noses to good stinks–sometimes thinking that if they still walked on two legs, this is when they'd play catchup, or make plans; they smell those lingering urges rolling off each other, feel it bubbling up in themselves. And always after chases blazing white euphoria of reaching for those old rhythms and finding them gone: there is no space in their canine brains for keeping time. They remember what it was like to think in terms of earlier and later, but now...memories are dreamy, an eternal river of things they know, in hazy unclear relation; and even Dumb Doggy knows not to think further ahead than you can smell. Their past is over, the future doesn't exist: there is only this moment, and only they are there to see it.

They scent an old doe, half a deadpant upwind. Stomachs rumble. Mouths hang open and toungues loll out, panting hot breath into the misty dark. Wolf, doggy, fox, coyotes all, breathe her in; drool beads on their tongues.

There is no moment of deliberation: they kick off the ground, coursing over root and creekbed with the night wind's own dreadful grace. Wolf leads–paws hit the ground, heavy duum-duum that drums through the trees; the others in her slipstream catch her movesmells, rolling off her tongue and pawpads and out from under her tail: when to leap and turn, secondpaw memories twisting up their nostrils like strings, wrapping around their bodies; they are in packthink, no thoughts their own, one will with forty legs.

Pack comes over a hill and finds the doe muzzledown in a sweet bush, easycatch in her old age. She makes them at scamperlength; startles, turns to run, but Pack is upon her–Coyotes get her in the hamstring, tense undertooth. She knows a moment of fear; half a scream, before Wolf takes her throat. Life runs out of her in sticky sweet red, down into the earth– splashed on the killer's muzzle, in rivers beneath her paws. The old doe doesn't suffer but three hearbeats. As clean a killbite as any fangs have ever ripped.

The hunt is over; sense is coming back to them. Pack breaks apart, becomes Wolf-and-coyotes-and-fox-and-dog again. They circle around her, tuck in on her flesh and take her memory up into themselves. Wolf gets the neck and the heartflesh, muscles are thick and corded undertooth. Coyotes take the legs–fangs into stringy thigh, rip clean chunks of gristly tendon–better than ripping away is to rip open, and press snout in, suck out the meat, feel it in chunks on your tongue and the smell of the prey's last run in your nose. Happyaps and meatsqueaks, wagging tails for all.

She did not die for nothing. The doe had her part, they have theirs–her body is dead but now she is forever. This is a dog's prayer.

Sun comes and goes. Pack stays in the dell; they follow the rhythm of their own hearts around the folded edges of the valley, making a homeplace of the forest. They split up for lazy scampers, drifting together again. Always they are going, never knowing where. There is a certain yearning for a den but they know in their hearts this is not that place.

The drizzle stays with them always: steady on the leaves above, music in their ears. Even at highsuns now the mist does not go away. There is never lightning, but always the mountains are echoing with soft sighs of thunder. It is as though the wide world's curtains have been drawn for intermission, and the band has gone into a vamp; and in this hushed, cloistered moment, down in seat of the valley, the twolegplace finds uncommon grace.

There is one twoleg road going sunbirthway, and another sunsleepway. Both winding and narrow, they stay quiet for long hours every day. The pack crosses them once each sun, always with a small skip in their hearts: once they knew different words for all the twoleg roads, names and letters and numbers–now all they can say is that the roads are a kind of stone, that's been rained on and mudded over and sun-baked into a jagged flaky mess.

There is a rise in the earth. From there you see the road in the distance, a scamperlength away– and down into the heart of twolegplace. The pack sits in blissful reverie under each other's chins and muzzles, bellies to paws to muzzles to tails–but the strangeness walks among the twolegs, and they are there with it.

It is going into their places with momentous news and unlikely fortunes, of the sort that don't ever reach this place. ('He left it all to me? But I th-') The wind brings them the news as snatches of loud words ('-lottery, we're quitting this town!') and purring motors; a lingering scent of exhaust ('full ride scholarship?!'). Maybe once every four hours or so a twoleg in an overloaded car leaves the town.

They will never be back.

Come one misty halfsun later on, Dumb Doggy follows her other-nose away from the pack's resting place. She wanders in that jumpy aimless way that you do when your whole world is a game that no-one can lose: quick to the crabgrass, down over skippering brook, up to the twoleg road and across the muddy tranches–down the length of the rubberstinky stones, to within easy eyeshot of the twolegplace. The rain is in two different tempos over the green world and the grey one; she can hear the curtain part around her passage.

Then she is up to their places, past the rotted-down wooden fences which marked their curtilege, and the rust-eaten signs that once gave them their names. She is going past their duplex homes, past the empty doghouses and the stores full of space; pawpads splashing in potholes, rainwater skipping off the rooftops to crown her soggy head.

She is not alone. Wagwag.

On one side of the street, opposite a small feelbetterplace (there was a word for that, she remembers?) where the lights are still on, there is a humble timber bungalow that has humbly born ninety years of wear–now the paint is peeled away and its tin roof is sagging in. There is a friendsmelling twoleg crouched in the doorway; the door is hanging open and attacking its hinges with a hammer. Dumb Doggy trot-trots up to scamperback distance–then woofs her presence. The twoleg startles, whips towards her, holding up the hammer like he's ready to swing it–when he sees her sitting pretty there in the street, rainwater rolling over her puppysad ears, he feels a whole different way.

"O-oh. Hey there, girl. You friendly?"

She wags her tail. Yap-yap. And despite everything good sense has taught him, the twoleg sits down and beckons her closer. Wigwagging, she trots–gentletrots, doesn't want to scare him–up to him, ears perky even though the rest of her is soggy; and when she gets near she sniffsnooflickylicks the twoleg, friendway. He yelps, makes half-an-effort to push her off.

She lets herself into the house and he doesn't try to stop her: she just moseys around like she owns the place, putting her nose up against everything that seems halfway fragrant: rank muddy shoes, clawed up table legs, man-stained chairs. They're the stories of a life like any other; of a man who has done nothing but his best, and received for his efforts nothing at all. He had never wanted to go far away; he has wanted to make safety for himself here. But now the rain is dripping down through a hole in his ceiling ceiling into a pickle tub on the floor, and the home is coming undone around it: his things are bundled up and set in boxes; the the back door is off the jamb, propped up against the wall; he is squatting in the rain, pulling the front door away.

"You must think I'm a crazy man, dog." He growls, in a voice as tired as his home. The rain is going in slick rivers down his jacket. "I feel like a crazy man. Talkna damn dog."

Dumb Doggy goes nosing through the man's boxes, traces his story across a manicured pair of running shoes and a shiny gold metal and a signed cast that wafts decades-old fear sweat. There was a lot of hope in him once; it's buried underneath all the regret now, and he thinks it's gone. But he soulsmells like this place; in his heart he doesn't wish for somewhere else. He wishes things had been easier, but–so does everyone.

Crunch

The Twoleg takes the last hinge off the door and pushes it down the stoop; it slides across the wet grass of his front yard down to the place where his land meets the street. He watches it go, rubbing the back of his neck, pivoting in place–really unable to figure out just what all has come over him, to think this is a good idea. He looks back over the threshold, to where Dumb Doggy is doing a big stretch across his newly barren living room; and it looks like fun, so he trot-trots over to her and sniffs her butt. Before he realizes what's happened, his tail starts wagging.

One sundown when the rain is gentle, Fox goes for a walk. She goes on her own more than any of the other canines: once a day, usually more. They always yap at her to be careful, keening as she goes–but she is smaller and agiler and called to thinner places than they can go. She snakes through the growth, straight, with solid intent: no nip at the flowers, no scampering after the pretty bunnies. She is unwelcome in this forest by the things great and small alike, and her white fur betrays her from afar. It does not wound her to be unwelcomed here; she is anathema in every ordinary place. But the thin places open to her as though she were a traveler returning.

In the base of a vertical red rock face there is a tunnel dug up by nature's paws; it is cramped the whole way through–the rocks press down into Fox's back, lonely tines raking through her back-fur. The tunnel stinks like recent passage–pawpads in the dirt, tail-fur matted in the roots poking down from overhead. It's miserably dark the whole way through–the sort of darkness that presses in at the edges of Fox's imagination, plays to her fears; makes her really reckon how much of her is unchanged. There's space in her brain for a name, if she ever had need of one; there's space saved for thinking ahead, and space for reading omens. She can feel those spaces yawning and well developed, waiting for something to come and fill them up. Here, in the totalizing darkness, for a few awful seconds she imagines that when she emerges from the hole she will be a twoleg again, at the tail end of some beautiful dream.

But when she presses through the hanging vine at the far end of the tunnel, she emerges just as she entered.

She is in a secret garden–fertile earth a scamperwidth across, ringed on all sides by the high red stone, where the only growing things are sparse grasses, and one lonely little tree not but twice her height. It is a thin place in every sense–except that it's crowded up, with nine other bodies.

There is a skulk of red foxes waiting there for her. They move with unnerving fluidity, in echo of each other's slightest movements: what one does, the next does a half-step removed–a movement seeming rehearsed. They come towards her in a jagged line, at a firm walking pace: they cross behind her tail and shepherd her into the center of the moot–she is swept up helplessly in the tide of bodies, suddenly as unsteady on her fours as she was during her first few steps; and in a moment she is encircled, pressed against by nine curious snouts–she breathes in sharp, and catches only one scent. Eyes wide, tail whipping, she unhinges her jaw and shrieks.

Then the other foxes open their mouths, one-after-one-after-one-after-the-other, and let out a chorus of wild ululating barks, that skip on the wind like nothing else in nature. Without another thought in their heads, the ten foxes sit with their eyes closed, raising unholy ruckus, squealing and chirping and yapping, tails flapping against each other's bodies–and for the ten throats there are ten different barks, but in every noise there is a common meaning: 'check out this weird sound I can make!'

The jagged rock walls drink up their voices, so that they can keep on screaming and lose themselves in it, in the simple make-silly of it–but there is another sound, greater than either of their voices, which no stone can muzzle; and that is the voice of the thunder, which comes from on high, saying for each of them to listen and look well. They are quelled, by instinct deeper than vulpinity; and raise their ponderous eyes to the night sky. Above them, the inky-dark rainclouds are parted like the lips of Heaven. Beyond, they see the shape of things to come written in the stars.

Orion. The Hunting Dogs. Libra.

The nine foxes bow their heads solemnly–ears folded, tails still, wishing they could do more than bear witness. White fox screams: a high plaintive wail, grief-stricken shrieking that rips her throat, boils in her ears and stings her eyes. She cannot shed tears, but her heart can hold the full depth of mortal sadness. She drops her eyes and buries her head in one of the other foxes, sinking into the sorrow.

Until one of them raises her muzzle skyward, and she sees the hydra.

The tripartite coyotes are muzzledown in the signs of a new friend’s passage–painted warm against the base of a tree two wandertimes ago. Seeps down into the roots telling a story its own: skunk, boy, floating on a cloud of ecstasy.

Many new friends in dell lately–one a day, sometimes more. Dumb doggies and whippytail playdeads, gristlefat squirrilies and hardcatch blackbirds. They come shambling out of twolegplace, confused and jumpy; walking their own soulpaths around the valley. Coyotes watch them–from far away, unseen and unheard, often smelled. Above them a sleepy grey sky, drizzle always but thunder never.

Every day fewer twolegs. For those precious few hours of sunup they find rare energy, and lives charmed anew: they are packing up and moving out for better things, the world of men opening up to embrace them. There are maybe forty of them left, now.

Scent-of-Pine and Scent-of-Trefoil are perched on their haunches, while scent-of-flowers splays on her back between them. They are listening intently to Rain and Chocolate; who are lying on their sides, back-to-back, thoughts wandering through vast possibility–mostly to do with the puppies. Denning, nursing, where and how to teach them to hunt. They want to find a place for them back in the desert, along a specific strand of road that holds some meaning to them. But Chocolate feels they will be with her in a moonlength or less–maybe not enough time to make it back to the sands.

Curious, Trefoil saunters over and takes a probing sniff under Chocolate’s tail–then up over her belly, around her gently growing nipples. She smells the pregnancy, warm and bright on her palate–but she is looking for puppies’ fatherscent, which by rights should be lingering on the desert dog’s coat–but the only smells are hers and Rain’s.

It is the early evening now. The rain has started going–shuffling over the hills in his unhurried way, letting little pieces of him pour off behind. This sundown is his last here, for the next little while: by midnight he will be a sprinkle and in the morning he will be gone. The water is changing shape from mighty clouds to humble streams and puddles, trickling down to the low places where nothing else is called; the twoleg on which he pours is following his example.

The people are most ways gone, the greatest share of their places abandoned. The lights are dimmed and broken; the doors are off the hinges. The wooden signs still squeak forlornly in the sighing winds, and nothing louder than this. There is nothing for trade; no struggling dreams in the windows. The village’s slow death has been quickened to this sad state.

There remain some twenty-odd twolegs, resigned to squat in their hovels awaiting death by neglect.

The canines go down into the twolegplace, trotting in loose pack down over the blasted road. They go unmolested down the carcass of main street, where dusty buildings gather ghosts. They pass the twolegs in their homes–they look up through the windows at their stony faces and helpless half-dead eyes; there is something almost like fear in them, when they see the flashing fangs of the wolf, or the coyotes’ hunting eyes–but mostly it is the same crushing emptiness that has defined their lives for so many years. They watch it all happening, afraid and wondering why; resolving without investigation that they can do nothing about it.

The animals can smell their stories, even muddled up in the rain. They are the young and old; the sick and firm; those who have gone far away, and those who have never left; some have lost hope, some were born without luck. There is but one common thread to bind them all: now they are too much of this place, and even that lucky world which welcomed in all their neighbors, can find no space for them.

And of the hamlet that once held their world, there is nothing which will persist in any worthy shape: no statuary nor plaques, nor one stitch in a flag. In every wall and post the timber is giving its last hurrah; before a twoleg lifetime has passed, the place shall sink beneath memory, and there will be only mud. For now its remains are a wild animals’ playground, and the things of the dell are drawn into this new place as they would be to fresh flowers and fat rabbits.

The sun is gone but the moon is yet to rise. In that uncanny stretched-out twilight, every figure is in silhouette and whole world is a shadowplay. The only light is that what spills from the lonely twoleg homes–not enough to clearly light the loping bodies, it mottles the darkness with shadows stretched to breaking.

The empty streets catch every sound and throws it back against itself; the night is a leaping symphony. The soursquish froggies raise their gutteral voices while the nightbirds trill their songs; they tickle the packs' sensitive wigglytops, make their ears go all twitchy; makes them want to lift up their paws in a merry dance and scamper round like mad–it blows against their fur, gentle pushing like a mother's nose. Above them, little constellations of fireflies split the dark; below them, rainscent rises from the drying stones. There is infectious life in everything, clamoring to be let in, storming up their nose and under their tails, changing their scents and inviting their noses. Life is finding its new rhythm, inviting them to dance–they let it sweep them up, and they give their voices to the song.

Chasing each other in a neverending dervish, the coyotes bark and yelp–splashing through icewater puddles that wick up through their toes, flicking tails through the fairy-finger spray; dumb doggy follows after, leaping and diving into the other dog who lives in the puddles, barking triumphantly every time she beats her. Fox goes abreast of them, quiet and smooth as moonlight, seeming like a thing from another world: she darts between quiet places, flying on quiet paws. From the shadows she watches and sniffs, her tail ever poised, whiskers catching beams of silver. Her song is low gekkering, the soft churrs of excitement: she leaves her scent in places, with the tuft of her fuzzy chin.

The wolf follows ever in their wake, straddling two worlds: in the depths she is a fathomless void, one with the shifting darkness: her hulking shape swallows the light, shag blurring the line between her and body mother nature's. Her feral eyes have a rare glow–inky dark, except for where they catch moonlight and spin it into rings of smoldering lavender. Under the full glow, she is a different beast–shaggy, powerful, and frightful, but harmless. Dumb Doggy's big sis.

Theirs is not the only song. From the far reach of twolegplace there is a rise of baying, chittering, squeaking, and squawking–a prey-song, twirling in the night against the hunters' own. It's a double-blue moon, hearing those ride the same wind: the twolegs are drawn to the windows and out of doors. From their back porches and in their gated yards they are watching the animals run wild, and in them stirs an unbidden yearning: they want to join the wild things' song but each of them lacks the voice.

Yet, each of them has ears to hear: there is one twoleg voice raised over the others. It is weathered but firm, like a heartwood timber; every note embraces the ears. His voice is loud enough to match the dogsong, but it rides the wind birdlike–swooping down between the playing creatures' ears and over the lonely twolegs' garden gates. The words are lilting, mournful, intoxicating to the ear–the weary stridor of a thing settling down for its last rest.

"-admit that the waters around you have grown; accept that soon you'll be chilled to the bone...”

His song peers over the rooftops and around the alleyways, beckoning the animals and twolegs alike: in his warbling noise there is that inimitable Strange, that compels them all equally. The animals go in their ordinary languid wanderings; after, the twolegs come down from their porches and unlatch their garden gates; they follow down the animals' paths, ataxic as if in trance.

Each of the pilgrims, on two and four legs, winds through the ghostly town towards a single place: they each come in their little groups, to a wide barren court, where lean patches of sod rise up from the puddly muck; and there in the center, on the lip of a crumbling fountain, a twoleg sits with a guitar on his knee. He plays without noticing a thing–not the dog pack nor the prey, nor the twenty-odd twolegs gathered at the fringe of the park. He strums out the chords, playing fingerstyle.

"Or you'll sink like a stone, for the times..."

And for sure he'd go on playing, without a care for any of them there, but for rainscent and chocolatescent–who break from the pack, skipping up to the stranger with giddy yips and wagging tails. They press their chins up against his thighs and their noses against his hands; his fingers come away from the strings, and he opens his palms to them–as their tongues flick across his skin, he softly chuckles.

"Don't I know y'all?"

Then he raises his attention to the ones beyond–the tripartite coyote and dumb dog, fox and wolf; the deer, the squirrels, the possums and raccoons and skunks and snakes and mice–up at the owls and the blackbirds and the croaking toads and the ants and the mosquitos and the buzzing bees and the twinkling fireflies–and out to the edge of the court, where there are foxes and black bears and even lonely mountain cats. But he cannot see a single other twoleg.

"Don't I know all y'all?"

At 1800 hours Local time, Monster Hunter Squad piles into the hummer; they're all two beers in, and they got whiskey flasks for on the way. They got the radio up and their hats on backwards, and the muffler right the hell off: the engine roars louder than beasts, echoing around the valley like a whole rack of machine gun fire. It's an awful sound–like driving nails in your ears, hurting you just for the hell of it. All four men are wearing ear protection, cuz they'd never put their own selves through the pain: that's just what they like, is to inflict themselves in the world.

They got more protection than just that: they're wearing plates graded for small arms fire; kneepads and elbow pads; vambraces made for dog trainers; night vision goggles on under their snapbacks, turning their faces angular and inhuman; rifles hanging off their chests, heavy magazines in the backpacks.

They drive wild and erratic, swerving all over the dirty highway remnants, trampling down the little trees trying to grow there; anything in the road, they will crush, and back up over again to disgrace the remains. They are men gone to war against the flow of time: chauvinists and proud, who want to turn back the clock to when man was the master of all he surveyed.

"Fuck you!" Screams a man called Colt, stretching his middle finger out the front-passenger window, at the first pair of yellow eyes he sees; he crushes a mostly-empty can of pepsi against his head and hurls the puck into the wilderness. He is a simple man who believes in the zero sum game: kill or be killed. He's got stimulants swirling in his brain, bull shark testosterone in his ballsack. "Don't none of you forget this is our country!"

Behind him there's a man named Gibbons, who's about the same: a little older, longer in the beard, a little crueler and less creative. He snorts and drains his soda pop–chucks it out the window much the same. "They don't speak English, dumbass. They're just animals now."

The third man, Baird, is sitting next to Gibbons. He is smaller than the others–clean cut, dreadlocks. He's most of the way through a twelve-ounce. He takes another swig, frowns at the taste, and shakes his head no.

"Nah-uh, man. They speak English, bet. That's what Riley said."

Gibbons snorts, crossing his arms. "Riley's soft in the fuckin head, Baird. S'why you're here and he ain't. First, they don't speak nothin. Second, they ain't got the fuckin room in their heads for English. They gave that up."

Baird snorts and shakes his head, giving him that told-you-so sideye; then he finishes his drink, crushes it up into a disc, slips it into his backpack. The hummer skips over a fallen log, skids across the muddy track–something _CRUNCH_es under the wheels, loud and wet, and they don't even slow down: Tony, the driver, isn't stopping for nothing. He just drones on, like he's giving one of his marketing briefs.

"Baird–you oughtta remember God made language for man; and only for man. The skinwalkers gave that up; they can't say a word now. They can't even think straight, anymore. Nothing but instinct in their heads."

The hummer slides through a patch of mud–shifts into low gear as they climb a muddy hill, over rocks that were once road and soon be only dirt. It is an ugly metal beast, stinking and loud and indiscrete, playing no part here except to rip and destroy; and that is precisely why they're driving one. Mankind is a mindset; mankind is a master; mankind has dominion over the earth and man does not yield his places to animals. They have come to the dell to destroy and defile and tame the place anew. In their heads they entertain lurid fantasies of dragging the skinwalkers into the street and standing them up on two legs, holding them with braces and whipping them until they writhe and scream and beg to become men again–then killing them, leaving them unburied on the roadside, as a warning to the rest. It gets Colt dripping in his cage.

"Alright." Tony brings the car to a stop at the top of the hill. Ahead of them the road becomes an unnavigable bowl of muddy rivers and fallen trees, a space only for beasts and the men who move like them. There's a great big tree fallen here–larger than the others, large enough that you'd wonder how it ever came unrooted. On its trunk, some mighty claws have carved a symbol: a rough circle, entwined with a triangle pointed down–and a four-toed gash through the center.

"This for sure's the place." He grunts–puts the car in park, switches on the E-break, and opens the door. He steps out with his rifle up and his finger on the trigger, watching the bushes like he might see Charlie looking back. "Alright. Everyone out."

Colt kicks open the door and kicks it shut again. Gibbons slides out of the hummer and hocks a loogie on the sigil. Yellowed phlegm rolls down the tree bark; he smiles softly. When it's drier, he thinks, he'll come back with some gas and make this stupid sign into kindling. It's Baird who comes out last–testing the ground underfoot, like the first man on Mars. Ahead of them in the belly of the dell, they see the remains of the town: forlorn piles of brick and timber, lashed under months of steady rain. It had some forgettable name, that they're gonna replace with something white and proud.

Tony gets the front winch rope and hooks it around his belt, and begins his slow descent down the muddle hill. The ground is trecherous, closer to water in some places than to dirt–going is slow, and keeps him off balance. If he slips he will fall some sixty meters in the muck. He doesn't mind, though: Tony is built, Tony works hard, Tony thinks he's hot as shit and that's why he got this whole thing together. He's gonna show these fuckin people where they belong in the grand scheme of things. The others are following along behind him, all hooked onto the cable like mountaineers.

Ten meters out from the bottom of the hill, Colt shouts. "Contact!"

He raises his rifles and fires five rounds into the trees. The sound is like thunder-cracks, reverberating across the open dell and splintering against the trees; clear across the valley, animals hear it–but twenty meters away something screams and falls to the ground, writhing and squealing and bleeding its last. Raccoon screams, Colt thinks.

"First blood to Colt." Tony murmurs. When he reaches the bottom of the hill, he detaches the winch rope, anchoring it to nothing: the bottom of the hill is a field of sucking mud. The animal is still screaming and thrashing, as he raises his rifle and advances towards the town–not stopping to put it down, certainly not stopping to honor the body. "Let's see if we can get one of them motherfuckers come out here and face us. Show em what all a man's made of."

Baird grunts–detaches himself and trudges across the field, to where the poor thing is screaming. As as he gets nearer, it quiets down, becomes erratic, then stops altogether. The others watch him bemusedly as he presses up into the treeline, even after that–and spends a few fruitless seconds trying to find the body. He returns with nothing to show.

"Watcha lookin fer, slowpoke?" Colt chides Baird. Gibbons leers resentfully at both; Baird doesn't give either of them an answer. Tony is leading on through the footslog, towards the tumbledown brick piles that once were the town's main street.

It takes them nearly a minute to cross ninety feet of mud: it keeps testing their laces, trying to hold onto their heels. Colt mutters they they should've brought some planks, and Gibbons grumbles at him to shut up. Bossman Tony just keeps his eyes ahead and his rifle up, setting a quiet example for the boys to follow. They'd like to think of themselves as men, they'd tell as much if you asked–but they are boys, and Tony knows it. Way he sees it they'll become men through killing, let strength be their badge.

Here they're close enough to see the ruins well defined: piles of red brick and timber, bundled for a cleanup that never came; bald foundations underneath. The town has not just been grown over and pulled down–it's been packed up and put away for a 'next time' that isn't coming. The only creatures who have a care for any of it are the perching birds and the mice who play on the boards, who are too small to be worth killing. It repulses them–spoils their souls, to see a time after man; all the more that it's a splendid time, at that.

They resent the green trees and the blooming flowers, and all the things that scamper and squeak, for having the termity to exist out from under them: it offends their sense of propriety, that the world should go on after America as they had known it. In their hearts they yearn, and have long yearned, to be the last; their heads are crammed with half-formed apocalyptic prophecies about Israel and Magog and pizza pedophiles, things they only believe for just as long as they are convenient to cruelty. They are death-worshippers incensed at the simple presence of life that is not on their terms.

BANG

Gibbons' rifle is smoking: he sent one shot, clean and straight, up into a tree–where there had been a bird, a crimson cloud is settling on the branches.

"Soo-eee!" Squeals Colt, who wants to stomp and fuss and make-believe like it's all fun. Gibbons curls his lip and snarls.

"Barely worth the fuckin bullet."

Halfway down the main street–ahead of where it widens into a grassy, overgrown, square–Tony showboats a little. He's the oldest of the four and has something of a preacher's way about him: he walks with his rifle braced over his shoulders, wrists over the ends, feeling a little like Jesus. Up past the square there's the remains of the town hall–most of a building, that like proper remains, still, not just the packaged-up bones and nails. Beyond that the treeline resumes: young sprouts, closer now to the square than they've been in a hundred years.

"Poor trades is ours to make, Colt; it's a world without end, and it's man's world to rule." He raises his voice and his head–projects the words over the streets of empty foundations, across the shaggy scrub and the little trees sprung up in people's yards. He fancies that if he yells loud enough all the bricks will get back in their place. "And sure as man can't become a woman, man can't become an animal. And any man who says he can -"

He kills the sentence stone dead–whips the rifle around, dropped to one knee, and zeroes on the treeline–there is a new sound coming back down at them, riding the wind's back, louder and longer than the gunshot. It swirls around them and hangs on their ears, incepts cold dread in the back of their minds. They huddle closer together, as the sound circles the court–it echoes down the empty streets and splashes over the distant trees, crossing the dell in giant steps. In the next moment their bravado is gone, replaced by a cold clench-jawed silence they tell themselves is manly stoicism. It is a naked terror, innate in the species since time immemorial: they have heard the howling of a wolf.

"That one sounded weird." Colt simpers–his eyes are on the treeline, his finger on the trigger. "Like–like there was maybe a whole bunch of em."

"Just a wind trick." Snorts Gibbons. "Scouts said only one wolf, they were real clear."

"How much you wanna bet on that?" Asks Baird.

"Let em bring thirty." Tony hocks a loogie on the ground and looks down his scope. In the distance only sees the trees–the goggles' grainy high-contrast monochrome turn the swaying leaves into a wall of static. "They've got teeth and we've got assault rifles."

Motion in the trees–krak-krak-krak, Tony places three shots in a tight cluster at the space where the shape was: he can't follow it through the noise, but he knows it was something large.

"Reckon I got the fucker up there. Three hundred feet-"

"Contact." Baird interjects, sweeping to Ten O'clock: there's motion through the city hall's empty doorway. His finger twitches; but when he makes the shape coming towards them, he keeps his finger off the trigger. "Oh...Never mind."

There's motion, yeah, and on four legs too–but even in this place's heavy shadows, it's clearly too small for it to be a wolf. Baird lowers his rifle and then opens his arms–the shaggy dog trots across the brush field with its tail wagging.

"What the Hell are you doing, Baird?" Gibbons spits; Tony and Colt are covering their sectors.

"Look–it's just a dog."

"Fuck you mean, could be one of them!" Gibbons pivots to target the animal; when Baird grabs the barrel and holds it down, he yanks his rifle away. "Get your fuckin hands off -"

"It's just a fuckin dog, man, look!"

Tony breaks off his vigil to look over–he snorts and tries to aim but the dog is already in his guard, sitting pretty at Baird's feet, staring up into his eyes with the same kind of glassy-eyed adoration that's an ordinary dog's ordinary state.

"It could be one of them, dumbfuck." Hisses Gibbons.

"They're only wild animals, G."

"Dogs can be wild!"

"Well", snorts Baird, tussling the dog's shaggy fur, "this one sure ain't." It sits there with its tongue lolling and tail wagging, taking gentle licks and sniffs of the friendly human's hand–blameless and unsuspecting, even while Tony points a gun at the back of its neck.

"Get back from that, now."

"Look, Tone, I came here to kill some Godless freaks, not random animals." Baird rests an arm over the dog's back, scratching it under the chin.

"The freaks are the-"

"Look!" Cries Baird, pointing his free hand over the dog–down the street to the treeline, where something is darting ahead of the shadows: small and white, a flowing cloud of motion, it's sprinting straight towards them. It's a hundred-fifty feet out when they make it for a white fox.

Rat-tat-tat! Colt puts three rounds downrange; they bite cement, kick dirt into the air, and the white blur twists around them–breaks at a hard angle and darts for cover behind a palate of bricks. "That's one of the fuckers, for sure that's one th-"

The squad hadn't heard the hooves coming up behind them–Colt feels them on his shoulders, under a hundred-fifty pounds of muscle and bone coming straight down, a whole welterweight of body mass aimed right at his neck. He's numb before he hits the ground–hooves are stomping on his neck, the stag is bringing his antlers down on the man's head–Gibbons screams and goes to aim his weapon–then the dog leaps into motion, snarl and bite, fangs coming down on trigger fingers, twoleg lifeblood pouring out over her lips. He screams, jerking his mangled hand against the animal's teeth, ripping his muscles and tendons as she closes down harder and harder; the stag drives his crown into wailing Colt, whump, thump, crunch. His screams become malformed, shapeless things, distorted by his broken bones and the blood running into his crushed-open mouth.

Tony is running for the town hall, Baird with him–from the treeline, a massive shape erupts, a grim specter of death with searing lavender eyes that flies at them with Hell's own fury.

"Help me, you sons of bitches!" Screams Gibbons, driving his knee into the devil dog's chest. He looks down at the bitch and sees a thing he had once thought was only for humans: tempered, purposeful hatred. They leave him for dead.

Tony and Baird run up the steps to city hall and slam the door behind them. In the courtyard Gibbons grabs the gun left-handed, squeezes the trigger; _bratta tattattatta _, the thing becomes a whipping hose that spits lead into bricks; it rips right out of his hand, and then the wolf is upon him–vast and terrible, shoulders rounded like a hillock and maw opening straight to Hell; man's worst enemy.

She grabs him at the left arm, rips him down to the ground–her weight takes him over, pulls him down into the mud; he comes down on it at an angle, wrenches it out of position, and it burns numb. Then she drags him–straight back, over the raggedy earth, raking him through mud and over split concrete, torquing the wrenched arm and twisting him against his own weight. The twoleg uselessly mashes his palm against the sidearm, trying to make his fingers work–but his hand is open and the meat's coming out, stringy reds and yellows like liver taffy. Dumb Doggy chases them, slurping up up the trail he leaves behind–she savors the robust texture of them, honed from and years of training. Now all his marksmanship is a snack, spilled all over the earth for the animals to take or leave.

Gibbons screams, jerks, rolls aimlessly–he is trying everything, making sounds with no meaning, beating himself against the earth and struggling uselessly for leverage. Then he hears them, giggling and yipping as they draw near; then he smells them, the thick earthy stench of wild beasts. They come around his shoulder, mesmeric in their grace: he stops thrashing and watches, transfixed, as the three coyotes, synchronous as the fates, draw near. There is such brilliance in those eyes; and such anger as he has never imagined. He trembles, whimpering, as one draws near him–noses up under her chin, and drags her tongue across his quivering, fleshy adam's apple.

"Wait-"

That is his last word. Flowerscent makes the killbite: hooks her teeth through the jugular, snags the muscle, and pulls. She braces her forepaws against his neck, twisting her head away from him. For one horrible instant his voice distorts into a thing low and stretched and awful, and then the sound is gone: the tendons snap, hanging elastic out of her maw, and the blood comes rushing out of him: he doesn't suffer long, which is more than he strictly deserved. Flowerscent swallows the flesh–feels it rolling down her throat, thick and tender like a prime cut. He tastes like all the things he loved: oil and gunsmoke and hot lead. She doesn't go in for a second bite.

Wolf drops the arm–and the five of them turn their attention, of a singular packmind, to the corpse of the town hall.

Pinescent on the left, Trefoil on the right, the tripartite coyote stalks around the side of the building–ears tilted at an angle, noses up in the air, huffing for twoleg fear-stink. The stag and his mate are crashing against the front door, heavy splintering booms ringing out–and wolf goes round the other side, thunder underfoot. Inside, the twolegs are crashing through mostly empty rooms, turning over bookshelves and stacking half-eaten chairs in the door. They are making the scared, hurried motions of prey–the heartbeat quickens in Flowerscent’s chest, her tail flipping crazy in the air. She has to fight to keep control of her motions, keep thinking–her body crackles with energy, a desire to cut loose and chase–she makes herself breathe deep, makebelieve twoleggy thoughts.

Ears twist on top of her head, following heavy echoing bootsteps through the timbers –she curls her lip and growls, hate welling up inside of her.

“They’re surrounding us–god damn animals–why ain’t you shoot that fuckin dog?”

No answer. Flowerscent whips around the corner, skidding over the rainslick grass–then she catches a scent of something makes her stop cold. She digs her nails into earth, nearly trips over her own paws.

“Baird…? Fuck!”

A storm of killbangs–through the windows, splintering timbers over Flower’s head; she pins her ears and drops. The spine tingling bellow of a stag–hoofbeats over hardwood. She twists her ears to follow their chase through the ground floor. Holes ripping through the timbers, sounds like a bottled storm–they stop and she doesn’t wait, she jumps and deadpants up the back stair into the cramped dark space, claws raking mildewed wood. He’s coming towards her, breathless and afraid, from the right: she whips, leaps open mouthed, clamps down on his arm-

DHOOM

Splitting black pain in her breast. She screams but it means nothing and she hits the ground to feel the world spiraling around her and she tries to right herself but the leg isn’t moving and she can feel her heart beating loud and slow smell her own blood running down over her coat and she knows it’s almost time and now that it’s here she really has nothing to say so she watches her packmates clamp their jaws on his hands as the stag darkens the doorway and begins to charge, and the darkness is creeping steadily in against her; and now that it’s here she doesn’t feel so scared.

This is what happens to wild animals, sometimes.

Trefoil and Pinescent didn't know what to do with themselves, after that. They stared listlessly into the sky, too tired to hunt. Dumb Doggy kept them fed–her grief came as keening, nervous grooming.

Fox kept to herself. She hadn't been ready, after all.

Wolf cried for days and days.

They all tried to live for each other.

Twolegs didn't come to the dell after that, for a long time. The big ugly car stayed at the top of the hill gathering rust, a warning to anyone with the wrong kind of ideas. The ones who did return, whole moons later, were of a different stripe: they carried brushes and shot cameras.

The nameless place drifted further into history every day. Bricks bound for clay, timbers bound for pulp. Living things came up through the foundations before long.

Rainscent and Chocolatescent stayed in the dell until their pups were born. They came out healthy–five, and she nursed them well. They came into the earth as wriggling, energetic things, eager with nowhere to go; blind and helpless and utterly innocent. For the first ten days they were hunkered down in a comfy den overlooking the valley, helplessly suckling at Chocolatescent's teats; Rain went out hunting, brought her back bunnies and voles. Pine and Trefoil were there often; they sat at the den mouth looking in, tails thumping the earth. It had been for this. All of it.

There was a late bloomer, who opened her eyes on the eleventh day and started walking on the twelfth. On the thirteenth, Rain and Chocolatescent kicked one of the pups out of the den–gave her to Pine and Trefoil's care, with the resignation of which only nature's mothers are capable. The reason was as simple as her scent: more than the den, or her siblings, or either of her mothers, she smells of flowers.

Flower doesn't miss her mothers' scent. She was nice. But she prefers Pine and Trefoil and Wolf and Fox and Dumb Doggy too. She comes to know all of their scents before she gets a look at them–her eyes aren't so good, yet, but her nose works just fine. They smell like their favorite flowers and their favorite foods and their favorite animals, so they all smell a little bit like each other. She remembers deciding that she wanted to smell them again; not when, or where. She spends long nights laying her supple, undeveloped body into the pack's embrace; their skins a blanket, their bones a home. She thinks that's what life is, for a time, and she likes it plenty–she likes wiggling over the ground, the feeling of the giants' tongues grooming her every morning.

One day she realizes her legs will hold her weight again and she can't wait to try her first steps. She props herself up and falls down, yapping and twisting around her own clumsy weight–she rolls through the dirt, kicking at the air–and only by several attempts does she learn how to stand on all of her legs at once. Then the world becomes a whole new thing, more marvelous every moment: she learns she can walk, unsteady awkward steps where she keeps kissing the dirt, only to bounce back up more excited than before–because everywhere she can go there is a new and exciting scent, of dirt and plants and the things that trample them down. She stumbles out of the den and wants to smell it all–when she wanders too far, Trefoil scruffs her and carries her back to their den, and she starts the journey all over again.

When she learns to run, it's all she wants to do; all she ever wanted to do, even in the other place. Around the den-mouth, up the hill, around the trees and between Wolf's legs. It's a rhythm: she wakes up, she eats, she runs around in circles, she tires herself out, she stumbles into the den and falls asleep.

When Flower’s teeth come in, her mothers start feeding her solids. Trefoil has sore nipples from the young one’s bottomless hunger–she is visibly relieved when Pine hocks up most of a masticated vole, and the little one eagerly tucks in. The meat is sweet and soft on Flower’s tender gums, wiggles down her throat like chunky water. For a moment the taste reminds her of something; then that feeling goes and she is awash in the thrill of discovery, her little tail wagging as playful yaps twist out of her maw. She washes it down with mother’s milk that sits in her tummy as ballast; then rests, swollen and content.

Flower’s mothers take her down to the creek; she follows along, full of energy, taking three steps for their every one. At the crest of a hill she slips; she tumbles down the bank to the stream, the whole world a blurry tumble of scents. It ends with a cold splash, and she learns how it feels to be wet. She jumps up out of the stream and shakes herself off and tries to roll around in the dirt until she’s dry, but all she does is make her head feel funny. She stumbles to and fro, until she bumps into Trefoil’s titanic tree-trunk leg, and falls dizzily to the earth.

Before she can get up again, the elder coyote presses her snout down over Flower’s shoulders, and begins tongue-raking her tiny body. It is a warm velvet blanket on the little one’s back, wicking the water droplets up out of her fur, nursing the cold out of her bones. The little one squeaks small protest, wriggling under Trefoil’s embrace; but all that does is call over Pinescent–who horns in, holding the little one in place with her snout.

At the end of it they release the tiny thing and she toddles over to the rushing water–where, steadying her forepaws on the bank, she bends to have her first drink of water. It’s a brilliant leaping cold, like nothing she’s ever known.

Now she is old enough for red meat. Pinescent brings home a bunny and shows the little one the basics: killbite on the neck, dinnerbites on the thighs. It comes to Flowerscent quite naturally: she hooks her teeth and gnaws against the tendon for the long seconds it takes to snap the thing into gristlefatty strings. She remembers…

…nothing, in the end; this is just the feeling of homecoming.

When she’s old enough to leave the den and drink in the daylight acreage, it is mother wolf who receives her most warmly. When the great she-beast nuzzles up against her, it is as the embrace of whole Mother Earth: massive forepaws hug the little pup like the mountain hugs the dell; hot breath rolls out of her up little Flower’s nose, sweet from months of kill; familiar, in that same fleeting way. Curious, playful, with a puppy’s sense of invincibility, Flower presses up against the wolf’s gargantuan body and affectionately licks her foreleg. She still remembers the taste; she will remember it forever.

Now Flower is out of the den and beyond the stream, into a place that is not marked by her mothers’ scents. She is in a sunny ring of ticklegrass, playing chase with the other little ones–who were her sisters, by Rain and Chocolate. They are all perfect little terrors, with no fear of anything and a teething instinct that makes the whole world look tasty. They are still larger than her, if only just; but she runs faster, and yaps louder. They chase each other in a circle, each one trying to tackle the other–paws up, mouths open, they bite each others tails and climb on one another’s shoulders. Flower yelps as one of her cousins tackles her to the ground–she bites their leg, growling and gnashing, and they split away again, now with her in pursuit.

The four mothers sit watching it all at the edge of the clearing. There’s no word for how it feels, watching the cycle spin up again–or if there is, they’ve forgotten it.

Now Flowerscent is big enough for the hunt. One dusky sundown when the living things are out in the woods, she goes out with her mothers out into the dell: around the bowl in an aimless dogtrot, noses to the ground, they scent a squirrel–the older ones linger, sending the puppy up ahead. She stalks the forest on tender paws, carefully measuring her steps with her ears perked up high–she feels every leaf and twig underpad, going carefully to keep from giving herself away. In the end it is for nothing: the hardcatch squirrel makes her from ten feet out and leaps up into a tree; Flower jumps impotently up its trunk, snapping her jaws against the empty air, while the treerat hisses and spits.

In the end her first kill is a vole. She hears it puttering around underneath the dirt, tiny footsteps echoing up through the ceiling–she rips up the ground with her forelegs, crumbling earth between her toes, and snatches the treatfat rodent up in her teeth–crushes and shakes it until it is dead. Trefoil and Pine come in to watch her eat–pressing their bodies against her, pride wafting off their bodies.

Time is going on. The world in spin. The sun is born again and again and again. Flower is dogtrotting with her pack most days idyllic with nowhere to be. She learns the countours of the dell as well as she knows her own pack's scent: the creeks and rocks and crags, and that big circle of little trees and broken-up stones down in the belly of the valley. She learns the scents of the things that live there: the hardcatch hares and taunting blackbirds, the whippytail playdeads.

She is playing with her cousins and Dumb Doggy. The older one mostly just watches; sometimes a guiding bite to keep them from the treeline, or a firm bark if one bites too deep. There is a special trick she keeps trying to teach Flower–sit pretty, she calls it, and you do it with your butt. Flower thinks it's a boring game; she prefers circlerun and squabblehops. A scamper away, a tall patch of yellowed grass, the stone-tired four mothers watch the little ones play.

Once she meets a pair of stags. They moves with grace and power like nothing she has ever seen–gliding on cloven hooves into the dog pack, with their prongs high and their necks bared. Mother wolf does not bare her teeth at them, though she has slain many deer before: but presses her nose up against them, and invites the little one to do the same. Hesitant, Flower presses up under her great guardian's paws, muzzle outstretched; one stranger bends down and touches his snout to hers. She scrunches up her skunklespots, breathing in the scent. She smells like someone she knew, once, but can't remember where; he doesn't feel like telling. And, after just a few minutes, both of them move on–they spring into the woods on legs of pressed fire, and the dog pack never sees them again.

Now Time is changing. The languid afternoons and the sunny days are trickling away; nighttimes are longer, and the fog comes earlier; and even though he is out by midday but he is terribly thick in the morning. The leaf colors are changing up overhead: that which has been crowned with green for Flower's short life is changing yellow, orange, brown–and one day, as Flower is staring up at them wondering what it means, one of those leaves flutters to the ground. It twists in the wind, and comes to rest between her paws–its life spent, its beauty in motion. She feels in her bones that she is Old Enough.

In the belly of the valley, with the small twiggy trees and the shaggy grasses and the broken-up stones in the odd shapes, Flower's family meets her cousins and swaps scents one more time. They bury their noses under each other's tails and hind legs, drink it in and hold it the soulscents in memory for next time: rain, chocolate, trefoil, pine, flower, and coyote butt. And then, of one mind, as one pack, a hunter with thirteen mouths, they raise their eyes to the moon and they howl–until the sound is echoing din and their emotions are spent.

Then it's time to go.

There are two ways out of the dell. Flower's cousins take one and her pack takes the other: she leaves without looking back, drawing ahead of the other she jumps over roots and yaps back at them over her ever-wagging tail. They are going more ponderously, stopping to sniff at places where they've left memories. She doesn't understand why they are acting like this place means something special, or like there's anything they can't bring with them.

They come to the great mucky hill which overlooks the lip of the valley, where mud has sloughed over the craggy black stone band and the fallen trees are going to pulp; and though it rises dauntingly, the last stop before unfamiliar country, Flower charges eagerly up the slope.

At the top of the rise she stops short–confronted by the first glimpse of the new world, she perks her ears and tilts her head. There is something up there with her: an inert chunk of metal balanced on four rubber circles, all big enough that the whole dog pack could fit underneath it–not that they'd want to: the thing's undercarriage stinks bad and there's no sides. She has no idea what it's for or how it got to be here; nothing's growing on it, and it doesn't look like anything will. But she knows it'll make sense eventually, the same way everything else does.

The world as Flower understands it is behind her; and ahead of her is a world gilded in Autumn's promise, where gloomy grey skies will always hang over lush green forests, and the wild animals will always run free. But as she turns away to check on the dogpack coming up behind her, something else catches her attention: near the big metal box, there is a fallen oak tree. Its roots caked up with muck, the trunk halfway rotted down–she has seen it remote a hundred times and never thought about it. But on the far side, where she has never seen, there is a symbol: a circle, intersecting a triangle pointing down, with a claw mark dead center.

The pack comes up the hill now: Mother Wolf, Trefoil and Pine, Dumb Doggy and Pretty Fox. They stop, crowd in around her, to look where she is looking.

She knows the symbol is hers; just looking at it sparks something in her, a feeling that makes her ears perk and her tail start whipping. She knows, too, that it meant something else, once, in a different world; but that world has been washed away, and the old meaning with it. Now, and forevermore, it means home.

It's beginning to rain.