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Give A Dog A Bone

by Richard Dansky

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A dog always remembers where he buries a bone.

Wolves, not so much. Wolves aren’t the burying type. They don’t save for later, because they know they can always make another kill. And they don’t bury the evidence of the past, because they damn well want other predators to know they’re there.

Doesn’t mean a wolf can’t sniff out a burial site, though. Doesn’t mean they can’t find what’s dead and buried, even when there’s no more meat on the bone. Just not something wolves like doing, most of the time. But dogs are dogs, and that’s all they’ll ever be.

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I was taking a walk in the national forest near Cecily’s family farm the day I smelled the body. It was maybe a week after Thanksgiving, and the weather was unseasonably warm. There were plenty of hikers out, the regulars and the twice-a-year types too, nagged into getting off their couches and outside for some exercise they’d never follow up on. The trails were thick with a steady flow of folks going in or out or around, some wearing well-worn running gear and others with flannel shirts they’d forgotten to take the price tags off of.

There was a lot of noise and a lot of sweat and a lot of stink, and that’s why I decided to leave the trails entirely to cut across the space between. Some nosy Karen yelled at me from fifty yards away when she saw me cut left into the trees, but I ignored her. She was still shouting about breaking the rules when the curtain of forest finally hid her from view, and I was on my own.

Things had been tense at home, I had to admit. That was one of the reasons I was out here, walking on two legs to try to work off the edge that had been sharpening within me since the holiday. Cecily and I had gotten real formal with each other over that time, never raising our voices but never letting our guard down neither. I’d been hoping that with a little time, the events of Thanksgiving might be smoothed over and tamped down, accepted as necessary and forgiven, but it was starting not to look that way.

And that had me a trifle worried.

I’d woken up first, which was a surprise, Cecily was usually the early riser, and then she’d make enough noise getting ready for the day to wake me up shortly thereafter. I didn’t mind. I’d just lay in bed and watch her put herself together. Most days she worked from home and didn’t bother with makeup or such. When she had to go into that office of hers, she’d put her face on and do up her hair and put on the good blouse and blazer, the navy one with the brass buttons on it.

I think she owned three of those, just in case.

Me, I’d watch the transformation and tell her she looked very professional or that she looked beautiful, depending on which one I thought she wanted to hear at that moment. She’d either smile and thank me, or snort in disbelief, then come over to the bed and kiss me and start her day.

Not today, though. She was still softly snoring when I woke up with a start, rising up from a dream where I was sleeping in sheets soaked with blood. I sat up and looked around. Nothing was bloody, just some clothes on the floor I needed to put in the hamper and a curled-up shape in the bed next to me under a quilt her grandma had made.

Quietly, I extracted myself from the bed and padded into the kitchen to make myself some breakfast and coffee. When I was done and had cleaned up, I went into the bathroom, thought about showering but didn’t, and brushed my teeth. Eventually, I walked back into the bedroom and she was there, still in bed, eyes closed. She didn’t smell sick, so I let her be, it being a Saturday and all. I watched for a minute and it became pretty clear that she was awake, just pretending to be asleep, which meant she didn’t actually want to talk to me.

Eventually, a man learns to take a hint.

I put on my hiking clothes and went out to my truck, saying “Love you,” as I left. She didn’t respond, not that I was expecting her to. It would have spoiled the act.

In any case, that’s why I found myself headed into the deep woods in the Mark Twain National Forest on that morning. It was clear I was meant to be on my own today, and so I decided to take that as meaning really on my own, away from everyone and everything else. Wasn’t worried about getting lost, I never got lost and my sense of direction was perfect.

Along, of course, with my nose. Worst came to worst, I could sniff out my own trail, easy.

I set myself up at a nice trot between the trees, taking it slower than I might have but faster than most people would have considered safe. I thought about letting myself take the easy way, but that would have been missing the point. Some issues require sweat and tired muscles to think their way through.

It was maybe half an hour gone from the trail, deep into the trackless woods, that I smelled it.

Dead meat, probably human. Just a whiff on the wind, not enough for most folks to notice and certainly not enough to put them off their feed, but for me it sang out like a scream.

I stopped and tasted the air. There it was again, that faint hint of old death and spoiled meat in a place I ought not to be smelling either.

Now, the Mark Twain has a bad reputation in certain circles. There’s stories about what goes on deep in these woods, tall tales of ghosts and demons and lost treasure. There’s even been stories of what one self-titled expert called “Hellhounds,” big black dogs with fiery eyes that could run down SUVs, tear them open, and feast on whoever was inside.

Personally, I thought all those stories were bull. I’d never seen a ghost, never smelled a demon, and while any damn hound will chase a car, none of them have any idea what to do if they catch one. So I wasn’t expecting anything much even deep in the woods there. Black bear, maybe, or one of the mountain lions the state government kept claiming didn’t exist round these parts anymore.

Hell, I didn’t even expect to run into any people. The ghost stories were enough to keep most folks on the trails, and common sense did for the rest. There was no need to go into the deep wild, nothing to see or find, no hidden wonders to discover.

But still, I smelled death.

Like an idiot, I decided to follow that scent. It got stronger as I headed west, deeper into the trees, and headed down a slope towards a trickle of a creek that was making its slow way towards being part of something bigger. As I went, the smell got stronger and stronger, and pretty soon I figured out it wasn’t just one dead body I was sniffing, it was a few, all mixed up together.

That gave me pause.

Like I said, no one ever came out here. That meant, by corollary, that it was a good place for people who didn’t want to get interrupted to go.

People who were up to no good.

People who were, maybe, doing bad things to other people.

A superstitious fool would have jumped right to the old stories and thought about maybe witchcraft and human sacrifice. A slightly saner one might have thought “serial killer,” and maybe done some research when they got back home, if they got back home, about disappearances in and near the park. No one would have thought “accident.”

Me, I thought something else. I thought “predator.”

I half-walked, half-slid my way down the last twenty feet of that hill, stopping just short of the edge of the water. A fat frog jumped as I did so, hitting the creek with a splash. It went below the surface and didn’t come up. I wasn’t hungry, so I ignored it and went searching for the source of the stink.

Following the scent led me along the creek bed, over exposed roots of trees doing their best not to tumble in. There was definitely a little bit of a path here, though. Something came through this way regular. Maybe deer to drink, maybe something bigger and meaner.

And then after a hundred yards, I found it, a rough patch of earth that showed signs of having been dug up and patted back down more than once. Nothing grew there, at least nothing that had been alive for more than a week or so, and I reckoned that’s how long it had been since something or someone had been buried here.

I got down on my haunches and poked at the earth with my finger. It gave easily. Digging out whatever lay buried underneath would be easy. I was guessing it was bones. Then once I dug them up, I could maybe call in the cops and lead them in. Help them solve some missing persons cases, even. Be a hero.

Or, that voice in the back of my head warned me, get asked what the hell I was doing out here in the first place, and how I just happened to stumble across those bodies, and hey, maybe I was in fact what they call a person of interest.

I had no intention of becoming of interest to anyone, except maybe Cecily again. “Leave it alone,” I told myself out loud, and then I realized how quiet it had gotten around me. There were no bird noises, none of the usual falling branch and wind sounds of the deep forest neither. Even that frog-laden creek seemed subdued.

I knew a setup when I heard one.

“All right, all right,” I told whatever higher power had led me here and was now listening to see what I would do next. “I’ll see what’s what,” With that, I got to digging.

My hands, whatever shape they’re in, aren’t the best tools for this sort of thing. I would have killed for an entrenching tool, let alone an actual shovel like I carried in the back of my old Ford. Sensibly, I had left it behind this morning.

The good news was, the dirt gave way real easy. I set to work with a will, and the mud flew, and before I knew it I was bruising my fingers on either rock or bone. I knew which way I was betting, and a minute later, I was proven right.

It was a femur, and it came unstuck from the dirt with a sick sucking noise. Big one, too. Belonged to what I guessed had probably been a very tall, very unlucky man. “Bet there’s more where that came from,” I said to no one in particular, and kept digging.

I found more bones almost immediately. Big ones, small ones. stained ones that had been buried for years, fresh ones that still had scraps of meat hanging nauseatingly onto them. Pretty quick, the pile got pretty big. And all the bones had one thing in common.

Bite marks.

Something or someone had feasted well here over the years. I couldn’t decide which. On the one hand, the burial spoke to someone with tools, or at least hands, and that meant I had stumbled onto a cannibal’s stash of empties. On the other….

I picked up that first femur, the big one. Took a close look at where it had been gnawed. Those bite marks definitely did not look like they’d been made by a human.

For a minute I considered if a lone wolf could have done this, someone exiled from their pack and living rough in the Mark Twain. I could see it as a faint possibility, them picking off stragglers on the trails and campers deep in the park and folks who decided to go off the grid who no one would come looking for.

But a closer look told me the bite marks weren’t right. This wasn’t no wolf.

Then suddenly, I heard a sound. A footfall, upstream, loud in the silence.

I looked up, and I had my answer.

Dog. It was a dog. Or more accurately, what they called a dogman.

I’d heard tell of them in other places. Land Between the Lakes in Kentucky, they were supposed to live over that way and kill campers on the regular. But I’d never heard tell of them in the Mark Twain, and I knew that where I saw one, there had to be others.

They’re pack animals, after all.

The dog saw me, and it grinned. Big yellow teeth showed against dark brown muzzle fur, seven feet off the ground, and it was clear that it didn’t know what I was. They way it saw things, dinner had just jumped right into the oven with an apple in its mouth.

Then again, that’s what it saw. It hadn’t yet smelled.

Slowly, I stood to face it. It started walking towards me, easy and slow, all unconcerned with what one man in a t-shirt and a Cardinals hat might be able to do. It could outrun me as things stood. It probably thought it could outfight me. And I was pretty damn sure it had friends tucked in amongst the trees.

I let it get close, and then I growled.

It stopped.

Waited.

Sniffed.

Its eyes got real wide, the way dogs’ eyes do when they catch the scent of an honest to God wolf. His mouth went slack. His dick, which had been riding high at the thought of the impending kill, went limp.

“What are you doing here,” I asked, my voice steady and low. “This ain’t your territory.” I had no idea if it was going to answer, or if it even could. I’d heard differing stories over whether dogmen could talk.

This one, at least, couldn’t. It snarled at me, then whined and pointed at the bone.

“You want this?” I asked, waving the femur back and forth. It nodded.

“Fetch,” I said, and threw it into the deep woods.

Its head snapped around as it watched the bone fly away. It let out a whimper of frustration, then turned back to me, its clawed hands flexing as it tensed to spring.

I prepared myself, got ready to change. One dogman, I was sure I could handle. But if he really did have friends – if he had a lot of friends – then things would get dicey.

And just like those poor bastards I’d uncovered, nobody knew where I was.

The dogman snarled at me, working up his nerve. I decided not to let it finish. Instead, I started the change and dove at him before he was ready. Caught him square in the chest with my shoulder when I was half-man, half-wolf, and he went over backwards. Dumb dog, thinking I was going to let him dictate terms.

He hit the wet dirt of the creekside with a thud, his head bouncing off a thick, exposed root. His claws scrabbled at my arms and he snapped his jaws as best he could, trying to get a piece of me in his mouth. I declined to give him the opportunity, batting his claws away and fastening my teeth around his throat. A low growl escaped mine, a warning of what was going to come next if he didn’t show his belly. I had no qualms about ending this beast. All I needed was an excuse.

He let out a noise halfway between a bark and a laugh. I tightened my grip on his windpipe and he did it again, and then another time for good measure.

That, I decided, was enough. I bit down, hard. Cartilage crunched and splintered and warm, wet blood filled my mouth. It tasted vile, but I finished the job. Tore out the dogman’s throat clean and proper, then slowly stood with my muzzle dripping with blood. The body lay on the ground, eyes open wide and blood leaking every which way from the hole where its neck used to be.

With my right foot, I nudged the dead thing into the water. It hit with a small splash, then stayed there as water swirled around it. Tendrils of red drifted downstream. I paid it no more mind.

Because there in front of me was another dogman. Twenty feet behind that one, peeking out from behind a tree, was another. I heard movement off to the right, and there was third one, trying to flank me. Sounds in the woods told me there were more.

Jesus, I thought to myself. How many of the damn things were there? How was one park able to support them all? Deer, I supposed, and then shoved the thought aside. If I didn’t do something quick, I was going to be the next meal. But with them ahead and moving to the sides of me, I wasn’t sure what options I had.

I started backing up, slow and careful, showing all my reddened teeth. That gave a couple of them pause, but only for a moment. They looked back and forth, one to the next, yipping and barking and no doubt working each other’s courage up to try to take down the big, bad wolf.

I kept walking backwards. They kept advancing. The yipping got fiercer and faster, as if in anticipation. They were driving me somewhere, I was sure of it.

Then my back hit a goddamned oak tree, so solid my teeth rattled, and I couldn’t retreat any further. I was pinned, and they knew it. They all came out from behind the cover of the trees to advance on me, closing in as a pack. I wondered idly if I had killed the alpha, or maybe someone’s mate, not that it mattered. They were hungry, and they wanted blood, and they needed to make sure I didn’t make it out of there alive. Because if I did, they knew I’d be coming back with friends, and a pack of wolves beats a pack of dogs in a fight any day.

No, this was it. Do or die time. I bared my teeth again, flexed my claws, got ready to fight.

The lead dogman snarled what had to be an order to the others. They advanced as one, fur standing up and mouths open, ready to bite.

I clawed at the dirt with my right foot, then sank into a crouch. My only chance was to be able to move, to engage one at a time and then the next instead of letting them bury me with numbers.

They knew it, too, and formed a wall in front of me as they stalked forward. I could see saliva dripping from the corners of their mouths. They were hungry. They aimed to fight.

They snarled in unison. I coiled my body, tensing to fight.

And up on the hill, I heard a howl. It was long and low, and I knew it instantly. Had heard it a thousand times, had joined in with it too many times to count and made its song mine.

Cecily.

The dogmen stopped and looked around. One wolf, they figured they could handle. Two was a different story. And then there might be more, who knew how many more, silent, waiting for the unspoken order to hunt.

Cecily howled again, closer this time.

The dogmen turned, one to another and then back to the one who was giving the orders. Its face was a mask of fury and frustration, overlaid with fear.

I took a step forward. “Boo,” I said.

They broke and ran. Within seconds, they were gone down the creek into the even deeper woods, yipping and whining as they went as they blamed one another for the failed hunt.

I watched them go for a minute, then shifted back into full human. “Cecily,” I said. “Happy to see you.”

She came down the slope then and out from between the trees, and I have never seen anything so beautiful in my life. Her hair was up in a bun and she wore a blue work shirt and jeans, with no makeup and one side of her mouth was quirked in a bit of a smile.

“Morning, Jerry,” she said. “Didn’t get a chance to say goodbye before you left.”

I let that slide. “Glad you decided to rectify that,” I told her, and it was truth. “Things were looking just a little dicey there. How’d you find me?”

She walked right up to me, bold as brass, and stuck her nose into my collarbone to take a big sniff. “Followed your scent. You didn’t shower this morning. It’s stinking up the whole damn forest.”

I threw back my head and laughed, and she laughed with me. For a moment, the distance that had built between us was gone. She gestured down the waterway. “You reckon we’re going to have to come back to clean up this mess?”

I walked her over to the bones. She looked at the pile I had unearthed and gave a low whistle. “We just might have to,” I said. “Don’t want too many mysterious disappearances near home. Assuming they don’t have the sense to run all the way back to Kentucky and leave us well enough alone.”

“They do, we follow them,” she said, and nudged the bones with her left foot. “Some things you just can’t let stand, not in your own backyard.” She turned and looked at me then. “We got our own issues, I figure. Don’t need this on top of it.”

I nodded. “Truth. They stick around, we might need more of the family to deal with them. And a lot of the family isn’t feeling kindly towards me right now.”

“Family’s complicated,” she said, and looked away. “For this, I think they’d be willing to set things aside for now.”

“And you?” I asked. It hung there in the air for a moment.

“I’m here, ain’t I?” she finally said.

I nodded, grateful. “Yes, you are. And I am thankful.”

She took a couple of steps. “You ought to be, at that. Lordy, you look a mess.”

I wiped my mouth with the back of my arm. It didn’t do much good. “Sorry,” I said. “I guess this is just what happens when someone lets the dogs out to play.”

She looked at me for a long minute, then shook her head. “Seriously?” she asked.

“It’s been a rough morning,” I said with a shrug. “I just wanna go home and rinse the taste of wet dog out of my mouth. You think we can do that, hon?”

“I think we can,” she said. After a moment, she slowly reached for me. I waited for a moment to see if she meant it, then reached out in turn. Hand in hand, for now, we walked back up the hill.

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Host Commentary

Richard asked us to pass on this message…

“Give A Dog A Bone” is the third story in the series of tales following the exploits of a married couple of werewolves whose relationship is under some unusual stresses. Both of the previous stories, “Licking Roadkill” and “Last Supper” also appeared at PseudoPod (links in the show notes), and were inspired by a real-life conversation I had in a bar where I saw someone offered a lifeline that was then refused for the most heartbreaking of reasons. This chapter’s a little further along in the story, and is largely focused on how relationships don’t grow – or unravel – in straight lines and clean curves. Sometimes, there’re bigger issues you have to face together, and sometimes being at odds with someone doesn’t mean you don’t still love them. And of course, this being a werewolf story, things just might get a little bloody.

Also, if you’d like to add to your audio experience, Richard sent us a link to the music Give A Dog A Bone was written to, which we’ve also added to our show notes. It’s A World of Hurt, by Drive-By-Truckers.

 

As Richard says in his notes, “sometimes being at odds with someone doesn’t mean you don’t still love them”. It took me a long time to learn this, and sometimes I still battle with my instincts. Our regular host Alasdair has talked before about how his size shaped his experiences, and here’s the thing: In some ways I’m not so different. I’m a woman, but I’m almost six feet tall with size ten feet, I’m on the muscular side, and I’ve never sat very easily with stereotypically feminine things. I ran into bullies at school, and promptly got into trouble myself – because when the nearly six-foot girl is standing next to the five-footer with cute plaits who’s turned on the waterworks, it’s all too easy for people to tell themselves a story that fits the image. The girls turned to gossip. Rumours were spread. Alliances excluded me. People I thought were friends decided associating with me wasn’t worth the risk.

I survived, as you do. It also shaped me, as such things do. I’m not a werewolf, as far as I know, but stories that centre cryptids are often about being different, and if they’re not directly about that, the theme still tends to run through the story like letters in a stick of rock. Go back to Licking Roadkill, where we first met Jerry, and we immediately recognise someone who’s learned to straddle two words. He’s spent a lot of time analysing people, human or otherwise, is very conscious of what their actions and behaviours mean, and he knows what to say to keep them calm. How to keep the peace. I recognise these habits.

Of course sometimes Jerry, because he’s what he is, and because we’re inside horror stories here, has to do something pretty strong. Dealing with Cole in Licking Roadkill, Michael and Trey in Last Supper. And here, it’s the dogman.

He’s confident in his actions, though, because he understands his own values, and he knows he’s doing what needs to be done right now, regardless of what the wider outside societal rules might be. He knows because of Cecily. He trusts her values, and understands that if she wants a thing done, then it needs to be done. We don’t know much, yet, about Jerry’s birth family, but we know that in Cecily he’s found an anchor. Someone he is completely sure will always reach his side, even if she has to climb over some other feelings first. Anger doesn’t run counter to love. In fact, often we’re most upset about the things, and people, we care about most deeply.

“Being at odds with someone doesn’t mean you don’t still love them” – yes, exactly. In fact, I think it might be the very definition of love: that point where you know, deep in your soul, that whatever someone does, you’ll still love them. Now, in some circumstances, you might have to make choices about how much you do, or don’t, have them in your life – valid and sometimes eminently sensible choices – but even then you still love them. Real love is not turn-on- and off-able, and learning that… might actually be part of growing up.

A big part of the reason I like Jerry’s character is that he is strong. Not just physically strong, but emotionally strong. He knows who he is, he knows what he stands for, he knows he loves Cecily and, likewise, that she loves him. They can fight, they can spend the day apart, but it doesn’t mean anything significant in the grand scheme of things. That’s a strong relationship, right there. And you know, it’s good to see that portrayed sometimes.

We don’t often have happy endings at PseudoPod, but just this once, I’ll allow it. Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate, and happy December to everyone.