Only the Animals (10 page)

‘One night, caught in one of these mindless furies, I killed and ate two piglets. When the humans discovered what I had done, they were determined to punish me for eating my own kind. The village leader decided that this should be done in accordance with medieval law, which he believed would please the new leaders of the country, who were nostalgic about the olden days. This law decreed that a human who had been sentenced to execution was to wear the skin of a pig to the scaffold, and that a pig who had eaten its own kind was to be led to the gallows wearing human clothes.

‘The family who had raised me from a piglet were so ashamed of what I had done that the farmer offered his son's clothing for me to wear. The son was much older now, strong from working in his father's fields. On the day I was to be hanged, he dressed me in his own shirt and trousers. Weeping, he fastened each of the buttons along my chest, rolled up the trousers above my rear hoofs, and led me to the gallows.

‘After my death, I returned to the village to watch over my family. One day humans in uniform arrived and arrested the son for breaking a law the new leaders had passed, which prohibited tormenting or mishandling an animal. They had been informed about my hanging. The son tried to explain that the villagers had thought the leaders would approve of their decision to abide by a traditional peasant law, but the men in uniform would not listen. The son was taken away, and has never returned.'

The pig soul sighed, and walked away from me. His outline grew faint in the sunlight that reached through the forest canopy. He did not say goodbye, but it seems the dead have no qualms about taking their leave without ceremony.

*   *   *

I was very hungry again once the ignorant pig soul had left me. I could smell something alive under the snow and I dug my claws beneath the frozen black earth, into a layer of soil that still kept some hint of mulchy warmth, until I found a giant earthworm. I recognised it immediately. It was a very rare
Lumbricus badensis
, found only in these forests, a creature my Master, in his compassion, had decreed should be protected. I had been in his office on the day he was informed that a human zoologist had cut into one of these earthworms in an experiment. A student had seen the worm move as its body was split open, and reported the incident as a violation of the new law banning vivisection. My Master had ordered that the zoologist be punished.

I ate the worm because I was starving – bad karma be damned – and lay down in the snow hoping to sleep. After a while I gave up and opened my eyes. Above me, specks of glitter were hovering in the moonlight. I focused more closely and saw a swarm of bee souls moving nimbly through the air. They made me miss my sister Blondi, who would have loved to watch them, snapping but not really wanting to catch one in her mouth.

I was too tired and sad to talk to the bee souls, but this did not stop them from speaking to me. They, too, were in mourning.

‘We are grieving for our beloved von Frisch, the only human to understand the meaning of our dances, who spent his days patiently observing our patterns of movement,' they said. ‘He was trying to help us survive the disease that is killing all the bees in Germany, but in the end it killed us too. The other humans in his laboratory are going to betray him. They suspect he is not one of them. His life is in grave danger.'

I closed my eyes.

‘Terrible things are going to happen in these woods,' they said. ‘You should leave while you can.'

*   *   *

For a long time – I do not know exactly how long in human terms, one year, possibly more – I lived in the woods with the souls of dead animals for company. Sometimes, when I skirted around towns and villages, I saw the souls of human beings too, but they were not interested in me, a lone dog in the wild – they were doing everything within their failing power to make themselves known to living humans, to warn them of dangers that were obscure to me.

At one stage I decided not to give up hope that I could still improve my karma, having remembered a story my Master told me of Buddha's journey towards enlightenment. Hadn't he, too, spent many years in a forest, in the wilderness, stepping over ants and caterpillars? Or perhaps it had been Krishna, or Thor, who kept vigil under a sacred fig tree? For three nights I kept watch, waiting to see the morning star rising as it did for Buddha, or Krishna, or Thor. But no star rose for me.

Much further east, I came upon great activity. I had tried as far as possible to avoid live human contact in the woods, but the smell of men's food and something else, something very familiar, drew me closer. It was the smell of my own kind: dozens of them, living alongside and protecting the brave German warriors, the men my Master commanded.

The dogs seemed to feel sorry for me in my emaciated state, and embarrassed for me that I had fallen so low. They helped me blend in, and at mealtimes some of them saved part of their own portion for me. On special occasions we were fed the same horsemeat as the humans, stringy and sweet. I watched as each horse was recorded in a logbook as having been killed by enemy fire before the men shot it themselves for food. They ground up the horse's feed into a rough flour for pancakes to accompany the boiled meat. I ate anything I was given, flesh or grain, no longer caring about karma, believing my soul to be beyond salvation.

I heard the dogs in the camp speak of Blondi often, in admiring terms. She had become quite famous by then – Queen of the Dogs, the Führer's closest companion. I wished I could see her again and bark with her in the echoing crypt at Wewelsburg, or dig at that frustratingly smooth marble star. I didn't tell them she was my sister. It did not seem fitting to drag her down with me.

I hoped beyond hope that she was as happy serving her Master as I had been serving mine. The last time I saw her at the castle, she told me something unsettling, that her Master's female companion did not like her – she had two spoiled terrier brats of her own – and took every opportunity to kick Blondi under the dining table. Blondi had resigned herself to this, for she had no way of telling her Master of this woman's coldness, her daily betrayals. Blondi had said to me she would follow her Master anywhere he asked, would endure kicks under the table until the end of her days, so long as she never had to leave his side, not even in death. And I had understood, for this was how I felt about my own Master, and still did, even after so long in exile.

One day, I was drafted into a legion of dogs who were to be given the special honour of leaving the camp to accompany the soldiers into combat. The other dogs were too busy surviving to keep an eye on me or to give me instructions, and I had no idea what to do. I ran in the wrong direction until something enormous exploded out of the ground and made me lose my hearing.

Disoriented, I ran deeper and deeper into the woods and eventually found myself in a camp of enemy soldiers. Deaf from the explosion and in shock, I had no choice but to rely on them for food until I could recover and find my way back to my own camp.

But the men fed me only once. After that, I was taken to an underground warren filled with dozens of starving dogs going mad with hunger. These dogs were chained just far enough away from one another that those who still had the energy to move could not eat their neighbours. I could feel them straining to get to my flesh as I was led through the warren and tied up at the end of the row.

I woke in the night to find the neighbouring dog gazing at me with saliva pouring from his mouth.

The men brought water down for us, but no food. Slowly my hearing returned as my hunger expanded. Each day, the humans took one dog from the warren and attached a pouch to its back. The chosen dog was led outside, and did not return.

The dog across from me, who had seemed too weak to wish me harm or well, decided one morning to take pity on me. ‘You don't know who we are, do you?' she said. ‘You have not been trained.'

‘No,' I said.

‘When that pouch is attached to our backs, we must look for food beneath the German tanks. We have been trained to distinguish them by the smell of petrol. Our tanks smell of diesel.'

‘You will find no food under their tanks,' I said. ‘I know. I am German. They don't keep food there.'

‘There is always food beneath the tanks,' she said.

She refused to talk to me again. Two days later, she was led out of the warren with the pouch strapped to her back.

*   *   *

My turn came. I was led outside. The pouch was heavier than I had imagined, and the sunlight blinding. The men pelted me with stones to make me run in the direction of my own camp.

I set my nose to the ground to try to find my way back to the Germans, to my compatriots, hoping one of them would risk everything to save me, and get the metal blight off my back. I picked up a scent leading to the west and followed it, unaware how much time I had.

But I was too weak; I could not find their camp. I collapsed beneath a tree in the wilderness. I tried to think only positive thoughts. Perhaps, just perhaps, I could still be reincarnated as a human being, as my Master had promised. Maybe the morning star – or was it the evening star? – would rise for me after all.

The pouch ticked with a metallic pulse of its own. I tried to get myself into something resembling corpse pose so that I could meditate like my Master had on the cold floor of the crypt at Wewelsburg.

I breathed in, and breathed out, and imagined that I was the legendary wolf Fenris, son of the Norse god of fire, who grew to be so strong and ferocious that the gods themselves became afraid and decided to forge a chain to restrain him. This chain was made of elements so elusive they could scarcely be said to exist: the roots of mountains, the breath of fish, the sound of a cat's footsteps. It was almost invisible, yet so strong it could keep Fenris at bay until the final battle of the gods, when the legend was that he would break free. On my back the pouch ticked. From far away, I heard my Master reciting in his hypnotic voice these words to me in front of the fire:
I am the great wolf Fenris, broken free from my chains …

 

SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE THE PEARL WOULD BE HANDED TO ME

Soul of Mussel

DIED 1941, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

 

Jack loved animals (especially cats) and once wrote that when the aliens finally land on planet Earth, they will be shocked to see the way humans treat their animal brothers and sisters, ‘down to the very worms yay.'

Helen Weaver,
ex-lover of Jack Kerouac

 

 

I first met Muss right when I'd decided that everything was dead, when I was sick of putting down the world with theories. Muss turned up overnight in our circle with a bit of the ecstatic in him, a joyous prophet, a conman curious about everything. My friend Gallos who'd crashed on my pier in the Hudson River for a while to write his poetry, he's the one who introduced me to Muss. Story was he'd grown up poor and tough on an underwater farm out west, surrounded by crooked sad characters he loved and he hated, and somehow he'd made it to New York City all the way from the waters off Washington. Muss didn't know much, but he knew it didn't make him tick to be told from his earliest days as a juvenile blue mussel what to do, what to eat, when to secrete threads from his byssus pit, which artificial pipes to attach to and in what pattern.

Shell-crushing, sad labour of the body. He'd left behind a little girlfriend still filtering water out west but he couldn't stick around to look after her and have his spirit stolen bit by bit. He was looking – hell, we all were looking – for a new way of being, something loose, open-ended. He told us he'd hitched cross-country overland and through the Great Lakes, then on a cargo ship slipping through canals, then in cold storage, then in a bucket of seawater that kept him alive on a freight train, and finally he'd been dumped out in the Hudson, which was right where he wanted to be dumped all along.

‘Wow! Man!' he kept saying the first time we talked. ‘There's so many things to do and tell and feel and write and – no more fluctuating, okay, Sel, no more untrue knowledge!'

And I agreed. No more untruths.

For a while after Muss arrived, he and Gallos were connected on an invisible circuit of madman energy. Gallos memorised everything Muss said and became his disciple because he thought there was something raw and real about him and the rest of us were cooked. They had a thing where they talked fiendishly, all-day-all-night talk, six, eight, ten hours straight, trying to share everything, every single fleeting thought or twinge or appetite. I followed and listened and was interested in them because they were mad and burning with it, and they liked to have an audience for their madness. It put some method in it. Muss would visit Gallos on our pier and I would sit next to them with my shell half open, listening. They'd face each other, open their shells wide, and get down to business.