The Dog Master (55 page)

Silex looked at Dog's mouth, the blood there. Then he glanced up at Lyra with a smile. “Dog master,” he repeated. “Just so. An apt term. Dog master.”

After they buried the dead, the five people, different creeds, Kindred and Wolfen, ate reindeer meat together by the fire.

*   *   *

Dog was tense and restless until night fell and her man and the woman took her to the cave. She could smell the other humans out by their fire, but now it was as it should be, with her man lying on the mother-wolf thing, the woman next to him. Dog did not fear any harm from the woman.

The events of the day were deeply disturbing to Dog, so she climbed over to the man and put her head on his chest, the way she had slept when she was a puppy. His hand came down to rest on her head.

“All is good, Dog.”

She understood that her name was Dog and knew the sound “good” as praise. She had pleased her man.

The woman, too, made sounds, though nothing Dog could recognize.

“I love you, Mal.”

“I love you, too, Lyra.”

Sighing, Dog felt the tension leave her. They were in the den, safe and together, the way they were meant to be. She closed her eyes and soon fell fast asleep.

 

PRESENT DAY

Professor James K. Morby met his friend and longtime collaborator Bernard Beauchamp in the small coffee shop just down the street from Morby's hotel. The two men drank strong coffee from delicate china cups, watching idly as people strode briskly past on the sidewalk. Each man kept drifting from the conversation, wandering among his own thoughts. Jean Claude, the graduate student thirty years younger than either of the two PhDs, sat at the table respectfully. Both professors had uneaten pastries on the small plates in front of them, making Jean Claude tense. He did not know if it would be impolite to ask the men if they were going to eat the sweet rolls, but he yearned to snatch them up and bolt them down as quickly as he had finished his own.

“You are all packed, then, Jim?” Beauchamp asked nonchalantly.

“What? Oh yes, yes. All ready to go. Sorry. I'm feeling oddly … deflated.”

“Deflated?
Je ne comprends pas tr
è
s bien ce que ca veut dire.
”

“I just mean to say that I always believed we would find her. The wolf, the first dog. I knew it. And now that we have … I have completed a quest, a purpose, and I am not sure what I will do to replace it.”

“So your work is finished?” young Jean Claude asked. He found a sliver of almond he had neglected to eat and put it in his mouth.

The other two men smiled at him. “Not finished, no,” Morby replied. “I will never be finished. But there is only so much we can guess from the fossil record. All of my work, in the end, comes down to nothing more than an educated guess. Would you like my roll, Jean Claude?”

“Well, perhaps … if you are not going to eat it.”

“You have been staring at it the way my dog watches me carve meat,” Beauchamp observed wryly.

Morby's eyes crinkled as he passed over the pastry. “For just a moment, let's picture it, Jean Claude. The climate is changing, vast sheets of ice preparing to storm the continent. The human race clings to a fragile existence, not even enough of us in all of Eurasia to fill a football stadium. The Neanderthals are, for reasons we still do not understand, slowly dying out. And then one tribe, one group of people, one
person,
manages to tame a wolf. Think how it must have changed everything!”

Jean Claude frowned as he chewed, swallowing before he confessed his doubt. “I am not sure why, Monsieur Professor, a dog would change everything.”

Morby nodded. “That is because you are thinking of it as a pet. Try, instead, to regard the wolf as a technology. From hunting—did the wolves kill rabbits and bring them back to their masters? To defense—what predator would take on a man being escorted by a couple of wolves? And finally to war—I do not buy it that early humans lived in Utopia, never fighting other tribes. No, the wolves were a
disruptive
technology.” Morby grinned over the term. “It is as Dr. Temple Grandin says, animals make us human.”

Jean Claude nodded thoughtfully, cutting his eyes to Beauchamp's uneaten pastry.

“You should know, Jean Claude, that not everyone agrees with this conclusion,” Beauchamp observed, passing his
pains su
é
dois
à
la cannelle
to the younger man without comment. “Our friend here has been rather derisively refuted by our peers.”

Morby took a sip of coffee, something like resignation in his eyes. “Current thinking in our field is that we rose to the top of the food chain ahead of the Neanderthals because we were more collaborative. Naturally, we are so narcissistic we believe the collaboration was with our own kind, and not with another species. Not with
Canis lupus
.”

“What I would give to be there, to see the game change, with these wolves,” Beauchamp remarked almost wistfully.

“You are right, it was a game changer.” Morby nodded. “The dogs didn't just help us, they
saved
us! From that point on, as we evolved, advanced, we did it with the dogs by our side. That's why we love them, and they love us—our fates became inextricably bound together, dogs and humans, each
needing
the other. Humans who didn't bond to the dogs were less likely to survive. They were evolving
us
! And meanwhile we bred them—the wolves who did not like us or care for our discipline were not allowed to reproduce. We eventually took over all aspects of natural selection, so that today we have boxers and bulldogs, dachshunds and Dobermans, lapdogs and Labradors. But what we didn't realize was at the same time, they altered our species' destiny. Up until the dogs, we lived our brutish lives as just another species of animal, subject to the whims of the environment, scrabbling for survival in the dirt. But then, with domesticated wolves, we began to see things differently. We began to look at other creatures and wonder if we might tame them, too. And if we could manage animals, what about plants? We began to see ourselves not as subjects of nature, but
masters
of it!”

Morby's face was alive now, his melancholy completely gone.

“But then what happened?” Jean Claude wanted to know. “I know eventually the Neanderthals vanished, though some of them mated with humans. And I know that after a time we domesticated other animals as well. But when the first dog came … what happened next,
right then,
when they were completely new? When the game was changing, as Professor Beauchamp said?”

Professor Morby finished his coffee and set the delicate cup down on its saucer. “You always ask the right questions; I wish I had you in my class, Jean Claude. Yes, that is precisely what I, too, would like to know. For the first time, wolves were our companions, so treasured and loved we buried them next to us in our graves. This had never happened before, but suddenly, there they are, man and wolf together. Everything was different. Yet titanic changes do not happen easily. There must have been conflict, doubt, setbacks. There were no dogs, and then there were dogs. So,” Morby smiled, “as you ask.
What happened next
?”

 

AFTERWORD

I was scanning the newspaper for some good news one day (as in, “Author Cameron Wins Everybody's Favorite Person Award”) when I came across a simple statement that had such profound implications I could barely comprehend them all. Around 30,000 years ago something extraordinary happened: a wolf became a human's companion. In other words, it was the birth of the first dog.

The article seemed to imply that it was all pretty easy and routine—one day, a wolf, the next day, a dog. But I believed it was such an astounding development in the history of both species, I just had to find out more.

This all happened a little before I was born, so I spent hours and hours doing research on this time period, talking to paleontologists, reading books and articles, even checking out Wikipedia. The era is called the Upper Paleolithic, and it's striking just how brutal life was for those early humans. As primates, we'd been happiest in the northern forests, but now glaciers were advancing like an invading army, shoving us out onto the plains, where we could be easily hunted as meat by animals of tooth and claw and speed. We had no agricultural sciences, no ranching, but lived opportunistically, chasing food and hoping to catch it before some other predator, or starvation, brought us down. We were competing for many of the same resources not just with lions and other killers, but with Neanderthals, who were stronger and faster and maybe even smarter.

But while I could picture all that, I simply could not come up with a scenario that explained how a wolf became a
pet
.

I spent a lot of my research time looking into the canine-side of the equation as well. Wolves back then were far more likely to see us as a food source than they do in the current era—the ones who hunted us have historically been killed off. Over time, our actions influenced the evolution of
Canis lupus
away from aggression and toward elusiveness, so that today, attacks on humans by wolves are rare (and met with lethal retaliation). But 30,000 years ago, we were
dinner
to these animals. Would we really invite a pack of wolves to come join us by the fire and sing campfire songs? That would be like inviting cannibals to lunch and asking them who they would like to eat.

And our own food supply was scarce enough to suggest we would hardly have wasted it feeding another species. Wolves were, after all, competing for the same prey, hunting the same herds. When I was a child, I didn't even want to share food with my sister. If people were starving, would we really have tossed meat scraps to our competitors?

So how did we natural enemies become such good friends that I allow one of their descendants to sleep in my bed, nearly shoving me off the mattress each night?

Evolution is a long process. I promise you no wolf pack gave birth to a Labrador who ran over to the Cro-Magnon camp to retrieve tennis balls. Yet what human tribe would have the patience to lure a wolf pack closer and closer to an intimate relationship? No, for this to occur the evolutionary path took an extraordinary shortcut. One person must have had the time and the will to domesticate one wolf.

The Dog Master
is a work of fiction based on an indisputable fact: dogs are our companions, their fates inextricably bound to ours. To write it I had to envision a unique human, an extraordinary circumstance, and a wolf whose ancestors had an unusual affinity for
Homo sapiens.

That was just the first challenge. The domestication of wolves took place in the most dramatic and dangerous time in human history—the dawn of the last Ice Age. Yet humans almost certainly had no comprehension of the scope of devastation coming their way—they knew local weather, not global climate. The speed of the ice's advance was, well, glacial. They were involved in the sweep of history, a resurfacing of continents, an extinguishing of many species, a cascade of life-threatening challenges, and yet all they would have been aware of was their own situation. The days might be colder, the hunting more scarce, the fruits slower to ripen, but to them it would portend only further and immediate hardship in a world already designed to be cruel. As an author, the best I could do to set the story's stage was allow the characters to react to their individual situations and let the reader draw more grand conclusions.

And here's what we can say for certain about any specific individual human being in this extraordinary time in our history: nothing.

There's no written record. Cave paintings provide some insight, and the sciences of archaeology and geography contribute much, but in the end we don't
know
. Were the people of the time warlike, or peaceful? What was family life like? How did the tribes function? Who were these people? Were any of them kleptomaniacs? Did they have stand-up comedy?

With no manuscripts to study, I could only speculate on what a conversation might be like between two members of the Kindred. I wanted to give the reader a flavor of how their language might have worked, but I was writing in modern English, so all I could do was suggest, through formal sentence construction and an incorporation of vaguely foreign-looking names, that these humans of the Upper Paleolithic were capable of complex statements and had a sophisticated vocabulary, but that it was different from the way we speak today. My choices hopefully convey my artistic choices, but I was aiming for mood and nuance, and in no way presuming to reconstruct how humans would have communicated. For all I know they would say “LOL” to each other.

I am not alone in having to guess: as I read what experts had to say about this particular era, I was struck by how current theories attract consensus and controversy, and how some dogma, accepted in the past, has fallen into disfavor. If you asked me to examine a skull from thousands of years ago and come to a scientific conclusion, the best I could do would be to say, “I think this dude is dead.” But through a lot of hard work by dedicated men and women, we have very complex explanations for a lot of the fossil puzzles from long ago. Explanations which are, of course, impossible to
prove
.

If you are one of these scientists, I hope you'll understand that I took artistic license in pursuit of the story I was writing. We cannot for sure identify the diet of every tribe that was wandering Eurasia at that time—in my telling, the Northern Tribes have not yet managed to successfully hunt horses, as an example, though other humans were certainly living on horse flesh. I took a lot of today's generally accepted theories about early humans in general and adapted them to a story about a very small number of people in particular. I will cheerfully admit I am far more likely to have committed errors in this regard than might have been the case if I had first pursued a doctorate in paleontology. Of course, I'm not bright enough to get a PhD, so the story of
The Dog Master
would have been put on indefinite hold while I kept flunking my dissertation.