twenty-three

As I jump I see the rope. The rope that I’m supposed to use to lower myself. I grab, catch it, and slide, my palms burning, until I touch down. I look around, spot a hole in the side wall, and crawl through into a mine shaft.

That’s what the shoes marked: a mine shaft. The proper entrances are sealed, but this opened up after a storm maybe five years ago. Kids found it and marked it with the shoes. After a year or two, it lost the novelty factor—if you want to smoke up or make out, there are better places closer to town.

After I heard about it at school, I brought Edie, thinking she’d be keen to explore. Instead, I got a lecture on the dangers of mine tunnels and the stupidity of the kids who were exploring this one. If I wanted to go caving, she’d happily take me to one without deadly gases, poisonous snakes, hidden vertical shafts, rotted beams, and abandoned explosives. We did exactly that, exploring relatively safe mountain caves instead. Which explains why I didn’t know about the rope, only that there was a hole kids jumped down.

I hear the dogs snarling at the top of the pit and hunt for something to block the opening into the mine shaft. I find a board and wedge it in. Then I head deeper into the tunnel, grateful for the penlight on my keychain. It doesn’t do much, but it’s better than stumbling around a mine in the dark.

Once I’m a little ways from the entrance, I check my wounds. Fang scrapes and punctures. I clean them with a tissue and then shine my light down the tunnel. The chance of finding a conveniently open second entrance nearby is about as good as the chance of finding someone selling ice cream bars. More likely I’ll hit gas pockets and bottomless shafts and toxic mold.

I contemplate going back up. I have two knives—my hunting one and the switchblade. There seem to be only the three dogs. I probably hurt Mange pretty badly. Though Flea is small, he has a good bite, as the throbbing in my arm reminds me. Alanna’s not much bigger than Flea, but she’s twice as nasty.

I can’t fight the three of them. Just can’t.

I’m preparing to wait it out, sitting near the hole, when I hear a yelp up top. It’s not a frenzied yelp of excitement. It’s not even the yelp of one dog turning on another. It’s a high-pitched yipping that raises the hair on my neck.

Then comes Alanna’s distinctive frenzied snapping and snarling, only this time it’s laced with panic. A thump sounds on the other side of the board covering that hole. Above, Alanna keeps snapping madly, but I’m staring at the board and I can see something beyond it. Something white. Then I hear a high-pitched whine and even Alanna goes silent.

Knife ready, I creep to that board and crouch. Through a gap, I see Flea. The white fur around his ruff is stained red and he’s struggling for breath, flanks heaving, nostrils flaring, eyes wide and staring.

He’s dying. His throat…

Alanna ripped out his throat. Blood is pumping, his lifeblood draining. There was a skirmish above, both of them jockeying for position, and she must have ripped into him and he fell, and now between the injury and the fall…

He’s dying. I’m gazing into his eyes and watching him die.

I’ve had to put animals out of their misery before. Usually it’s in traps. If I can’t save it, I kill it. But after delivering the fatal cut I look away and act like I just happened upon a dying animal, like I played no role in that passing.

Now I watch. And I feel…

I feel like I should do something. Hasten his death. It doesn’t matter that he’d have ripped out my throat. Doesn’t matter that he’d have dined on my corpse. I’m watching him die slowly, and it is horrible, and all I can think is that this is a dog, a pet animal.

Had someone dumped him, tired of him once he was no longer a cute puppy? Or after he chewed up too many shoes? Had he been loved once? By a child who’d cuddled him? Who’d wept when he was gone?

I want to end his suffering, and I cannot because Alanna is still up there. She’s back to that frenzied snarling and snapping, her claws clicking against rock. I’m afraid that if I go out there to hasten Flea’s passing, she’ll leap down that hole.

Flea gives one last gurgling breath, blood bubbling from his throat. He sighs then. Sighs as if he’s remembering some good memory, one from a time before he was abandoned.

He goes still, and a tear slides down my cheek. I could say that tear is for him, but I’m not sure it isn’t for me—for what I see of myself in that fantasy past I’ve created for him.

There’s a yelp up top, as if the alpha has just realized her pack mate is dead. A sudden yelp of shock and then a drawn-out whine, and I wonder if I’ve misjudged her. I think of these feral dogs as shipwrecked killers, forced to rely on one another for survival, always ready to tear into a pack mate if he comes between them and a full belly. Perhaps they were more, perhaps as much a pack—a family—as they could be.

Then the whine turns to a scrabbling of claws and a high-pitched strangled cross between a whine and a yip mingled with a frantic growl and then…

Silence.

One long moment of silence.

A hollow plopping sound follows. I tug aside the board to see a growing spot of red on Flea’s white flank. At first, it’s just a dot. Then it’s the size of a silver dollar and then another spot forms beside it, the two seeping together. It’s not an injury. He wouldn’t start bleeding after his heart stopped pumping. The blood is coming from…

I lift my gaze, and I watch a drop of blood fall onto Flea’s flank from the top of the hole, where Alanna has gone quiet.

Everything has gone quiet.

That’s when I hear breathing. Slow and steady breathing echoing down that hole.

Then the unmistakable squeak of a shoe. Pebbles tumble into the hole, raining on Flea. Another squeak. Then a dog collar thumps onto Flea’s side.

Alanna’s collar.