The Dog Master (2 page)

“As you will discover,” Morby continued almost reverently, “I have my own theories.”

He and Tommy would have exchanged another glance at this juncture—the point at which some of the students, looking at their textbooks, would suddenly make the connection and look up in surprise:
Hey, Morby
wrote
this thing
.

There would be no faking their way through their reading assignments in this class, not with the author evaluating their comprehension. So they'd focus, many of them detesting the subject so much that when, about halfway through the textbook, they did stumble across Morby's theory, the one on which his entire career had been built, they'd largely miss the significance.

“We have no written record of this, the most dangerous time for mankind, we have only our conjectures, based on the fossil record. Have we unearthed every skeleton of every species that walked the land and swam the waters? Probably not. Can we describe the topography of the landscape before the ice sculpted it into its current shape? No, no more than we can say precisely what hills and valleys existed under what the glaciers eventually turned into Lake Michigan. But we can say this: They were
us,
these humans. They had our brains. They weren't as tall and they didn't live as long, but there's no reason to suppose they didn't have language. They just didn't have symbols—or at least, symbols that have survived the eons. So remember that, when you read of the harsh challenges facing prehistoric man. They were
us
.”

And then something unprecedented: A single set of doors in the back banged open and, like a deputy set on serving a warrant, Tommy the TA marched in. Ignoring the freshmen necks craned to see him and the freshmen mouths gaping open at the bold interruption, Tommy came straight down the aisle, his eyes shining.

Morby pulled in a breath and held it, his heart suddenly pounding. Tommy read the question on his face and nodded with delight, bounding up the short set of stairs to join the professor on the stage. He reached out and placed his hand on the microphone to shield their conversation, while a low murmur began to build in the crowd.

“I just hung up with Beauchamp,” Tommy said, something like triumph threading tension into his voice.

“They found her,” Morby whispered, a shiver traveling up his spine.

Tommy nodded exultantly. “They found her,” he affirmed.

The two men, teacher and pupil, mentor and student, stared at each other in amazement over what they'd just dared to say. Then, slowly returning to his role as professor, Morby turned to face his class. Tommy's hand dropped away from the microphone.

“Gentlemen and ladies, this is Mr. Rooker, my assistant. He will complete today's lecture and will be leading the class for the next week or two. I have something I need to tend to. I need to catch a plane.”

*   *   *

Seventy-two hours later, Morby was crouched over a dig site, the earth peeled back to reveal the treasures underneath. Standing above him were a French graduate student named Jean Claude and Morby's longtime friend and collaborator, Bernard Beauchamp. Before him, the dirt brushed away with strokes as careful as an artist applying paint to canvas, lay the skeleton of a
Homo sapiens
—a male. The body was nearly intact, a beautiful find—someone long ago had taken care to inter this corpse with respect and even love.

But it was what lay next to the human that was so remarkable: an enormous canine, larger than any modern wolf Morby had ever seen. Carbon dating would confirm what the professor already knew to be true: The man and the wolf had been buried together.

Beauchamp was grinning because Morby was weeping. He put a hand out and gripped Morby's arm.

“Tu avais raison, mon ami.” You were right, my friend.

Jean Claude, looking barely older than the freshmen from the lecture hall, had driven Morby the four hours it had taken to get to the dig site and knew only that the American was good friends with his boss. He was a little bewildered, now, watching the two men wrestling with such profound emotion.

“Regardez le cou. Tu vois?”
Morby whispered.
Look at the neck. See?

“Red,” Beauchamp nodded, answering in heavily accented English.

All soft organic matter had been leached away by the greedy demands of the soils and their denizens, though in return the bones had been gifted minerals that had helped preserve them. Whatever might have been looped across the wolf's neck had been lost forever, but the ferrous oxide that had decorated that loop still remained, a thread of dusky red. Just as it appeared in the cave painting.

“What is it? A wolf? Or a dog?” Jean Claude asked, mimicking the quiet tones of the other men.

“A wolf, but also a dog,” Beauchamp murmured.

“No,” Morby corrected after a moment. “Not a dog.
The
dog.” He turned to Jean Claude. “You've found the very first dog.”

Jean Claude contemplated this. Morby wondered if the young man saw what Morby saw, what Beauchamp saw: fossil evidence of a turning point in human history. No: To mimic the sentence structure he'd just used, not a turning point,
the
turning point. When we went from enduring to prevailing.

“But then, who is the man? There must be a reason why he is buried with the dog.”

Morby stood, his knees snapping back into position. He slapped his palms on his sides, raising dust in the afternoon sun.

“Well yes, you raise a very interesting point,” Morby agreed. “I have spent so much of my career pondering how it is possible that wolves evolved into our friends and companions—evolution being the glacial process that it is. But suppose we look at it a different way: How did we humans go from being preyed upon by wolves to
living with them
? From wolf food to dog masters, if you will? Now you're talking adaptation, instead of evolution. Now you're not talking centuries, you're talking a single generation, the life of one person. Twenty years, let's call it. So, Jean Claude, you ask an important question, a very important question, indeed.

“Who is the man?”

 

BOOK

ONE

 

ONE

Year Nineteen

The big mother-wolf and her mate had made a den in a small cave along the stream. She was heavy with her pups, and she and the father had left the pack to give birth. She had done this before—left to bear her young, tended to by her mate, only to return to the howling site when her pups were able to travel and eat solid meals. Memory and instinct were both guiding her now.

The male-wolf was out searching for food. It was still cool, this spring, and the air carried elements of ice and water, buds and new leaves, stale grass and lush shoots. She took a deep whiff of it, noting that though he had been gone some time, she could still smell her mate on the breeze. He was not far away.

A shift inside of her told her the time had arrived. The birthing would start momentarily. Suddenly extremely thirsty, she left the den and eased down to the stream and lapped at the clear water. This would be her last drink on her own for several days. Her mate would regurgitate all of her sustenance while she lay nursing. But right now she drank and drank, some primitive part of her calculating the need to take on liquid.

Her senses alerted her to a shift in the breeze. She heard it in the trees and smelled it before it stirred her fur, but by that time her head had already whipped around, her pupils dilating and her nostrils flaring.

Lion.

The wind was now flowing straight from the direction of the den and it carried with it the scent of a killer. The mother-wolf could tell that the lion was approaching, whether by chance, or because it was tracking the tantalizing odor of the fluids that had started to leak from her.

She hesitated. Her instinct was to flee, but it battled with the urge to return to the den to give birth. She padded a few feet toward the den, then halted. No. The lion was coming from that direction, coming
fast.

She turned and ran for the stream, which even deep with meltwater could be forded without swimming. She lunged across, her pregnant belly slowing her down, scrabbling up the opposite bank and hearing the lion hit the water behind her. She turned and the lion was upon her.

The attack was swift and brutal. The mother-wolf ignored the pain as lion claws raked her flanks and she twisted, snapping her teeth, trying to get the lion's throat.

Then a massive impact tumbled them both. Male-wolf had arrived and had thrown himself into the fray, slamming into the lion and seizing the feline behind its head. Yowling and growling and screaming, the two did battle.

The mother-wolf turned away and fled toward the den. She could not rejoin the fight; her only concern could be for the pups.

Her rear legs gave out when she was still two dozen yards from the mouth of the den. She crawled ahead, panting, while behind her she could hear the yelps and screams of her mate's final moments. The lion was nearly twice the size of the male-wolf—the outcome of this bloody engagement had been foretold the moment the feline found them.

She was still struggling toward the mouth of the den when the sudden silence behind her pronounced the end of the fight. She kept her eyes on the opening where a gap between rock and ground made for the entrance, dragging her useless legs, focused on getting to safety and not looking back even when her senses told her the lion was coming after her.

*   *   *

The man had never been alone. Not like this, not with no prospect of seeing another human as he made his way along the rocky bluffs bordering the slender stream. No prospect of
ever
seeing another human, not ever again, though that seemed impossible, even ludicrous. Of course he would return to his tribe, would be
allowed
to return. He could not imagine anything else.

But on this day, with winter still lurking in pools of crystalline snow in deep shadows and buds barely making their long overdue appearance on the trees, he was turning his back on his people, both literally and figuratively.

Just as they had turned their backs on him.

He had tracked along the stream for most of the day, trekking into unfamiliar territory. This was land that belonged to no clan—he was safe here.

He carried a pouch sewn from reindeer hide looped over his shoulder, and carefully extracted some dried meat to chew on while he walked. His mind was on rationing, stretching his supplies as long as he could, but his stomach was focused on hunger and the easy availability of food. As a sort of compromise, he did not use the smoldering horn dangling from his neck to make fire to heat his snack, as if depriving himself of that luxury was a relevant sacrifice. The horn was packed with coals and moss and, with a few sticks and leaves added every so often, would still be potent enough to allow him to make camp before dark.

He carried both club and spear and was watching the ground for animal tracks when he heard a strange, almost ghastly, grunting and hissing. Several creatures of some kind were just ahead. He stopped, tense—hyenas? His heart was pounding—though he had never seen one, he knew he could neither successfully flee nor fight a pack of hyenas.

A shadow crossed the path and he jerked his head upward as a huge bird ghosted out of the sky and landed to a chorus of loud hisses and furious wings beating the air. Less afraid—no one had ever, to his knowledge, been killed by birds—he eased forward.

There was blood on the trail, here. Something had happened on this path, something savage and brutal, with lion tracks and wolf tracks jumbled together.

He tightened his grip on his club and, drawn by the noise, went down to the stream and stopped. A flock of immense, hideously ugly birds, with deadly beaks and featherless faces, were pecking at what he determined was a dead wolf on the opposite bank. He had never seen them before, but he supposed these were vultures. He watched their greedy plunder of the corpse for a moment, his lips twisted in repugnance.

“Yah!” the man yelled. “Away!”

The birds all but ignored him, so he stooped and picked up a rock. He hit one and the entire flock took flight, beating the air as they strained to take off.

The wolf was completely torn apart—the tracks suggested the fatal injuries had come from a cave lion, whose immense paw prints sank into the mud, but the vultures had stripped the flesh to the bone.

The man knelt, puzzling it out. It appeared that there was a vicious fight on the other side of the stream, the lion taking on the wolf. The male-wolf was eventually killed in the battle right there where he lay. Yet the blood trail was on
this
side of the stream. What had happened over here, away from where the vultures had been feeding?

He studied the tracks. They told a contradictory story, both lion and wolf prints seeming to go back and forth to the stream. But the blood only went in the direction away from the banks, away from the dead wolf. How was that possible?

What if he had it wrong? What if there were two wolves? Both fought the lion. The shredded carcass of one canine lay where it died, on that side of the stream, while the other one fled to this side.

But a lion probably would not attack a pair of wolves unless they were pups, and, judging by the tracks, the surviving wolf was even larger than the dead one. But
something
brutal had occurred here. Also, where did the wolf go when it escaped? By all appearances, it had crawled off to die.

The corpse of the wolf on the other side of the stream was too picked apart to be of any use, but if he could find the other one and it was more intact, the man decided to harvest its fur. There was great honor in wearing a wolf pelt.

He cautiously followed the blood trail, his club at the ready. A wounded wolf would attack instinctively, though judging by the blood loss he felt fairly certain the other wolf would be dead.