The Last Dog on Earth (15 page)

Plop-plop.

Beavers. Logan's cracked lips curled in a smile. Of course. What had he been thinking? Oregon was the Beaver State. Not the Weird Lumberjack State. Logan had just never seen any beavers up close, in the wild. Whenever he'd gone hiking in the past, he had always stuck to the trails. Beavers tended to stay away from trails.

He dropped the garbage bag and walked up to the stream.

“Wow,” he murmured.

A massive dam had been built across it, maybe thirty feet long and eight feet deep. It was sloppy looking, like a giant bird's nest—with
leaves and branches sticking out all over the place—but it did what it was supposed to do. The water level on one side of it was a good three feet higher than the water level on the other side. It was really pretty incredible. That little fur ball he'd just seen was less than half the size of Jack. How could something like
that
create something like
this
?

Logan bent down beside the stream and cupped his hands, slurping up water in big gulps, splashing it all over his face. It tasted cold and fresh. He could feel the wetness going all the way through him. He'd never imagined plain old water could be so good.

When he'd finally had enough, he stood up straight again. He was breathing hard. He felt a little light-headed.

Okay. He wasn't thirsty anymore, but he was still hungry.
Very hungry.
He was probably hungrier than he'd ever been in his life. So hungry that he would even have sunk so low as to eat tuna fish, which he'd always refused to eat on the grounds that it looked and smelled like cat food. Unfortunately, he didn't have any tuna fish.

He glanced back at the garbage bag. He should have risked waking up Sergeant Bell to get a fishing rod. He had no way of catching any fish now, tuna or otherwise.

Unless … Logan gnawed on his lip and stared at the beaver dam, thinking.

He was no beaver expert, but the way he figured it, beavers probably didn't build dams so they'd have a nice place to swim. They probably built dams to catch things that flowed downstream. Like fish, for instance.

Or maybe not.

The point was, fish probably
did
get caught in that dam. Which meant that Logan could catch some as well. He just had to make a fishing net.

Logan dashed back to the bag and dumped everything in it onto the ground. Then he took the big carving knife he'd swiped from the Alpha Base kitchen and carefully punched a bunch of tiny holes into the bottom of the bag—about twenty in all, no bigger than the tip of a pen. As soon as he was done, he cut four small pieces of rope, each about as long as a shoelace. (So Sergeant Bell
had
been right about needing rope. Imagine that.)

Then he started hunting for sticks. In less than two minutes he found what he needed: four strong, thick sticks that were all a foot long or so.

Using the pieces of rope, he tied the branches together to form a square. Then he fit the square into the open end of the bag. He punctured the rim of the bag with the sharp ends of the branches and tied a few extra knots in the plastic so that the bag wouldn't fall off the square.

There
, Logan said to himself.

Now he had a net: one that was a foot wide and would always stay open. He walked upstream a little way, away from the dam, then tied what remained of the rope—about ten feet—to one of the sticks. With that, he tossed the net into the water.

It landed with a small splash.

The rope stretched tight, like a leash. The force of the current made the end of the bag balloon out behind the square, just like a parachute.
Perfect.
Logan could see it all underwater: a big, empty garbage bag that would soon fill with fish. He had to smile. The LMMFN (Logan Moore Makeshift Fishing Net) wasn't nearly as state-of-the-art as the LMMRC, but it would do the job.

He was in the woods, after all. You had to do what you could.

* * *

Within a couple of hours (by Logan's estimate—he wasn't wearing a watch), he'd caught three fish. The LMMFN was a huge success.

As soon as a fish would swim into the bag, he'd yank the bag back to shore. That was the easy part. The hard part was actually getting the fish
out
of the bag. They'd squirm in his fingers and usually slip back into the black plastic netting about a hundred times. Logan ended up getting soaking wet. Then they'd flop around in the dirt beside him for a few minutes until they were dead. Too bad Jack wasn't with him. If she saw those fish flopping around, she'd probably go crazy. He laughed once, remembering the way she'd pounced on the baseball mitt and whipped it around in her jaws….

His smile quickly faded. There was no point in thinking about Jack. If he wanted to see her again, he had to figure out a way to get home first. And if he was going to do that, he had to
eat.

He dragged the LMMFN from the water.

The fish weren't very big. They were all pretty skinny and less than a foot long. A lot less, actually. Whatever. He wasn't in a position to be picky. There was plenty of meat on them to make a nice breakfast. Or lunch. Or whatever meal it was.

Now the only problem was finding enough dry wood to build a fire.

Man
, he thought, frowning. He should have swiped Perry's lighter after all. He had only a single box of kitchen matches, and there weren't that many left. He glanced around the woods. There had to be—

A shadow jumped in the fog.

Logan held his breath.

His pulse quickened. There was some rustling there, some movement maybe a hundred feet away. It was an animal. And it
definitely
wasn't
a beaver. It was big, sort of dark … a wolf, maybe?

It was coming right toward Logan. Not that fast—but not that slowly, either. It was limping a little, staggering, even … it was nothing more than a silhouette with a tail.

A wolflike silhouette.

Logan didn't move. He couldn't. Fear had frozen him solid.
A wolf is stalking me.
The way he saw it, he had two choices. He could dive into the stream, or he could stay still.

The wolf barked.

Wait a second.
Logan's pulse snapped into overdrive.

That bark.

It was as if his body had suddenly been jammed into a giant electrical socket and the switch had been thrown.
That bark.
Logan didn't even have to glimpse her bedraggled auburn fur or those liquid brown eyes or those skinny legs. The bark was enough.

But this was impossible. There was no way she could be here—
here
, in the middle of the Cascades—not unless Robert and Mom had somehow tracked him down. Or maybe he was still asleep….

“Jack?” he said. His voice cracked a little.

And then she was jumping on him, wagging her tail, breathing her stinky dog breath right into his face—and he knew he was awake. Dreams didn't include bad breath.

“Okay, girl,” he gasped, laughing. “Easy. Easy, there—”

His laughter stopped.

All four of Jack's legs were bloody. They were dotted with oozing sores. Her paws were in tatters. She lay down beside Logan and shuddered a couple of times, panting. Drool fell from her jowls in big white globs. She was a wreck.

“What happened to you, girl?” Logan whispered.

Jack whimpered softly.

“Okay. Okay, don't worry. I'll—”

Crack!

Logan looked up with a start. That wasn't the sound of a tree falling. It was short and sharp and loud, like a rifle shot. It echoed all around him, so that he couldn't tell where it had come from. There was no way Sergeant Bell would come looking for him with a
gun
, was there? The guy was pretty whacked out, but still …

Crack!

Something whizzed by Logan's head. A branch on the other side of the stream snapped and fell into the water.
What the—

Logan ducked down, panting as hard as Jack. His eyes were like saucers. All right. That was a bullet. No doubt about it. He had to stop. To think. Rewind. Start over. If he'd been scared when he thought a wolf was stalking him … he didn't know
what
he was now. Actually, that wasn't true. He was on the verge of passing out.

“Hey!” he shouted into the mist. “Don't shoot! Don't shoot!”

Jack whimpered again. She glanced at Logan, then sniffed at the LMMFN. She must have smelled the fish because she crawled right through the opening and curled up inside it.

Several seconds later, two men in hunting caps and orange vests appeared out of the fog.

“Hello?” one of them yelled. “Anybody there?”

“Yeah!” Logan shouted back. He stood up and raised both hands over his head. His knees wobbled. “I'm right here! Don't shoot!”

The men drew closer. Both of them looked angry. And both were carrying rifles.

“What are you doing out here, kid?” one of them asked.

“I, uh …” Logan swallowed. It probably wasn't a good idea to
tell them he was a runaway. In fact, that would be a very, very stupid idea. “I'm just doing a little fishing. I live … I live down the stream a little ways.”

“In Mitchell?” the second one asked. He sounded suspicious.

Logan nodded. “Yeah. In Mitchell.”

The second guy smirked. “You can put your hands down, kid,” he said.

“Oh.” Logan managed a nervous laugh. His arms flopped down to his sides.

“Look, it's not safe for you to be around here,” the first one said. He didn't look at Logan as he spoke. Instead, his eyes slowly and systematically scanned the woods. “There's a sick dog on the loose. We've been tracking it from the highway. We know it's around here somewhere. We got to take care of it. Put it down. Know what I mean?”

Put it down.
It took every ounce of Logan's self-control not to look at the LMMFN. “Um … how—how sick is the dog?” he stammered. His voice was shaking.

“It's got POS, boy!” the second one snapped. “And I don't care what the CDC says. It's up to us to take these dogs
out.
The government sure as hell isn't going to do it for us.”

Logan shut his mouth. His eyes darted from one guy to the other. He could hardly breathe. His chest felt as if it were about to explode. Thoughts jumped around in his brain like popcorn in a skillet—a swirling, hot, crackling mess. These guys were trying to kill Jack. They thought she had the disease. But so what? Even if she
was
sick (which she wasn't), you couldn't just go around shooting dogs. Could you?

“Have you seen it?” the first guy asked.

“The dog?” Logan said. He shook his head. “No. No, sir. I haven't.”

“How long have you been out here?”

“Since early this morning, sir,” Logan said. “I haven't seen anything but beavers.”

The second guy looked at the LMMFN. “What's that for?” he asked.

Logan's heart was beating so loudly that he was certain they could hear it. “That's for catching fish,” he said. He shot a quick glance at the bag. It rattled. “There's a couple in there right now. Big ones.” He chuckled, then bit the inside of his cheek to keep the laugh from running away with him. “See them squirming?”

The second guy raised his eyebrows at Logan and grinned. “You use a garbage bag to catch fish? Wouldn't a line and tackle be easier?”

“I can't afford those things,” Logan said. It was true, technically. He was broke. And he sure
looked
poor: thin and wet and dirty— not to mention stuck in the middle of nowhere.

“Oh,” the guy said. He seemed embarrassed. He turned to his friend. “Well, I don't see that mutt anywhere. I bet it's headed back toward the highway.”

Logan nodded. “Yeah, you know, come to think of it, I
did
hear something in the woods a few minutes ago. I thought it was a beaver or a deer. It seemed to be heading toward where you just came from.”

The guys looked at each other. Without a word, they started marching back into the fog, away from the stream.

Logan stared at them.
Please, just go away. Please, please, please …

The second guy glanced over his shoulder. “If I were you, kid, I'd head home,” he said. “It's dangerous out here.”

“Gotcha. I'm on my way home right now. Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

He held his breath until they had vanished completely.

Pent-up air exploded from his lungs. He dashed back to the plastic bag and peered inside. Jack appeared to be sleeping … but fitfully, as if she was having a nightmare. She wheezed every time her chest rose and fell.

Logan tried to think. So. However she had done it, Jack had found him.
Here.
Forty miles from home, at least. And Robert and Mom were nowhere to be seen. If anything was
Ripley's Believe It or Not!
material, this was it. This was a miracle. An old-timey, parting-of-the-Red-Sea, flat-out miracle.

Too bad he couldn't enjoy the moment.

He had a couple of problems to deal with first. He had a sick, injured dog on his hands. He had two mouths to feed: his and hers. He had no money, no food (okay, three measly fish), and nothing with which to bandage Jack's wounds or clean up her sores. And for all he knew, Jack really
did
have POS.

If she did, he wouldn't let her die. He wouldn't let anyone shoot her, either. He'd nurse her back to health somehow.

And that was the biggest problem. Jack was a runaway, too. Logan couldn't take her to a vet. He couldn't tell anyone about her. Otherwise, they'd both get caught—and he would be shipped back to the Blue Mountain Camp for Boys and she would either be “put down” or taken to a CDC quarantine center. And
then
killed, he was willing to bet.

So he would have to play doctor.

Logan Moore, veterinarian.

Ha, ha, ha. It was almost funny. Almost.

For many days and nights, White Paws had been unable to hunt. It was as if some dark spirit had taken control of his body. He stumbled through the forest, lost and frightened and bewildered—following a scent only to find it gone, chasing an easy victim only to find that he couldn't run.

Sleep was winning its battle. White Paws was too tired to fight it anymore. It settled over him like a thick fog, playing tricks on his mind and body. He had to surrender, to end his hunger and pain. Yet he couldn't keep still. Every time he lay down, his body twitched and jerked. So he would get up and try to hunt again.