In taming any animal, you must replace the mother of the young animal so that it fixes its affection on you instead of on its dam; or, in the case of animals that hunt in packs, you must become the leader of the pack.
This is what I do when I hunt with my hounds. Though I carry a rifle, a knife, and a pistol, I would not try to handle my pack without a bull whip and a short club. Every now and then a young dog, never a bitch, challenges me. Weighing as much as or more than I do, he might pull me down if I were not ready for him. On one occasion I killed—with my bare hands—a dog that weighed two hundred and five pounds (I had the curiosity to weigh him.) His name was Racketeer, and his breeding was Great Dane, police dog, Saint Bernard and Afghan.
Racketeer was a lovely beast, but suddenly he challenged me. I had put the pack onto a bear spoor. It was spring, and the spoor was very clear in the moist ground, but Racketeer wanted to follow a lynx. When I began to whip him off—this was before I carried a club—he turned on me, while the pack waited to see which would be master. I saw him crouch for the jump, and as he leaped for my throat I struck him straight in the nose with my fist. As he fell I jumped on him; leaping into the air, I brought both feet down on him, smashing his ribs. Then I raised him in my arms and threw him back to the waiting pack.
But all this discourse has been an evasion of the description of the death of Annie, my pinscher. The past is still too near to make it easy to discuss. But the way it went was this: I held her on my knee, with my left hand over her shoulder, and brought the hammer down on her skull, cracking it with a single blow. I then cleaned and skinned her and we ate her, for though we had canned food we were trying to conserve it for the days that were to come. When it became known that I had killed my pets and eaten them, a woman burst into the apartment and called me a cannibal and a brute. She said it was like eating a human being, and I said, “We may be doing that yet.” There had been cannibalism in the German concentration camps at Dachau and elsewhere, but this good woman had forgotten or had never believed it. On the other side of the same penny were the people who wanted me to kill their dogs for them because they could not bring themselves to do it. I killed a number of dogs that I had known quite well, many of them having lived in the hotel as long as I had. I charged half the dog for killing and dressing it, and became accustomed to dog soup and stew.
During this period the destroyed part of the city was walled off, the rubble of the fallen buildings being used to close off the streets. It made me think of the walled-off ghettos of the German occupation in Poland, and of the way situations tended to repeat themselves, death being enclosed by walls in both cases. It was a defense mechanism on our part against the knowledge that death had us hemmed, walled in, and was one of our final tributes to complacency, to the idea that if we could not see a thing we stopped its existing. But you could not help smelling it. All over the city there was a stench of death in the air.
Order, as I say, had been for a while somewhat restored and a few minimum services functioned, but everything worked on a kind of reflex. Policemen remained policemen because it was their habit and they did not know what else to do; for a few days garbage collectors still collected garbage for the same reason. But there was neither credit nor currency, central authority having disappeared. Public servants were paid in food from the stock that was available in the city warehouses, a system that obviously could not continue for long.
There were amazing tales of the fights put up by farmers against the influx of city dwellers who had run out of the metropolis and had flung themselves upon anything edible in the country—a swarm of human locusts that the country people resisted in every manner possible. There was a pitched battle on the Canadian border in the vicinity of Niagara Falls. The Canadians appeared to be a little better off than we were, having retained their central government, and they used troops to turn back the unwelcome thousands, many of whom had known the Falls only as a honeymoon resort. We got the story from one of the survivors and his wife. She was a lovely blond night-club singer who now looked like an old and shrunken woman; he had played a hot trumpet and was at one time internationally famous through his recordings. I recall the incident because, despite everything, he had held onto the silver trumpet that had made him famous— a remarkable young man who no doubt died tooting on his instrument.
All this took place in the first few months. I was proved to have been wise in my decision to stay in New York: there was more food here than in the country. There were still some pigeons, and there were plenty of cats, for with the departure of mankind and the failure of all city services, the rodents had increased in a phenomenal manner and naturally the city cats had increased with them. I had eaten cat as a child (our gardener in France, who trapped them, had once given me some), and both Mildred and I found them excellent. There were still some dogs in the street, which lived, literally, by dog eating dog, and these I shot with my .22. Our system of hunting was to go out together; I went a pace in front with the .22 and Mildred followed with the heavier rifle, the 303, which she, like a gunbearer in Africa, put into my hand if I asked for it. Some of the big dogs could not be stopped by a small-bore rifle; and there were human wolves, too, who had to be destroyed. Mildred was in no danger now as a woman, having like all other surviving women, lost any visible sexual charm which she had ever had, near starvation having reduced the sexual curves that characterize women; and the sex fiends, who had run riot in the early days, raping and murdering, had either been eliminated or had been reduced by the food shortages to seeking nourishment rather than other satisfactions.
For a change, we used to fish in Central Park. Mildred, being better at it than I, would watch her float bob in the water while I stood guard with the rifle. We cooked out on the roof where, when first we had taken the apartment, I had had built a little barbecue. Water was now obtained with difficulty. Some we brought from Central Park, some we collected by damming up a section of our roof.
At this time there were very few people left in the city—only a few thousand—because everything had broken down with the breakdown of credit. People simply would not work without money. They were not even ready to save their lives by co-operative effort. So deeply had our competitive system bitten into us that they preferred to sit around and starve, or else they ran away and starved— except the few who, like ourselves, lived on what they could find or loot from the stores. The word “loot” persists, though obviously it was no longer looting. It remained, however, an operation of some danger because of the darkness of the stores and the maniacs who had taken up their abode in many of them—savages who resented any intrusion into their territory. I remember one man that I shot at Gimbel’s while Mildred held the flashlight on him. He was an immense man who ran at us roaring with rage as he brandished a meat cleaver. We had gone to Gimbel’s for caviar and pâté de foie gras. They had a lot of it, for apparently the other looters, having less sophisticated tastes than ours, left it alone.
For anyone who liked adventure I suppose this would have been very interesting, but to us who had become almost sedentary and were quite unaccustomed to swift movement, hard living, or even loud noises, the adjustment was most difficult. Yet in this twilight world, we succeeded in living and forming a pattern of life, even remembering the days with some semblance of accuracy. I, who had always hated a schedule of any kind, now invented one. Monday: Central Park, fishing; Wednesday and Friday: food-looting expeditions. Inevitably, though, the human instinct being what it is, more was collected than food. We found some beautiful fur coats—stone marten, blue mink, Russian sable, and ermine. The ermine came in very handy for winter hunting in the snow. We picked up some wonderful diamond rings of fifteen or twenty carats, ruby clips, necklaces and bracelets. We both looked like pirates. We were far from clean but we were dressed in suede, silk and satin; we wore rare fur coats from which I had cut the arms to give greater freedom. We had silk sashes around our waists, carried an arsenal of daggers and pistols, and over our shoulders were slung the best guns New York could provide.