An impersonal voice was giving out the news. It made me think of the town crier who had in the old days brought the news of war, of victory or disaster. It appeared that Washington was completely obliterated and that, since the federal government no longer existed, New York and all the other states were on their own. The Governor advised calm and patience. He said he would undertake to keep order and restore vital utilities. People were advised to stay where they were and wait and not rush off to the country. This news, of course, succeeded in achieving the purpose opposite to that desired and stampeded everyone, so that later in the day there was a veritable exodus of such cars as had gas in their tanks. The rest of the news was that, bad as things were, there was no cause for panic or alarm and, though the casualties in New York City were estimated to be more than seven hundred thousand, the fires were under control and we should remain calm.
The voice went on and on. Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and every other major city had been severely damaged. But everything would be all right; this foolish catch phrase was reiterated and we were again advised to remain calm, stay at home if possible, until normalcy was restored. How this was to be done with seven hundred thousand casualties and a quarter of Manhattan destroyed was not revealed.
There were a great number of suicides. Within an hour of the blast, we saw one woman throw her child out of a high window in the Lincoln Hotel, stand naked for an instant on the parapet and then follow her child in a headfirst dive. Most suicides, however, were on the fashionable upper East Side—the working poor being more able to stand disaster; having so little, they had little to lose.
Forced by curiosity and the knowledge that the longer we waited, the harder it would be to go out, we made our way down the stairs from our eleventh-floor apartment to the street. I had often called dwellers in apartment houses “troglodytes,” and I remember thinking how right I had been as we climbed down the concrete stairs and crossed the paved passages that divided one flight from the next, pausing to rest and to listen to the strange sounds we heard. There was some drunken singing, the sound of quarrels, a hysterical woman blaming her husband for what had happened and asking him why he did not do something about it. He did. He struck her; she fell down and got up screaming she’d “have the law on him for that”; at which he laughed and she burst out crying loudly because now there was no law. On another floor, people were having a prayer meeting and singing hymns. There was no one in the office, and the lobby was deserted.
We went into the street and found it empty. It was rather like a Sunday afternoon with everyone away, or a Saturday—a week-end—because a car was being loaded with things from a house almost opposite the hotel entrance. I had with me a heavy blackthorn stick that I always carry on account of the lameness caused by an old wound, and since we had money with us, we thought we might as well go up to the corner and see if we could buy more food. Obviously, money was no good any more, but here was the possibility the grocer would not have come to that conclusion yet; he might not have had the sense to load up his stock and take it home with him. This guess proved to be right, and we were able to buy fifty dollars’ worth of canned goods: sardines, herring, salmon, tuna fish, and potted meat. We obtained a gunny sack and staggered back with our wealth.
On the way home there was the body of a man—his head had been bashed in—lying in the gutter on the corner of 45th Street, opposite a liquor store which had been raided and was completely empty. And, as we were getting our stuff in the grocery store, a girl ran screaming past us pursued by a gang of young hooligans. I judged from the noise that followed that they must have pulled her down in the next block. It was this incident which decided me to cut off Mildred’s hair (she wore it long, more than shoulder length) and make her dress in dungarees. With short hair, dungarees, and a dirty face, she would pass for a youngish, rather queer-looking boy, but everyone looked queer now and she would certainly be safer.
We lay low for a few days. This was the time that the sediment of the underworld rose to the surface and took over. The streets were the scene of unrestricted pillage, murder and fights between rival gangs. From our roof we saw some amazing sights. But by degrees, in a matter of four or five days, things improved. My friend the manager told me that he had heard that the city was full of wounded and crazed people. He asked if I had seen any and I said no. He said they were flooding up Lexington and Park avenues. He told me more of the exodus, of how the routes out of the city were packed with refugees in cars and on foot. The police were making no effort to control them, since control was impossible. But what could they have done, anyway? Given tickets? Made arrests? Broken cars were jamming the roads. People were being run down and robbed, girls abducted; other people were jumping off bridges and out of windows. But still they were moving outward like the spokes running from the shattered hub of a wheel. He asked me what I was going to do. I said I was going to stay.
Though my memory of the sequence of events that followed is somewhat confused, certain incidents stand out very clearly, the first among them being the destruction of our pets. The fish went first, since they could not live without the light in the tank. But then they did not count as pets; they were merely a decoration and an interest—no more than that. The kinkajou was different. She was very affectionate and never bit hard enough to draw blood. Looking back on it, it seems funny now; but I had been away from farming for fifteen years or so and had gotten out of the habit of killing things. It was only with the greatest difficulty that, holding her in the crook of my left arm, I made myself hit her on the back of the head with a two-pound ball hammer. She stretched out the way animals do when struck, her legs quivered, and then she went limp. I skinned her while she was still warm, as it’s much easier then, and then I cut her up for a stew. Mildred cried. The dog looked on, not at all sorry to see the kink go. She had never understood our interest in it. It was difficult to think of Annie going the same way, which she did two days later.
Dogs have been associated with man for so long, a million years perhaps, that they no longer, in the full sense, count as animals; they are extensions of man, inventions of many like the spinning jenny, the Queen Mary and the atomic bomb. Breeding livestock has always interested me, and I have learned a great deal about it since I have lived alone in the world with animals. Domestic dogs, as we knew them, were bred by continually discarding dogs that were not tractable, but my dogs now are bred two ways: the dogs of my hunting pack, which have been bred for strength and courage alone, would be capable of pulling me down if they were really starving, while my personal dogs are almost human, having been bred for both brains and courage.