Now, Sumer, there was no one to maintain your kennel.
The woman who cared for you had been banished from society.
It was late summer 1957.
And what had Ice been doing that summer? What had become of our mongrel Queen of the Monsters, leader of a pack that roamed back and forth across the borders of four states?
She had puppies. She had given birth again. She was an active mother, suckling her young. How many times had you given birth, Ice? You had no idea. You never counted. Only idiots bother to count each little digit like that, crooking the five fingers on their two hands. Counting is a cross borne by the people of civilized communities, saddled with their decimals. You, Ice, had feet, not hands, and pads on your toes, because your feet were meant for running. They were the engines of your speed. You, Ice—you do not count. You don’t skitter from number to number, you live by instinct. You heed your blood… you are swayed by the intuitions you inherited from a line of victors.
It was, probably, your fourth birth, though you didn’t know that.
And so, Ice, as summer drew to a close, you and your pack ceased your roving.
You were in your nest. You hated summer. The blood coursing through your veins derived, every drop, from northern breeds. Summer was your enemy. Truth be told, the south itself was your enemy. But it was your destiny to move southward, and destiny is not something you can shake. Your mane, which had evolved to help you endure the bitter cold, was no more now than a soft brush. Each time you birthed a litter, you caressed the puppies with your mane. It was a sign of your motherly love. You and your pack stayed close to the nest. Seven pups were born over seven hours in that gray area at the end of August and the beginning of September, before and after midnight on August 31—you could say the puppies had been born in one month or the other, depending on the time zone—and for the next week you didn’t have a free moment. Another week went by and still you had no time to yourself, but you could at least begin teaching your pups to walk. And other things too. THIS WORLD IS HOT, you told them. IT’S BRUTALLY HOT, AND SO YOU’LL HAVE TO LEARN TO ADAPT AS YOU LIVE YOUR LIVES. This was your command to them: Mongrelize. This was the sacred law of mongrelization: Mix. Be contaminated. Refute the notion of the standard.
Because people are the ones who tried to keep dogs pure.
You and your pack ceased your roving, Ice, if only for a time, and that was very dangerous indeed. True, you had given birth several times before, but this was not then, this was America in 1957. You were public enemies. You, Ice, were Public Enemy Number One. You assumed it would be safe to stay put for two or three weeks, that it would be enough, but you were wrong. You miscalculated. You didn’t even calculate. Because you didn’t count.
People were idiots, yes, with five fingers on their two hands. But they did more with those fingers than count to ten. They also gripped their guns and pulled the triggers.
What happened?
You were surrounded. You and your pack were no longer roving freely. Your territory, and your hunting, began to center on a single point. A single point on the broad map of America. A place one could have pointed to on the mainland—there. A place with clearly identifiable coordinates. You were beasts, it was fitting that you be eliminated, and now at last they had tracked you down. Little by little, they closed in on you. They had you by your tail. These idiots, with their ten fingers… these humans, Ice, had the highest respect for your intelligence. The amateur hunters had all given up. Now only professionals were left on the side of the hunters, and they were hunting you.
National Guard.
Past developments, years of repeated failure, had led to their dispatch.
It was 1957 in America. The governor gave the local members of the National Guard the go-ahead, and they took up their guns—their military guns. Gripped them with their ten fingers. The National Guard was a reserve corps, of course, but they were professionals. Equipped as professionals, with the authority of professionals.
You were fine, Ice, you and the pack of “wild dogs” you led, as long as you could run. You were safe, you didn’t die. But now you didn’t run. You couldn’t run. And so it happened. One of the squads at the western edge of Wisconsin closed the border and came in pursuit. They used every trick in the book. You could hardly move. You were stuck in the nest with your puppies, not yet three weeks old, and so you couldn’t rely on your intuition to anticipate what was coming, to lead the other dogs. You couldn’t run at the head of the pack. No longer could you assure them, WE WILL NOT BE CAUGHT. No longer could you say, WE WILL KEEP RUNNING.
And so it happened.
Panicked, terrorized, the pack dispersed.
Ice was still a mother then. Not the queen, not the leader of her pack; she was the mother of seven little pups. What’s happening? Ice responds sluggishly. The other dogs are fast, fleeing. Their speed attracts attention. The leaderless pack, dissolving, yet incapable of dissolving fully, winding up somehow in town, in groups of three and two and four. They are discovered, they are shot. The call goes out and they are shot. The dogs are shot, and so quickly too, in no time at all—the guard have accomplished their mission! And so Ice and her children, a bitch and seven pups, are left alive.
They survived until the very end.
They left the nest. Of course. WALK, she told them. WE WILL ESCAPE, STEP BY STEP. WE WILL SURVIVE. The mother and her children stumbled forward. Ice was growling softly. Rrrrrrrr. Searching for a path that would save them from extermination, a path to deliverance.
Searching.
They came to the state highway. They could hide their scents by crossing here. Hide their tracks. WAIT HERE A MOMENT, Ice told her children. I’LL INVESTIGATE, YOU WAIT HERE. With that, she darted out onto the highway. She was crossing. There was nothing at all difficult about this. She had crossed any number of these nameless rivers, “human roads.” A moment later, she had crossed to the middle. This river was heavily trafficked, yes, but not so much that it could not be forded. And then… Ice stopped. There in the middle of the river, she paused, turned, looked back. Stood still, looking back. One of her pups had barked. Yelped for its mother. It was about to run out into the road. NO! STAY THERE! YOU MUSTN’T FOLLOW! Ice commanded. She watched until the puppy had retreated. And then—
She was hit.
A pickup truck traveling at seventy-five miles per hour threw her nine feet into the air.
She hit the ground. She died instantly. Countless cars ran over her, and in fifteen minutes she was flat. Cars, cars, cars. Ice, of course, would never have even tried to count them.
And so, Ice, you are dead. Utterly and completely dead.
You are dead, and Sumer is still alive.
Sumer: the other mother. The earth goddess, whose whole life was centered on the shows, who lived in her clean cage and gave birth to one litter after the next, spawning a beautiful elite. Except that no one looked after her cage anymore. The woman who had cared for her had been locked up herself now, in a much bigger cage. So your kennel was no longer maintained. Not that it had been completely abandoned. True, the first two days after the arrest, no one had fed the dogs, but then the authorities noticed. Something had to be done.
The situation was taken care of within a single day.
The kennel was auctioned off. The dogs too. Most of the dogs found new homes right away. They had belonged to the queen (now deposed) of the American dog show universe, after all, and their breeding was impeccable. Over a dozen bids were placed for some of the newborn pups in Sumer’s newest litter. There was much maneuvering. Sumer’s former owner had plotted to take down her rivals; now the other dog-show regulars were eager to take what they could from her. The owner was a celebrity—a queen, even if she had lost her throne.