The blood-bitch was looking at Orph with her tail high and wagging, eyes bright. Orph trotted over to her. They stood side by side. He raised his tail for her to know him, felt the touch of her nose. She lifted her tail.
He licked her blood and swollen ness His legs trembled with excitement. He put a paw on her back.
She spun out from under and faced him. They touched the ends of their muzzles. Their tails wagged. She batted his face with a paw. He reciprocated. They stood on their hind legs and swatted each other. He raced around her, then rushed headlong toward her and pounced, landing a few feet in front of her. She whirled and slammed her rump into his side, went speeding off. He pursued her. They ran with great sweeping strides. He bumped her repeatedly with his shoulder, herding her. She reversed on him and plunged into the brush.
They ran for an hour, teasing each other. She stopped with her tongue out, panting. His muscles coiled and he seemed to grow bulkier. He put his front paws on her back and she bowed under his weight, but braced and supported it. He pumped against her side. She didn't move.
He shifted his hind feet in a series of clumsy steps. His organ was half emergent. He shoved it against her hindquarters, against the blockage of her tail. She stood several minutes, then jumped out from beneath him and went running off again.
They courted two days, the taste and smell of her swollen ness unfolded an increasing heaviness in Orph. They ate and drank little. They ran and wrestled and mock-fought each other into weariness. When she squatted to urinate, Orph lapped at the liquid with saliva foaming his jaws. When she was done, he paused to squirt his own urine on the patch of ground, marking it and her as his.
The black and the spotted dog followed at a desultory half mile. The black approached once when Orph and the bitch were resting, but Orph snarled and rushed it, and it retreated hastily and didn't try again.
On the morning of the third day, Orph licked the blood bitch and his legs went weak. His throat thickened. His loins trembled. He hurled his weight on her. She ran him. He herded her roughly, biting at her ruff and slicking it with saliva. Finally she stopped. She lowered her head and flagged her tail high and to the side, exposing herself.
He went up on his hind legs immediately, clasping her tightly around her loins with his forelegs.
Humped over her, his eyes glassed and saliva dripped from his mouth in strings and he battered against her. In a minute he penetrated, and she yelped, and he drove frenziedly for some time. One of her back legs buckled, both of them staggered as she worked to regain her footing, but he didn't stop, and it went on that way several minutes, and then panting he slowed, and then didn't move, he was huge and deep within her, knobbed, unable to separate, and he slid off her back at an angle to her, still tied, and slowly he worked his left rear leg up and over her back and down to ground, and they stood rump to rump facing in opposite directions.
A quarter of an hour passed, and then all his strength shot into her.
He shrank, slipping out, and walked away unsteadily. He stopped. The spasms began. His abdomen tightened, toward his backbone, the clenching moved forward to his diaphragm, started from the rear again, rolled that way several moments. He made choking sounds. His stomach emptied in a rush. He retched for several moments, than sank down in exhaustion. His eyelids lowered fiutteringly.
A little later the spotted dog came creeping toward the bitch, who had rested only a short while and was now up and ambling about. Its scent drifted into Orph's sleeping mind, and jarred him awake. He lunged up with a roar. The spotted dog ran. Orph overtook it and bit it twice, hard, on the rump. The spotted dog shrieked. Orph stopped the pursuit and stood long enough to be sure the spotted dog was gone, then he returned to the bitch.
Orph mounted her twice again in the next two days. The other dogs lingered not far away. Orph permitted them to approach on the following day. The bitch was no longer in blood, and he was unconcerned. She sported and teased them and they responded eagerly, but when they tried to climb her she snapped and drove them back, would not stand, her season past.
Orph was ravenous. The other three dogs milled listlessly. Orph walked about, head high, tasting the air. Faintly, in the direction of the sinking sun, came the scent of a food animal.
Orph set out in that direction. The bitch and the spotted and the black fell in behind him.
Chapter 5
ELIZABETH COLLIER washed her hair and brushed it until it hung lustrous and silky about her shoulders. She put on a red blouse with long collar tips and puffy sleeves, snug black ski pants. She looked good, provocative. Ordinarily she wasn't very concerned with her appearance.
But the Covington
American Legion chapter had invited her as a veterinarian and canine-behavior authority to debate Harry Wilson before an audience. She wanted to discomfit him. It was a petty tactic, but she didn't care. She didn't like Wilson. He was a pompous opportunist, with limitless ego. He was married to a bewildered child of a woman, whom he made the butt of hurtful jokes. He'd asked Elizabeth out, and once when he cornered and groped her at a party, she'd said she'd turn celibate first and figure she had the best of the deal.
Wilson was late. They waited, the audience grew restive.
Half an hour after the debate was to have begun, Wilson's office phoned with his regrets, he was tied up with something else. So Elizabeth spoke alone.
They weren't happy. The anti dog people didn't want to hear anything but that the animals were a menace and a plague, which they were not, and the dog owners refused to accept any responsibility at all.
Elizabeth left in anger and depression. She wasn't impressed much by the human race and wouldn't have given more than 50–50 on its ability to survive itself. She wasn't sure whether that mattered. The planet would probably be a nicer place without them.
Bauer walked down the stairs of Tully Hall with Kathy Lippman after class.
He'd hurried to gather his material into his briefcase and he felt foolish and obvious. She'd scribbled some final notes, then rummaged through her purse before she got up, one of the last students to leave, so maybe she'd waited for him. He didn't know. He'd never been very good at recognizing female approaches.
She'd been friendly and bright since the night of the seminar, perfectly easy, but that could mean anything. Maybe it was a closed issue for her.
How could he tell? He was flustered and clumsy.
"Going to take the summer term off?" he asked.
"Uh-huh. That's one thing I can't do, study during the nice weather.
It's all I can manage to finish up this term."
"Are you going home, or working in Covington?"
She laughed. "Not home, except for a long weekend. My parents can't communicate without shouting at each other. We get on fine if I limit it to a couple of visits a year. There's a kind of commune up around Sprout's Mountain. I'll do the summer there."
They emerged from the building onto the quad, moments from going their separate ways. Bauer was tight. How? Christ, each time was like the first, as if he'd never done it before. Kathy looked at him curiously.
Well shit, he thought. If she said no, he wasn't a dead man.
It was what he'd done to her, after all.
"I thought I'd smoke that joint tonight. I… was wondering… which end to light."
Their pace slowed.
"Usually," she said, without expression, "one end will be thinner and tighter than the other. That's the one you put in your mouth. Light the fat end."
"Oh," he said. She wasn't buying. Fuck it.
She continued to look at him.
"I thought," he forced himself to say, "that you might like to smoke it with me."
"Sure."
Bauer was relieved, and happy. "Well, why didn't you say so in the first place?"