His muscles went flaccid. Orph, teeth sunk to gums, strained and lifted him a few inches from the ground. The dog shook the heavy, limp body. Lowered it back down and stood with teeth deep, rumbling low in the chest. Stokes twitched. Orph shook him again. Stokes lay still.
Orph released the body and stood several moments poised to bite again.
There was no movement. Orph walked around the body, sniffing. The spotted was still worrying one of the legs, but with fading interest.
Orph pressed his snout to the man, drew air and opened his cells to sense for vital force. The life was gone.
Orph walked to the gray bitch and licked at her broken head, scented.
He turned away and walked off, dropped heavily to the ground. A shoulder muscle ticked. Storms of excitation still surged and collided within him.
He was matted with blood. He began to lick it off with long lavings of his tongue. He became aware of a stinging line across his chest. He licked and nibbled at it. It wasn't very painful. He licked the blood from his forepaws.
The others had nosed around the gray bitch, and then left her. The dun, her dugs engorged, her belly big and low, near her time, bent backward to chew at a wound on her thigh. The spotted dog licked the hole in the black's neck, which the black couldn't reach. The black groomed the spotted gratefully with its tongue.
When they were done cleansing themselves, they looked to Orph. He was weary and wished to rest, as they did. But they could not stay here, not anywhere near, not a moment more, his cells insisted, and so he stood and took the wind, and padded off up the side of the mountain.
The dun and the black and the spotted fell in behind him.
Chapter 9
BAUER sat in front of the television with a tumblerful of Scotch. He didn't want to see what was coming, he didn't want it to be real. He'd heard about it at school in the late afternoon.
The report was videotaped, which gave it that curious quality of supra reality inherent in the medium. First there was a view of Stokes' house. The camera zoomed slowly until the front door filled the screen. Cut to a black-and white snapshot of a big, heavy, square-faced smiling man.
Which was replaced by Stokes' widow, weeping.
Buddy Stokes, the announcer said, left for work Wednesday morning and did not return that night.
"Sometimes," Mrs. Stokes said dully into the camera, "he'd run into friends and stay out all night and just go to work the next morning.
But when he didn't come home Thursday night, I made some calls, but no one had seen him. I stayed up waiting, and then in the morning"-She bit her lip-"in the morning, I called the sheriff's department, and … Oh!
I was mad at him, and all the time he was, he was…" She broke down sobbing.
"This is Watson Hollow," the commentator said somberly, "a small valley between two rugged mountains. Buddy Stokes was cutting timber here.
His pickup truck appears just as Sheriff's Deputy Bill Sanders found it at ten o'clock this morning, an auto-loading highpowered rifle still secure in its brackets… Stokes walked this trail five hundred yards to the maple stand he was working. But he didn't stop here, he went on up the rock shelving and through this brush, past this copse of trees. Buddy Stokes had found the spoor of wild dogs back in these woods. According to his wife, the only person in whom he had confided, he couldn't know whether or not this was the same pack that attacked and grievously injured young Homer McPhee last month and he didn't want to sound the alarm without cause.
He set a line of traps, like this one, and checked them every morning.
Here, on this ridge, he found a wild dog naught fast, and that discovery cost him his life."
The camera dropped to a tarpaulin covering a body. Legs moved around the edges, a state trooper knelt on one knee in the background. Muffled voices could be heard.
"Covington Coroner James Castleman and Conservation Officer William Burgher reconstructed the event after careful examination of the site.
The trapped dog was not alone. There were four others-the size of the pack that attacked McPhee. They slunk into hiding at Stokes' approach.
When he became aware of their presence, and probably as they menaced him, Stokes fired up his chain saw, a potent but unwieldy weapon. The pack attacked."
The camera raced from a briar thicket and came to a jarring halt on a chain saw lying crookedly on the ground.
"Stokes must have abandoned the clumsy saw early and resorted to his knife." A shot of a blood crusted knife lying atop a handkerchief in someone's hands. "It was a terrible, violent fight." The camera spun about the surrounding trees, up to the sky, down to the torn and stained earth. "A primitive battle between a lone man and a snarling pack of wild beasts. Stokes managed to kill one of them" The camera came to rest, for an instant, on the twisted corpse of a gray dog-"and to wound others, though how many and how seriously is not known. In the end, though, he could not stand against them-it is likely that no man could-and he fell dead beneath their teeth, savaged beyond imagination.
"We spoke to Deputy Bill Sanders, who was first upon the scene and who discovered the body of Buddy Stokes. Deputy Sanders, you have seen death in many violent guises in the course of your duties. What was your reaction early this morning when you made the discovery?"
The face of a uniformed young man appeared, pale and troubled, eyes on his feet. He shook his head. He was barely audible. "I turned away.
Because he hardly even looked like a man anymore. And I went and sat down until I got my stomach back, until I could force myself to look again." His eyes rose slowly to the camera. "They tore him apart," he said in awe. "They tore him to pieces. Pieces."
The camera pulled back to reveal the reporter standing near the deputy, a mike in his hand, a portable recorder slung from his shoulder, and farther back to include the tarp-covered bulk, the dead dog, and a handful of men in uniform and civilian clothes who were milling about, consulting, examining the ground.
"And so," the reporter said, "the wild dogs of Queensbridge County, with one vicious attack on an unarmed youth behind them, have now killed their first human being. This is Gerald Becker returning you to the studio."
Bauer set his glass aside. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and held his face in his hands.
A new voice said, "Gerald Becker's report was taped early this morning.
Continuing this story, we have a series of interviews conducted this afternoon, and a summary of the operation already in progress to find and destroy the feral dogs who killed Buddy Stokes two days ago, early last Wednesday. Here now is Dr. Elizabeth Collier, Covington veterinarian and authority on canine behavior."
Elizabeth appeared on the screen, mouth tight and eyes narrowed.
"Dr. Collier," the reporter said, "it's almost certain that the same pack of dogs that attacked Homer McPhee has now killed Buddy Stokes. Is such ferocious behavior within the natural capacities of the animal that is so generally called Man's Best Friend?"
"If you mean to suggest that house dogs are killers in pets' clothing, then the answer is absolutely no. I want to emphasize that as strongly as I can.