Red Leaves
A Wild Story
Red leaves covered the forest floor, like so many sparks in a brushfire. Every year, in early November, Cody trotted out past the edge of his master’s property into the woods, for the annual convening of the council on canine relations. There, he met his old friend and sometime nemesis, Fang, a wolf whose age was just beginning to show in his coat even if it made no change to his stride. Just like Cody.
The wolves all had names like Fang and Snout and Forepaw. Cody was proud he had a real name, instead of just a part of the body, but he knew the wolves thought it the height of softness to take a human name.
“I see you have grown weak from living indoors and eating kibble, old friend,” said Fang when he saw Cody.
“You mean I haven’t been freezing my butt off in the rain or catching diseases every summer,” said Cody.
Fang shook his head. “You dogs have no pride,” he said. “Every dog longs to live life outdoors, real and vivid and immediate, wolves know this. You gaze out from your dens and imagine what it would be like to live by the swiftness of your feet and the sharpness of your teeth.”
“Then why don’t we?” asked Cody.
“Because you are afraid,” said Fang. “Because you have no self-respect.”
“Buddy,” said Cody. “How many of you are left in the world? One hundred thousand? Two? Across all wolf packs, across all the continents.”
“There is no way of knowing for sure,” said Fang, “however those who have ranged the farthest and widest believe the counting is in the hundreds of thousands.”
“Yeah. Well, there are two billion dogs. You’ve been making fun of us for ten thousand years for going down into the campfires to live with the humans, but you have to admit it paid off. We won that bet. The law of tooth and claw is not that an animal must do whatever is natural and authentic, but that an animal must survive. The measure of a creature is whether it survives, not how it survives.”
“I would rather live a day in the ice and snow than a thousand years in the houses of the hairless apes,” replied Fang, but he fell in beside Cody and they loped together over the leaves towards the meeting ground. Fang tried to outrun Cody, but Cody held his pace. Cody practiced in his master’s great yard, running back and forth over the hills and through the orchards every summer. Fang might be a fool, but he wasn’t wrong about what happened to a dog who spent too much time indoors.
“I see that age has not caught up with you, friend,” said Fang.
“Nor you,” said Cody.
“I always liked you over and above most dogs, because at least you are an outdoor dog, and though you may spend your nights inside, you hunt and run during the day,” said Fang, in acknowledgement of the fact that only certain dogs were invited to the council, those breeds of dog which continued to earn their right to be there.
“I have slept alone in the rain,” said Cody.
“I sleep alone in the rain every night,” said Fang.
“No, you don’t. It doesn’t rain every night. And besides, you live in a pack. It’s a myth that wolves live by themselves.”
“How would you know if it rains every night or not if you sleep indoors?” asked Fang.
They continued in this manner all the way to the meeting hill. The meeting hill lay far enough from human settlement that the council would not be disturbed, but close enough to human settlement that no dog had to travel more than a day to be there. There were dogs who spent days at a time away from their homes and ranged far and wide over that part of the country, and some of them were at the council. But many belonged to families which began to worry if a dog was gone for longer than ten hours. The wolves mocked them for this.
Representatives from eight of the major North American wolf clans had traveled to the meeting, as well as representatives from nine of the independent tribes. Twenty dog breeds were represented, included the German Shepherd, the swamp dog, the chinook, the hound, and the husky. The great surprise this year was a dingo from Australia, who claimed to have stowed away inside a shipping container bound for Mexico, stolen across the border somewhere west of El Paso, and slept in ditches all the way up to Ohio. Cody thought this unlikely, but didn’t have a better explanation.
The hill was alive with canines, clustering in small groups, conversing among themselves in low growls and short barks. They sat or stood or lay on the leaves and their fur ranged from ebony to sawdust-brown to squirrel-red. Cody smiled as he approached the meeting, for here as nowhere else in all the world, the preeminent barbarians met with those representatives of civilization who had not yet grown too civilized to fail to appreciate their barbarian kin. Occasionally, a small squabble would break out, but this was always resolved very quickly, for if left unchecked it could lead to terrible war which could spread to all corners of the canine globe.
There was a cluster of terriers – the reformed terriers, the relapsed terriers, the orthodox terriers, the practicing terriers, and the demi-terriers – arguing amongst themselves about arcane points of terrier theology. A group of wolves from Northern Canada looked on in what would have been called amusement if they had been dogs, but since wolves were perpetually angry and hungry was better classed as a form of interested annoyance. Wolves practiced only the most primitive and rudimentary religions, which emphasized the moon and the stars, darkness and warmth, and an afterlife which consisted of feasting, procreation, and endless battle.
Cody followed Fang over to a mixed cluster, where a grey wolf was arguing with an old chinook.
“You die, that it,” said the wolf. “Nothing after. You not go on. Nothing. Gone.”
Cody wondered why this was the topic of conversation, but he listened to the chinook tell the wolf that the humans built great shrines to the afterlife and that if the humans were doing this, it must mean they knew something canines didn’t.
“Humans not know anything,” said the wolf. “Of course, dog think human know everything. Wolf know better. Human strap himself into tube and create big explosion. Send him up into sky. Maybe he come down. Maybe not. Human think this smart thing to do. Explosion to throw him into sky.”
“The humans say they’ve been to the moon that way,” said the chinook. “They plant flag there.”
“Plant flag my claw,” said the wolf. “They not plant flag. What flag? Probably big red and white stripe flag humans in this part of world so proud of. They like red and white flag more than any other human like any flag. They not go to moon. Impossible to go to moon. Moon not let them. Humans lying about that like lie about everything else. If they could go to moon, couldn’t do it by blowing explosions out back of metal tube. Go to moon. Hah.”