(urth) Short Story 172*: The Dog of the Drops

[Marc Aramini]

 Since I am reformatting these now, I wanted to get them out in case anyone
had some excellent input that needed to be incorporated. Most of these
presented out of order are fairly straightforward, however.


 “The Dog of the Drops” first appeared in 2002 in *3SF* and is
reprinted in *Starwater
Strains*.


 SUMMARY:


 In a decimated future, an unnamed narrator reveals that his duties took
him to the lands beyond the bombed cities where they have no accommodations
for travelers and no cook shops. He asks at a farm and sees a “beautiful,
very quiet young woman and five noisy boys who called her 'Ma.'” As he is
leaving, an elderly man stops him and tells him a tale in a dialect which
resembles Scottish.

The elderly man starts by asking him if he knows what a dog is. He once saw
a picture of a small one, with ears like small rugs or earmuffs. It had no
hands. His father told him those dogs could talk and do small errands for
their owners as well as aid in hunting raccoons and watching the house when
the master was away.

However, the “Life Man” did not like them, for they did not care for his
taxes, only for the masters who fed them, and ultimately decided to kill
all the dogs, claiming that they brought sickness and plague (which no one
had noticed before). Those that kept dogs were hung. His father said that
the dogs were “dead as cats”.

He tells the narrator of a man named Pet who went hunting out into
uncivilized areas called “the drops”, which were once called the “barbs”,
were people once lived around “fallinwalls”. There are holes everywhere out
there, most filled with water, dangerous for a man to fall into if he is
not paying attention. The speaker mentions how bad the drops are, where old
folk lived before the “Bigkill”. On one of his hunts, Pet shot a wolf and
followed its blood trail. . Pet stayed the night there and heard a girl
talking to him. She said her mother was dead and there was no one left to
feed her. She refused to come by his fire, but he threw her food. He
promised to return the next day so that she would not die. Thinking that he
would find a woman to take care of her, he doesn't want anymore than the
five kids at home he already has, yet for a year he went back and left food
for her.

Eventually, a bull gored Pet in the meadow, and his young wife, who came
looking for him, saw a huge creature standing over Pet which would not let
her approach. She grabbed the speaker to come look with other neighbors,
and he made them put their weapons down when they saw the giant black
dog-like creature over Pet, protecting his body. He talked to it, and told
it he knew that she wouldn't harm Pet. The giant dog creature left like a
shadow. When they recovered Pet's body, they knew that a bull gored him.

Soon thereafter, the young widow of Pet found fawn and raccoons left on her
step some days. She was also left with the five children Pet had from a
previous marriage. Soon a man named Sut started to like her, but then made
the mistake of hitting her. The next day he was killed by a wolf. The
elderly man, seeing that the narrator is interested in Pet's widow, relays
all of this and ends by warning the narrator to take care and treat the
young woman good, as well as Pet's kids, or to simply go home.

The narrator looks back at the cottage of the widow, where he hopes to
return soon. He wonders where the Dog of the Drops lays, who watches the
cottage with him.


 COMMENTARY:

The challenging portion of this text is simply the dialect. Otherwise, it
is a straightforward tale of a future torn apart by war in which dogs and
other domestic pets were eradicated for fear of the diseases they brought.
The criticism implicit towards a government which would eliminate pets
which have come to have some psuedo-sentience due to their freedom from
taxation is perhaps a barb at the concern of large government, but clearly
some disaster has submerged humanity into a civilization that resembles the
peasant life of the middle ages and pre-industrialization more than the
life to which we are accustomed. It is conceivable that these pets are
related to the speaking ones who serve mankind in “The Hero as Werwolf” and
in “Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kitty.”

The irony is that Pet may have killed the mother of the wolf cub or puppy
whom he treats with such kindness afterwards. It seems unlikely that
lycanthropy or fantasy is involved – this is a straight science fiction
story in which the remnants of the dogs elevated to a kind of sentience
(who outlive cats, certainly) are forced to survive in the wild after a
destructive war just as the humans are. The bonds of kindness that Pet
forges create a protective instinct in the Dog of the Drops towards his
family.

It is conceivable that “The Drops” represents a kind of barbaric backwater,
and that this is the meaning of the word “barb” which the elderly speaker
uses to describe it. The dialect might resemble a Scottish one. The
libertarian attitude of the speaker, criticizing the “Life Man” for blaming
dogs for their problems, is perhaps presented without irony.

The idea introduced by the elderly speaker that dogs were already speaking
to their owners might be taken literally in a science fictional environment
as evidence that the genetic evolution of dogs to something “more” than
they currently are was already occurring, especially given the government's
disdain for them and there freedom from taxation.


 UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:


 There has clearly been a war, possibly leaving large radiated areas. Is
the giant talking dog a product of this a mutation as a result of the
weapons of war, or is it a natural outgrowth of the dogs which had already
begun to change under the guidance and manipulation of men, an advanced dog
simply returning to a natural, harsh environment but still capable of love,
affection, loyalty, and communication?


 CONNECTION WITH OTHER WORKS

 There is certainly a strain in Wolfe which presents the future as a
barbaric and less civilized past. “The Hero as Werwolf”, “King Rat”,
“Tracking Song” and *The Book of the New Sun* all have features which
mirror this post apocalyptic future. The animals raised up to something
higher with the ability to communicate with their human masters may be
found in all of those works as well. The use of dialect and dogs will be
repeated in “Rattler”.
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