The Dust of 100 Dogs - A. S. King [91]
“You will see!” he yelled, jumping from the brush. “You will see how true love lasts! You will see how real love spans time and distance we know nothing of!”
He rushed forward, then, shaking a small purse toward her. From it came a fine powder that covered Emer’s hair and face. She reached up and wiped her eyes clear, confused.
“What are you at?” she asked, spitting dust from her lips.
He stood with his arms and face raised to the night sky. “I curse you with the power of every spirit who ever knew love!” he screamed. “I curse you to one hundred lives as the bitch you are, and hope wild dogs tear your heart into the state you’ve left mine!” He began chanting in a frightful foreign language.
Still brushing the dust from her hair, Emer took aim with her gun and fired.
As she watched the man fall, she felt a burning prod in her back and stumbled sideways—long enough to see that the Frenchman had miraculously not been all dead, and long enough to see that he was covered in stray pieces of the strange dust his first mate had thrown at her.
She tried to fall as near to Seanie as possible, and managed to get close enough to reach out and grab his cold hand. She took her dying breath lying halfway between her lover and her killer, covered in the dust of one hundred dogs, knowing she was the only person on the planet who knew what was buried beneath the chilly sand ten yards away.
And not knowing she was about to become a French Poodle puppy, two thousand miles away from the Caribbean Sea, with her memory completely intact.
DOG FACT #8
Learning to Be a Happy Dog
Dogs don’t need much to be happy. Your dog will most likely be content with the basics. Food, water, exercise, companionship. You don’t need to give him warmed gourmet meats or hugs every ten minutes.
Moderation is the key.
The same goes for discipline. A beaten dog behaves no better than a spoiled dog who’s never been scolded. A dog must be taught what’s right and what’s wrong and learn from his mistakes. This goes for humans too, of course. Though dogs can’t argue about their mistakes, which is where humans waste so much of their time.
Take the American Civil War, for example. It’s hard to believe there was a time in U.S. history when people thought it was okay to enslave other people. It’s hard to understand why, when confronted with ideas of equality and progression, people fought instead of changed.
At the time, I was a Yankee dog living in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. My owner was an abolitionist who helped move slaves north to become free. He would meet them in the local wood, then bring them to our root cellar to hide until they were rested and fed enough for the next leg of their journey.
Trouble started in late June. My owner sent his wife and girls, on his best horses, to his brother’s house many miles northeast, up by the Susquehanna River. As night fell on the county, Confederate cavalry moved in by the thousands.
Five days later, the fields of Gettysburg were littered with more corpses than the war had seen so far. I found my master there, bloated and wet from the hard rain, missing half of his torso. The view from the top of the hill was unbearable. The smell was worse. Dead horses and men were laid out like carpet on a hot July afternoon. Men buried the dead, and piled up the distended horses and burned them for days, causing the entire town to swim in an ocean of thick, deathly stench which made every creature ill.
All of this for slavery. All of this for a white man’s right to own a black man. To own wives and children and mothers. All of this stinking death for the right to deprive other people of their own rights.
Crazy, isn’t it?
And yet the war continued for two more years. And it took another one hundred years to give those freed slaves’ great-great-grandchildren basic rights. In fact, the microwave oven was invented two decades before a black man could sit where he wanted on a bus in some parts of America (the land of the free).
If dogs ran the world, there would be endless food, water, walks, and humping,