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there were employee abuses here, but the basic situation wasn't intolerable.
Too bad young Kevin had never wanted a dog. Had there been dog food in the
house, Bob might have been able to identify this by brand if, indeed, it was a
brand and not something made here. Nutrition concerned him. He would have
known the cereal, ash and waste content, and the food value.
He sniffed it, and was surprised to discover that his nose could tell him a
great deal about what was before him. There was a thick, oozing odor that
seemed to congeal in his muzzle: perhaps that was fat. Another odor, slightly
gray, almost like wet cement that was ash. There was some cereal, not much.
Then a faint but piercing scent that made his stomach tighten with need. This
was the meat, the real food. Then there was bone, and the dense smell of
organs. What had they done, dropped dead animals into a hopper and ground them
up, then thickened the whole mess with ashes? Was that all there was to making
cheap dog food?
He returned to the question of the source of the meat. Certainly it wasn't
steak. Dog was probably a good guess. Or maybe bulls, roosters. What if
unscrupulous zoos sold their cadavers to dog-food manufacturers? This could be
anything. Gorilla. Python.
The smell of the meat went deep into his brain, into lusty new centers. This
new, inner self must be the instinct of the wolf he had become. He turned to
it, and found confidence mixed with churning fury, a questing, probing mind
that was designed to compare and make sense of millions of odors. If he
quieted his chattering human thoughts, he was at once connected to this
spirit. His nose made sense for him then, and the few odors he could verbally
identify expanded by a thousandfold into a nonverbal catalog of great
richness.
That wasn't good enough, though. He was a man, and verbal. To use the powers
of this new body, he had to break the boundary that existed between its
instincts and his familiar mind. He could not abandon his human self to the
wolf. And yet there were things in the smells living, twisting things that
were not connected to human words at all. Call them memories, call them
longings, they shot through his body like the very words of creation.
His wolf sense knew there was food value in the slop. But the man Robert Duke
was not about to taste it.
At one o'clock his gut knotted. In the distance he heard Paul Simon singing
"Graceland," and they hauled four more dogs down the hall. The slop, drying
and lined with flies, said, "I am life."
Two o'clock. The keepers muttered. A man came, smelling of coffee dregs,
sauerkraut and hot dogs, and took pictures of him through the bars. When the
keepers retreated, the man pulled a monopod out of his camera case and tried
to prod Bob. "C'mon, you sucker, get mad." He laughed, a cruel, nervous man
with a nose like a knife, a man with eyes glazed by what Bob saw was a habit
of sadness. "Heyah! C'mon, sucker, give me a snarl!" He lit a Bic and thrust
it at
Bob, flame full on.
With a blubbery flap of tongue and lips, Bob blew it out.
"Holy moly."
The man then met his eyes. A terrified, screaming mutt was slammed into a
cage.
Barking erupted, the flip-flop rhythm of doghood.
The man looked away. "What the fuck are you?" he said in a hoarse voice. He
started to raise his camera, then dropped it and grabbed the monopod. "You
bastard!" He jabbed it at Bob, who pressed himself against the far bars. He
jabbed again, and Bob felt the monopod against his skin. Again, and it seared
a rib. The man was sweating, grimacing. "Fight, baby! C'mon, you aren't gonna
fucking eat me! Fight, you bastard!"
Then the camera, click click click. Bob tried to create an expression of utter
peace, deep, soft, calm. With a curse the man ran off. Soon he was back, one
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of the keepers in tow. "Look, get behind the cage. Get the damn thing's tail
and give it a pull. I gotta have it growling. I'll get page one if this sucker
looks dangerous enough."
"I ain't doin' that. It ain't right."
"Ten bucks says different."
"Ten bucks, man, I can't buy shit with ten bucks."
"A double saw, then."
"Double, you got yourself a man." The keeper headed around to the back of the
cages. Bob stood in the middle of his space, his tail curled way up under his
legs. "C'mon, c'mon Jeez, how you know I'se after your tail?"
"It's weird. You shoulda seen it a minute ago, it blew out my lighter. Sorta
slobbered it out. I dunno."
Fingers came in and closed around Bob's tail. He felt stabs of agony right up
his spine and he cried out.
Almost at once the pain stopped. "Christ!" The keeper was out from behind the
cage. "You hear that? You hear what it sounded like?"
"What of it?"
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