The County Dog

The County Dog was an old grey mare who wasn’t what she used to be. But She was all we had.

It was a lonely world that we had created for ourselves. From the beginning of time, Humankind had sought to communicate with an Otherkind; at one time S/He had other species of humanoids to converse and trade with and among; but these the early modern humans killed, for reasons that are as unfathomable as they are no doubt appalling. So humankind felt alone, and ever more lonely, even among the lower orders of animals which still thrived alongside us for hundreds of millenia.

Yet we scarcely could ever be said to have been good stewards to these, our stupid cousins. We beat them and enslaved them; and for untold thousands of years, we even ate them. For sport, we killed them, and we mutilated their bodies afterward.

And when one day we decided that we were sick and tired of living among so many dumb creatures, none of which we held out any hope for communicating with to any remarkable extent, we started the wholesale slaughter of them. Just because we wanted to be alone, to live at peace, and in quiet solitude. We humans had thought we knew what we wanted, and in our desperate, lonesome misery, we got it.

It had been years and years ago, after the last great Depression, that Humankind finally put an end to the vast majority of all those other pesky species they found themselves sharing the planet with. What was left now was mostly a collection of stragglers and has-beens, plus a few true, hardy survivors. Of those, only a few people had ever been granted access to see them. Of the rest, well, most people saw them from time to time. Or one of them, anyway. Usually on the weekends, and sometimes after dinner on weeknights.

One time a group of people who called themselves “the sciencists” announced that there were only about 35,000 non-human fauna left. These were scattered across the globe, put on display in various regions, districts, counties, and states (depending on where you happened to come from). And they represented roughly 9,000 species.

What humans missed most about all those extinct, or nearly-extinct Animals, was the Dog. This most sacred of all the creatures was so scarce that only about 130 existed in all of the United States of Amerigo (for instance).

The thing about Dogs was that they had for thousands of years provided humans with a very special kind of companionship, one that few other Animals could claim to give. Monkeys could sign crudely, and dolphins could follow fairly complex commands; but it was the lowly, wordless Dog that Humankind communicated with the best of them all.

So, what we had left, we simply called “Dogs.”

In my state, Ohia, in the USA, we had 80-some counties, and in each one of those was a County Dog. Most of these were a variety of other creatures, such as snakes, elk, some bugs, a chicken or two, zebras, bull elephants, ostriches, one camel, and assorted sheep. There was one Dog, up near Cleaveland. Most of the states had at least one. One state, New Hampster, had none. Californ Yeehaw had three; so did Texis and Al-Axa.

Needless to say, the Real Dogs were the most popular of the County Dogs.

So there was Merissa and Kyle and me. My name’s Davij. We were all sitting around on a Saturday night, trying to think of things to do. Last weekend we did practically nothing, just sat around and ate pretzels and played racing games on the video console. This time we were even more desperate, Merissa having smashed the gaming block in a frenzy just Wednesday evening. She could be a little aggressive like that at times.

Kyle said that he heard somewhere that there was a new Dog, a real one, at a fairgrounds in Mary Land.

“So the fuck what, Kyle? We got one up in Cleaveland!” said Merissa, looking uninterested and in fact barely looking up from her mag-o-zeen article.

“But this one’s different. They say it’s the first new Dog ever. As in, there’s no others like it anywhere else in the World!”

Kyle was known to believe just about anything he heard. The problem was that about half the time, what he heard turned out to be, inexplicably, true.

I’d previously been having a better time, as usual among these two (when we weren’t having sex), staring at the dust on the blue-green walls of our little dingy 14^th-floor walk-up apartment, but I just had to put my two cents in. “Just what the hell you think that means, anyway? And where did you hear that from?”

“Chat.”

“Chat doesn’t know shit,” I screamed, at no one in particular. I think we all knew the story there, and if not, I didn’t feel like going into it.

“So says you,” said Kyle, indignant. “But everyone at work always asks him first about this kind of stuff. They say his dad used to be one of the Sciencists!” He was picking his nose and fooling around with the pale red plastic cap of his raspberry ice-drink.

“And…?”

“He was. I heard the same thing myself, from Emersin,” claimed Merissa. Whatever. Yeah. Alright, whatever. So what? That makes him an expert?

After a pause: “Whatever. Yeah. Alright, whatever. So what? That makes him some kind of instant, automatic expert or something?” I was fuming.

It made no sense. A new dog? Like, a new breed? But how? There were too few Real Dogs left to take any chances at moving them. The last time it was attempted, the poor thing – a nervous little cocker spaniel – died in transit. Things were getting desperate, but there was, at least, just a little frozen spermatozoa left with which to artificially inseminate the females that were left. But in just a couple more generations, that would be the end of that.

I had thought I’d heard that some “alternatives” were being looked into. In theory, at any rate. But no idea that anything had been carried out.

“Hey, you dumbasses. Why don’t you look it up on the news?” (From Merissa, who always was the real brains of our little outfit.)

So we looked it up. It was true, all right. They had assembled a team of Sciencists together to come up with a way to keep the Dog Race alive somehow. What they had done was engineered a brand new Dog! Whatever that means. The thought just creeped me out… but just like a bad skycar wreck, I couldn’t just ignore it.

We scrambled like eggs to get together all our gear: prayer hats, robes, and boots. I threw on my cape and out we went. We jumped into my car, an old Benz-o-matic Creeper. It was ancient; ran on wheels, like most people’s cars still did. It was mostly rust and melt, but it still ran, generally speaking.

We knew where we were going from the news machine. It was at the fairgrounds outside of Beth’s Da. It would be about 6 hours from Klumbus, where we lived.

The drive was long, and between radio stations we sang old-time rock-songs and tried to remember the names of all the Celebrities. Kyle won, with 26. I had 17, and Merissa had 19. Kyle watched a lot more teevee, so that’s why he was only 6 away from naming them all.

Somewhere outside of Beth’s Da, we crossed Route 671. (“That’s five worse than the Devil’s number!” shrieked Kyle, ever the panicker.) There was a line of cars crossing under the road. I knew from when I was a kid and came this way that there was a fairgrounds around here. If memory served, then those cars were, the way I figured it, about five miles’ worth of screaming, kicking kids, drunk uncles, flummoxed fathers, and sleepy girls. Five miles! It was about 10 Clockings-A’Night, though, which was pretty much the evening primetime, since most people tended to get off their day shifts about 8N, ate at about 9N, and then went to see the County Dog after dinner. Still, that was an awful lot of fucking people!

About a half hour later, we were there. We pulled into a Changing Station to change into our Dogging Clothes. Kyle and Merissa started getting all frisky until I elbowed Kyle in the ribs. “Remember where we are, dipshit,” I cried. Merissa looked slightly embarrassed, and we continued changing in silence. The air was stifling. It was mid-summer, and it was humid out. I swatted a gnat from in front of my face. Gnats and a couple other insects were among the only other “common” animals left. They were dwindling, too, to be sure, but some things never change. Human nature being what it is and all.

On our way back to the car, we noticed something peculiar. Under the lemon-yellow of the parking lot lights, there was nothing but blacktop and those phosphor-green lines that tell you where to park among the other vehicles. And that was it. There were maybe 15 cars in the whole lot, and doubtless at least ten of those were employees’ cars. Let me tell you, that was spooky to see. Even on an off day, the lots are always pretty full. Go figure! With only one County Dog every few hundred square miles, that’s the Place To Go. But why was the lot so empty? This was supposed to be something special, was it not?

It was so quiet that we could hear each other breathing as if our lungs were great bellows in some ancient cathedral in the middle of, I don’t know, wherever they had cathedrals at. Spain or whatever.

You have to remember that we didn’t have things like birds or crickets and stuff in those days. So any noise had to come from either people, or machines. And neither category was active on this night, in this place.

Merissa looked nervous and pale. “Whaddya suppose things just didn’t work out for some reason?” she warbled.

“I don’t know. Something different is going on, that’s for sure,” I replied. It really didn’t matter what I said at that moment; I only wanted to fill the air with something.

“Davij, that’s it! We’re at the wrong place, I bet! That’s why the other fairgrounds were so busy… duh!” cried Kyle. But we all saw the screen. Three different news sites all specified the exact same location. And they were all confirmed to the last 30 minutes.

We were standing by the car by this point, staring around and trying to decide what to do. Across the parking lot (Kyle pointing out), someone was coming out and leaving. We watched the car speed off. Whoever was at the wheel was driving like a maniac.

“Stupid fucking drunks!” screamed Merissa, nervously cracking open a half-pint of Old Mountaineer’s Apple Rum, right before swigging about half of it right down and passing it blindly to me and Kyle.

I took a good swig, and started the car. The path from the Changing Station was well-worn and long. It felt like ten minutes before we came out and into the mouth of the main lot. Only the car’s wheels over the gravelly road kept us company for that short eternity.

For some reason I will never be able to explain, we parked at the end of the lot anyway, rather than up front. Hell, I don’t know, maybe it was just a force of habit. We walked the whole way to the entrance, about 200 meters or so of empty silence. We didn’t say a word, either; just walked, hand in hand, staring in crazy-eyed wonder at the heavy blankness of the parking lot.

We got our tickets, 235 credits each (about 30 more than back home, I noted), and went inside. Unsurprisingly (considering the state of the empty lot we’d just walked through, otherwise yes, very surprisingly), there were no lines inside either. A beeline to the traditional green-and-orange County Dog tent got made that night.

What I saw when we got inside stole away my wonder and left me with some pretty clear answers. How often does that happen to you?

There were about a dozen or so people in line. The air smelled of stench, but it was a little bit different from the normal hay-and-shit, County Dog variety of stench. In a cage to the center of the tent was the Animal. It was a Dog, all right, but not a natural one. This one was made of the parts of other animals. It had a pig’s tail, a fox’s snout, the top of its head and ears were some kind of fat deer or something, and most of its legs looked like they came from some kind of large cat, like a cougar or a puma or something. The body was definitely wrong. It looked like it might have been a goat. Except that it also looked as if somebody had forgotten that real Dogs don’t actually have wings, and made a rather hasty adjustment. It was the shoulder blades – they just seemed wrong somehow, like they were too high or something. It looked like they may have forgotten about installing a neck to the poor, wretched Thing; although up close, there may have been something there after all. The whole thing was a melange of different shades of oranges and browns and grays. It was striped, and it was spotted, and it had disturbingly mottled hair in all the weirdest places.

But the line kept going, and people went up to Pet the creature, and to offer it gifts of beans, simulated meats, jellies and breads. Each client carried their little votive candle up and blew it out at the right moment, asking the County Dog for its blessings and advice, then spitting into their prayer hats and stomping them with their shrine boots, bending over in a bow toward the creature’s head; and each left with the same astonished look on their face.

Nobody in line was speaking, not even us. By the time we got to the front of the line, we were all visibly quite distressed. I am not ashamed to admit that Kyle even had tears in his eyes. Maybe I did, too. I really don’t remember that.

I will never forget what that County Dog said to me that night.