Our First Dog

iUniverse, Inc.

Chapter One

Tork the Bison Butcher had had a very pleasant morning but now things were really getting on his nerves.

He had spent a few relaxing hours looking down on his favorite glen, an upland meadow, often dotted with hares, his favorite prey. At one end, where the glen narrowed at the base of the low ridge which partially circled it, and on which he was now lying and studying the scene before him, was his favorite tree. The tree was a great oak and Butcher liked to come here of a morning and, between a couple of large exposed roots, lean against the immense bole, pick a few lice and, as he told himself, ponder things. Butcher did most of his pondering with his eyes closed, for he was always badly in need of sleep.

He would usually ponder away until the sun had found a gap in the foliage and started to warm his face when he would awake and often find that a few big hares had ventured out into the glen and begun to nibble the foliage.

But this morning, when he came over the ridge, he was irked to find a small herd of bison browsing just where he had hoped to bring down a few of those hares and, rather than going down to the tree, he had settled himself in some tall grass and watched the bison for a couple of hours. As he had done so many times in the past, Butcher tried to figure out some reliable and comparatively safe way of killing the large animals, in fact, any large animals.

Though Butcher was called the Bison Butcher, al-katta Tork, he had never actually killed a bison. His jovial family had teased him with the name after he had shown great vigor in butchering a large animal wounded by a giant bear and tracked by his uncle until it died. When the family had carried the neatly trimmed meat back to the f re, Uncle had declared it Butcher's name-day. From then on, all referred to the former boy as Tork, or Butcher, or, simply, Butch.

How he would love to kill a bison! Butcher regarded himself as a merely competent hunter. He almost always brought home some meat, but usually it was small stuff — hares, fish, snakes, birds, and so on. What a thrill it would be, some afternoon, to drag a big haunch of bison back to the fire!

As to the task at hand, finding a way to kill the animals, he first concentrated on communicating with the spirit of the bison. As Uncle had taught him, he recited the hunter's standard prayer: "Bison, show me the way to honor you in the hunt!"

This was a matter of respect, for he knew that Bison would not answer. She never did. He wanted to find a way of propitiating her, but didn't know how. Some people liked to kill to get the spirit in the mood for a little excitement and blood-letting, but Uncle always assured him that the spirits of the hunt were not keen on anything being killed unless it was going to be eaten or otherwise used; if you were going to eat it then it wasn't a sacrifice, so he preferred to look for an incantation that would please the spirit of the animal he was hunting. Uncle had shared a few good ones with young Butcher, who had always boasted to Switcher and the other boys sharing a valley for a few seasons, that Uncle's incantations usually worked; until one day Uncle, having overheard one of these childhood boasts, drew him aside, and smiling wryly, asked him, "Did you ever notice that those magic words I taught you work best when you are very careful to hide your scent, and the game is plentiful?"

"Does that mean they don't work?" Butcher asked.

"I don't know. It means they only work when you are well-prepared, anyway."

Then there was the matter, assuming the spirit of Bison cooperated in the hunt, of actually killing the large beasts. He had no weapon to make up for the bison's advantages in size and strength. He could spear a single animal, but the bison traveled in large groups, and they were not afraid to defend themselves. Even if he could spear one, avoid its counter-charge and track it until it succumbed to the wound, by that time, it might have covered such a distance that Butcher would not be able to carry much of the meat back to the fire; certainly not enough to justify the time away from the family. He might as well just kill a few hares with his throwing sticks.

Butcher ground his teeth with frustration. He was sick of hares and wanted some big red meat, rich with fat and blood, meat that a hunter needs to keep fit, to kill even more large beasts.

One night, when he was very young, he came up with a plan to surprise Uncle with a dead bison. In the morning he slipped away from the fire and tried to stampede a small herd that had been browsing in a nearby meadow for a couple of days. His plan was that the males would outrun the calves and the old and weak, and Butcher could slay one and drag it home to great acclaim. But Bison were not afraid of The People. The big bulls turned their huge heads toward the screaming, waving, skinny youth, as if wondering what the weird animal was. They continued to stare until he stopped and stood panting in front of the giant heads arrayed before him. Finally, his weapons hanging from limp arms, he turned and trudged back to the fire.

* * *

As the hot sun moved across the sky and still the bison did not leave his glen, Butcher's lice began to vex him as well. It seemed that they only bothered him when he lay down and tried to relax. Perhaps he just didn't notice their little tickles when he was striding through the forest, or hauling in a fish. Or maybe they wanted him to be still before they went to work on him, to get the maximum effect, to drive him crazy. Louse is truly a vexatious spirit, Uncle had said, one of the few pests in the bounteous world that seemed to offer no benefit to make up for the irritations she caused.

He rolled onto his back, drew in his feet and felt under his fur leggings for the little critters sticking to the skin of his legs. He peeled off each louse with considerable pleasure, ate the big sweet ones, and crushed the small, bitter ones.

As he found another little bump below his left knee, then slid a thumbnail under it and a finger on top, he thought that there was something very pleasant just in that sensation of trapping the thing. Maybe that was the purpose of Louse, to give man the pleasure of finding him in return for a little blood now and then. No, it wasn't the trapping that was so pleasant, because Butcher got the same pleasure from gently worrying and picking at old scabs, and bits of dead skin that occasionally sloughed off his body.

Lice had one other major benefit. The first time he had lain with his woman Bird— Song of the Morning Bird—they had begun by picking lice from each other's hair, and sharing the sweet ones, then moved to more secluded parts of their bodies. Finally, Bird found a rich source between Butcher's legs. He joked that he had been saving them for her, and she said, with a laugh, "Sure, you were saving them for the first girl who found them!", and she wouldn't share any of these lice with Butcher, but made a big point about how particularly delicious they were.

After a short time, as Bird moved his parts here and there in her search, Butcher grew impatient and suddenly rolled her onto her back and began a search of his own. He was pleased to find that Bird's crotch was...