Tracking Dog Quotes

It seems to me that the good lord in his infinate wisdom gave us three things to make life bearable- hope, jokes, and dogs. But the greatest of these was dogs.

The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past.

It's true. somewhere inside us we are all the ages we have ever been. We're the 3 year old who got bit by the dog. We're the 6 year old our mother lost track of at the mall. We're the 10 year old who get tickled till we wet our pants. We're the 13 year old shy kid with zits. We're the 16 year old no one asked to the prom, and so on. We walk around in the bodies of adults until someone presses the right button and summons up one of those kids.

I thought back on my running career at Oregon. I’d competed with, and against, men far better, faster, more physically gifted. Many were future Olympians. And yet I’d trained myself to forget this unhappy fact. People reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing, that it always brings out the best in people, but that’s only true of people who can forget the competition. The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past. You

Girl like a garden you never volunteered to tend. Dirt all tracked into your front hall.

You wake up on a winter morning and pull up the shade, and what lay there the evening before is no longer there--the sodden gray yard, the dog droppings, the tire tracks in the frozen mud, the broken lawn chair you forgot to take in last fall. All this has disappeared overnight, and what you look out on is not the snow of Narnia but the snow of home, which is no less shimmering and white as it falls. The earth is covered with it, and it is falling still in silence so deep that you can hear its silence. It is snow to be shoveled, to make driving even worse than usual, snow to be joked about and cursed at, but unless the child in you is entirely dead, it is snow, too, that can make the heart beat faster when it catches you by surprise that way, before your defenses are up. It is snow that can awaken memories of things more wonderful than anything you ever knew or dreamed.

So this Zealot comes to my door, all glazed eyes and clean reproductive organs, asking me if I ever think about God. So I tell him I killed God. I tracked God down like a rabid dog, hacked off his legs with a hedge trimmer, raped him with a corncob, and boiled off his corpse in an acid bath. So he pulls an alternating-current taser on me and tells me that only the Official Serbian Church of Tesla can save my polyphase intrinsic electric field, known to non-engineers as "the soul." So I hit him. What would you do?

If you live on the railroad tracks the train's going to hit you, Grandpa used to say. -- Brown Dog

Saskia groaned again. She threw back her bed covers, the last vestiges of sleep leaving her. It would be evening in Lyon. Clarissa would be expecting to hear from her. A call-in at least once every 24 hours was part of several protocols Clarissa had established. The instruction at the end of the conversation, “Give the dogs a pat for me”, reassured Clarissa that all was well. Leave the words out, replace any one of the words in the sentence with another or not place a call in a 24-hour period, and Clarissa would alert authorities. In her younger years, Clarissa had served in the British army. Her experiences in those years had caused the trauma she now lived with, though she used her expertise by teaching her three partners basic self-defence, how to operate firearms and how to wield weapons. She also programmed their watches and phones to enable her to constantly track their whereabouts, explaining, “I want to know that my three charges are safe”. Another protocol was to always check accommodation venues for listening devices. Saskia did this before calling Clarissa. “Clarissa. Ça va?” “What have you to report?

The FBI had finally wised up and put Charley Davidson on the task of bringing a killer to justice. Because that’s what Charley did. Brought killers to justice. She also found lost dogs, exposed cheating spouses, and tracked down the occasional skip. And she rarely referred to herself in the third person.

Charlotte: Giordano is terribly afraid Gwyneth will get everything wrong tomorrow that she can get wrong. Gideon: Pass the olive oil, please. Charlotte: Politics and history are a closed book to Gwyneth. She can’t even remember names—they go in at one ear and straight out of the other. She can’t help it, her brain doesn’t have the capacity. It’s stuffed with the names of boy bands and long, long cast lists of actors in soppy romantic films. Raphael: Gwyneth is your time-traveling cousin, right? I saw her yesterday in school. Isn’t she the one with long dark hair and blue eyes? Charlotte: Yes, and that birthmark on her temple, the one that looks like a little banana. Gideon: Like a little crescent moon. Raphael: What’s that friend of hers called? The blonde with freckles? Lily? Charlotte: Lesley Hay. Rather brighter than Gwyneth, but she’s a wonderful example of the way people get to look like their dogs. Hers is a shaggy golden retriever crossbreed called Bertie. Raphael: That’s cute! Charlotte: You like dogs? Raphael: Especially golden retriever crossbreeds with freckles. Charlotte: I see. Well, you can try your luck. You won’t find it particularly difficult. Lesley gets through even more boys than Gwyneth. Gideon: Really? How many . . . er, boyfriends has Gwyneth had? Charlotte: Oh, my God! This is kind of embarrassing. I don’t want to speak ill of her, it’s just that she’s not very discriminating. Particularly when she’s had a drink. She’s done the rounds of almost all the boys in our class and the class above us . . . I guess I lost track at some point. I’d rather not repeat what they call her. Raphael: The school mattress? Gideon: Pass the salt, please.

You come out; it is still dark. The door creaks, or perhaps you sneeze, or the snow crunches under your foot, and hares start up from the far cabbage patch and leap away, leaving the snow criss-crossed with tracks. In the distance dogs begin to howl and it takes a long time before the quieten down. The cocks have finished their crowing and have nothing left to say. Then dawn breaks.

I’ll wait. I’ll wait forever. I’ll die waiting, holding your hand and watching you sleep. If that’s all I get, fine, I’m gonna hold the hell out of your hand.

Before running a big race, you always want to walk the track.

Life bullies us son, but God don't. He had good reasons for fixin' it where if'n you git too sick or too hurt to live, why, you can die, same as a sick chicken. I've knowed a few really sick chickens to git well, and lots a-folks git well thet nobody ever thought to see out a-bed agin cept in a coffin. Still and all, common sense tells you this much: everwhat makes a wheel run over a track will make it run over a boy if'n he's in the way. If'n you'd a got kilt, it'd mean you jest didn't move fast enough, like a rabbit that gits caught by a hound dog... When it comes to prayin' we got it all over the other animals, but we ain't no different when it comes to livin' and dyin'. If'n you give God the credit when somebody don't die, you go'n blame Him when they do die? Call it His Will? Ever noticed we git well all the time and don't die but once't? Thet has to mean God always wants us to live if'n we can.

Forty feet long sixty feet high hotel Covered with old gray for buzzing flies Eye like mango flowing orange pus Ears Durga people vomiting in their sleep Got huge legs a dozen buses move inside Calcutta Swallowing mouthfuls of dead rats Mangy dogs bark out of a thousand breasts Garbage pouring from its ass behind alleys Always pissing yellow Hooghly water Bellybutton melted Chinatown brown puddles Coughing lungs Sound going down the sewer Nose smell a big gray Bidi Heart bumping and crashing over tramcar tracks Covered with a hat of cloudy iron Suffering water buffalo head lowered To pull the huge cart of year uphill

Forewarned is not forearmed. Sometimes you spend so much effort looking for the track that you know is there, that you miss the other one that you didn’t know about.

There was no other wanderer on that road, yet I was not alone, for his tracks went with me, each pawprint as familiar as the print of my own hand. I followed them, and I knew each thing that he had done, each move that he had made, each thought that had been his; for so it is with two who live one life together.

Coming back, he took the tracker out of Morley’s hand, slid back into the car and flipped a switch. An internal Mannheim, a force shield, flared into life, dividing the front of the car from the rear. Once he was satisfied the Mannheim would prevent the sound of their voices being picked up by any undiscovered bugs he spoke. “I have a plan, a way to turn the tables on them.” “How?” Instead of explaining, Lieges waved his hand at the stray dog. Thinking it was going to be fed, the mutt came over. Lieges grabbed it, removed some of the gum he was chewing, fixed the bug to it and stuck the gum under the dog’s collar. Picking the dog up, he placed it in the front of the air-car. Morley hissed. “What the hell are you doing?” “Thinking laterally,” Lieges replied. “We’ll fly a few kilometres from here and push the dog out. The BlackClads will then lock onto the dog and not us. No doubt they’ll realise something is wrong after they’ve been tracking it for a while, but it will probably buy us some time.

GEOLOGY, n. The science of the earth's crust --to which, doubtless, will be added that of its interior whenever a man shall come up garrulous out of a well. The geological formations of the globe already noted are catalogued thus: The Primary, or lower one, consists of rocks, bones or mired mules, gas-pipes, miners' tools, antique statues minus the nose, Spanish doubloons and ancestors. The Secondary is largely made up of red worms and moles. The Tertiary comprises railway tracks, patent pavements, grass, snakes, mouldy boots, beer bottles, tomato cans, intoxicated citizens, garbage, anarchists, snap-dogs and fools.

Because it's a brilliant film. It's funny, and violent, and it's got Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth in it, and everything. And a cracking sound track. Maybe there's no comparison between Ian sleeping with Laura and Reservoir Dogs after all. Ian hasn't got Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth in him. And Ian's not funny. Or violent. And he's got a crap sound track, judging from what we used to hear through the ceiling. I've taken this as far as it will go.

Either peace or happiness, let it enfold you. When I was a young man I felt these things were dumb, unsophisticated. I had bad blood, a twisted mind, a precarious upbringing. I was hard as granite, I leered at the sun. I trusted no man and especially no woman... I challenged everything, was continually being evicted, jailed, in and out of fights, in and out of my mind... Peace and happiness to me were signs of inferiority, tenants of the weak, an addled mind. But as I went on...it gradually began to occur to me that I wasn't different from the others, I was the same... Everybody was nudging, inching, cheating for some insignificant advantage, the lie was the weapon and the plot was empty... Cautiously, I allowed myself to feel good at times. I found moments of peace in cheap rooms just staring at the knobs of some dresser or listening to the rain in the dark. The less I needed the better I felt... I re-formulated. I don't know when, date, time, all that but the change occured. Something in me relaxed, smoothed out. I no longer had to prove that I was a man, I didn’t have to prove anything. I began to see things: coffee cups lined up behind a counter in a cafe. Or a dog walking along a sidewalk. Or the way the mouse on my dresser top stopped there with its body, its ears, its nose, it was fixed, a bit of life caught within itself and its eyes looked at me and they were beautiful. Then...it was gone. I began to feel good, I began to feel good in the worst situations and there were plenty of those... I welcomed shots of peace, tattered shards of happiness... And finally I discovered real feelings of others, unheralded, like lately, like this morning, as I was leaving for the track, I saw my wife in bed, just the shape of her head there...so still, I ached for her life, just being there under the covers. I kissed her in the forehead, got down the stairway, got outside, got into my marvelous car, fixed the seatbelt, backed out the drive. Feeling warm to the fingertips, down to my foot on the gas pedal, I entered the world once more, drove down the hill past the houses full and empty of people, I saw the mailman, honked, he waved back at me.

Toby placed his front paws on the track, looked up at Ian, and whined. "What in hell are you wearing, big man?" he asked, staring down at the dog. "It's his sweater." "That's a terrible thing to do to a noble beast," Ian muttered, grabbing the sweater by the hem and pulling it up over Toby's head. -Ian and Jessie

As a horse when he has run, a dog when he has tracked the game, a bee when it has made the honey, so a man when he has done a good act, does not call out for others to come and see, but he goes on to another act, as a vine goes on to produce again the grapes in season.

Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s Track of the Cat, Wallace Stegner’s The Big Rock Candy Mountain, and Katherine Anne Porter’s Noon Wine.

I see dead people. Like in that movie. Ghosts that no one else can see. Except my dog. I think he sees them, too.

We all do stupid, cruel things as children. I remember I once took a neighbor's dog and shut it in my house, then told the little girl her dog had been picked up by the dog catcher and destroyed. I still wake up at three in the morning seeing her face. I tracked her down about ten years ago to say I was sorry but she'd been killed in a car accident." "You have to forgive yourself", said Gamache, holding up Being. "You're right, of course. But maybe I don't want to. Maybe that's something I don't want to lose. My own private hell. Horrible, but mine.

At Eversong, there were all sorts of dogs. And some of them, the ones I liked best, would lift their heads when they smelled an interesting scent in the air. If it was vivid enough, if they couldn't identify it immediately, or it, as the case may be, they knew exactly what it was- their brains going, 'Um steak tartare'- they'd track it until they came to the object itself. In the face of th real article, the true story, they decided then waht to do. That's how they operated. They didn't shut down their desire to know just because the smell was bad or the object was dangerous. They hunted. So did I.

Like an abandoned dog who cannot find a smell or a track and roams along the roads, with no road, like the child who in a night of the fair gets lost among the crowd, and the air is dusty, and the candles fluttering,--astounded, his heart weighed down by music and by pain; that’s how I am, drunk, sad by nature, a mad and lunar guitarist, a poet, and an ordinary man lost in dreams, searching constantly for God among the mists.

For that matter, few ideas are as crazy as my favorite thing, running. It’s hard. It’s painful. It’s risky. The rewards are few and far from guaranteed. When you run around an oval track, or down an empty road, you have no real destination. At least, none that can fully justify the effort. The act itself becomes the destination. It’s not just that there’s no finish line; it’s that you define the finish line. Whatever pleasures or gains you derive from the act of running, you must find them within. It’s all in how you frame it, how you sell it to yourself. Every

TOP TEN RESOLUTION PITFALLS 1. Being vague about what you want 2. Not making a serious commitment 3. Procrastinating and excuse making—no time, wrong time, dog ate my homework 4. Being unwilling to go through the awkward phase 5. Not setting up a tracking and reminder system 6. Expecting perfection, falling into guilt, shame, regret 7. Trying to go it alone 8. Telling yourself self-limiting rut stories 9. Not having backup plans 10. Turning slip-ups to give-ups

Their eyes tracked me as I moved through the club, and I fought not to notice how many of them were next to naked. Or completely naked. A man wearing nothing but a leash sat at the feet of another man who petted his head, as if he were a dog.

The men digging in on both sides of me cursed the stench and the mud. I began moving the heavy, sticky clay mud with my entrenching shovel to shape out the extent of the foxhole before digging deeper. Each shovelful had to be knocked off the spade, because it stuck like glue. I was thoroughly exhausted and thought my strength wouldn’t last from one sticky shovelful to the next. Kneeling on the mud, I had dug the hole no more than six or eight inches deep when the odor of rotting flesh got worse. There was nothing to do but continue to dig, so I closed up my mouth and inhaled with short shallow breaths. Another spadeful of soil out of the hole released a mass of wriggling maggots that came welling up as though those beneath were pushing them out. I cursed and told the NCO as he came by what a mess I was digging into. ‘You heard him, he said put the holes five yards apart.’ In disgust, I drove the spade into the soil, scooped out the insects, and threw them down the front of the ridge. The next stroke of the spade unearthed buttons and scraps of cloth from a Japanese army jacket in the mud—and another mass of maggots. I kept on doggedly. With the next thrust, metal hit the breastbone of a rotting Japanese corpse. I gazed down in horror and disbelief as the metal scraped a clean track through the mud along the dirty whitish bone and cartilage with ribs attached. The shoved skidded into the rotting abdomen with a squishing sound. The odor nearly overwhelmed me as I rocked back on my heels. I began choking and gagging as I yelled in desperation, ‘I can’t dig in here! There’s a dead Nip here!’ The NCO came over, looked down at my problem and at me, and growled, ‘You heard him; he said put the holes five yards apart.

In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree — and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before.

As they were speaking, a dog that had been lying asleep raised his head and pricked up his ears. This was Argos, whom Odysseus had bred before setting out for Troy, but he had never had any enjoyment from him. In the old days he used to be taken out by the young men when they went hunting wild goats, or deer, or hares, but now that his master was gone he was lying neglected on the heaps of mule and cow dung that lay in front of the stable doors till the men should come and draw it away to manure the great close; and he was full of fleas. As soon as he saw Odysseus standing there, he dropped his ears and wagged his tail, but he could not get close up to his master. When Odysseus saw the dog on the other side of the yard, dashed a tear from his eyes without Eumaeus seeing it, and said: 'Eumaeus, what a noble hound that is over yonder on the manure heap: his build is splendid; is he as fine a fellow as he looks, or is he only one of those dogs that come begging about a table, and are kept merely for show?' 'This dog,' answered Eumaeus, 'belonged to him who has died in a far country. If he were what he was when Odysseus left for Troy, he would soon show you what he could do. There was not a wild beast in the forest that could get away from him when he was once on its tracks. But now he has fallen on evil times, for his master is dead and gone, and the women take no care of him. Servants never do their work when their master's hand is no longer over them, for Zeus takes half the goodness out of a man when he makes a slave of him.' So saying he entered the well-built mansion, and made straight for the riotous pretenders in the hall. But Argos passed into the darkness of death, now that he had fulfilled his destiny of faith and seen his master once more after twenty years…

People reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing, that it always brings out the best in people, but that’s only true of people who can forget the competition. The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past. You must forget that internal voice screaming, begging, “Not one more step!” And when it’s not possible to forget it, you must negotiate with it. I thought over all the races in which my mind wanted one thing, and my body wanted another, those laps in which I’d had to tell my body, “Yes, you raise some excellent points, but let’s keep going anyway . . .

It became his habit to creep out of bed even before his mother was awake, to slip into his clothes and to go quietly down to the barn to see Gabilan. In the grey quiet mornings when the land and the brush and the houses and the trees were silver-grey and black like a photograph negative, he stole toward the barn, past the sleeping stones and the sleeping cypress tree. The turkeys, roosting in the tree out of coyotes' reach, clicked drowsily. The fields glowed with a grey frost-like light and in the dew the tracks of rabbits and of field mice stood out sharply. The good dogs came stiffly out of their little houses, hackles up and deep growls in their throats. Then they caught Jody's scent, and their stiff tails rose up and waved a greeting Doubletree Mutt with the big thick tail, and Smasher, the incipient shepherd-then went lazily back to their warm beds. It was a strange time and a mysterious journey, to Jody -an extension of a dream. When he first had the pony he liked to torture himself during the trip by thinking Gabilan would not be in his stall, and worse, would never have been there. And he had other delicious little self-induced pains.

Standing on your own feet, naturally, is as tiresome and dangerous as standing your ground; and when the wild dogs begin to circle grinning round you with their dripping tongues hanging out and you know that with mock servility they like to go for your toes first, why, then, you should stand on someone else’s feet, or head if necessary. It is a point of faith for me never to be Hitler; he stood his ground in his own two shoes in his own little hole almost to the end, the fool. But I may disguise myself as any other animate or inanimate object in what follows. I can be eight lame women with falsies, eight cracked chamber pots, or -- let’s get right to the point -- a gladiator who is actually constructed of old clothes, brooms, and a paper plate with a face daubed on in finger-paints, not to mention two vagrants inside each shirt-sleeve and pant-leg, moving Goliath’s limbs at my say-so; but as long as you believe in the gladiator, you are whipped, and the Museum people will set out on your track, and then once they catch you, don’t think I won’t come study your exhibit until I can convince your own sweetheart that I am you come back from the dead. For I am Big George, the eternal winner.

I imagine being wanted by Beej feels like the high people want from narcotics. Best feeling in the world. Sometimes I can’t see straight in the pursuit of it. Look at my track record, it’s right there. I’ll do anything to make him want me. He is the master and I’m just a dog doing tricks to please him.

What was once an anonymous medium where anyone could be anyone—where, in the words of the famous New Yorker cartoon, nobody knows you’re a dog—is now a tool for soliciting and analyzing our personal data. According to one Wall Street Journal study, the top fifty Internet sites, from CNN to Yahoo to MSN, install an average of 64 data-laden cookies and personal tracking beacons each. Search for a word like “depression” on Dictionary.com, and the site installs up to 223 tracking cookies and beacons on your computer so that other Web sites can target you with antidepressants. Share an article about cooking on ABC News, and you may be chased around the Web by ads for Teflon-coated pots. Open—even for an instant—a page listing signs that your spouse may be cheating and prepare to be haunted with DNA paternity-test ads. The new Internet doesn’t just know you’re a dog; it knows your breed and wants to sell you a bowl of premium kibble.

For that matter, few ideas are as crazy as my favorite thing, running. It’s hard. It’s painful. It’s risky. The rewards are few and far from guaranteed. When you run around an oval track, or down an empty road, you have no real destination. At least, none that can fully justify the effort. The act itself becomes the destination. It’s

Robyn: [narrating] Animal lovers, especially female ones, are often accused of being neurotic and unable to relate to other human beings. More often than not, those pointing the finger have never had a pet. It seems to me the universe gave us three things to make life bearable: hope, jokes, and dogs. But the greatest of these gifts was dogs.

the good Lord in his infinite wisdom gave us three things to make life bearable – hope, jokes and dogs, but the greatest of these was dogs.

In the smallest room there's a flicker of light. Your steps chase me to here and my hearing follows them like a dog. I listen until I lose their tracks among the roads.

The country of the souls is underneath us, toward the sunset; the trail leads through a dim twilight. Tracks of the people who last went over it and of their dogs are visible.

got him, that’s all,’ said he. ‘I know a dog that would follow that scent to the world’s end. If a pack can track a trailed herring across a shire, how far can a specially

We used to have songs for everything, and nobody knows the songs anymore. There were songs for dogs, for good dogs and bad dogs, and songs to make them work or track bear. There were songs for all of everything.

THE EVERLASTING SELF Comes in from a downpour Shaking water in every direction — A collaborative condition: Gathered, shed, spread, then Forgotten, reabsorbed. Like love From a lifetime ago, and mud A dog has tracked across the floor.

I don’t keep track of time. Im lost in the sameness of the stale air and humming of the plane. My eyelids keep slipping down, but whenever I close them, all I see is the white of snow. I don’t want to return to that dream. I already know what happens next, when that winter night blurred into an eternity. Frigid fear seeps through me now, like I never closed the door on that part of my life. Believe me, I’ve tried. My mother left me to the snow and the dogs. I was six years old.

Particles detached from the physical Aura remain around the spot or place where the person has been, and a strongly developed sense found in dogs and other animals enables them to follow up the "scent" of the person or animal they are tracking.

The sound track of life was not the sustained grumble of engines, but the murmur of wind and the howling of dogs, the scolding of mothers; chisels, footfalls, and laughter; the clatter of hooves, the screams of prisoners, and the secrets of neighbors.

Beyond that row was a double row of trees. Sam headed in that direction, Dad on her heels. "Be careful of snakes." That stopped her in her tracks. She could deal with a snarling dog. A hissing cat. Even a spitting ferret like her cousin Chris had, but she had the biggest fear if snakes. It didn't matter if it was a grass snake or a supposedly good snake that ate the poisonous snakes. In Sam's opinion, the only good snake was a dead snake. Dead and chopped up into little, itty, bitty pieces. ~From "Samantha Sanderson On the Scene

I had come a long way from a guy who had worked in slaughterhouses, who had crossed the country with a railroad track gang, who had worked in a dog biscuit factory, who had slept on park benches, who had worked the nickel and dime jobs in a dozen cities across the nation.

But at that moment all I could see was the wolf in the white van, so alive, so strong. Hidden from view, unnoticed, concealed. And I thought, maybe he's real, this wolf, and he's really out there in a white van somewhere, riding around. Maybe he's in the far back, pacing back and forth, circling, the pads of his huge paws raw and cracking, his thick, sharp claws dully clicking against the raised rusty steel track ridges on the floor. Maybe he's sound asleep, or maybe he's just pretending. And then the van stops somewhere, maybe, and somebody gets out and walks around the side to the back and grabs hold of the handle and flings the doors open wide. Maybe whoever's kept him wears a mechanic's jumpsuit and some sunglasses, and he hasn't fed the great wolf for weeks, cruising the streets of the city at night, and the wolf's crazy with hunger now; he can't even think. Maybe he's not locked up in the back at all: he could be riding in the passenger seat, like a dog, just sitting and staring out the open window, looking around, checking everybody out. Maybe he's over in the other seat behind the steering wheel. Maybe he's driving.

Being a Negro means showing your best face to the white man every day. You know his wants, his needs, and watch him proper. But he don’t know your wants. He don’t know your needs or feelings or what’s inside you, for you ain’t equal to him in no measure. You just a nigger to him. A thing: like a dog or a shovel or a horse. Your needs and wants got no track, whether you is a girl or a boy, a woman or a man, or shy, or fat, or don’t eat biscuits, or can’t suffer the change of weather easily. What difference do it make? None to him, for you is living on the bottom rail.

Being a Negro means showing your best face to the white man every day. You know his wants, his needs, and watch him prosper. But he don't know your wants. He don't know your needs or feelings or what's inside you, for you ain't equal to him in no measure. You just a n****r to him. A thing: like a dog or a shovel or a horse. Your needs and wants got no track, whether you is a girl or a boy, a woman or a man, or shy, or fat, or don't eat biscuits, or can't suffer the change of weather easily. What difference do it make? None to him, for you is living on the bottom rail.

Simon & Schuster for thirty years, and Jonathan Karp, the publisher, both were extraordinarily diligent and attentive in shepherding this book, as was Amanda Urban, my agent. Crary Pullen was dogged in tracking down photos, and my assistant, Pat Zindulka, calmly facilitated things. I also want to thank my father, Irwin, and my daughter, Betsy, for reading the book and offering advice. When the original version of this book came out, it caused some wounded feelings, which was probably inevitable given what a complicated and extraordinary man Jobs was. For that I am sorry. It was not my intention.

Initially children use just a few names, mostly for familiar things and people. But when they are still just beginning to talk, many babies will suddenly start naming everything and asking for the names of everything they see. In fact, what’sat? is itself often one of the earliest words. An eighteen-month-old baby will go into a triumphant frenzy of pointing and naming: “What’sat! Dog! What’sat! Clock! What’sat juice, spoon, orange, high chair, clock! Clock! Clock!” Often this is the point at which even fondly attentive parents lose track of how many new words the baby has learned. It’s as if the baby discovers that everything has a name, and this discovery triggers a kind of naming explosion.

Returning from a hunting trip, Orde-Lees, traveling on skis across the rotting surface of the ice, had just about reached camp when an evil, knoblike head burst out of the water just in front of him. He turned and fled, pushing as hard as he could with his ski poles and shouting for Wild to bring his rifle. The animal—a sea leopard—sprang out of the water and came after him, bounding across the ice with the peculiar rocking-horse gait of a seal on land. The beast looked like a small dinosaur, with a long, serpentine neck. After a half-dozen leaps, the sea leopard had almost caught up with Orde-Lees when it unaccountably wheeled and plunged again into the water. By then, Orde-Lees had nearly reached the opposite side of the floe; he was about to cross to safe ice when the sea leopard’s head exploded out of the water directly ahead of him. The animal had tracked his shadow across the ice. It made a savage lunge for Orde-Lees with its mouth open, revealing an enormous array of sawlike teeth. Orde-Lees’ shouts for help rose to screams and he turned and raced away from his attacker. The animal leaped out of the water again in pursuit just as Wild arrived with his rifle. The sea leopard spotted Wild, and turned to attack him. Wild dropped to one knee and fired again and again at the onrushing beast. It was less than 30 feet away when it finally dropped. Two dog teams were required to bring the carcass into camp. It measured 12 feet long, and they estimated its weight at about 1,100 pounds. It was a predatory species of seal, and resembled a leopard only in its spotted coat—and its disposition. When it was butchered, balls of hair 2 and 3 inches in diameter were found in its stomach—the remains of crabeater seals it had eaten. The sea leopard’s jawbone, which measured nearly 9 inches across, was given to Orde-Lees as a souvenir of his encounter. In his diary that night, Worsley observed: “A man on foot in soft, deep snow and unarmed would not have a chance against such an animal as they almost bound along with a rearing, undulating motion at least five miles an hour. They attack without provocation, looking on man as a penguin or seal.

Suddenly, from the depths of that chair emerged the biggest, meanest-looking dog Jesse had ever seen. One side of his face had suffered some disfiguring injury. The jaw hung slack and the eye on that side was missing. Jesse froze in her tracks, terrified that she might be mauled by this monstrosity of a pet. She glanced around, looking for a stick or a rock or anything to defend herself. There was nothing close but she was afraid to move. Surely if the animal were dangerous, Floyd and Alice Fay would have said something. Jesse waited tensely for a moment before realizing the dog wasn’t so much growling or barking as he was howling; loudly, purposefully howling. “She don’t bite,” a voice called out. “She’s my hillbilly alarm system, letting me know that they’s strangers about.

By then Prefontaine was universally known as Pre, and he was far more than a phenom; he was an outright superstar. He was the biggest thing to hit the world of American track and field since Jesse Owens. Sportswriters frequently compared him to James Dean, and Mick Jagger, and Runner’s World said the most apt comparison might be Muhammad Ali. He was that kind of swaggery, transformative figure.

He simply had to trust the dogs. On the hunt, man and dogs were always a team. With Jesse, perhaps this was more true than with most. Most men, knowing themselves to be a lot smarter than the dogs, often overruled their judgment. Jesse, not thinking himself much smarter than anything, did not. He often relied upon his own instincts. He therefore had more respect for instinct, perhaps, than a man who normally relied upon intellect. The mind of the dog was in many ways as simple and uncomplicated as Jesse's own. He was taught to memorize actions in places he couldn't reason, and obey in situations that he did not understand. When he did understand he followed his instinct. His instincts assured him that as hunter, the dog was at least the equal of man. And for scenting and tracking, the dog was superior.

I realized I still had my eyes shut. I had shut them when I put my face to the screen, like I was scared to look outside. Now I had to open them. I looked out the window and saw for the first time how the hospital was out in the country. The moon was low in the sky over the pastureland; the face of it was scarred and scuffed where it had just torn up out of the snarl of scrub oak and madrone trees on the horizon. The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon. It called to mind how I noticed the exact same thing when I was off on a hunt with Papa and the uncles and I lay rolled in blankets Grandma had woven, lying off a piece from where the men hunkered around the fire as they passed a quart jar of cactus liquor in a silent circle. I watched that big Oregon prairie moon above me put all the stars around it to shame. I kept awake watching, to see if the moon ever got dimmer or if the stars got brighter, till the dew commenced to drift onto my cheeks and I had to pull a blanket over my head. Something moved on the grounds down beneath my window — cast a long spider of shadow out across the grass as it ran out of sight behind a hedge. When it ran back to where I could get a better look, I saw it was a dog, a young, gangly mongrel slipped off from home to find out about things went on after dark. He was sniffing digger squirrel holes, not with a notion to go digging after one but just to get an idea what they were up to at this hour. He’d run his muzzle down a hole, butt up in the air and tail going, then dash off to another. The moon glistened around him on the wet grass, and when he ran he left tracks like dabs of dark paint spattered across the blue shine of the lawn. Galloping from one particularly interesting hole to the next, he became so took with what was coming off — the moon up there, the night, the breeze full of smells so wild makes a young dog drunk — that he had to lie down on his back and roll. He twisted and thrashed around like a fish, back bowed and belly up, and when he got to his feet and shook himself a spray came off him in the moon like silver scales. He sniffed all the holes over again one quick one, to get the smells down good, then suddenly froze still with one paw lifted and his head tilted, listening. I listened too, but I couldn’t hear anything except the popping of the window shade. I listened for a long time. Then, from a long way off, I heard a high, laughing gabble, faint and coming closer. Canada honkers going south for the winter. I remembered all the hunting and belly-crawling I’d ever done trying to kill a honker, and that I never got one. I tried to look where the dog was looking to see if I could find the flock, but it was too dark. The honking came closer and closer till it seemed like they must be flying right through the dorm, right over my head. Then they crossed the moon — a black, weaving necklace, drawn into a V by that lead goose. For an instant that lead goose was right in the center of that circle, bigger than the others, a black cross opening and closing, then he pulled his V out of sight into the sky once more. I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of the sound.

People who think they need high-pressure methods or tools—pinch collars or electric appliances—to train a dog have no clue how to train a dog well. Training, both as a hobby and as a profession, should be pleasant for the dog and the handler. It should be a successful learning process that yields progress for both parties. If training becomes a torment for the handler or the dog, then both parties are on the wrong track.

WhatsApp forwards about love and kindness. I wonder if on a Sunday morning all these enthusiastic do-gooders could send out truly helpful things like ‘11 cures for a hangover’ or ‘How to clean puke stains from your dress’. I have no such luck; all I get are strange messages like ‘Little memories can last for years’. Very useful when you are trying hard to forget all the embarrassing things you did the night before. Do I really need messages saying, ‘A little hug can wipe out a big tear’ or ‘Friendship is a rainbow’? There is also a message saying, ‘God blues you’, which I am trying to guess could mean that either God wants to bless me, rule me or make a blue movie with me. Has it ever happened that a murderer just before committing his crime gets a message stating, ‘Life is about loving’, and stops in his tracks, or a banker reads ‘No greater sin than cheating’, and quits his job? So, what do these messages really do? I think they allow lazy people to think that they are doing a good deed in the easiest possible manner by sending these daft bits of information out into the universe. Go out there! Sweep a pavement, plant a tree, feed a stray dog. Do something, anything; rather than just using your fingers to tap three keys and destroy 600 people’s brain cells in one shot. 11 a.m.: This is turning out to be a hectic day. The

Dogs sneak up on you like that, burying parts of themselves deep within you, bits that are only revealed later, once they are long gone. In full daylight, when you are doing something quite ordinary, one of these parts will be dug up again, quite by accident, and it will stop you in your tracks. Sometimes the memories will appear at night, in the dark, when they’re harder to get away from and it feels as if you might be smothered by the sadness of it all.

I thought back on my running career at Oregon. I’d competed with, and against, men far better, faster, more physically gifted. Many were future Olympians. And yet I’d trained myself to forget this unhappy fact. People reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing, that it always brings out the best in people, but that’s only true of people who can forget the competition. The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past. You must forget that internal voice screaming, begging, “Not one more step!” And when it’s not possible to forget it, you must negotiate with it. I thought over all the races in which my mind wanted one thing, and my body wanted another, those laps in which I’d had to tell my body, “Yes, you raise some excellent points, but let’s keep going anyway . . .

Sweetheart, you got to understand something. Mad Dog Twenty-Twenty, that’s my favorite wine. And Mad Dog and opera, they don’t go together. Opera make you want to drink some white wine in a Volvo. Some Chardonnay or something like that. But listen to this.” He turned up the eight-track and James Brown hollered. “Now, James make you want to drink some Mad Dog in a Cadillac, don’t he? This is an Eldorado, to be more specific, but James don’t sing Chardonnay music, and this ain’t no Chardonnay car.

They played a Dave Matthews track, I have no idea which one as they all sound the same. It’s the kind of guitar based elevator music that people with beards and beanies listen to while drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and vaping in their friend Steve’s bedroom. They nod along as they flick through mountain biking magazines and discuss CamelBak® water bottles and spoke tightening tools. Thankfully the song was killed halfway through and with a few words, a clank and whirring noises, Simon’s coffin lowered into the platform and was gone.

People will remember you,” I said, “remember what you did and what you said. They’ll remember the truck you drove, and the fish you caught and the ball you played…and they’ll remember you took care of your momma and your baby brothers in a cold house with no food on the table…,” and when we finally fled that life, down a railroad track in the dark, he walked in front, because even though he was seven years old he was already more grown than most people ever got, but somehow I couldn’t get that part said. “Well,” he said, “ain’t that ever’body?

My body was so filled with pain that I could not separate the hurt within from that without. And I was tired. Tired in Cohen’s way, tired with the weight that makes your bones two inches shorter. I was tired of killing. Tired of death. Exhausted from scraping up against the kind of hatred that makes a man slap a little girl, slaughter a woman, shoot a dog. All I wanted was to lie in the snow and the dark and think about Clyde and Dougie and Cohen until I ran out of thoughts. Ran out of feelings. Until the wind abraded my skin to nothing and I was only disarticulated bones.

I had tracked down a little cafe in the next village, with a television set that was going to show the World Cup Final on the Saturday. I arrived there mid-morning when it was still deserted, had a couple of beers, ordered a sensational conejo au Franco, and then sat, drinking coffee, and watching the room fill up. With Germans. I was expecting plenty of locals and a sprinkling of tourists, even in an obscure little outpost like this, but not half the population of Dortmund. In fact, I came to the slow realisation as they poured in and sat around me . . . that I was the only Englishman there. They were very friendly, but there were many of them, and all my exits were cut off. What strategy could I employ? It was too late to pretend that I was German. I’d greeted the early arrivals with ‘Guten Tag! Ich liebe Deutschland’, but within a few seconds found myself conversing in English, in which they were all fluent. Perhaps, I hoped, they would think that I was an English-speaker but not actually English. A Rhodesian, possibly, or a Canadian, there just out of curiosity, to try to pick up the rules of this so-called ‘Beautiful Game’. But I knew that I lacked the self-control to fake an attitude of benevolent detachment while watching what was arguably the most important event since the Crucifixion, so I plumped for the role of the ultra-sporting, frightfully decent Upper-Class Twit, and consequently found myself shouting ‘Oh, well played, Germany!’ when Helmut Haller opened the scoring in the twelfth minute, and managing to restrain myself, when Geoff Hurst equalised, to ‘Good show! Bit lucky though!’ My fixed grin and easy manner did not betray the writhing contortions of my hands and legs beneath the table, however, and when Martin Peters put us ahead twelve minutes from the end, I clapped a little too violently; I tried to compensate with ‘Come on Germany! Give us a game!’ but that seemed to strike the wrong note. The most testing moment, though, came in the last minute of normal time when Uwe Seeler fouled Jackie Charlton, and the pig-dog dolt of a Swiss referee, finally revealing his Nazi credentials, had the gall to penalise England, and then ignored Schnellinger’s blatant handball, allowing a Prussian swine named Weber to draw the game. I sat there applauding warmly, as a horde of fat, arrogant, sausage-eating Krauts capered around me, spilling beer and celebrating their racial superiority.

But far from being a harmless source of fertilizer, dog feces is both an environmental contaminant (and is classified as such by the Environmental Protection Agency) and a source of pathogens that can infect people. Like human excreta, dog poo teems with pathogenic microbes, such as strains of E. coli, roundworms, and other parasites. One of the most common parasitic infections in Americans is the result of their exposure to dog feces. The dog roundworm Toxocara canis is common in dogs and, because of the ubiquity of dog feces, widespread in the environment. It can contaminate soil and water for years.

One sort of person, when he has done a kindness to another, is quick to chalk up the return due to him. A second is not so quick in that way, but even so he privately thinks of the other as his debtor, and is well aware of what he has done. A third sort is in a way not even conscious of his action, but is like the vine which has produced grapes and look for nothing else once it has borne its own fruit. A horse that has raced, a dog that has tracked, a bee that has made honey, and a man that has done good- none of these knows what they have done but they pass on to the next action, just as the vine passes on to bear grapes again in due season. So you ought to be one of those who, in a sense, are unconscious of the good they do. p37

Accepting Uncle Tom’s Cabin as revelation second only to the Bible, the Yankee women all wanted to know about the bloodhounds which every Southerner kept to track down runaway slaves. And they never believed her when she told them she had only seen one bloodhound in all her life and it was a small mild dog and not a huge ferocious mastiff. They wanted to know about the dreadful branding irons which planters used to mark the faces of their slaves and the cat-o’-nine-tails with which they beat them to death, and they evidenced what Scarlett felt was a very nasty and ill-bred interest in slave concubinage. Especially did she resent this in view of the enormous increase in mulatto babies in Atlanta since the Yankee soldiers had settled in the town.

One day, fearing that I was coming down with the flu, I stopped by Bowerman’s office to say that I wouldn’t be able to practice that afternoon. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Who’s the coach of this team?” “You are.” “Well, as coach of this team I’m telling you to get your ass out there. And by the way . . . we’re going to have a time trial today.” I was close to tears. But I held it together, channeled all my emotion into my run, and posted one of my best times of the year. As I walked off the track I glowered at Bowerman. Happy now, you son of a—? He looked at me, checked his stopwatch, looked at me again, nodded. He’d tested me. He’d broken me down and remade me, just like a pair of shoes. And I’d held up. Thereafter, I was truly one of his Men of Oregon. From that day on, I was a tiger.

So few women made it to the top of the tree and for every one of them who understood the importance of solidarity, there was one ready with an axe to chop any other contender off at the knees. It wasn’t just lonely at the top. Sometimes it was lonely all the way from the ground up. She held her arms out at her sides and gave her hands and wrists a good shake. The physical action made her feel as if she’d shucked off the encounter with the Dog Biscuit. She knew it wasn’t that simple and that it would return to plague her later, but for now, she’d parked those complicated emotions. She was an investigator; time she did some investigating. Jason was out in the field trying to track down camper van records from 1995. The least she could do was try to come at the case from a different angle.

I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other. When you are five, you know your age down to the month. Even in your twenties, you know how old you are. I'm twenty-three you say, or maybe twenty-seven. But then in your thirties, something strange starts to happen. It is a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I'm--you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you are not. You're thirty-five. And then you're bothered, because you wonder if this is the beginning of the end. It is, of course, but it's decades before you admit it. You start to forget words: they're on the tip of your tongue, but instead of eventually dislodging, they stay there. You go upstairs to fetch something, and by the time you get there you can't remember what it was you were after. You call your child by the names of all your other children and finally the dog before you get to his. Sometimes you forget what day it is. And finally you forget the year. Actually, it's not so much that I've forgotten. It's more like I've stopped keeping track. We're past the millennium, that much I know - such a fuss and bother over nothing, all those young folks clucking with worry and buying canned food because somebody was too lazy to leave space for four digits instead of two - but that could have been last month or three years ago. And besides, what does it really matter? What's the difference between three weeks or three years or even three decades of mushy peas, tapioca, and Depends undergarments? I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other.

Natasha started to take notice. My sleepiness was good for rudeness to visitors to the gallery, but not for signing for packages or noticing if someone had come in with a dog and tracked paw prints all over the floor, which happened a few times. There were a few spilled lattes. MFA students touching paintings, once even rearranging an installation of shattered CD jewel cases in a Jarrod Harvey installation to spell out the word “HACK.” When I noticed it, I just shuffled the shards of plastic around, no one the wiser. But when a homeless woman set herself up in the back room one afternoon, Natasha found out. I’d had no idea how long the woman had been there. Maybe people thought she was part of the artwork. I ended up paying her fifty bucks out of petty cash to leave. Natasha couldn’t hide her irritation.

The day was grey and bitter cold, and the dogs would not take the scent. The big black bitch had taken one sniff at the bear tracks, backed off, and skulked back to the pack with her tail between her legs. The dogs huddled together miserably on the riverbank as the wind snapped at them. Chett felt it too, biting through his layers of black wool and boiled leather. It was too bloody cold for man or beast, but here they were. His mouth twisted, and he could almost feel the boils that covered his cheeks and neck growing red and angry. I should be safe back at the Wall, tending the bloody ravens and making fires for old Maester Aemon. It was the bastard Jon Snow who had taken that from him, him and his fat friend Sam Tarly. It was their fault he was here, freezing his bloody balls off with a pack of hounds deep in the haunted forest.

If absolutely everything important is only happening on such a small screen, isn’t that a shame? Especially when the world is so overwhelmingly large and surprising? Are you missing too much? You can’t imagine it now, but you’ll look like me one day, even though you’ll feel just the same as you do now. You’ll catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and think how quickly it’s all gone, and I wonder if all the time you used watching those families whose lives are filmed for the television, and making those cartoons of yourselves with panting dog tongues, and chasing after that terrible Pokémon fellow…well, will it feel like time well spent? “Here lies Ms. Jackson, she took more steps than the other old biddies on her road”—is that the best I can leave behind? Is it all just designed to keep us looking down, or to give us the illusion that we have some sort of control over our chaotic lives? Will you do me a small favor, dears, and look up? Especially you New Yorkers and Londoners and other city dwellers who cross all those busy streets. How else will you take in the majesty of the buildings that have stood there for hundreds of years? How else will you run into an acquaintance on the street who might turn into a friend or a lover or even just recommend a good restaurant that no one has complained about on that app yet? If you never look out the window of the subway car, how will you see the boats gliding by on the East River, or have an idea that only you could have? Just look up for no reason, just for a moment here and there, or maybe for an entire day once in a while. Let the likes go unchecked and the quality of sleep go unnoticed. Que sera sera, my dears—whatever will be will be, whether we’re tracking it on our GPS devices or not.

But sympathy we cannot have. Wisest Fate says no. If her children, weighted as they already are with sorrow, were to take on them that burden too, adding in imagination other pains to their own, buildings would cease to rise; roads would peter out into grassy tracks; there would be an end of music and of paintings; one great sigh alone would rise to Heaven, and the only attitudes for men and women would be those of horror and despair. As it is, there is always some little distraction—an organ grinder at the corner of the hospital, a shop with book or trinket to decoy one past the prison or the workhouse, some absurdity of cat or dog to prevent one from turning the old beggar's hieroglyphic of misery into volumes of sordid suffering, and the vast effort of sympathy which those barracks of pain and discipline, those dried symbols of sorrow, ask us to exert on their behalf, is uneasily shuffled off for another time.

Barry, if I were to say to you that I haven’t seen Reservoir Dogs yet, what would that mean?” Barry looks at me. “Just…come on, what would it mean to you? That sentence? ‘I haven’t seen Reservoir Dogs yet?’” “To me, it would mean that you’re a liar. Either that or you’ve gone potty. You saw it twice. Once with Laura, once with me and Dick. We had that conversation about who killed Mr. Pink or whatever fucking color he was.” “Yeah, yeah, I know. But say I hadn’t seen it and I said to you, ‘I haven’t seen Reservoir Dogs yet,’ what would you think?” “I’d think, you’re a sick man. And I’d feel sorry for you.” “No, but would you think, from that one sentence, that I was going to see it?” “I’d hope you were, yeah, otherwise I would have to say that you’re not a friend of mine.” “No, but—” “I’m sorry, Rob, but I’m struggling here. I don’t understand any part of this conversation. You’re asking me what I’d think if you told me that you hadn’t seen a film that you’ve seen. What am I supposed to say?” “Just listen to me. If I said to you—” —“‘I haven’t seen Reservoir Dogs yet,’ yeah, yeah, I hear you—” “Would you …would you get the impression that I wanted to see it?” “Well…you couldn’t have been desperate, otherwise you’d have already gone.” “Exactly. We went first night, didn’t we?” “But the word yet… yeah, I’d get the impression that you wanted to see it. Otherwise you’d say you didn’t fancy it much.” “But in your opinion, would I definitely go?” “How am I supposed to know that? You might get run over by a bus, or go blind, or anything. You might go off the idea. You might be broke. You might just get sick of people telling you you’ve really got to go.” I don’t like the sound of that. “Why would they care?” “Because it’s a brilliant film. It’s funny, and violent, and it’s got Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth in it, and everything. And a cracking sound track.

How beautiful this security seemed to me, this enchanting security of knowing oneself unnoticed and unseen! And not only was the forest empty of human beings, but our nearest neighbour on the other side, the side of open plains and rolling rye-fields, was ten miles away along almost impassable rutted tracks—the one neighbour, that is, of our own class, which was hochgeboren. Other neighbours there were, much nearer, some only two miles off and easily accessible because they lived on the high road, but they were no good to us because they were only wohlgeboren. For purposes of social intercourse, Wohlgeborens were of no use at all. If the Hochgeborens happened to meet them in a train or other public place, they were, of course, gracious, almost crushingly gracious, but they never invited them to dinner; and having myself become hochgeboren, through what seemed to be no fault of my own, I found that it was one of my duties, and an immediate and pressing one, to learn

Trying to trick the creature, hoping that it would react without hesitation to the first sign of movement in the door way, Travis tucked the revolver under his belt, quietly picked up one of the dining-room chairs, eased to within six feet of the kitchen, and pitched the chair through the open door. He snatched the revolver out of his waistband and, as the chair sailed into the kitchen, assumed a shooter's stance. The chair crashed into the Formica-topped table, clattered to the floor, and banged against the dishwasher. The lantern-eyed enemy did not go for it. Nothing moved. When the chair finished tumbling, the kitchen was again marked by a hushed expectancy . Einstein was making a curious sound, a quiet shuddery huffing, and after a moment Travis realized the noise was a result of the dog's uncontrollable shivering. No question about it: the intruder in the kitchen was the very thing that had pursued them through the woods more than three months ago. During the intervening weeks, it had made its way north, probably traveling mostly in the wildlands to the east of the developed part of the state, relentlessly tracking the dog by some means that Travis could not understand and for reasons he could not even guess. In response to the chair he had thrown, a large white-enameled canister crashed to the floor just beyond the kitchen doorway, and Travis jumped back in surprise, squeezing off a wild shot before he realized he was only being taunted. The lid flew off the container when it hit the floor, and flour spilled across the tile. Silence again. By responding to Travis's taunt with one of its own, the intruder had displayed unnerving intelligence. Abruptly Travis realized that, coming from the same research lab as Einstein and being a product of related experiments, the creature might be as smart as the retriever. Which would explain Einstein's fear of it. If Travis had not already accommodated himself to the idea of a dog with humanlike intelligence, he might have been unable to credit this beast with more than mere animal cleverness; however, events of the past few months had primed him to accept-and quickly adapt to-almost anything.

Something moved on the grounds down beneath my window — cast a long spider of shadow out across the grass as it ran out of sight behind a hedge. When it ran back to where I could get a better look, I saw it was a dog, a young, gangly mongrel slipped off from home to find out about things went on after dark. He was sniffing digger squirrel holes, not with a notion to go digging after one but just to get an idea what they were up to at this hour. He’d run his muzzle down a hole, butt up in the air and tail going, then dash off to another. The moon glistened around him on the wet grass, and when he ran he left tracks like dabs of dark paint spattered across the blue shine of the lawn. Galloping from one particularly interesting hole to the next, he became so took with what was coming off — the moon up there, the night, the breeze full of smells so wild makes a young dog drunk — that he had to lie down on his back and roll. He twisted and thrashed around like a fish, back bowed and belly up, and when he got to his feet and shook himself a spray came off him in the moon like silver scales.

Martin Street is the archaeologist who has done most work in recent years on the dog from Bonn-Oberkassel. His theory is that what is known as ‘putting the game at bay’ was one of the first important tasks performed by dogs. This is a method of hunting still used today in many places, including the forests of Sweden. The dog runs around in the woods on its own to track game, while the hunter tries to stay near it. Once the dog locates its quarry, it starts to bark, forcing the animal to stop moving and focus on the dog’s irritating barking. The dog has put its quarry at bay. In the meantime, the hunter creeps nearer and shoots the animal. This type of hunting emerged when woods started to grow on the tundra, blocking the view. Before that time it was easier for hunters to scan the landscape for their prey from an elevated point. This is what makes it so interesting that the first dog universally recognised as such, the one from Bonn-Oberkassel, lived 14,500 years ago, at precisely the time when the tundra of the Ice Age was beginning to give way to woodland. That circumstance, in my view, is rather too striking to be a mere coincidence. If

The Calf Path One day, through the primeval wood, A calf walked home, as good calves should; But made a trail all bent askew, A crooked trail as all calves do. Since then three hundred years have fled, And, I infer, the calf is dead. But still he left behind his trail, And thereby hangs my moral tale. The trail was taken up next day By a lone dog that passed that way; And then a wise bell-wether sheep Pursued the trail o’er vale and steep, And drew the flock behind him, too, As good bell-wethers always do. And from that day, o’er hill and glade, Through those old woods a path was made. And many men wound in and out, And dodged, and turned, and bent about And uttered words of righteous wrath Because ’twas such a crooked path.15 But still they followed—do not laugh— The first migrations of that calf, And through this winding wood-way stalked, Because he wobbled when he walked. This forest path became a lane, That bent, and turned, and turned again; This crooked lane became a road, Where many a poor horse with his load Toiled on beneath the burning sun, And traveled some three miles in one. And thus a century and a half They trod the footsteps of that calf. The years passed on in swiftness fleet, The road became a village street; And this, before men were aware, A city’s crowded thoroughfare; And soon the central street was this Of a renowned metropolis; And men two centuries and a half Trod in the footsteps of that calf. Each day a hundred thousand rout Followed the zigzag calf about; And o’er his crooked journey went The traffic of a continent. A hundred thousand men were led By one calf near three centuries dead. They followed still his crooked way, And lost one hundred years a day; For thus such reverence is lent To well-established precedent. A moral lesson this might teach, Were I ordained and called to preach; For men are prone to go it blind Along the calf-paths of the mind, And work away from sun to sun To do what other men have done. They follow in the beaten track, And out and in, and forth and back, And still their devious course pursue, To keep the path that others do. They keep the path a sacred groove, Along which all their lives they move. But how the wise old wood-gods laugh, Who saw the first primeval calf! Ah! Many things this tale might teach— But I am not ordained to preach. —Sam Walter Foss

As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop. My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair. Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.

BEST FRIENDS SHOULD BE TOGETHER We’ll get a pair of those half-heart necklaces so every ask n’ point reminds us we are one glued duo. We’ll send real letters like our grandparents did, handwritten in smart cursive curls. We’ll extend cell plans and chat through favorite shows like a commentary track just for each other. We’ll get our braces off on the same day, chew whole packs of gum. We’ll nab some serious studs but tell each other everything. Double-date at a roadside diner exactly halfway between our homes. Cry on shoulders when our boys fail us. We’ll room together at State, cover the walls floor-to-ceiling with incense posters of pop dweebs gone wry. See how beer feels. Be those funny cute girls everybody’s got an eye on. We’ll have a secret code for hot boys in passing. A secret dog named Freshman Fifteen we’ll have to hide in the rafters during inspection. Follow some jam band one summer, grooving on lawns, refusing drugs usually. Get tattoos that only spell something when we stand together. I’ll be maid of honor in your wedding and you’ll be co-maid with my sister but only cause she’d disown me if I didn’t let her. We’ll start a store selling just what we like. We’ll name our firstborn daughters after one another, and if our husbands don’t like it, tough. Lifespans being what they are, we’ll be there for each other when our men have passed, and all the friends who come to visit our assisted living condo will be dazzled by what fun we still have together. We’ll be the kind of besties who make outsiders wonder if they’ve ever known true friendship, but we won’t even notice how sad it makes them and they won’t bring it up because you and I will be so caught up in the fun, us marveling at how not-good it never was.

Sonja said once that to understand men like Ove and Rune, one had to understand from the very beginning that they were men caught in the wrong time. Men who only required a few simple things from life, she said. A roof over their heads, a quiet street, the right make of car, and a woman to be faithful to. A job where you had a proper function. A house where things broke at regular intervals, so you always had something to tinker with. “All people want to live dignified lives; dignity just means something different to different people,” Sonja had said. To men like Ove and Rune dignity was simply that they’d had to manage on their own when they grew up, and therefore saw it as their right not to become reliant on others when they were adults. There was a sense of pride in having control. In being right. In knowing what road to take and how to screw in a screw, or not. Men like Ove and Rune were from a generation in which one was what one did, not what one talked about. She knew, of course, that Ove didn’t know how to bear his nameless anger. He needed labels to put on it. Ways of categorizing. So when men in white shirts at the council, whose names no normal person could keep track of, tried to do everything Sonja did not want—make her stop working, move her out of her house, imply that she was worth less than a healthy person who was able to walk, and assert that she was dying—Ove fought them. With documents and letters to newspapers and appeals, right down to something as unremarkable as an access ramp at a school. He fought so doggedly for her against men in white shirts that in the end he began to hold them personally responsible for all that happened to her—and to the child. And then she left him alone in a world where he no longer understood the language.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK WHAT TO DO FIRST 1. Find the MAP. It will be there. No Tour of Fantasyland is complete without one. It will be found in the front part of your brochure, quite near the page that says For Mom and Dad for having me and for Jeannie (or Jack or Debra or Donnie or …) for putting up with me so supportively and for my nine children for not interrupting me and for my Publisher for not discouraging me and for my Writers’ Circle for listening to me and for Barbie and Greta and Albert Einstein and Aunty May and so on. Ignore this, even if you are wondering if Albert Einstein is Albert Einstein or in fact the dog. This will be followed by a short piece of prose that says When the night of the wolf waxes strong in the morning, the wise man is wary of a false dawn. Ka’a Orto’o, Gnomic Utterances Ignore this too (or, if really puzzled, look up GNOMIC UTTERANCES in the Toughpick section). Find the Map. 2. Examine the Map. It will show most of a continent (and sometimes part of another) with a large number of BAYS, OFFSHORE ISLANDS, an INLAND SEA or so and a sprinkle of TOWNS. There will be scribbly snakes that are probably RIVERS, and names made of CAPITAL LETTERS in curved lines that are not quite upside down. By bending your neck sideways you will be able to see that they say things like “Ca’ea Purt’wydyn” and “Om Ce’falos.” These may be names of COUNTRIES, but since most of the Map is bare it is hard to tell. These empty inland parts will be sporadically peppered with little molehills, invitingly labeled “Megamort Hills,” “Death Mountains, ”Hurt Range” and such, with a whole line of molehills near the top called “Great Northern Barrier.” Above this will be various warnings of danger. The rest of the Map’s space will be sparingly devoted to little tiny feathers called “Wretched Wood” and “Forest of Doom,” except for one space that appears to be growing minute hairs. This will be tersely labeled “Marshes.” This is mostly it. No, wait. If you are lucky, the Map will carry an arrow or compass-heading somewhere in the bit labeled “Outer Ocean” and this will show you which way up to hold it. But you will look in vain for INNS, reststops, or VILLAGES, or even ROADS. No – wait another minute – on closer examination, you will find the empty interior crossed by a few bird tracks. If you peer at these you will see they are (somewhere) labeled “Old Trade Road – Disused” and “Imperial Way – Mostly Long Gone.” Some of these routes appear to lead (or have lead) to small edifices enticingly titled “Ruin,” “Tower of Sorcery,” or “Dark Citadel,” but there is no scale of miles and no way of telling how long you might take on the way to see these places. In short, the Map is useless, but you are advised to keep consulting it, because it is the only one you will get. And, be warned. If you take this Tour, you are going to have to visit every single place on this Map, whether it is marked or not. This is a Rule. 3. Find your STARTING POINT. Let us say it is the town of Gna’ash. You will find it down in one corner on the coast, as far away from anywhere as possible. 4. Having found Gna’ash, you must at once set about finding an INN, Tour COMPANIONS, a meal of STEW, a CHAMBER for the night, and then the necessary TAVERN BRAWL. (If you look all these things up in the Toughpick section, you will know what you are in for.) The following morning, you must locate the MARKET and attempt to acquire CLOTHING (which absolutely must include a CLOAK), a SADDLE ROLL, WAYBREAD, WATERBOTTLES, a DAGGER, a SWORD, a HORSE, and a MERCHANT to take you along in his CARAVAN. You must resign yourself to being cheated over most prices and you are advised to consult a local MAGICIAN about your Sword. 5. You set off. Now you are on your own. You should turn to the Toughpick section of this brochure and select your Tour on a pick-and-mix basis, remembering only that you will have to take in all of it.

That's Branton, Michigan, by the way. Don't try to find it on a map - you'd need a microscope. It's one of a dozen dinky towns north of Lansing, one of the few that doesn't sound like it was named by a French explorer. Branton, Michigan. Population: Not a Lot and Yet Still Too Many I Don't Particularly Care For. We have a shopping mall with a JCPenny and an Asian fusion place that everyone says they are dying to try even though it’s been there for three years now. Most of our other restaurants are attached to gas stations, the kind that serve rubbery purple hot dogs and sodas in buckets. There’s a statue of Francis B. Stockbridge in the center of town. He’s a Michigan state senator from prehistoric times with a beard that belongs on Rapunzel’s twin brother. He wasn’t born in Branton, of course – nobody important was ever born in Branton – but we needed a statue for the front of the courthouse and the name Stockbridge looks good on a copper plate. It’s all for show. Branton’s the kind of place that tries to pretend it’s better than it really is. It’s really the kind of place with more bars than bookstores and more churches than either, not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. It’s a place where teenagers still sometimes take baseball bats to mailboxes and wearing the wrong brand of shoes gets you at least a dirty look. It snows a lot in Branton. Like avalanches dumped from the sky. Like heaps to hills to mountains, the plows carving their paths through our neighborhood, creating alpine ranges nearly tall enough to ski down. Some of the snow mounds are so big you can build houses inside them, complete with entryways and coat closets. Restrooms are down the hall on your right. Just look for the steaming yellow hole. There’s nothing like that first Branton snow, though. Soft as a cat scruff and bleach white, so bright you can almost see your reflection in it. Then the plows come and churn up the earth underneath. The dirt and the boot tracks and the car exhaust mix together to make it all ash gray, almost black, and it sickens your stomach just to look at it. It happens everywhere, not just Branton, but here it’s something you can count on.

No,’ she answered, wondering at the harsh simplicity of life. ‘My father was a scoundrel then? cried the lad, clenching his fists. She shook her head. ‘I knew he was not free. We loved each other very much. If he had lived, he would have made provision for us. Don’t speak against him, my son. He was your father, and a gentleman. Indeed he was highly connected.’ An oath broke from his lips. ‘I don’t care for myself,’ he exclaimed, ‘but don’t let Sibyl… It is a gentleman, isn’t it, who is in love with her, or says he is? Highly connected, too, I suppose?’ For a moment a hideous sense of humiliation came over the woman. Her head drooped. She wiped her eyes with shaking hands. ‘Sibyl has a mother,’ she murmured; ‘I had none.’ The lad was touched. He went towards her, and stooping down he kissed her. ‘I am sorry if I have pained you by asking about my father,’ he said, ‘but I could not help it. I must go now. Good-bye. Don’t forget that you will only have one child how to look after, and believe me that if this man wrongs my sister, I will find out who he is, track him down, and kill him like a dog. I swear it.’ The exaggerated folly of the threat, the passionate gesture that accompanied it, the mad melodramatic words, made life seem more vivid to her. She was familiar with the atmosphere. She breathed more freely, and for the first time for many months she really admired her son. She would have liked to have continued the scene on the same emotional scale, but he cut her short. Trunks had to be carried down, and mufflers looked for. The lodging-house drudge bustled in and out. There was the bargaining with the cabman. The moment was lost in vulgar details. It was with a renewed feeling of disappointment that she waved the tattered lace handkerchief from the window, as her son drove away. She was conscious that a great opportunity had been wasted. She consoled herself by telling Sibyl how desolate she felt her life would be, now that she had only one child to look after. She remembered the phrase. It had pleased her. Of the threat she said nothing. It was vividly and dramatically expressed. She felt that they would all laugh at it some day.

Permanent Revolution THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OPENED up new ways to convert energy and to produce goods, largely liberating humankind from its dependence on the surrounding ecosystem. Humans cut down forests, drained swamps, dammed rivers, flooded plains, laid down hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad tracks, and built skyscraping metropolises. As the world was moulded to fit the needs of Homo sapiens, habitats were destroyed and species went extinct. Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre. Today, the earth’s continents are home to billions of Sapiens. If you took all these people and put them on a large set of scales, their combined mass would be about 300 million tons. If you then took all our domesticated farmyard animals – cows, pigs, sheep and chickens – and placed them on an even larger set of scales, their mass would amount to about 700 million tons. In contrast, the combined mass of all surviving large wild animals – from porcupines and penguins to elephants and whales – is less than 100 million tons. Our children’s books, our iconography and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; only 200,000 wolves, compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; only 250,000 chimpanzees – in contrast to billions of humans. Humankind really has taken over the world.1 Ecological degradation is not the same as resource scarcity. As we saw in the previous chapter, the resources available to humankind are constantly increasing, and are likely to continue to do so. That’s why doomsday prophesies of resource scarcity are probably misplaced. In contrast, the fear of ecological degradation is only too well founded. The future may see Sapiens gaining control of a cornucopia of new materials and energy sources, while simultaneously destroying what remains of the natural habitat and driving most other species to extinction. In fact, ecological turmoil might endanger the survival of Homo sapiens itself. Global warming, rising oceans and widespread pollution could make the earth less hospitable to our kind, and the future might consequently see a spiralling race between human power and human-induced natural disasters. As humans use their power to counter the forces of nature and subjugate the ecosystem to their needs and whims, they might cause more and more unanticipated and dangerous side effects. These are likely to be controllable only by even more drastic manipulations of the ecosystem, which would result in even worse chaos. Many call this process ‘the destruction of nature’. But it’s not really destruction, it’s change. Nature cannot be destroyed. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but in so doing opened the way forward for mammals. Today, humankind is driving many species into extinction and might even annihilate itself. But other organisms are doing quite well. Rats and cockroaches, for example, are in their heyday. These tenacious creatures would probably creep out from beneath the smoking rubble of a nuclear Armageddon, ready and able to spread their DNA. Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid. Still, the rumours of our own extinction are premature. Since the Industrial Revolution, the world’s human population has burgeoned as never before. In 1700 the world was home to some 700 million humans. In 1800 there were 950 million of us. By 1900 we almost doubled our numbers to 1.6 billion. And by 2000 that quadrupled to 6 billion. Today there are just shy of 7 billion Sapiens.

Gasping Stars Look Down Upon My Tired Soul When I need to again find my own way late midnight walks are my mainstay There is this place I walk and roam comfort away from worries of my home The sidewalk ends and fields begin I imagine they stretch and never end Cool night air soothes my tired brain far away, whistle of an old night train My pace slows to soak so much more in I am not alone, night is my friend Gasping stars look down upon my soul Seeking calm, I then reach my goal Dog barks sadly as I slowly trod by moans so blue, almost seems to cry Past the farmhouse my favorite tree massive black oak, does so comfort me Gazing at its massive majestic form I see damage from a terrible storm Ahh yes, none are immune from harm not even this great titan on the farm Very slowly I turn to find my way back retracing this walk along this track A calm has now found my lonely spirit happiness approaches I can even hear it My pace increases as I seek to return to the place where my love does burn Family , the gift of my very long life my children, my love , my sweet wife When I need to again find my own way late midnight walks are my mainstay

The simple fact is that domestic dogs and wolves are different animals, adapted to different environments, and cannot live (well) in the other’s niche. Wolves are consummate predators, but it’s rare to find a dog that can hunt down and kill a moose for food. Dogs will track deer or chase wild hogs as they “hunt” with humans for sport, but it’s highly doubtful they could ever earn a living by hunting on their own. For their part, wolves rarely become tame enough to get by in the household dog’s world of human hearth and home. They may occasionally live on their own in or near human habitation, but they tend not to be able to eat in the presence of people. Whereas even free-living dogs that are raised in garbage dumps or just outside town are able to dine in the company of humans.

Human beings have one of the poorest senses of smell of all the organisms on Earth, so weak that we have only a tiny vocabulary to express it...We depend on the sophistication of trained dogs to lead us through the olfactory world, tracking individual people, detecting even the slightest trace of explosives and other dangerous chemicals.

The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse), by Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917), ca. 1896, oil on canvas, Cleveland Museum of Art. Katherine Anne Porter’s (1890–1980) classic

His mate was so gorgeous, and he wasn’t a fool. Not once did he imagine she was untouched. Just like him.