The dog understood none of the words, but he picked up on Will’s enthusiasm and moved closer, licking Will’s face, his feet patting the ground, his tail awag almost frantically.
In scratching and rubbing Shark, Will wasn’t too surprised to see legions of fleas leaping about the dog’s coat. The raw skin of mange bothered him, as well. He pointed to the water. “Let’s go, Shark.”
Will was amazed that the dog immediately got up and trotted to the sinkhole. Will tried some other hand signals: down, stay, go away, and so forth. Shark responded perfectly to each command. Will shook his head. “You sure had some good training, fella,” he said.
Of course, Shark had been in the water a couple of days ago—and that apparently did nothing but wash a few fleas overboard. But today Will was going to use both water and mud and clay. He was going to coat Shark, and at the same time, re-treat his own face and arms. Maybe it was the clay and maybe it wasn’t that made his healing so rapid, but it sure was worth another application.
Will strode into the water up to his knees and called his dog to him. Shark charged out, splashing, swimming in that foolish way dogs have. Will scooped up viscous handfuls of clay and mud and plastered Shark. The dog was curious—his eyes showed that—but he was neither frightened nor angry. Finally, so that Shark wouldn’t lose too much of the muck from his coat, Will hefted the dog in his arms and carried him to shore.
The sun soon dried the clay and mud on man and dog. Much cracked off, but much stayed in place. The mange spots of exposed flesh, Will was pleased to see, remained covered.
Shark began to shake himself as soon as all four feet were on solid ground. “No,” Will said, not shouting the word, not even saying it louder than a normal conversation level. The dog immediately stopped his instinctive drying ritual.
“Jeez,” Will said. “You know damned near everything, doncha, Shark? Good boy.
There was one command Will hadn’t experimented with, but he planned to get to that later. For now, the heat was too oppressive to do anything but hide under the trees from the malevolent glare of the sun.
Will slept soundly and didn’t awaken until a jack was dropped on his chest by a clay-encrusted dog who sat grinning at him, tail raising a cloud of dust behind him. Will laughed.
“Great, Shark,” he said. “You’re a hell of a hunter.”
There was a very feeble, dull red ember from the previous fire. Will, on all fours, blew gently at it—and put it out.
“Goddammit,” he said disgustedly.
Once again he gathered up twigs and branches and went to work spinning a stick between his palms, its carved point lodged in a small notch he’d cut into the larger piece of dry limb. An eternity later, smoke appeared, followed by a miniscule orangish flame. Will fed the fire bits of dried grass and small bits of dried wood until it was ready to accept more hardy fuel. Within an hour he and his dog were eating broiled rabbit. The jack was scrawnier than the female had been, and he yielded less meat. Neither Will nor Shark complained.
Will looked closely at Shark as the dog scarfed down his meal. There’d been a picture book in grade school, Will recalled, showing different breeds of dogs, and he fuzzily recalled several of the pictures. Shark, even coated in dry and flaking clay, looked a good deal like a husky—except for his tail, which hung down, rather than curling up over his back. Shark was a good-sized dog, collie-sized, perhaps, with a broad chest. His head, though, strongly reminded Will of a breed he couldn’t bring to mind—something to do with a foreign country, maybe England, maybe Germany. Whatever. Shark was Shark.
The temperature didn’t drop a whole lot as the sun began to settle in the west. Will finished his meal, sucking the suet from the jack’s bones, and wiped his mouth on what remained of a burned sleeve. Looking at Shark he took off his denim pants. Strangely, the denim showed few signs of the fire and Will’s stumbling dash through the flames. He tied the cuffs in sloppy knots and then filled the pants with scrub, bits of branches, handfuls of dried needles, and whatever else he could find. He stripped off his raggedy-assed shirt, filled that, too, and attached it to the pants with a young and supple limb. He wedged the creation between a pair of fairly stout branches, the stuffed cuffs maybe a yard off the ground.
Will had no idea what the signal, the command, for attack might be.
Shark stood next to Will, looking up at him, his tail moving gently from side to side, his eyes curious as to what Will was doing.
Will snapped his fingers and said, “Go.” Shark stood as still as a statue. He tried again with “Sic,” with the same result.
“Waitaminnit,” Will said aloud. “All the other stuff you did was based on hand an’ arm commands.” He thought for a moment, Shark still focused on his face. “What the hell,” Will said, and made a sweeping motion with is right arm, his hand ending up pointing at the hastily constructed dummy.
Shark immediately dropped, stomach to the ground, and began moving slowly but steadily, like a cat stalking a bird. Shark was totally silent; there was no growling, no threatening snarl.
Will watched, fascinated, as Shark covered the few yards to his target. The big dog appeared to be hardly moving, but he was covering ground. He didn’t look back at Will at all. He had his order and he was going to carry it out. When he was six feet from the dummy, he threw his body at it as if he’d been propelled by a powerful steel spring. The attack brought a quick shiver to Will’s spine. It was impossibly fast, as quiet as a sepulcher, and as deadly as an eight-foot rattler.
Although the dummy was headless, Shark’s jaws tore into where a man’s throat would be. Still airborne, he dragged his fangs down the chest and stomach of the dummy, and then, almost before his feet hit the ground, he tore the crotch out of the dummy’s—Will’s—denim pants. The attack had freed the dummy from the tree and Shark went for its throat once again.
“Come,” Will said, his voice an awestruck rasp. Shark stepped away from the dummy, shook away a piece of fabric that had hung on an eyetooth, and trotted over to Will.
For once, Will had nothing to say. He crouched and stroked his dog.
The next day Will waded into the water with Shark at his side. He peeled and scrubbed the clay from the dog’s back and sides and was gratified to see what looked like hundreds of flea corpses embedded in the slabs of clay. The raw mange flesh looked much better: the seeping, raw spots were replaced with pinkish flesh. If dog wounds were anything like horse wounds, Will thought, it’d be a short time before hair sprouted, grew, and covered the bare areas.
Will’s face and arms were still hotter than they’d normally be, even under the West Texas sun, but most of the pain was gone. He looked at the burned, ripped, and torn clothing he’d been wearing, and laughed at the crotchless drawers.
“What we need to do, Shark, is go back to town an’ find some supplies—an’ maybe take down a few of those killers.”
Chapter Seven
The pinto had stayed quite close to Will, wandering to seek grazing but never putting a great deal of distance between himself and the man. The horse looked good: he might have dropped a few pounds from the dried buffalo grass he was eating, but he hadn’t been off good feed long enough to hurt him.
Will used a handful of scrub to clean the sand and grit from the animal’s coat. The pinto grunted and leaned into Will’s hand. “Where the hell did those scum git you?” Will said as he cleaned the horse. “They for sure didn’t buy you—so they musta killed your owner, the man who trained you. Whoever he mighta been, he knew horses. He took good care of you.” Will stepped back a couple of feet. “Let’s see how this goes.” He drew and fired his pistol. The pinto, startled, seemed to come to attention like a soldier, but he didn’t shy or run. The whites of his eyes showed momentarily, but then came back to their place under his lids as he quickly calmed.
The horse went back to grunting happily as Will finished rubbing him clean. His hooves looked good—the shoeing job was excellent. The single rein that draped from the hackamore, the leather strand around the pinto’s snout, rested in his mane and gave him plenty of room to drop his head to eat and drink.
