Then Dad checked with Aura to see that she was all right. He said a few things to her that I couldn’t hear, and I saw a tear slide down her face. She cries easily. She always has.
Dad walked away from her looking harassed. He led us up the path out of the canyon. We walked our bikes, and we all kept looking around. We could see now that there were other dogs nearby. We were being watched by a big pack. Jay Garfield brought up the rear, guarding our backs.
“He said we should stick together,” Joanne told me.
She had seen me looking back at her father.
“You and I?”
“Yeah, and Harry. He said we should lookout for one another.”
“I don’t think these dogs are stupid enough or hungry enough to attack us in daylight. They’ll go after some lone street person tonight.”
“Shut up, for godsake.”
The road was narrow going up and out of the canyon. It would have been a bad place to have to fight off dogs. Someone could trip and step off the crumbling edge. Someone could be knocked off the edge by a dog or by one of us. That would mean falling several hundred feet.
Down below, I could hear dogs fighting now. We may have been close to their dens or whatever they lived in. I thought maybe we were just close to what they were feeding on.
“If they come,” my father said in a quiet, even voice, “Freeze, aim, and fire. That will save you. Nothing else will. Freeze, aim, and fire. Keep your eyes open and stay calm.”
I replayed the words in my mind as we went up the switchbacks. No doubt Dad wanted us to replay them. I could see that Aura was still leaking tears and smearing and streaking her face with dirt like a little kid. She was too wrapped up in her own misery and fear to be of much use.
We got almost to the top before anything happened.
We were beginning to relax, I think. I hadn’t seen a dog for a while. Then, from the front of our line, we heard three shots.
We all froze, most of us unable to see what had happened.
“Keep moving,” my father called. “It’s all right. It was just one dog getting too close.”
“Are you okay?” I called.
“Yes,” he said. “Just come on and keep your eyes open.”
One by one, we came abreast of the dog that had been shot and walked past it. It was a bigger, grayer animal than the one I had seen. There was a beauty to it. It looked like pictures I had seen of wolves. It was wedged against a hanging boulder just a few steps up the steep canyon wall from us.
It moved.
I saw its bloody wounds as it twisted. I bit my tongue as the pain I knew it must feel became my pain.
What to do? Keep walking? I couldn’t. One more step and I would fall and lie in the dirt, helpless against the pain. Or I might fall into the canyon.
“It’s still alive,” Joanne said behind me. “It’s moving.”
Its forefeet were making little running motions, its claws scraping against the rock.
I thought I would throw up. My belly hurt more and more until I felt skewered through the middle. I leaned on my bike with my left arm. With my right hand, I drew the Smith & Wesson, aimed, and shot the beautiful dog through its head.
I felt the impact of the bullet as a hard, solid blow-something beyond pain. Then I felt the dog die. I saw it jerk, shudder, stretch its body long, then freeze. I saw it die. I felt it die. It went out like a match in a sudden vanishing of pain. Its life flared up, then went out. I went a little numb. Without the bike, I would have collapsed.
People had crowded close before and behind me. I heard them before I could see them clearly.
“It’s dead,” I heard Joanne say. “Poor thing.”
“What?” my father demanded. “Another one?”
I managed to focus on him. He must have skirted close to the cliff-edge of the road to have gotten all the way back to us. And he must have run.
“The same one,” I said, managing to straighten up.
“It wasn’t dead. We saw it moving.”
“I put three bullets into it,” he said.
“It was moving, Reverend Olamina,” Joanne insisted. “It was suffering. If Lauren hadn’t shot it, someone else would have had to.”
Dad sighed. “Well, it isn’t suffering now. Let’s get out of here.” Then he seemed to realize what Joanne had said. He looked at me. “Are you all right?”
I nodded. I don’t know how I looked. No one was reacting to me as though I looked odd, so I must not have shown much of what I had gone through. I think only Harry Balter, Curtis Talcott, and Joanne had seen me shoot the dog. I looked at them and Curtis grinned at me. He leaned against his bike and in a slow, lazy motion, he drew an imaginary gun, took careful aim at the dead dog, and fired an imaginary shot.
“Pow,” he said. “Just like she does stuff like that every day. Pow!”
“Let’s go,” My father said.
We began walking up the path again. We left the canyon and made our way down to the street. There were no more dogs.
I walked, then rode in a daze, still not quite free of the dog I had killed. I had felt it die, and yet I had not died.
