Twilight of the Dogs
In the company of friends. And others. At the far end of the trail. Fiction By David Guterson

Ben took stock. He was in the sagelands, alone but for his dogs, in the deepest hour of night. The cold had entered his long-suffering joints, and his bladder pressed for attention. He was as stiff in his back as if the vertebrae were fused, his left eye was swollen shut, and his fingers were numb and useless. More, his left knee seemed incapable of bending, and his arthritic ankle throbbed. Ben rose on one elbow, put his hand on Tristan's head, and berated the dog for rousing him.

Rex, he saw, was out at 30 yards, head high in the sageland. The dog pranced ahead another five yards, stopped to cast for scent and listen, then turned in Ben's direction, gazed at him, and whined.

Ben didn't know what to make of his dogs or of their present animation. He'd seen Rex and Tristan fidget in the presence of porcupines, moles, skunks, owls, voles, and rattlesnakes, but he could not surmise what bothered them now, out here in the placid desert. There were only the stars and that rich, prominent moon, its surface broken by shadows, pocked by enormous craters. And moonlight silver over everything.

Propped on one elbow, immobilized by doubt, Ben watched his agitated dogs. He wanted to lie down again wrapped in his blanket and leave them to face, without his help, whatever was so disconcerting. Ben recollected hearing somewhere that coyotes sometimes worked in packs to lure dogs to untimely deaths, attacking viciously. For a moment he was certain there were coyotes about, and he peered nearsightedly into the desert as though to spot one against the sage. Then, thoroughly exasperated with himself for indulging his fear of shadows — of shapes that were nothing more than wraiths produced by a marijuana-addled mind — he drank from his water bottle. He hoped no effort would be required, that he might sleep again without interruption if his dogs would only settle down, stem their animal fear of the night. "Pipe down," he told them. "That's enough."

Tristan whimpered louder in reply and came to nuzzle Ben's face again with greater urgency.

Ben rose bitterly, then peed long and hard against the earth. It was satisfying to him here at the end of his days to pee with so much vigor. It was a ridiculous thing to be satisfied about, but still he was satisfied. His stream splashed against the ground. He stretched his back and revolved his head so that the bones in his neck cracked a little. He cleaned his glasses with his handkerchief, and when he slipped them on again, the moon appeared through his one good eye like highly polished marble. Everything it illuminated melted into shadows and was softly, darkly beautiful.

Ben pressed the heel of his palm against his head and hawked spit into the desert. Out to the north, as he stood beside Tristan with his blanket wrapped around him, he heard what he thought was the baying of hounds, a restless din far off somewhere, a chorus of dogs just audible, and he cupped his strong ear to listen. They were hounds all right, Ben decided, and they seemed to be moving closer, coming in his direction, perhaps, though not yet visible in shape or motion, instead a wild singing in the night, a yapping, frantic tumult. "Heel," he called to Rex then. "You get in here now."

He repeated himself more forcefully, until Rex, against his will, fell in beside Tristan, whimpering a little. The dog made several false starts to the north, turned in a circle, and whined. The baying of the hounds, though distant and faint across the hills, was audible now not just as a chorus but as a number of distinct hard-trailing hounds in the throes of heated pursuit. "Stay," said Ben. "Just stay there. We'll let them run right past us."

He regretted, deeply, the marijuana. The world was a viscous dream. He felt inhabited by a listlessness ill-suited to what might be needed. His limbs, he knew, would resist what he asked. He was too numb with cold, too much in ruins, unprepared for a pack of hounds bounding in from nowhere. Ben hoped that nothing would come of them. He hoped they would pass, a night tableau, a spectacle, something merely to be witnessed. He hoped Rex and Tristan would keep out of their way. But his dogs, barking maniacally, bolted into the night.

He called with threat and anger in his voice, but they ran off with a heedless certainty, beyond the sphere of his influence. He thought to call a second time, but they were moved, he saw, beyond his command, and in the next seconds he better understood them — for a shadow slid across the desert, a coyote, he saw, at a full-out run, and his dogs were giving chase.

Ben caught only a fleeting glance: the dark coyote swift in flight, its tail low, its ears tucked back, hurtling along like a ghost in the sage, approximately the size and shape of his Brittanies but with a bottle-shaped tail and longer muzzle. The shadow of motion passed before him and disappeared without warning, suddenly gone into a dip in the terrain, out of his line of sight. A spirit soundless across the desert, his dogs in clamorous pursuit of it, and Ben uncertain if what he had seen was real or a deception of the night.

He dropped his blanket into the sand and took up his side-by-side. He pried two shells from their vest loops, broke the gun open, nudged them in, and snapped the action shut. The shotgun, like the world itself, seemed part of a dope-inspired dream, an object flooded by silver moonlight. It was his father's gun, also the gun he had put in his own mouth earlier that morning. For a moment he regretted every gun he'd ever held in his hands, but he shook off the urge to stand pondering this, rolled his blanket, folded his poncho, and lashed them together with the empty duffel to the bottom of his rucksack. Finally he wrestled his arms through the straps and set off in pursuit of his dogs.

East of the breaks the land flattened out into gentle, unbroken prairie. There was moon and starlight enough to travel by as Ben twined between islands of sage, carrying his gun like the infantryman he'd been in Italy 53 years before. The baying grew closer, and his own dogs barked in the distance. He exhorted himself to overtake them, but the back of his left knee soon bound up, and he had to stop to knead it.

He came on a pair of wheel ruts across the sage. Probably they'd been made by rolling stock trucks releasing and rounding up cattle, but they seemed to have no reason to be there, like most human sign in the desert. He followed them for their easy walking and because they tended in the right direction — his dogs were off to the southeast, he guessed, though he couldn't know with certainty. The ruts hairpinned and he followed them for a while, until they hairpinned again. He stopped in their bend to listen for his dogs, but the baying hounds were so close now, their cries mingled with his dogs' barking, and he found himself confused. He stood listening to no avail, and again he regretted the marijuana, its discombobulating effect.

Ben stood as though waiting for the flush of birds and watched the ridgeline a quarter-mile north, where the stars disappeared behind crenellated rock, for it seemed to him that from just out there the cry of hounds was gathering. A star plummeted down the length of the heavens, and then a roiling shadow broke over the hill, bursting forth in a dust storm of sorts, hounds pell-mell and hell-bent southward, a sinuous, frenetic pack of them barreling down the ridge. They were too far off for Ben to identify, but he took them to be a half-dozen or more, and he guessed from their rolling, leaping gait — gracefully fast, like cheetahs or antelopes — that these were Irish wolfhounds, the coyote hunters of his youth.

It had been 50 years, but he remembered the wolfhounds' vaguely terrifying size, their power and lithesome restlessness, and it seemed to him in the desert now that these shadowy creatures spilling through the night had just that sort of galloping height, that equine size and speed. They sprinted across the broken terrain without the slightest hindrance. They killed, Ben knew, for the pleasure of it. They were thought by some to be valorous dogs, desirable as guardians and companions, clever, trustworthy, gentle with children, well disposed and tolerant, but Ben had no faith in their goodness and didn't count himself among their admirers. They were too much enamored of killing.

The pack surged toward him, though at an angle to miss him narrowly, so that he had time to count their number and note their stride and size. Among the six he saw at least two as large as wild yearling colts, and the pack of dogs in their fury and noise reminded him of desert mustangs. In a panic he raised his side-by-side, his thumb against the safety tang, to kill the lead dog in its tracks should the pack turn full in his direction. He had no reason to believe it would, only an inchoate fear born of nothing distinct.

Time seemed fragmented. The distance between moments was greater than usual, so that he saw the hounds at their close approach with a particular detail prominent — the bubbling slather and foam hanging from the jaws of the lead dog, glistening in the moonlight, strands of silvery mucus flying from its teeth and gums. Then all was a blur until the passing of the hounds resolved itself into a crystalline frieze: the last hound's high-speed gait broken down into two clear frames of suspension, of airy, springing levitation, the acrobatic feat of touching the ground with only one paw — impossible — at any given moment. Even as Ben made all this out, the hounds went by him as though he was nothing but an apparition in the desert. He lowered his gun and checked the safety.

Then they were gone, fading to the south, their baying squalls still trailing them, and Ben, suspended briefly in their wake, stirred himself into action. He fell in behind and gave chase with as much zeal as he could muster.

It was a matter of proceeding as if on a forced march. He couldn't hear beyond his own breathing, nor could he stop to let it subside, since speed, he felt, was essential, his dogs had innocently tossed themselves between these hounds and their quarry. Spurred on by thoughts of the worst that could be, he gave himself to a fretful haste that magnified his pains. He limped ahead as fast as he could, making his way by the light of the moon and squinting into the distance.

In 15 or maybe 50 minutes, he worked his way to the bottom of a draw choked with sumacs and willows. The place was mad with the noise of hounds, their guttural fury and desperation, and as he thrashed through the thickets it seemed to him he was in their very midst. He could see no sign of them, only hear, though the full moon poured over everything, illuminating close details. He felt certain the doomed coyote was here, having found a covert where trickery might triumph over speed. The hounds were trying to roust it out, rooting and tearing at the bramble to expose it lying low. Like any animal brought to bay, the coyote had nothing to lose by waiting. It would cling to the earth, deep in its covert, its smallness now its only salvation, while beyond the thorns its enemies thrashed to get it by the throat.

Ben beat his way to the lip of the draw, stood above it in the open sage, then dropped wearily to one knee and called for Tristan and Rex, beseeching each by name. He wished he could catch a glimpse of them. His apprehension was greater now. They should have come at the sound of his voice. He had no trust in the wolfhounds, and the cries emanating from the thickets below were fraught with cruelty.

A dark shape plunged from the sumac thicket not 20 yards from where he knelt, a soundless shadow low to the ground and almost formless in its haste, though Ben noted its bottle-shaped tail, canted left and deployed like a rudder, as the animal became aware of his presence and instantly changed course. He watched it twist off in a puff of dust and disappear into the sage. Behind it, three times as large, with arched loins and pointed muzzle, a wolfhound cleared the tangled draw with as much loud bucking as a lassoed horse and charged after it. Then four more hounds emerged, and amid them he saw Rex.

Ben stumbled to higher ground. Out in the sage the hounds held moonlight, their flanks shimmering as they ate up ground, their long tails curled. Rex, already, had fallen far behind, while the distance between the hounds and the coyote diminished with astonishing speed. The lead hound surged, the coyote veered in a twisting evasion, the hound found it smoothly. The coyote wheeled to face them all with its teeth bared, snarling.

Two hounds leaped to hamstring the coyote; a third locked jaws between its shoulder blades, while the lead dog spun and drove in low to seize it by the throat. The coyote cartwheeled in a spray of dust, but the hounds clung heedlessly to it, addressing its death from various angles, thrashing as though to rend the animal, pinning it to the dusty ground. Then Rex drove into the fray.

Ben, struggling free of his rucksack, plunged downhill with his gun. At the same moment, off to the east, he spotted a light on the ridge crest — the solitary headlamp of a vehicle — and then he recognized the silhouette of a dirt bike raising dust in a high channel as it careened in his direction.

He saw the world through his one good eye, through the wire-rimmed glasses from another time, appearing as though underwater as he stumbled down toward the welter of dogs, the dirt bike approaching through the sage. There was no time to ponder anything. The hounds, he saw, had finished with the coyote and were turning their attention to Rex.

His dog seemed astonished to find matters so, wheeling back against the tide of hounds, growling and baring his teeth. The hounds advanced with mad insistence and sent Rex sprawling into the dust, and then one seized him firmly at the hindquarters, another sank his teeth into his withers, and a third clutched him at the throat.

Ben lashed into their midst yelling, raised his shotgun toward the stars, and fired a deafening warning. Immediately, the hounds desisted, tongues hanging, whimpering, except that one still had Rex by the throat and tossed him left and right.

Ben waded forward and slammed the butt of his shotgun against the ribs of this hound. He saw how desperate Rex was now, pinned by the throat against the earth, his breathing hollow, reedy. Ben kicked the wolfhound as hard as he could, first in the ribs and next in the head, swearing at it under his breath, but it was as though he hadn't kicked at all. And now there was no time for anything else; Rex was dying as he stood and watched, and he had to act without compromise and in a way he had much resisted acting in the years since his war ended. He set his teeth, grimacing, then pushed the barrel of his Winchester home against the ribs he'd kicked before, and squeezed the gun's front trigger.

He had no time to contemplate the outcome or to deliberate with morbid revulsion on the destructive force of his shotgun. Instead, he knelt to look at Rex.

Rex, on his side, twisted slowly in the dust, exerting himself like a drunk man. He meant to rise but could not find the means, and howled a note of pain such as Ben had never heard issue from the throat of any dog. Something like human suffering was in it — a high, piercing wail. The dog's hindquarters were clearly ravaged, and Ben feared his spine was broken. "I'm sorry, Rex," he said.

He tried to put a hand on Rex's flank, but the dog writhed, his howl surged higher, and Ben thought better of it. The wolfhounds leered at him uncertainly, keeping a respectful distance. Ben swore at one, and it loped away.

The dirt bike stopped in front of him, throwing sand from under its tires, and the rider, whom he could not see — the man had his headlamp aimed in Ben's direction — cut the low-throated motor. Ben caught a glimpse of one heavy boot as it came to rest against the sand, its steel toe protruding through the leather. He threw his free hand over his forehead and tried to make out the face of the rider, but to no avail: He was jacklighted. He was as blind and incapacitated as a deer in a car's high beams.

"Supposing you put out that light," he said. "The thing is blinding me."

"Listen here," the rider answered. "You're on private property, damn it. You pick up that gun of yours. Carefully."

Ben did so, holding it by the breechblock, in his right hand.

"It's a side-by-side," the rider said. "I believe I can see that from here."

"You're right," Ben answered. "It is."

"Well, you fired two shots," the rider said. "So unless you reloaded after shooting my dog, the barrels are empty right now."

"I didn't reload," Ben said. "Why don't I break the gun open?"

"No," said the rider. "I don't want that. I want you to toss it out in front of you. With one hand, as far as you can. And I want you to do it now."

Ben hesitated. The Winchester had been his father's gun. "Look," he said. "Throwing it that way might damage it. What if I just put it down?"

Again there was a pause from behind the light, the disembodied voice gone silent. "All right," the rider said at last. "You set it down there in front of you. I'm watching. You go ahead."

Ben set the gun down gently. "There," he said. "That's that now. I'm going to see to my dog."

"Hold on," said the rider. "I want you to go on over there and get beside that dog you killed and take a look at him."

"What?"

"Get over there and take a look. Just go on now. Do it."

"Listen," said Ben. "I'm sorry he's dead. But it's my dog who needs attending to, if — "

"That dog's going to be all right. You get over there."

"Listen," said Ben. "I — "

"Look," the rider said firmly. "Just you do like you're told. I got my gun pointed at your head and I want you over there."

"All right," Ben told him. "I'm going."

He stumbled to the dead wolfhound. It lay on its side about five feet off, where the force of the shot had thrown it. Its midsection, its withers and flanks, were bright with viscera and bits of white bone, and its head lay tilted at an unnatural angle, as if it had been severed and then reconnected incorrectly. "OK," Ben said. "Now what?"

The rider adjusted his dirt bike slightly so as to throw a full light on Ben. "Read his collar there for me," he demanded. "The tag's at his throat. Read it."

Ben dropped stiffly to one knee and took the slain dog's collar. He worked it around and found the tag. He squinted for a long moment. "Jim," he said. "I think it reads Jim. I can't tell. My eyes are bad."

"Jim," said the rider. "Damn."

"I'm sorry," Ben said. "I am."

The rider again fell silent. "Jim," he said after awhile.

"He had my dog by the throat," Ben explained.

"You shouldn't have done it," the rider said. "I don't want to hear about it."

"Fine," said Ben. "You won't."

"Damn," said the rider. "Come out in front now. And keep your hands up high."

Ben rose and stepped around the dog, his face averted from the light.

"On the ground, now. Face down, go on. And spread everything out."

"What for?"

"Just do like you're told."

"I have to look after my dog now."

"He can look after himself, damn it. You get down on the ground."

Ben lay down on his belly. He rested his cheek against the sand.

"All right," said the rider. "You turn your head. Look off toward the west there."

Ben did so.

"Just so you don't get nervous," said the rider. "I'm going to take a walk out here and pick your gun off the ground."

"Go ahead," said Ben.

"And this coyote here," the rider said. "I'm going to take his tail."

"All right," said Ben. "Go ahead."

He waited while the rider went about his business. One of the wolfhounds sat in Ben's view, dour and bored-looking. Ben listened to Rex's whimpering and the sound of the rider's boots. Then to the sound of his shotgun broke open, the metallic snap of the action. "Say," said the rider. "A regular antique. And some fancy looking engraving."

"It's a Winchester 21," said Ben.

"What do you figure it's worth?" said the rider. "Because replacing Jim'll cost me some. A dog like that isn't cheap."

"I don't really know," said Ben.

"Anyway," the rider informed him. "I can't exactly leave this here. You're liable to shoot me in the back with it. So I'm going to sell your shotgun off and get myself a new hound."

"Now wait a minute," Ben said. "That's highway robbery."

"Shut your mouth," said the rider. "You just shut your mouth now." He snapped the gun's action closed again. "Smooth," he said. "You just stay right there. Don't you move a muscle."

Ben made no reply.

The rider whistled his hounds in about him. Ben heard the soft trotting sounds of their feet. "I ought to make you bury Jim," the rider announced bitterly. "I ought to make you paw out a hole and give Jim a decent grave."

"I didn't have a choice," Ben said again. "Jim was strangling my Brittany."

He struggled to his feet, brushed the dirt from his jacket. "Shoot me if you want," he told the rider. "I'm looking after my dog."

"Shooting you'd just be more trouble," the rider answered him. "If shooting you could bring Jim back, I wouldn't even think to hesitate."

"It couldn't be helped," Ben said. "He was killing my dog, like I told you. I didn't have a choice."

"Well, now you don't have a shotgun," said the rider. "So it can't happen again."

"Go to hell," Ben said.

In the nimbus of light around the rider his remaining wolfhounds milled. Ben could see them in silhouette, turning restlessly.

"I'll tell you what's got me worried," said the rider. "Maybe while I'm tearing out of here, you'll try'n plug me in the back."

"With what?" said Ben. "You stole my gun."

"With whatever else you got on you. Hidden down your pant leg."

The rider started up his bike with a hard shove that registered beyond the light. "I'll tell you what," he said above its roar. "If you can draw that fast and hit a moving target, 'specially blinded the way you are, you deserve to get your gun back."

He spun out suddenly in a spray of sand aimed in Ben's direction. The dirt bike turned, gathered speed, and found its way between clumps of sage, the pack of wolfhounds following it as though on a casual training run, the rider intentionally veering to and fro in an effort to dodge the bullets he imagined Ben was aiming at his back. But, of course, there were no such bullets. Ben had already turned away to kneel, a doctor, beside his dog.

Rex seemed languid in a way suggesting shock, yet his breathing came neither rapid nor shallow, nor did he heave with a racing pulse, nor did he seem submerged in a torpor, but merely patient with the state of things, containing his distress in some private space, yielding himself to fate.

Ben rose and located his rucksack, uphill in the sage. He knelt again beside his dog and with his medical kit propped open beside him, his headlamp fixed just over his eyes, took stock of Rex's wounds.

"I'm sorry, Rex," he whispered.

Using moist towelettes from his kit, he scrubbed his fingers thoroughly. He unraveled a length of sterile gauze and draped it over one shoulder. Gently he put one knee on the dog's head, the other in his rib cage. Rex lurched with a feeble resistance, growled, and lurched again. Ben formed the gauze into a hanging loop and maneuvered it over Rex's muzzle. "I'm sorry," he said. "I know it's not pleasant." And then he snugged it moderately tight, crossed the ends beneath the dog's chin, brought them up behind his ears and tied them off at the top of his head, so that Rex looked like a soldier with a head wound dressed on the field of battle. "There," said Ben. "We're done."

Lifting his pinning weight from the dog, he lay a hand against Rex's flank and stroked him soothingly. "You're all right," he said. The dog whimpered through the makeshift muzzle. He did not seem entirely resigned; there was a hint of anxiety in his voice.

"You're all right," Ben said again. "I'm just going to look."

Under the headlamp, working through the fur, following the evidence of blood matted there, he took account of Rex's wounds: The left hamstring, between the hip and stifle, was punctured and swollen from hemorrhage; from shoulder to shoulder, low across the withers, a long run of skin had been ripped open, a gaping tear he could retract with his fingers to reveal the transparent fascia, the blunt tips of the spinal column, and the neat bone of the shoulder blades; and finally a broad tearing of the skin at Rex's throat, exposing one jugular.

For many years Ben had played, informally, the role of climbing expedition doctor, and his kit testified to that. He carried Compazine, erythromycin, butterfly bandages, roller gauze, Telfa, and adhesive bandages. He also carried a scalpel with a set of blades and suture material in packets. Ben had field-stitched pocketknife cuts and an ice-ax laceration. He had, in the field, set a fractured arm, had reduced both shoulder and hip dislocations, and had seen to the construction of makeshift litters, transport slings, and crutches. Yet he had never field-stitched a dog before, and that was needed now. Rex had a desert journey in front of him. He would need his wounds closed first.

There was plenty of downed willow on the bank of the draw, and Ben dragged out what he could in ten minutes and with his spearpoint blade cut shavings. His cigarette lighter sparked sluggishly, so he squeezed it inside his armpit. He lit one of the paraffin fire starters and built, quickly, an extravagant blaze. The wizened willow burned hot and clean. He heaped long branches of it on, then sat by Rex, watching him, one hand brushing his coat. After a while, when the dog seemed calm, he washed his hands a second time, drew out his suture needle, opened a packet of two-aught nylon suture — the only sort he had on hand — and rinsed the needle in antiseptic.

"All right," he said. "It'll hurt a little, Rex. A lot less than what you've been through, though. We'll just go at it carefully."

He pulled up his coat sleeves, adjusted his headlamp. He pinned Rex again beneath his knees, and held him down firmly with his left hand, which seemed the only workable position. He would have to throw stitches in a one-handed fashion, in a continuous pattern, like a seamstress. "Here we go," he whispered.

Rex heaved beneath him when he threw the first stitch and again when he tied the anchor, but after that the dog surrendered. He was braver than Ben had anticipated, more patient in the face of pain. Rex had always seemed too brash, too headlong and imprudently eager, but now he acquitted himself with a decorous restraint and endured nobly. Ben felt a grudging admiration.

With the light he knew there was no choice left but to go in search of Tristan. He walked the rim of the willow draw, crossed at a swale of low wheatgrass that wet his boots with morning dew, and reconnoitered up the farther side with the steam puffing from his mouth. Twice he stopped to call into the silence, and in the heightened stillness that followed, he listened carefully. No answer came from any quarter, nor did he really expect one. For hours now he'd sensed the dog's fate, and it angered him to imagine it, this dog he had known for ten full years as a placid, sober, sensible companion, this dog he had brought home at seven weeks, not to hunt birds — he was not hunting then — but because he had wanted a dog in his life as a vestige of childhood. He'd seen Tristan through ringworm, coccidiosis, cherry eye, yeast otitis, then through a series of old-age maladies — gastroenteritis, a perineal hernia, a dislocating kneecap. He'd observed the dog's steady decline, his need to sit whenever possible, his waning zeal to cut up cover or pound his way through heavy brush, his great thoroughness everywhere to make up for an advancing sloth. That was when Ben brought home Rex, in the hope that the young dog might learn what he could in the seasons before Tristan died.

Another 20 minutes passed before Ben found Tristan at the base of a willow, sprawled in the position in which he slept, so that at first Ben hoped it was only sleep, until he saw Tristan's broken neck. The dog's head had been wrenched and distended, the skin at the throat torn open, the jugulars both severed. A penumbra of blood surrounded Tristan's head and stained the ground under him. Already his upturned eye had clouded, entirely obscuring the lens.

Ben carried Tristan up into the sageland and at a little distance from his willow fire dug up the ground with the entrenching tool he carried in his rucksack. The grave was shallow and imperfect, but he had no strength to give Tristan more, and he laid him to rest with a little less care than he might have mustered at better times. Nevertheless, it was a grave of sorts, and the dog deserved at least that. He knelt beside it for a moment, then pressed the dog's eyes closed and shoveled the sand back over him.

It was that odd morning hour when clouds roll over after a clear fall night has passed, clouds that would douse the sage for an hour before marching eastward across the desert toward the Selkirk Mountains. Sitting beside his willow fire, Ben noted them, first and foremost, as a transformation in the texture of the air and a subduing of the morning light, as something imminent to be felt in all things, a sensation he remembered from childhood. He watched the sky and then, a third time, tucked his fingers under Rex's right hind leg to press against the femoral artery, measuring the dog's resting pulse, which seemed satisfactory enough. Then, his back warmed by the flames, he turned to watch the clouds come. They were high, dark plumes, fully massed in vertical columns like the ramparts of battleships, their lower reaches dense with rain. Ben, in the face of them, stirred himself and urgently loaded his rucksack.

He stood with his compass in his palm and estimated that in three miles of walking, shading slightly northeast, he would hit a piece of section road, or perhaps the reclamation project's West Canal, and then he could follow the roads or the canal another five miles into George. It was shorter, he guessed, than the walk into Vantage, and while he could not outrun the rain, he could get a jump on it if he set out now, and with luck he might even hail a ride, though chances were slim, in the Frenchman Hills, that many cars would be on the roads. George, he decided, might be ten miles off, which in his state of health and with the dog to carry meant the better part of the day ahead. His work stood starkly cut out for him.

With his folding saw he went down into the draw and cut two willow poles. He brought them out, smoothed them patiently, then laid one on either side of the dog, drew them into the shape of a V, and lashed their ends together. It took time to adjust things to his standards, but eventually he made a sling of Rex's blanket and hung it carefully. He ran a loop from the pole ends and slung it over his shoulder to use as a makeshift harness.

It was a travois of the sort once used by Indians to move loads over the plains. As Ben pulled it, Rex swayed where he hung, snared like so much cargo. Still, it worked acceptably. The lashings held up sufficiently. Ben hauled his dog across the desert, and his travois scored the sand.

He felt a damp wind blowing at his back, and the first large raindrops began slapping hard against his shoulders. He remembered the poncho in his rucksack, but it seemed impossible to wear it and pull Rex without overheating. Ben was already drenched in a sweat that turned cold whenever he stopped, so he pushed on under the rain, pausing often to catch his breath with his elbows against his knees. The cold rain soaked the crown of his head, his neck, back, and ears.

Sometimes, journeying, he thought of other things, but mostly his mind was returned to the present by his agonized discomfort. He was worn-out, utterly exhausted, and at times his discipline fragmented and he felt himself begin to cave. The rain moved east, leaving the morning dour, the desert sand darkly stained with water, the sagebrush dripping wet. Ben's periods of rest lengthened. There was a rhythm to his thoughts when he struggled forward — panic alternating with redoubled efforts to cultivate detachment. Finally he rested on his back for so long that he had to quell the urge to rest permanently before setting out once more.

In two hours Ben left the sage behind and entered into a vast, dreary field, turned to lie fallow for the cold season. He crossed its unbroken, sodden expanse, traveling toward a line of power pylons and carefully keeping the big river bluffs over his shoulder to the southwest. Tucked under a ridge stood a stack of moldering hay bales five times as large as any farmhouse and covered with black tarpaulins. Ben came down into wheel ruts and a sign — hunting by permit only — nailed into a fence post, and another that said leased hunting. The weeds at roadside had been burned off. It occurred to him that yes, he had trespassed last night, as the rider had indicated. He cleared a rise and south, toward Royal Slope, lay blond, sweeping, dry wheat fields, and north toward the Caliche Lakes grew trellised apple trees stretching geometrically across the plateau reach.

He came down out of the Frenchman Hills, tortured beneath his burden. Below stretched big fields all disked under, and standing fields of grain corn. On the slope grew gala apples trained on spindles in the European fashion, and a broad neat swath of red delicious trees in umbrella form, with centers open. The branch props were stacked by the orchard. There were no bins in sight. At last he found a branch canal, which he knew to be laden with pathogens and the excreta of cattle, water he would never imagine drinking at any but desperate times. Now he filled his bottles with it, dropped into each an iodine pill, waited for the crystals to dissolve, and drank with steady greed. The taste was abhorrent; he spat it out. He untied Rex's traveling hammock and let him lap water from his palm.

Ben stroked the dog's coat softly. Rex sat on the blanket looking about, pawing tentatively. Finally, he pushed into a standing position, and keeping one foot free of the ground, hobbled forward on the other three.

"You're looking good," Ben called after him. "You're looking better, Rex."

The dog limped off about 20 yards and with considerable trouble, whining a little, defecated in the sand. He tried for a time to lick his wounds. He turned, hopping, ran his tongue along his hamstring, poked his nose into folds of his coat, then hobbled off another ten yards and urinated feebly, stumbling in the midst of his stream. Licking his wounds again, he limped to the blanket, where Ben was already dismantling the travois. "Looks like you can walk," Ben said.

They limped on, two invalids, two lame wanderers in the desert. They hobbled across the plateau reach and at noon came out on a section road. They passed a pile of rubble in a ditch — stone, bricks, slab concrete — and then a draw strewn with worn-out tires and the rusting hulks of appliances — refrigerators, freezers, dryers. There were dusty side roads, irrigation pumps, the canal water drifting lazily in its course of half-round concrete. A sign sat mounted on a metal post, purple loosestrife harms wetlands and waterways, and a few cattails grew here and there where the irrigating water spilled over. They'd come into true farm country. There were mobile homes with satellite dishes. There were lines of poplars, irrigated fields, and newly planted orchards. They came to an intersection with a paved two-lane that Ben guessed was the Beverly-Burke Road as it cut north from Low Gap Pass back in the Frenchman Hills.

They traveled on across the plateau, past mailboxes, newspaper flutes, and big aluminum silos. They surprised three coots on a brackish pond, which began to swim as Ben and Rex approached, paddling silently around a corner. The plain lay broken by shade trees and silhouetted farm buildings far into the east. There were no cars anywhere. Sometime after two o'clock they passed what remained of the George Feed Store, with its window frames devoid of glass, a mobile-home park laid out behind poplars, a gravel yard full of irrigating pipe, and finally a street of unkempt homes with ragged squares of lawn. They passed the Church of the Assembly of God and the George Community Hall. There was a sign in English and then in Spanish: warning neighborhood crime watch. alerta se esta vigilando le vecindad. They limped on into the town of George, the doctor first and behind him his dog, and when they came across a boy behind a chain-link fence who was changing an excavator's hydraulic hose — a boy dressed in a mechanic's grease suit, haggard-thin, his hair worn long, a cigarette hanging from his lips — Ben asked in a weary voice if there was a vet somewhere in town. The boy cast an eye briefly over them and then, adjusting his cigarette, replied that the vet was up in Quincy, 11 miles north.

Ben and Rex shuffled on. They hiked along Montmorency Boulevard, with its median grass and poplar trees. They passed a sign for a Lutheran Church declaring its membership in the Missouri Synod. The leaves had come down everywhere, and the wind had whisked them into the gutters, where they were ground to an auburn paste.

With his dog at his side, Ben crossed the interstate and walked along the verge of Highway 281, the way north to Quincy. The road made a bend, then straightened to run through fields of seed peas, potatoes, alfalfa, peppermint, and wheat. There was a stand of low bare walnut trees and a feedlot thronged with cattle. It was not familiar as the country of Ben's youth, because it had been so deeply alchemized by the coming of irrigated water. What he recalled as wastes of sagebrush broken by coulees and willow draws were now fields and orchards. The river of his youth had been diverted and poured out broadly across the land to seep through dirt to the roots of crops instead of running in its bed. The river was no longer a river, and the desert was no longer a desert. Nothing was as it had been.

He knew what had happened to the sagelands. He himself had helped burn them. Then men like his father had seized the river without a trace of evil in their hearts, sure of themselves but ignorant, and children of their time entirely, with no other bearings to rely on. Irrigators and fruit-tree growers, they believed the river to be theirs. His own life spanned that time and this, and so he believed in the old fast river as much as he believed in apple orchards, and yet he saw that the two were at odds, the river defeated that apples might grow as far away as Royal Slope. It made no more sense to love the river and at the same time kill it growing apples than it made sense to love small birds on the wing and shoot them over pointing dogs. But he'd come into the world in another time, a time immune to these contradictions, and in the end he couldn't shake old ways any more than he could shake his name.

He was coming into the place he'd sought when he'd set out on his journey. From Quincy it was six miles to the Columbia. Over the crest of Babcock Ridge and across the mouth of Lynch Coulee, beyond the trading post at Trinidad, and then upriver toward Rock Island. Northwest of Baird and Willow Springs, but southwest of Moses Coulee. Southwest of the Burlington Northern line and the road to Palisades. It was the place Ben wanted to end his life, if he could only get to it. A surcease from living where his life had started. A neat, uncomplicated end.

This story is excerpted from David Guterson's new novel, East of the Mountains, which will be published this month by Harcourt Brace.