The Last Days of Dogtown

She should have thrown him out when she first walked in from Easter’s. She should have shown some pride. Even now she should shake him and demand an explanation, an answer, something. But she said nothing. She inhaled the familiar woody smell of him and took comfort from the warmth of his body under her blanket.

Judy stared at the back of his head and willed him to turn and face her.

She had survived without him, of course. She had fed herself and cleaned her house, earned enough money to get by, and even acquired some new acquaintances in

Gloucester. She showed herself to be self-possessed and self-sufficient, so no one would suspect how her heart beat only half the time, waiting for Cornelius. If he had turned to face her, she would have begged him to return the next night and the next. She would have wept and pleaded.

But Cornelius remained still. She knew that they had no future together and that his presence in her bed was a fluke of some sort. And finally, she preferred his silence to hearing him say good-bye.

Judy tried not to fall asleep. She thought of small things she had wanted to tell Cornelius, like how she’d begun cooking in his mother’s fashion, putting blackberries and

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ramps into squirrel stew. And how the cellar he’d dug for her was so dry and cool, she could store butter as well as turnips down there. And that she’d made him a pair of stockings years ago and still hadn’t unraveled the yarn for another purpose.

Worn out at last by her long day, Judy slipped into a shallow pool of a dream. She walked with Cornelius, bare-foot, through the warm water of a low tide on the beach at Little Good Harbor. It was a sunny day, and other people were strolling there, too. Ruth walked arm in arm with Easter, and the Dogtown pups chased one another.

Judy woke up at dawn, shivering. The heat from the fire that Cornelius had carefully banked did nothing to warm her. She was alone. Even Greyling was gone. She turned her face to the mattress and pulled the blanket over her head and tried to think of a reason to get out of bed.

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Greyling

Greyling had stayed on the floor rather than take her usual spot behind the woman’s knees, unsure

of her place with the man on the bed. She

watched him rise before first light, keeping perfectly still as he ran his hands over the chair and table. When he put her cloak to his nose, he caught the dog’s eye and held her gaze long enough to show her that he belonged there, even if he never returned.

She slipped out the door behind him as he left, and stood beside the house while he hurried away. Greyling shook herself head to tail and raised her nose to sniff the new day. The frozen ground was painful beneath her feet as she padded in the direction of the smallest of the pack’s many warrens, a tunnel dug below a rocky outcropping near the now-frozen swamp.

She would stop at certain houses if she caught the scent of cooking, but there were others where she did not bother.

Generous or indifferent, gentle or cruel, people were features of the landscape, as important as the location of fresh water.

One by one, men and women represented either a threat or a meal; survival required that she remember which was which.

Greyling spent most of her days outdoors, like the other dogs. But she was not fully a member of the Dogtown pack,

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and never would be. She had not been born there. She held no rank. She would never bear a litter, and she was not even permitted inside the oldest burrows, which had been dug by a generation of dogs long dead.

When food was plentiful, the grey dog ate what they left for her. On summer days when all of them lay together in the high pasture, basking and panting in the sun, she positioned herself a little distance away. There was no shame in being the lowest among them. That was simply the order of things.

Greyling had turned up in Dogtown not quite fully grown, starved and skittish. She found her way up from the harbor to the hills and hid in the woods, watching the way of things, learning her manners. The dogs rarely went inside a house in the summer, but when it grew cold, the

y scratched softly at doors. They did not show their teeth and took what was given to them with a soft mouth. They left no droppings near the houses, nor did one dog enter when another was inside, except on the bitterest days, when all animals huddled together as a matter of life or death.