Free Tooth and Claw by T. C. Boyle Page A

time. “I hope you don’t mind my asking,” she said in her hush of a voice, “but did you ever have a dog here?”
    He stood looking down at her, gripping his drink, feeling awkward and foolish in his own house. He was thinking of Seymour (or “See More,” because as a pup he was always running off after things in the distance), picturing him now for the first time in how many years? Something passed through him then, a pang of regret carried in his blood, in his neurons: Seymour. He’d almost succeeded in forgetting him. “Yes,” he said. “How did you know?”
    She smiled. She was leaning back against the wall now, cradling her knees in the net of her interwoven fingers. “I’ve been training myself. My senses, I mean.” She paused, still smiling up at him. “Did you know that when the Ninemile wolves came down into Montana from Alberta they were following scent trails laid down years before?Think about it. All that weather, the seasons, trees falling and decaying. Can you imagine that?”
    “Cara’s allergic,” he said. “I mean, that’s why we had to get rid of him. Seymour. His name was Seymour.”
    There was a long braying burst of laughter from Ben Ober, who had an arm round the husband’s shoulder and was painting something in the air with a stiffened forefinger. Cara stood just beyond him, with the La Portes, her face glowing as if it had been basted. Celia La Porte looked from him to the girl and back again, then arched her eyebrows wittily and raised her long-stemmed glass of Viognier, as if toasting him. All three of them burst into laughter. Julian turned his back.
    “You didn’t take him to the pound—did you?” The girl’s eyes went flat. “Because that’s a death sentence, I hope you realize that.”
    “Cara found a home for him.”
    They both looked to Cara then, her shining face, her anchor-woman’s hair. “I’m sure,” the girl said.
    “No, really. She did.”
    The girl shrugged, looked away from him. “It doesn’t matter,” she said with a flare of anger, “dogs are just slaves anyway.”
    KAMALA AND AMALA
    T HE R EVEREND S INGH had wanted to return to the site the following afternoon and excavate the den, convinced that these furtive night creatures were in fact human children, children abducted from their cradles and living under the dominion of beasts—unbaptized and unsaved, their eternal souls at risk—but urgent business called him away to the south. When he returned, late in the evening, ten days later, he sat over a dinner of cooked vegetables, rice and
dal
, and listened as Chunarem told him of the wolf bitch that had haunted the village two years back after her pups had been removed from a den in the forest and sold for a few
annas
apiece at the Khuar market. She could be seen as dusk fell, her dugs swollen and glistening with extruded milk, her eyes shining with an unearthly blue lightagainst the backdrop of the forest. People threw stones, but she never flinched. Everywhere she left diggings in the earth for farmers to step into on their way out to the fields, attempting, some said, to memorialize that den that had been robbed—or to avenge it. And she howled all night from the fringes of the village, howled so that it seemed she was inside the walls of every hut simultaneously, crooning her sorrow into the ears of each sleeping villager. The village dogs kept hard by, and those that didn’t were found in the morning, their throats torn out. “It was she,” the Reverend exclaimed, setting down his plate as the candles guttered and moths beat at the netting. “She was the abductress—it’s as plain as morning.”
    A few days later he got up a party that included several railway men and returned to the termite mound, bent on rescue. In place of the rifle he carried a stout cudgel cut from a
mahua
branch, and he’d thought to bring a weighted net along as well. The sun hung overhead. All was still. And then the hired beaters started in, the noise of