An excerpt from In a Dog’s World. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead to the next chapter.
The new students were all quite excited to visit the dining hall. Except for the few rare students who’d had a chance to visit Isleywood while deciding which college to attend, this was the first time any of them had been in the dining hall where they would be taking their meals everyday for the next year.
The upperclassmen assured the new students quite vociferously that the food wouldn’t usually be this good. Since there were so few of students on campus this early, the dining hall had ordered a bunch of take-out instead of bringing in the usual chefs for one night.
The dining hall was in a large building with high ceilings. At first, Katasha thought it might be a well maintained relic from the age of humans, retrofitted to serve the smaller stature of its new occupants. The details weren’t right though. In real retrofitted buildings, the doors were either quite large or recessed inside a much larger original frame. The windows tended to be higher. Katasha concluded that this building had simply been designed to mimic the style of a classic human building. It was a nice effect, full of history and power.
For herself, Katasha had never believed in the preeminence of humans. Certainly, history showed that humans had existed, and, in their time, they’d held an impressive empire that spanned across the face of the planet. However, Katasha saw no reason to believe that humans had left plans for dogs and cats to follow. She saw no reason to believe that humans had any greater claim to knowledge and wisdom than the sentient creatures who’d followed them.
If anything, Katasha thought that the sudden disappearance of humanity, nearly five centuries ago, should cast doubt on the First Racer beliefs. It was much more likely that humans had simply died out than that they’d abandoned their home world on a mission to the heavens for some arcane reason that First Racers could never seem to be pinned down on. Nonetheless, it was a pretty mythology.
The dining hall had rows of long tables down one side and collections of round tables on the other. Tonight, the entire Intro to Isleywood group was small enough to fit around one of the long tables. They sat at the table closest to the kitchens. The upperclassmen clustered together at one end, and the new students took up the rest of the table.
Katasha found herself sitting with Jimothy and Claire from her hiking group. Howell, however, was down at the far end with the other upperclassmen. Katasha hadn’t had a chance to talk to him yet, and she was beginning to feel very silly for thinking that their prom date had meant anything at all to him.
“Have any of you met your room mates yet?” Jimothy asked anyone and everyone around the table.
His bearded face gave him a serious look beyond his age, but Katasha knew that was simply an illusion of the breed. Or else, it might be. Bearded breeds tended to look serious. She wasn’t sure about this guy, though — with him, it might be accurate. So far, he’d been acting as serious as his bearded face made him look.
“I know my roommate’s supposed to be around here,” Jimothy added. “Anyone met a guy named August?”
“Augustus, you mean?” Turtle woofed in his deep voice, looking down the table to Jimothy. “That’d be me.” He stuck a paw out as if to shake paws with Jimothy, but there were too many other students between them for that to be practical. “At your service, but call me Turtle.”
A few other room mates found each other during dinner, but Katasha knew her room mate wouldn’t be at that long table.
After dinner, they all went back to the gymnasium. The upperclassmen set up their sleeping bags in a far corner and promptly went to sleep. A few of the more serious seeming new students — including Jimothy and Claire — followed suit. Some of the others were clearly too excited and restless to go straight to sleep on what truly amounted to their first night at college.
“Does anyone have a pack of cards?” Turtle whispered to the others who were still awake, gathered in the pool of light that stretched into the gymnasium from a light in the hallway. “We need something to do.”
“That one guy does,” another dog offered, pointing at Jimothy who was already snoring in his sleeping bag. “He was shuffling them all through dinner.”
“Perfect!” Turtle said. “He’s my roommate; I’m sure he won’t mind if I borrow them.”
Turtle crept over and gently liberated the pack of playing cards from Jimothy’s paw. The Jack Russell boy had been holding them even in his sleep.
Turtle took the cards out of their box and lazily shuffled them. They moved much more loosely in his paws than in Jimothy’s. “This game is called Rat Bite,” he said. “I’ll deal the cards into the center, and I want each of you to slam your paws down on a card whenever you see one you need for your hand.”
Jimothy dealt a hand of cards to each of them. Katasha wasn’t sure how interested she was in playing cards, but she knew she was too worked up to sleep.
The card games went on until late into the night. Slowly, different dogs gave up and went off to their sleeping bags until it was just Katasha, Turtle, and a dachshund. All three of them were addled from stress, excitement, and exhaustion.
The last thing Katasha remembered was the dachshund and Turtle competing to turn their heads fast enough to bite their own ears. Those two, with their floppy ears, had a chance. Katasha, of course, couldn’t possibly bite her own ear. The three of them fell apart in hysterics when she tried. Not long after that, they all fell asleep like the others. Katasha didn’t even get around to setting up her sleeping bag.
Stiff and sore, Katasha awoke to Mirabelle’s bark in the morning: “Everybody UP! Bus will be here in twenty. This is your last chance for a shower all week!”
Groggy students stretched and yawned. Their wide canine jaws opened wide like hinges. As for Katasha, she’d never scrambled so quickly. The rec room showers weren’t great, but Katasha already felt like her fur was grungy from one night of sleeping on the gymnasium floor. She feared how she’d feel after a whole week of hiking.
Riding a bus through the early morning was surreal. The upperclassmen led them all in singing scramball chants with the lyrics altered to be about Isleywood classes. The bright morning light, glaring off the windows hurt Katasha’s eyes. And, mostly, she wished she were sitting next to Howell instead of Claire. Or Turtle. She wouldn’t have minded sitting next to him.
The bus dropped them all off at a trailhead for the Sylva Canyon National Forest. Each group was assigned to a different trail, and shortly after the bus pulled away, the big, merry crowd of students dissolved into a bunch of small hiking groups, heading through the wilderness in different directions.
Very quickly, Katasha’s group separated into halves. Howell and Jimothy hiked ahead while Claire and Katasha struggled to keep up with them. At every break, it seemed like Katasha and Claire would trudge their way around a bend, find Howell and Jimothy resting and chatting easily, and within three minutes of sitting down, the boys would tell them it was time to get up and move on. Even lunch didn’t feel like it lasted longer than ten minutes before they were on their feet again, hiking up the mountain.
It was a long day. Katasha tried to talk to Claire a few times, but the two of them were working hard enough to keep up with the boys that neither of them really had the breath to spare.
After waiting all summer for the reward of going on this hike with Howell, Katasha felt ready to cry. She was immensely relieved when she and Claire finally made it to a clearing at the top of a hill and saw Howell setting out the dinner supplies.
“We’re having protein-pasta tonight, ladies,” he said.
Jimothy added, “That’s the dinner that was in my pack. We may want to shift things around so that tomorrow’s dinner is in one of our pack’s too.” The implication being that Howell and Jimothy wouldn’t want to have to wait on starting dinner until Claire and Katasha were able to catch up. Katasha’s neck fur bristled, but Claire agreed amiably.
The protein-pasta bubbled away on the butane camp stove. When it was ready, Howell served it into bowls, and they sat around the stove eating their soggy noodles. It didn’t taste that great, so Katasha guessed she hadn’t worked hard enough at hiking yet.
“Tell me about yourselves,” Howell said, breaking the silence. “Do you each know your majors?”
Jimothy told them that he was a computer archeologist. He’d probably be working with data from the compu-relics that had been discovered in Boston. Claire was an engineer like Katasha. This perked Katasha’s interest, and she hoped maybe the two of them would have more to talk about during the rest of the hike.
When it came to Katasha’s turn to talk about herself, Howell said, “How are your littermates?” Then, turning to the others, he said, “Katasha and I met at a mixer for new feline students last spring. I was there to answer questions.”
Howell had finally acknowledged her, but he’d dismissed everything that mattered. She was just a another cat at the feline mixer. Katasha was stunned. She was speechless for a moment. Then she thought about Dominic and how he’d promised to beat up any dog who hurt her. “My littermates are fine,” she said.
Staring up at the stars that night, trying to fall asleep, Katasha kept going over that first night she met Howell in her mind. If there’d been any other prospective students at the mixer who’d dared ask him to prom, would Howell have said yes? Had there been anything special about her in his eyes? Was he really only trying to recruit her? She wondered how differently things would have gone if she’d done what Corina wanted and asked Blue. He’d have probably quoted scripture about the stars to her all night. Insufferable yet sweet. He would have been exactly what Papa wanted for her. She wouldn’t have had to spend all summer bored to tears, working in Papa’s office.
Yet, Blue’s arms wouldn’t have engulfed her the way Howell’s had. He wouldn’t have pulled her out on the dance floor with all the dogs, eager and unabashed. And, he was probably studying quietly, on campus, with the Pathways Program for Cats right now. That sounded terribly claustrophobic — all the new cats, measuring out their places relative to each other, gossiping, sniping.
For all the strain and effort of keeping up on this hike, Katasha had to admit it was breathtaking to sleep on the top of a mountain, under the stars, with the cold night air in her whiskers. She closed her eyes and, once again, dreamed about being a dog.
Continue on to Chapter 12…