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.
While the others set up the final camp, Katasha tried to think of how to get away, back to the quiet moments she’d had alone with Jimothy, earlier on the hike. There weren’t many obvious chances though. Mirabelle had stepped in as the overall group leader from the moment she showed up, and she kept everyone busy in the camp, delegating various cooking and campfire building jobs. For, although there’d been no campfires up ’til now, Mirabelle felt they could get away with one big campfire on their last night.
After dinner was ready and the fire was roaring, the two groups sat around the campfire in a circle. They stared into the dancing flames and chomped down on improvised tacos, devised from all the leftover bits and pieces of trail food that each group had still been carrying. The tacos had been Mirabelle’s vision, and they were good.
When they were done eating, Howell asked, “Who wants to hear a legend about Isleywood?”
Mirabelle chuckled. “I know the story you’re going to tell,” she said.
Howell hushed her, and then he stared at all the new students, each in turn, very seriously. When a Labrador Retriever wants to, he can look very serious.
“All right,” Jimothy said. “I’d enjoy a story.”
Claire just smiled at Howell shyly.
Mirabelle’s team agreed also. Though, the dachshund insisted that any story told around a campfire had to have ghosts in it.
“Very well,” Howell said, settling back comfortably in his spot. “This story has something like a ghost in it.”
Howell was sitting next to Katasha, who had Jimothy on her other side. When Howell rearranged his brushy tail, it swept against Katasha’s back, sending shivers down her spine. He didn’t even look aware that it had happened. Katasha sidled a little closer to Jimothy.
“When Isleywood College was founded, nearly half a century ago,” Howell started, “the very first professor of human studies was a French Mastiff named Hudson Lockley.”
“Human studies?” the dachshund boy interrupted. “Isleywood is a science school. That’s history,” he complained. “Why would a professor be teaching that?”
Mirabelle glared at the dachshund boy. He was a member of her hiking group, and he wasn’t being polite. Her flat-faced, beady-eyed glare was terrifying, despite the fact that she was such a small dog. “Isleywood likes its students to be well-rounded,” she barked at the dachshund. “Now, listen.”
As Howell told his story of the legend of Professor Hudson Lockley, Katasha watched the canine faces in the circle around her, bathed in flickering firelight. Katasha felt strong and happy, surrounded by intelligent, powerful dogs who would be among the next generation of important scientists in her country. She was accepted by them. She was one of them.
Sitting there, among dogs, listening to a dog tell a story about a dog, she felt acutely aware of her felinity. It was a strange sensation, but, for once, she didn’t mind so much. She didn’t mind being a cat among dogs. What she minded was being a cat excluded by dogs.
“In the early days of Isleywood College,” Howell said, “It was even smaller than it is now.”
Isleywood was still a small college, with a student population of under a thousand students, more than three quarters of whom were canine. When it was founded, the student and faculty were one hundred percent canine.
“Back then,” Howell said, “the professors spent a lot of time hanging out with their students. A lot of them even came to student parties in the dorms.”
“Do they still do that?” one of the German Shepherd sisters asked. “‘Cause, that sounds weird.”
“Not so much,” Howell said.
“Except for Professor Brody,” Mirabelle said, jumping in. “But he’s only a visiting professor.”
“Of course, he’s been a visiting professor for longer than I’ve been a student…” Howell said. “Anyway! Back to the story: Professor Hudson Lockley wasn’t like the other professors. He never came to student parties. He never hung out in the dorms.”
“That sounds like a normal professor to me,” Jimothy said.
Howell growled. “It wasn’t normal for Isleywood back then.”
Jimothy shrugged and began shuffling his cards particularly noisily. Katasha reached toward the shuffling blur and extended a single claw. If she poked her claw into their orderly arches, the interruption would likely send the cards flying. Jimothy looked at her and cocked an eyebrow. It was the eyebrow on the side of his face covered in a brown splotch of fur.
Katasha withdrew her paw, and, after a moment, Jimothy cut the deck and offered half of it to her. The smaller half, but still. Katasha’s throat rumbled in a purr, and she took the cards.
Howell looked utterly discomposed when he heard a second pair of paws start shuffling cards next to him, but he gamely continued telling the ghost story. “As the years passed,” Howell said, “Professor Lockley never seemed to age. His fur didn’t gray. It stayed the exact same rich red-brown. And his jowly face didn’t sag. However, over time, his lectures grew increasingly… specific. To begin with, he covered the entire scope of human history from their early empires in Rome and Egypt, through their great wars, all the way to their disappearance after the advent of the computer dark ages.”
A number of the new students looked at each other wondering whether they were really going to have to study all that stuff. However, none of them interrupted this time.
“Eventually, Professor Lockley’s seminars came to focus entirely on the details of the final stage of human society. He would give entire lectures on what the restaurants were like right before humanity disappeared. Or their traditions concerning baseball, a game humans played way back when much the way that we play scramball today.” Howell looked around at his audience. None of them looked scared yet, and Katasha felt kind of sorry for him. She put down the cards Jimothy had lent her and tried to look like she was really interested in Howell’s story. “Professor Lockley brought a level of personal passion to these anecdotes he told in lecture that suggested to some students that, maybe, he’d actually been there.”
“So…” Jimothy said, sounding terribly skeptical, “He was over five hundred years old?”
“I knew it,” the dachshund said. “He’s a ghost.”
“Or he travelled back in time,” one of the German Shepherd sisters offered.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Claire said. “He’d have had to travel forward.”
“He could be travelling back in time to eat at human restaurants and go to baseball games,” the other German Shepherd said, defending her sister.
“Is that what you’d do with a time machine?” Jimothy asked.
“Not me!” the dachshund said, “But, then, I wouldn’t be wasting my time on human studies.”
“I might use a time machine that way…” the first German Shepherd sister said. “I mean, to walk among humans. Just to be near them…” The dark eyes in her wolfish face glowed with religious fervor. “That would be the highest honor.”
Mirabelle coughed pointedly, and everyone quieted down. Howell seemed little rattled by all the interruptions. Then Katasha smiled at him with her round, blue eyes, and he looked encouraged.
“Professor Lockley’s only friend,” Howell said, “as far as anyone could tell, was the chair of the biology department, a professor who specialized in medicine and primates.”
“So, they shared an interest in humans,” Katasha said, trying her best to be the good audience that no one else was being for Howell.
“Right,” Howell said, looking grateful. He leaned forward, and the the light of the fire glowed eerily on his muzzle. “Except, some students started to wonder if it was more than an interest for Professor Lockley. See, he was an unusual professor in a number of ways. His voice was soft and flute-like. His sense of smell was notoriously weak. He often complained of being too hot, but no one ever saw him panting.”
“Ghost,” the dachshund said. “Just sayin’.”
Howell harrumphed and continued, “As the years passed, rumors started to spread. Students said they’d see Professor Lockley slumped at his desk, so deeply asleep that he looked devoid of any life or animation. When they’d see him like this, as they walked past his office door, the students would sometimes knock at the door, to see if he was okay.” Howell paused dramatically, and then clapped his paws together. “Wham! The door would fly shut. Sometimes, the students thought they saw a pale, shining figure moving in the darkened office. Its limbs were strange and stiff, bending in the wrong places.”
“Ghost,” the dachshund repeated. Mirabelle smacked him upside the head, and his ears flopped forward. “Ow,” he said dramatically, but he clearly wasn’t hurt.
“Listen,” she admonished again.
“The last lecture Professor Lockley ever gave was about cryogenics,” Howell said. “He explained to his class that near the end of the age of humans, there was a fad where very rich humans who were going to die soon would freeze themselves. They hoped that in the future, cures for their illnesses would be found. Then they would be unfrozen, treated, and allowed to continue their lives in the future.”
The dachshund snickered. The German Shepherd sisters looked at each other, their ears turning askew. But Mirabelle had already made her point, and no one tried to interrupt any more.
“Professor Lockley disappeared after that lecture. All his paperwork was in order for an indefinite leave of absence, and, technically, he’s still listed as an active, tenured professor at Isleywood.” Howell leaned back from the fire now, crossing his arms on his broad chest. He seemed happier now that his audience was under control. “Shortly thereafter, the chair of the biology department released a whole series of groundbreaking papers about the details of human physiology. No one knew where he’d gotten the information for them.”
The dachshund couldn’t take it anymore and burst out with, “He killed professor Lockley and dissected him!”
Mirabelle rolled her eyes.
Howell grimaced and said, “Well, um, no. I mean, that’s not how I heard the story. I guess, we don’t really know…”
Howell was getting befuddled, and Mirabelle stepped in to save him: “According to the legend,” she said, “the biology professor was Lockley’s doctor. He cured Professor Lockley of a brain cancer that had caused him to be cryogenically frozen five hundred years earlier.”
“Right,” Howell said, “See, he’d been in a cryogenics chamber in an abandoned science lab. The biology professor found him, thawed him, cured him, and together they devised a fur suit costume that allowed Professor Lockley to blend in with the dogs who now populate Earth.”
“So… wait…” Jimothy said. “What happened to him?”
“He went back into the cryogenics chamber,” Howell said, looking terribly excited.
“Um… why would he do that?” Jimothy asked.
“He’s waiting for the rest of humanity to return from the stars,” Mirabelle said.
“Right…” Jimothy said.
“That wasn’t really a ghost story,” the dachshund said. “I know a real ghost story that I could tell.”
“You know,” Jimothy said, “the stars are plenty beautiful without pretending that some godlike race is living up there, waiting to come down and usher us into a mythical era of peace and prosperity.”
“It’s not pretending–” Howell said, but Mirabelle held up a paw to stop him. He gracefully lowered his muzzle and kept the rest of his sentence to himself.
Jimothy, however, had an entire speech to give about the chemistry and physics of stars. When it was over, he asked, “Isn’t that amazing enough?”
The gathering was silent until Mirabelle said, “Since you’re so interested in stars, Jimothy, it’s too bad our groups didn’t meet up before we were back under all these trees.” She gestured around at the thick wall of trees around them. The reaching branches blocked out most of the star-studded sky. “See, I brought a small telescope, and last night my group was looking at the otter space station through it. It’s visible from here right now.”
“Really?” Jimothy said. He sounded both excited and disappointed.
Katasha finally saw that opportunity she’d been waiting for: a chance to get Jimothy alone. “You know,” she said, teasingly, “trees can be climbed.”
Jimothy smiled, and his tail thumped against the ground in a happy wag.
“I saw a really good climbing tree about twenty feet back that way.” Katasha pointed down the trail that their campfire was burning beside.
“Can we borrow your telescope?” Jimothy asked.
Mirabelle shrugged and pulled a striated metal tube out of a side pocket on the backpack she’d been leaning against. She held it out, and Jimothy took it. Then he looked at Katasha eagerly. She got up, feeling a little stiff from sitting on the hard ground so long, and picked her way out of the camp, placing her paws carefully and balancing with her tail.
She could feel Howell’s eyes on her back, watching her go.
Continue on to Chapter 16…