“And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak and bare,
And their ways are filled with thorns:
It is eternal winter there.”
— “Holy Thursday,” William Blake
All dogs know secrets like the bones they’re said to bury, and Blake knew from the change in the air that the bad thing was coming and was inescapable. It was an ozone tang fused with something other that yes made his snout quiver but also his heart. Something necrotic. Not the strain of decay you’d want to roll in, a thing much worse. Putrefaction. Blake felt his tail curl like a sneer between his legs when he first untangled the smell from all the rest on the early summer air and he knew his world and all worlds were about to change but he could not warn his two-leg people with words.
Piney, of course, sensed it too, and even when Blake lay quiet in the unlit corners of the barn he’d catch her anxious night whistles hying from the house when she dreamed. They each would comfort the other in daytime, nuzzling and licking, eyes heavy and freighted with dread.
Blake knew he owed his very name to his two-legs and their love of a long-dead wordsmith and dreamer (and my dog, did they privilege words and dreams, speaking them over for the joy itself), so he waited and shied from overt alarm, mindful of antiquity and the inscrutable ways of his adopted clan.
Came first the blight that blackened the green things. Hunger bided its moment and stole in behind, and Blake’s two-legs soon cried and made of themselves lightning trees, black and rigid and implacable, and began to slaughter Blake’s playmates in the barn, whom he loved: the small, horned, surefooted ones; their gentlefolk kin clad in cumulus coats of softness; the pink ones who were bright and avid with tender mischief.
After which they believed in nothing. The rain of dark birds. Creeks pulsing black with the stink of rot. Dry thunder amid teethlike rock.
Times the wrongness didn’t equate with anything Blake knew or loved.
“Sweet Blake,” whispered the mother. “We fear things will get worse for us all. I wish we could save you.”
I know this, thought Blake. I knew this before you.
The father was silent. But he too then whispered, “‘Some are born to endless night.’”
So it was that after the bad air came worse men.
Blake remembered his people, recalled his efforts to save them, but he was shabby and not ferocious, and his two-legs fell one after the other, the father and the mother fighting valiantly, and their boy child, Eric, and the marauders absconded with his favourite, the girl child who was kind beyond measure, sweet Eleanor who he’d played with in the hills.
Slat ribs and mourned kin united him with Piney, until even she was slain one day on the roadside by a single clade of an endless stream of two-legs ruined and set loose by this new world’s dictates.
Here he was now, nowhere to go, eviscerate of purpose, bereft of plans.
Maybe the mountain wolves, emboldened or desperate, would decide for him. He even made it into the foothills until a heart change breathed on the embers of his resolve.
He turned from the hills where the howling of wolves caught the desiccate wind and shambled toward home or where he believed home still to be and he stopped for a moment at the place on the road where Piney’s blood still marked her departure from this world and he let out a broken howl of his own, hoarse and plaintive, and hoped the wolves would leave him alone because alone he was.