Sheepdogs: Keeping the Wolves at Bay, Gordon Carroll [howl and other poems .txt] 📗

time, the mask couldn’t empty fast enough and he aspirated some of the decaying contents into his lungs. He coughed, hacked, coughed again, a weak sounding wheeze that left him feeling dizzy.

The truck scraped against a tree trunk, snow from the branches falling into the bed and over his cage, sprinkling pure, white flakes over the bed of the truck and all its contents. Max tried to smell them, something clean in the midst of the filth, but all he could smell was the putrid stench of his own blood and vomit. The truck dipped forward, the tail end following with a heavy thud that again bounced his head off the bars. Max saw the snow near his face turn from white to pink to red as his blood spread and soaked.

The fear was gone now, replaced by a listless, crackling rumble that seemed to emanate from his chest, his throat and somewhere deep inside his head all at the same time. His muscles lost their rigid, rock-hard consistency, going loose and then limp, his tongue lolling from between his teeth, his stomach’s contents oozing past his jaws and filling the front of the muzzle.

Golden sparks flashed behind his eyes like exploding suns and everything grew dark at the edges of his vision, funneling in like a tornado preparing to touch down. The rough grumble and roar of the truck’s engine droned down to a monotonous hum that echoed hollowly in his ears as though from far away.

He tried once more to pull his legs free and a memory of pain staggered up his nerves to his graying brain. His un-swollen eye rolled up under the lid and the last thing he heard was the laughing of the men in the truck.

It was almost dark when he woke for the second time. Hours had passed. The swollen eye’s lid was so crusted that it hurt to even try to open it.

His body was a mass of pain. His legs were stiff from being tied so long and his paws felt like inflated chunks of cold meat. The tears in his flesh and the deep bruises throbbed in unison with his heartbeat. His breathing still had that scary crackling that made him feel as if he were suffocating a little more with each breath.

The muzzle, tacky and filled with a horrible smelling mixture of bile and blood, scrapped roughly against the soft skin of his snout.

Max had lost control of his bowels while unconscious and the cage stunk of that as well. His stomach, back legs, and tail were smeared in waste.

The cage sat at the edge of a clearing, away from the warmth and light offered by the small campfire the men sat around; eating from cans and metal plates. The wind blew, moving the branches of the trees and swirling eddies of snow and ice crystals into mini-blizzards that were there and gone in an instant.

Some of Max’s fur had frozen to the bars of the cage so that when he moved, clumps were pulled from his tender coat.

He raised his head by shear force of will, the action dragging a whine from him that made him ashamed.

One of the men, the one he had bitten the fingers and thumb from, jumped and turned toward him, his face going white with fear. He masked it quickly, the look turning hard. He reached into the fire and pulled out a long, slender branch, burning at the tip. He brought it over to the cage. The other men turned to watch, laughing and throwing jibes.

The Huge Man said, “Best to leave sleeping dogs lie.”

Two Fingers held up his ruined left hand, the bandages were crude and had soaked through staining them brown.

“See what you did?” he screamed in German. “Do you see, demon? Do you see?”

Without hesitation Max lunged, dragging his whole body to the side of the cage in a single thrust, smashing his muzzle into the bars. His teeth slapped together harmlessly behind the mask, making a brittle “clack”, sound.

The man jumped back, tripped over a branch and landed on his bottom in the snow. He held the burning stick up, protecting its flame, but used his bad hand to break his fall. He screamed and dropped the stick, cradling his injured hand as though it were some fragile infant. Tears streamed down his dirty face and he yelled and shouted his pain for several minutes, while the other men laughed.

He pointed a finger at Max. “Demon!” He grabbed up the extinguished stick and stumbled over to the fire, jamming it into the heart of the coals, the gray ash giving way to a cherry-red inner-core. The end of the stick flamed quickly. A change of wind brought the smoke odor to Max. It was a good smell, clean somehow, like the snow, as though the fire could purge the stench of filth that covered him.

Two Fingers stood in front of the cage and jabbed the stick through the bars, hitting him in the chest. Max surged forward again, but this time the man did not back away, instead he dug the stick in deeper and a small patch of Max’s fur began to smoke. Instinctively, Max swung down with the muzzle, snapping the stick, but the fire had already caught and licked up toward his shoulder where the tiny flames branched off like the jagged arcs of racing lightening.

The man jumped up and down in the snow, still cradling his hand, and cackled madly. “Burn, demon! Burn!”

A tongue of flame leapt up Max’s throat, searing in to the underside of his jaw, while another burned across his shoulder, a fist sized patch spreading like opening fingers. Another stitched down to his belly, the pain wicked. Max smashed his face into the bars a finale time, wanting nothing more than to rip the throat out of the howling lunatic.

Max rebounded from the cold iron and rolled, burying the growing flames in the snow beneath him. The smell