Loon Lake by E. L. Doctorow Read Free Book Online Page B

from the wind in the trees, of group exertion, breath chuffing across twenty or thirty hanging tongues, yelps of murderous excitement. Was the moon out? I rose from my crouch seeing something like an earthwave coming toward me, as if the ground were advancing in a sort of rolling quaking upheaval. This gradually distinguished itself as the furred musculature of shoulders and chests and legs, and I think now I must have seen the face of the lead dog, flung into moonlight, its maddened red eyes like the tracers of those launched fangs. If I didn’t see it I’ve dreamed it a thousand times.
    Goddamnit, if city boys knew any animals at all it was dogs. But these were like nothing I’d ever seen. Not that I had the leisure for contemplation. I held up my forearm and his teeth tore it like a piece of paper. Together we rammed into the side of the tennis shack. And then the others were up, tossing themselves at me in their fury but with great inefficiency, they turned on each other snarling for getting in each other’s way though they were effective enough to my pain and screaming terror. I was kicking at them and flinging them off going for the throat trying to tear my throat out, I was kicking and waving my arms and fists and howling like a dog myself and knowing that if I went down I faced something more than the end of my life—shit—the extenuated appreciation of its end, piecemeal, my life taken from me chunk by chunk drop by drop every nerve shrieking.
    I think I can imagine some faint memory of the odor of those dogs, feel the closeness of their life, their wild heartbeat! I hear their snorts and the snaps of teeth on air, I remember the toothtumblers lock once the flesh is found, the quick release and regrip down to the bone.
    I recall without difficulty the intimate apprehension of prey in the jaws of a maniac life beyond all appeal.
    Somehow I was vaulted or inspired upward in some acrobatic backward tumble through the unframed shack window. I took one of the dogs with me, slamming it fixed in my wrist against the inner wall of the shack whilethe heads of the others appeared outside the window, a fountain of faces leaping and falling back in rage in frustration. But then one gripped the sill with its paws and began to pull itself up till its own weight would get it inside, I grabbed a tennis racquet hanging in its press and swung toward that head down on those paws. The dog fell out of sight and the other, who had come in with me, stunned loose from its slam against the wall, I now caught on the back with the racquet edge in its heavy press and broke its spine. They were not uniformed pedigreed hounds, they were every kind and make, and this one, a smaller mongrel, I lifted howling and threw to the others.
    Things immediately got quiet. I heard the yelps and moans and grunts of appeasement, the soft sound of flesh being fanged. The small moonlit square of night I saw from the floor of the shack was peaceful with stars. Maybe I heard human voices, or the firing of a rifle or a gun, but I’m not sure. I lay there and as the blood flowed from me I lost consciousness.

 
    Adirondacks.
Region first known for wilderness industries trapping hunting.
Earliest roads were logging trails out came the great trees
chained to sledges. In the winter blocks of ice were sawn
from the frozen lakes and carried in procession on funicular tracks
uphill to the railroad depots for shipment to the cities.
In early spring the tapping of the huge sugar maples
and the sap houses sweet blue smoke hanging over the green valleys.
In summer the natives grew small corn and picked wild berries
and grilled trout on open fires by the edge of rock rivers.
But one summer after the May flies painters and poets arrived
who paid money to sit in guide boats and to stand momentously
above the gorges of rushing streams.
The artists and poets patrons seeing and hearing their reports
bought vast tracts of the Adirondacks very cheaply
and began to build