Only the Animals Read online

  But he lay on the floor for a long time without moving, until my adrenaline ebbed and I became aware of his subservience. When I opened my mouth slightly, still keeping my teeth close to his neck, he began to talk to me in a gentle voice, saying he was sorry he had upset me and that he respected my authority.

  His voice was so soothing that it began to feel like an effort not to lie down beside him, which I did, and I let him stroke my back because he knew how to move his hand firmly in the direction of my fur growth, which I liked, and in my treacherous heart I thought of how my Master sometimes stroked me in the wrong direction. I was in such a trance that I did not notice my Master had returned.

  He immediately realised my betrayal. ‘What have you done to my dog?’ he said, very quietly.

  The stranger sat up. ‘I am the veterinarian you sent for to tend to your dog, the one who is sick,’ he said. ‘He tried to attack me. I had to calm him down.’

  I went to my Master’s side but he would not touch me. ‘You have deprived me of the only creature who is truly faithful to me!’ he said to the stranger. ‘You have taken my companion away!’

  The stranger was looking with fear at my Master, not understanding.

  ‘Arrest him!’ my Master shouted to one of his guards.

  I tried to lick my Master’s hand but he was inconsolable, and ordered that I be taken away and never allowed to return. In disgrace, I was dragged outside the compound’s gates by another guard.

  How could I have been susceptible to the petty attentions of a human so much less worthy than my Master? With great shame, I ran into the woods and kept running all day and long into the evening, until my exhaustion eased my despair enough to let me fall asleep.

  * * *

  That night, the first snow of winter fell. I woke to find my coat dusted white beneath a beech bent sideways by decades of strong winds, snow silted along its motionless branches. All around were trees so old I could sense their profound lack of interest in the fleeting lives of other creatures.

  I started to sniff around, hoping to catch the scent of some plant or another to eat, and noticed tracks on the snow leading deeper into an oak grove, tracks that looked like those of a deer. I tried to ignore them. I had attracted enough bad karma; I couldn’t go back to eating meat. As I watched, new tracks were imprinted in the snow, looping around the nearest oak and out towards the beech again. Something spoke right in front of me.

  ‘Look more closely,’ it said. ‘You can see me if you try.’

  ‘What are you? I can see nothing!’

  ‘Have you forgotten that it is your birthright to see the souls of the dead?’

  ‘Please stop!’ I cried. ‘I cannot bear this!’

  The voice was silent for a while. I could not move for fear, but those disembodied words recalled to me something I had once known. In the evenings, my Master had read aloud to me from a book of ancient Germanic folklore. A long time ago, when the great Hermann was in power, it was believed that dogs could see the souls of the dead in these forests. When a dog seemed to be howling at nothing, it meant a soul had approached.

  I concentrated on the empty air above the closest set of tracks, and finally I saw an apparition so thin, so without substance, that it could have been powder blown from a branch.

  ‘What are you?’ I asked again.

  ‘I am the soul of an auroch,’ it said.

  Its bovine silver form was becoming clearer. ‘What is an auroch?’

  ‘The true aurochs were wild ox-like creatures who lived in these woods until they were hunted to extinction a few centuries ago.’

  ‘Has your soul been here for that long?’

  ‘No,’ the creature replied. ‘My kind was created more recently by the Master of the German Forests, Herr Göring. He wished to repopulate these woods with aurochs so that the German people could know what the forests looked like long ago. His scientists crossed many types of deer and oxen. But not one of us survived in the wild.’

  I thought then of my grandfather caught behind the mongrel bitch, of the shame he had been made to feel. ‘Why are you still here?’ I asked. ‘Why haven’t you been reincarnated?’

  ‘My life mate is dying. He is the last of us. I have come to accompany his soul.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘If I told you, you would hunt and eat him,’ the auroch said. ‘I want him to die in peace.’

  I didn’t explain to the auroch soul that I was a vegetarian. I let her pass by me and on through the snow between the dark trunks.

  A day passed, and another night, and still I could find no living plants beneath the snow to ease my hunger. I ate some bark and it did nothing but make the gnawing pains worse.

  Late in the day, at a distance, I saw a young fox crossing a river that had frozen solid, repeatedly laying its ear against the ice to listen to the water flowing beneath.

  The last thing I remembered was admiring the gracefulness of the gesture. When I returned to myself, I realised with horror that I had made a meal of the fox in a frenzy, not only breaking my Master’s taboo on eating meat, but disrespecting the human law against using dogs in the fox chase. My karma was polluted again. I had perhaps destroyed forever my chance at being reincarnated as a human being.

  That night I slept beneath a pine and dreamed I was curled up on my Master’s lap, small enough to fit across his thighs. My dream turned sinister. A thunderbolt was aimed at me from the sky, a weapon sent by the Aryan gods to kill me. I woke up shivering in the dark, remembering my Master’s love of thunderstorms, his belief that bolts of lightning were gifts of power from these ancient gods.

  * * *

  In the morning, the forest’s silence unnerved me. When I saw a new set of ghostly hoof prints appearing in the snow, I was half glad for the company. I could just make out the outline of a pig against the evergreens.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘Good morning,’ the pig replied. ‘I wasn’t sure if you could see me.’

  ‘It is a new ability.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the pig.

  ‘Tell me, pig, how did you die?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s a personal question,’ the pig said.

  ‘Then at least tell me why you haven’t yet been reincarnated.’

  The pig soul stared at me, then burst out laughing.

  ‘I’m serious,’ I said indignantly. ‘Don’t you know about karma and reincarnation, that if you live a good, clean, brave life you will come back as a higher creature, even as a human?’

  ‘I don’t know who has been telling you these things,’ the pig soul said. ‘But you’ve got it all wrong. I don’t think it works like that.’

  ‘My Master taught me everything I know. He is inspired by ancient India, and Hinduism, and … he’s a vegetarian. He is the reincarnation of the warrior Arjuna, and the Aryan gods of light. He has the greatest mercy and compassion for animals. I haven’t got it wrong, I assure you.’

  ‘My goodness me,’ the pig said. ‘He’s certainly covering his behind, isn’t he? Is he a follower of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism too?’

  ‘Well, yes, I think so,’ I said. ‘Of course he is.’

  The pig looked at me closely. ‘You haven’t been in the wild long, have you?’ he said. ‘Your paws are soft.’

  ‘I was exiled,’ I said. ‘I betrayed my Master.’

  ‘I am His Highness’s dog at Kew; pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?’ the pig said.

  ‘Pardon?’ I said.

  ‘What I’m asking is, who is your Master?’

  ‘He is one of the leaders of this country, a great man, a gentle warrior, a protector of creatures great and small. Don’t you know what he has done for you, for all animals? He has thought even of the fish in the rivers, of their suffering.’

  The pig snorted. ‘The suffering of the fish?’

  ‘Yes. He and the other leaders have passed many laws to protect us animals. One of those laws is that water creatures can only be killed humanely.’

 
‘Oh? And what are these humane ways of killing?’

  ‘Fish must be stunned with a blow to the head or an electric current before being gutted,’ I said. ‘Eels must have their hearts cut out before they can be slit from head to tail. Crustaceans must be killed by being dropped into boiling water, not painfully brought to the boil.’

  ‘A wise friend once told me that kindness, like cruelty, can be an expression of domination,’ the pig said.

  ‘That makes no sense,’ I said scornfully.

  ‘Look, dog, I will tell you how I died,’ the pig said. ‘I think it might do you good to understand how confused humans can be. They have a tendency to mix things up.’

  ‘My Master is not to blame,’ I said. ‘He loved me.’

  The pig cleared his throat. ‘Once upon a time,’ he said, ‘in a village in this very forest, there lived a farmer and his wife and young children. Though they were a modern family, they were encouraged by the men who had come to power to reconnect with ancient traditions of this land. One such tradition was to adopt a pig as a family member and raise it with affection. The family chose a piglet – me – and spoiled me with treats. I was allowed inside the farmhouse, and onto the children’s beds, and at night I sat with my human family in front of the fire.’

  The pig soul paused. ‘Are you listening?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘The children grew and I grew and the farmer and his wife grew older, and one day I could no longer fit through the front door,’ he continued. ‘The family built a special pen for me outside, and fed me the best food scraps and visited me often. But over time, they forgot about me. The children found other things to occupy them once I was no longer a piglet. I was very lonely. I could sense that my body was changing, that my mind was not always my own – beastly impulses would surge in me, over which I had no control.

  ‘In the middle of a hard winter, the family sold me to another farmer in the village. I was put into a stinking shed with dozens of other pigs, but I didn’t know how to interact with them. Sometimes I would fly into a rage for no reason, and when the rage released me I would find the other pigs huddled warily on the opposite side of the shed.

  ‘One night, caught in one of these mindless furies, I killed and ate two piglets. When the humans discovered what I had done, they were determined to punish me for eating my own kind. The village leader decided that this should be done in accordance with medieval law, which he believed would please the new leaders of the country, who were nostalgic about the olden days. This law decreed that a human who had been sentenced to execution was to wear the skin of a pig to the scaffold, and that a pig who had eaten its own kind was to be led to the gallows wearing human clothes.

  ‘The family who had raised me from a piglet were so ashamed of what I had done that the farmer offered his son’s clothing for me to wear. The son was much older now, strong from working in his father’s fields. On the day I was to be hanged, he dressed me in his own shirt and trousers. Weeping, he fastened each of the buttons along my chest, rolled up the trousers above my rear hoofs, and led me to the gallows.

  ‘After my death, I returned to the village to watch over my family. One day humans in uniform arrived and arrested the son for breaking a law the new leaders had passed, which prohibited tormenting or mishandling an animal. They had been informed about my hanging. The son tried to explain that the villagers had thought the leaders would approve of their decision to abide by a traditional peasant law, but the men in uniform would not listen. The son was taken away, and has never returned.’

  The pig soul sighed, and walked away from me. His outline grew faint in the sunlight that reached through the forest canopy. He did not say goodbye, but it seems the dead have no qualms about taking their leave without ceremony.

  * * *

  I was very hungry again once the ignorant pig soul had left me. I could smell something alive under the snow and I dug my claws beneath the frozen black earth, into a layer of soil that still kept some hint of mulchy warmth, until I found a giant earthworm. I recognised it immediately. It was a very rare Lumbricus badensis, found only in these forests, a creature my Master, in his compassion, had decreed should be protected. I had been in his office on the day he was informed that a human zoologist had cut into one of these earthworms in an experiment. A student had seen the worm move as its body was split open, and reported the incident as a violation of the new law banning vivisection. My Master had ordered that the zoologist be punished.

  I ate the worm because I was starving – bad karma be damned – and lay down in the snow hoping to sleep. After a while I gave up and opened my eyes. Above me, specks of glitter were hovering in the moonlight. I focused more closely and saw a swarm of bee souls moving nimbly through the air. They made me miss my sister Blondi, who would have loved to watch them, snapping but not really wanting to catch one in her mouth.

  I was too tired and sad to talk to the bee souls, but this did not stop them from speaking to me. They, too, were in mourning.

  ‘We are grieving for our beloved von Frisch, the only human to understand the meaning of our dances, who spent his days patiently observing our patterns of movement,’ they said. ‘He was trying to help us survive the disease that is killing all the bees in Germany, but in the end it killed us too. The other humans in his laboratory are going to betray him. They suspect he is not one of them. His life is in grave danger.’

  I closed my eyes.

  ‘Terrible things are going to happen in these woods,’ they said. ‘You should leave while you can.’

  * * *

  For a long time – I do not know exactly how long in human terms, one year, possibly more – I lived in the woods with the souls of dead animals for company. Sometimes, when I skirted around towns and villages, I saw the souls of human beings too, but they were not interested in me, a lone dog in the wild – they were doing everything within their failing power to make themselves known to living humans, to warn them of dangers that were obscure to me.

  At one stage I decided not to give up hope that I could still improve my karma, having remembered a story my Master told me of Buddha’s journey towards enlightenment. Hadn’t he, too, spent many years in a forest, in the wilderness, stepping over ants and caterpillars? Or perhaps it had been Krishna, or Thor, who kept vigil under a sacred fig tree? For three nights I kept watch, waiting to see the morning star rising as it did for Buddha, or Krishna, or Thor. But no star rose for me.

  Much further east, I came upon great activity. I had tried as far as possible to avoid live human contact in the woods, but the smell of men’s food and something else, something very familiar, drew me closer. It was the smell of my own kind: dozens of them, living alongside and protecting the brave German warriors, the men my Master commanded.

  The dogs seemed to feel sorry for me in my emaciated state, and embarrassed for me that I had fallen so low. They helped me blend in, and at mealtimes some of them saved part of their own portion for me. On special occasions we were fed the same horsemeat as the humans, stringy and sweet. I watched as each horse was recorded in a logbook as having been killed by enemy fire before the men shot it themselves for food. They ground up the horse’s feed into a rough flour for pancakes to accompany the boiled meat. I ate anything I was given, flesh or grain, no longer caring about karma, believing my soul to be beyond salvation.

  I heard the dogs in the camp speak of Blondi often, in admiring terms. She had become quite famous by then – Queen of the Dogs, the Führer’s closest companion. I wished I could see her again and bark with her in the echoing crypt at Wewelsburg, or dig at that frustratingly smooth marble star. I didn’t tell them she was my sister. It did not seem fitting to drag her down with me.

  I hoped beyond hope that she was as happy serving her Master as I had been serving mine. The last time I saw her at the castle, she told me something unsettling, that her Master’s female companion did not like her – she had two spoiled terrier brats of her own – and took every opportunit
y to kick Blondi under the dining table. Blondi had resigned herself to this, for she had no way of telling her Master of this woman’s coldness, her daily betrayals. Blondi had said to me she would follow her Master anywhere he asked, would endure kicks under the table until the end of her days, so long as she never had to leave his side, not even in death. And I had understood, for this was how I felt about my own Master, and still did, even after so long in exile.

  One day, I was drafted into a legion of dogs who were to be given the special honour of leaving the camp to accompany the soldiers into combat. The other dogs were too busy surviving to keep an eye on me or to give me instructions, and I had no idea what to do. I ran in the wrong direction until something enormous exploded out of the ground and made me lose my hearing.

  Disoriented, I ran deeper and deeper into the woods and eventually found myself in a camp of enemy soldiers. Deaf from the explosion and in shock, I had no choice but to rely on them for food until I could recover and find my way back to my own camp.

  But the men fed me only once. After that, I was taken to an underground warren filled with dozens of starving dogs going mad with hunger. These dogs were chained just far enough away from one another that those who still had the energy to move could not eat their neighbours. I could feel them straining to get to my flesh as I was led through the warren and tied up at the end of the row.

  I woke in the night to find the neighbouring dog gazing at me with saliva pouring from his mouth.

  The men brought water down for us, but no food. Slowly my hearing returned as my hunger expanded. Each day, the humans took one dog from the warren and attached a pouch to its back. The chosen dog was led outside, and did not return.

  The dog across from me, who had seemed too weak to wish me harm or well, decided one morning to take pity on me. ‘You don’t know who we are, do you?’ she said. ‘You have not been trained.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘When that pouch is attached to our backs, we must look for food beneath the German tanks. We have been trained to distinguish them by the smell of petrol. Our tanks smell of diesel.’