| The next afternoon the dogs found the stuff. John knew how many of them were running in the pack. He counted their bloated carcasses. He'd gotten all of them and felt pretty safe with the savage things out of his way. That evening, a little after dusk, the two men sneaked up to Dog Joe's camp. They hid behind some clumps of ironwood and watched for awhile. Dog Joe, with an animal instinct that something was wrong, sniffed the air and stared suspiciously into the woods. He was wearing two pistols in a broad belt filled with cartridges. Little Pete was curled up by the fire, nodding sleepily. Joe was making peculiar noises in his throat that the two watching assassins figured must be a call to the wild dogs. Once he started to leave the boy to go search for the animals; but he glanced back at the boy and evidently could not make up his mind to leave him. The watchers waited for an hour or so. The child fell asleep. Dog Joe pulled a deer skin up around the boy's shoulders and sat down beside him. In his savage eyes there crept a strange tenderness as he looked down at the sleeping boy. Presently, as Big John and Tolt held their breath, Joe took off his gun belt, laid it carefully by his side, and stretched out. The two men behind the ironwood moved their Lugers to a position of rest on the branches of a tree. They were only sixty feet away from their victim; even in the poor light, they couldn't miss. Then after a few seconds, the roar of their Lugers was silent. They saw Dog Joe on the ground, his massive figure convulsed in agony, screaming like a stricken animal. Paying no attention to the awakened, whimpering boy, they walked slowly up to Joe and emptied their guns once more into his body. They stood over him, knives held in readiness. But they had not reckoned with the man's unbelievable animal vitality. He rose to his knees, shaking his great, shaggy head. The knives went spinning from their hands with one sweep of his powerful arms. He could not get to his feet since his legs and torso had been shattered by their bullets. His arms were his remaining strength. He used them like clubs. Terrible blows to the abdomen tumbled his surprised enemies in a heap beside him. With the boy whimpering on his shoulder, he crushed their skulls in, fell back beside the embers of the dying fire, and lapsed into the torpor that precedes death. I found them there just before dawn the following morning: a frightened, weeping boy with long, uncut hair; the twisted, lifeless bodies of Big John and Tolt; and Dog Joe. Dog Joe lived until shortly after dawn. I tore the boy away from Joe's body at last. His attachment for the man was so great that he asked me to bury him with his wild foster-parent. But I was able finally to persuade him that Joe would have wanted him to come back to the mining settlement with me. I told him that Joe wanted him to go to school and be like other boys his age. He told me fiercely, "Joe is a great man, the greatest in the world, the strongest, the best. You don't know about Joe." I returned the next day with Pete to bury Joe. I read a little from the Book, whittled a cross out of a pine bough and gave it to Pete to put on his grave. Maybe Joe is out there with May somewhere, or with that pack of wild animals who were his friends. Maybe he won't hold it too hard against us who called him "Dog" Joe. My boy Pete doesn't think so. HOME |
| "I was born on a storm-swept rock and hate the soft growth of sun-baked lands where there is no frost in men's bones. Swift thought and the flight of ravenous birds, and the squeal of hunted animals are to me reality." -- Liam O'Flaherty on his own background, in Joseph Conrad: an Appreciation 1925 |