Chapter 2

Jack looked up in surprise at the large black dog which kept looking at him and starting out then turning and whining, coming up to him and permitting him to only very briefly pet or scratch before grabbing his sleeve gently in his teeth and tugging meaningfully telling him in unmistakable terms to come with him. He groaned in defeat and started to put on his fur coat and snow-shoes.

He also decided to see if the dog would put up with a harness and pull sled, since he was insisting on Jack accompanying him to where ever he meant to take him. Jack imagined the large black dog had experience as a sled-dog since he took the lead position with only a submissive whine from Jack’s normal lead-dog Hoist. It was very strange, Hoist didn’t back down to anything, not even a bear.

Jack needed a name to call the strange dog since a good sledder needed an accurate whip and a name for every dog, since a certain way to tangle the traces was to call out one dog and sting another. He talked to the dog as he harnessed him up in an Inuit style rig, each dog on it’s own trace, the lead dog on the longest line, and the dog listened attentively, passed on most of the names he offered, and accepted the name Jim by barking once. As it turned out, the whip wasn’t ever needed while Jim was lead dog.

Not that Jack was directing this expedition, that honor belonged to Jim, who seemed to know where he was going, apparently in the direction of Nashville which was about fifty miles ahead across some rough country. It turned out they weren’t going that far- after only fifteen miles of breaking trail effortlessly Jim headed in at a remote cabin, where once loosed he jumped up on a woodpile and entered a broken enclosed porch window, turning around to poke his head back out from where he stood on the defunct dryer to bark that this was the place, come on in.

Inside was a scene of horror and hope. Upstairs there were the desiccated corpses of tiny trampled puppies, viciously stabbed by high-heeled shoes, the nursery door ajar at the head of the stairs, inside the cozy interior room nested in a mountain of bedding and linens was a scrawny bitch almost out sized by her teets, although she was not a small dog at all, and two little human girls of under a year old, but both by now nearly having out-grown the miraculous cross-species nourishment provided by their step-mother, who growled low at Jack until Jim communicated something to her.

At the bottom of the stairs on the first floor were the devoured remains and the pristine hated high-heel shoes of the twin’s crazed mother, who’s body provided for their nourishment (along with a trashcan’s worth of dried dog-food) these past six months since the madness in a truly macabre fashion.

Evidently Missy (as Jack took to calling the mama bitch) had fiercely defended the nursery and the babies, causing their mother to fall back down the stairs. We won’t speculate beyond that. That cabin luckly had running water, a spring piped through to run out the drain in a basin as the best way to have clean pure flowing water.

Jim had come along later, and had come to fetch Jack only when the girls were outgrowing their ba-bas. Besides, Human children need a human parent to parrot or they don’t become human.