Rez Dog

By Janet Shell Anderson

The deep winter moon lifts over the Pine Ridge Reservation just after sundown. The west wind sings to itself as it scours the rez badlands, cliffs, escarpments, chutes, as it bends over Quiverhill, Ghost Canyon, Bear in the Lodge Creek. Coyotes twist their barbed-wire cries over the night.

 

One man, hunched against the wind, ignores the moon, the coyotes, walks west along the old dump road, a gravel track near the badlands escarpment. Joshua Fast Elk, angry, grieving, dark head bent, dark eyes fixed on the ground, doesn’t see the moon, hear the wind, care about it. His younger brother, Melford, his only family, has just died. Nineteen. Pneumonia. No one saved him. Melford was worth saving.

 

Josh knew Mel was sick, but Josh thought it was just a cold, went to work thirty miles away in Kadoka and didn’t get back to their village, Wambli, until late. Josh didn’t know Mel left the house, passed out in the old Gethsemane Cemetery in town where he’d gone alone, sad because his girl, Kate Quiver, broke off with him.

 

Josh knows now. He saw his brother die twelve hours ago. He’s walking to Kate’s house, going to deal with her. She’s to blame for all of it. In a wind silence, he hears the coyotes and feels like a coyote himself, a predator out in the cold. He’d like to rip Kate out of the world. Then he might feel better.

 

He and Mel were like twins, born twelve months and five days apart, inseparable, their parents dead when they were five, raised by an old grandmother. They grew up like twins, except Mel was a really talented artist and Josh wasn’t good at anything but looking tough.

 

An old dog falls in beside Josh, patters along as if they are partners. Josh doesn’t see any lights on at the Quiver house; it looks like Kate isn’t home. No truck out front, nothing. The old dog, some sort of dark spotted Australian shepherd mix, wags its sad, black tail, approaches Josh, presses its muzzle against his hand. Head hanging, it has no hope of friendship but tries anyway, swinging its tail slowly. It cringes a little too; he might kick it.

 

It will die tonight. A coyote will savage it, or the old dog will freeze.

 

“Who are you anyway?” he asks it.

 

A rez dog, nobody wants it. Full of fleas, dandruff, dirt. The animal pants softly, terrible breath. Gentle eyes.

 

A coyote calls from Bear in the Lodge Creek half mile away; another answers it. “Here’s your dinner,” Josh shouts to them. Damn Kate and the Quivers anyway; he is going to have to walk all the way back to the village. The dog drifts closer.

 

“You know, huh?” he says to it. “You know what’s coming?”

 

The dog hangs its head as if it does know. “Everybody says us Lakota don’t take good care of dogs. That’s what the man I work for says,” Josh tells it. “He says I didn’t take good care of Mel either. I heard him talkin’.” He stops and looks at the dog. The pine trees are black against the edge of the road. No more coyote howls. Josh has turned around, is walking east toward Wambli.

 

The big full moon rises, silvers all the landscape, the horse pastures that fall away toward the ravines, the steep prairie with its deep, wild grasses, the pale badlands walls. Josh sees a truck, signals, steps in the headlights, and it screeches to a stop. The driver, Kate Quiver, looks concerned.

 

“You heard about Mel?” he asks her. She nods. “Turn the truck around and give me and my dog a ride home.” He hoists the old dog gently into the front of the truck. The deep winter moon lifts across wide night sky; in darkness, the coyotes twine their cries, sharp as human loss.