Do You Love Your Dog?
Created | Updated May 21, 2003
Do you love your dog?
Come with me. I want to show you something....
These are the wilds of Russian Karelia! It's sunrise, in a solitary place. Before you and below you lies the flood plain of the Vuoksi river. Quicksand... shrouded in red mists as far as the eye can see...
You're standing at the top of a slate-strewn slope, and at your back climbs a thousand miles of pine forest. There's no sound, there's no sense of time... You're in awe of nature!
Then suddenly you're frightened, and you don't know why you're frightened. Adrenalin sharpens your senses; now you can hear something. The faintest and deepest of growls. But what you can smell is worse. Hot, dark, corrupt... the breath of a carnivore.
You try to turn, to face the thing behind you, but you only stumble and slide among the stones. Now you're lying on your stomach, looking back to the forest edge maybe twenty feet away. And for a moment, you're eye to eye with a creature that makes your heart quail...
It's a wolf... and it's huge; twice the Alsatian-like creature you've imagined a wolf to be. In that fleeting second, it's image is burned into your mind. The power of its forequarters. The yellow hunger of its glare. The long and savage canines protruding beneath its lip...
And in a grey flash it has gone. It's a full minute before you can move, let alone stand. Only now do you sense the stinging of your palms, sliced open by your slide in the scree.
Your mind is shredded. Your one clear thought is the recognition of an ancient memory. You've felt the terror of your ancestors, cowering in the Northern forests, five thousand years ago...
And you do love your dog. But forever after this...
take a deep breath before you look into her eyes...
