City

"Let's get out of here," urged Shadow. "You high-tail it down the trail and I'll bring up the rear. If he tries anything-"

"He won't try anything," snapped Ebenezer. "He's a friend of ours. It's not his fault about the rabbit. He doesn't understand. It's the way he lives. To him a rabbit is just a piece of meat."

Even, he thought, as it once was for us. As it was for us before the first dog came to sit with a man before a cave-mouth fire – and for a long time after that. Even now a rabbit sometimes Moving slowly, almost apologetically, the wolf reached forward, gathered up the rabbit in his gaping jaws. His tail moved – not quite a wag, but almost.

"You see!" cried Ebenezer and the wolf was gone. His feet moved and there was a blur of grey fading through the trees – a shadow drifting in the forest.

"He took it back," fumed Shadow. "Why, the dirty-"

"But he gave it to me," said Ebenezer triumphantly. "Only he was so hungry he couldn't make it stick. He did something a wolf has never done before. For a moment he was more than an animal."

"Indian giver," snapped Shadow.

Ebenezer shook his head. "He was ashamed when he took it back. You saw him wag his tail. That was explaining to me – explaining he was hungry and he needed it. Worse than I needed it."

The dog stared down the green aisles of the fairy forest, smelled the scent of decaying leaves, the heady perfume of hepatica and bloodrot and spidery windflower, the quick, sharp odour of the new leaf, of the woods in early spring.

"Maybe some day-" he said.

"Yeah, I know," said Shadow. "Maybe some day the wolves will be civilized, too. And the rabbits and squirrels and all the other wild things. The way you dogs go mooning around-"

"It isn't mooning," Ebenezer told him. "Dreaming, maybe. Men used to dream. They used to sit around and think up things. That's how we happened. A man named Webster thought us up. He messed around with us. He fixed up our throats so we would talk. He rigged up contact lenses so that we could read. He-"

"A lot of good it did men for all their dreaming," said Shadow, peevishly.

And that, thought Ebenezer, was the solemn truth. Not many men left now. Just the mutants squatting in their towers and doing no one knows what and the little colony of real men still living in Geneva. The others, long ago, had gone to Jupiter. Had gone to Jupiter and changed themselves into things that were not human.

Slowly, tail drooping, Ebenezer swung around, clumped slowly up the path.

Too bad about the rabbit, he thought. It had been such a nice rabbit. It had run so well. And it really wasn't scared. He had chased it lots of times and it knew he wouldn't catch it.

But even at that, Ebenezer couldn't bring himself to blame the wolf. To a wolf a rabbit wasn't just something that was fun to chase. For the wolf had no herds for meat and milk, no fields of grain for meal to make dog biscuits.

"What I ought to do," grumbled the remorseless Shadow, treading at his heels, "is tell Jenkins that YOU ran out. You know that you should be listening"

Ebenezer did not answer, kept on trudging up the trail. For what Shadow said was true. Instead of rabbit-chasing, he should have been sitting up at Webster House listening – listening for the things that came to one-sounds and scents and awareness of something that was near. Like listening on one side of a wall to the things that were happening on the other, only they were faint and sometimes far away and hard to catch. Even harder, most times, to understand.

It's the animal in me, thought Ebenezer. The old flea-scratching, bone-chewing, gopher-digging dog that will not let me be – that sends me sneaking out to chase a rabbit when I should be listening, out prowling the forest when I should be reading the old books from the shelves that line the study wall.

Too fast, he told himself. We came up too fast. Had to come up too fast.

It took Man thousands of years to turn his grunts into the rudiments of speech. Thousands of years to discover fire and thousands more of years to invent the bow and arrow – thousands of years to learn to till the soil and harvest food, thousands of years to forsake the cave for a house he built himself.

But in a little more than a thousand years from the day we learned to talk we were on our own – our own, that is, except for Jenkins.

The forest thi

The house stood on the hilltop, a huddled structure that had taken root and crouched close against the earth. So old that it was the colour of the things around it, of grass and flowers and trees, of sky and wind and weather. A house built by men who loved it and the surrounding acres even as the dogs now loved them. Built and lived in and died in by a legendary family that had left a meteoric trail across centuries of time. Men who lent their shadows to the stories that were told around the blazing fireplace of stormy nights when the wind sucked along the eaves. Stories of Bruce Webster and the first dog, Nathaniel; of a man named Grant who had given Nathaniel a word to pass along; of another – man who had tried to reach the stars and of the old man who had sat waiting for him in the wheelchair on the lawn. And other stories of the ogre mutants the dogs had watched for years.

And now the men had gone and the family was a name and the dogs carried on as Grant had told Nathaniel that far-gone day they must.

As if you were men, as if the dog were man. Those were the words that had been handed down for ten full centuries – and at last the time had come.

The dogs had come home when the men had gone, come from the far corners of the earth back to the place where the first dog had spoken the first word, where the first dog had read the first line of print – back to Webster House where a man, long ago, had dreamed of a dual civilization, of man and dog going down the ages, hand in paw.

"We've done the best we could," said Ebenezer, almost as if he were speaking to someone. "We still are doing it."

From the other side of the hill came the tinkle of a cow bell, a burst of frantic barking. The pups were bringing in the cows for the evening milking.

The dust of centuries lay within the vault, a grey, powdery dust that was not an alien thing, but a part of the place itself – the part that had died in the passing of the years.

Jon Webster smelled the acrid scent of the dust cutting through the mustiness of the room, heard the silence humming like a song within his head. One dim radium bulb glowed above the panel with its switch and wheel and half a dozen dials.

Fearful of disturbing the sleeping silence, Webster moved forward quietly, half awed by the weight of time that seemed to press down from the ceiling. He reached out a finger and touched the open switch, as if he had expected it might not be there, as if he must feel the pressure of it against his fingertip to know that it was there.

And it was there. It and the wheel and dials, with the single light above them. And that was all. There was nothing else. In all that small, bare vault there was nothing else.

Exactly as the old map had said that it would be.

Jon Webster shook his head, thinking: I might have known that it would have been. The map was right. The map remembered. We were the ones that had forgotten – forgotten or never known or never cared. And he knew that more than likely it was the last that would be right. Never cared.