Dog Tales

Though the cold air bit into her skin, Catherine didn't complain as she was led into the nearby settlement. The sign in front, an old post with a board nailed sloppily to its top read "Lever Du Soleil." The town itself seemed primarily made from scrap metal and cut wood, evidently the two most abundant resources gathered from the drones and trees respectively. The various small buildings were arranged around a central, dirt gathering area. And in that area a crowd had gathered around a small, prone figure.

"Marti?" Catherine recognized the leader's voice as he knelt next to a little girl. Blood was pooling beneath her body, springing from a small splotch on her shirt just above her left hip.

"I'm sorry John, we didn't see them 'till it was too late," one of the locals said, his voice shaking. "I don't even know what she was doing out there."

The leader, who Catherine could guess was the girl's father judging by the worry and concern on his face, said nothing in response. Instead, he reached into his jacket and produced a small needle.

"You're not going to give her the entire dose, are you?" Mike asked as they passed. John and half the locals assembled turned to glare at the interloper, evidently wondering why the doctor was bothering to ask. "Good lord. Don't you have a doctor, or any real medical supplies?"

"You're looking at it," the girl's father replied holding the needle up. "And Doc Schroder moved away a year ago."

"Get her somewhere warm and dry," Mike snapped as though that were the obvious solution to a gunshot wound. As John and another local gently lifted Marti, evidently trusting his advice, the doctor dug in his backpack. Though one of the men kept a rifle trained on him, he lowered it when Mike pulled a small bag from the pack. Following her traveling companion, Catherine wondered if he intended to operate in nothing more than a winter coat and his underwear.

"Can you help her?" John asked, laying his daughter on a large table inside what looked to be a kitchen. Mike looked at the leader from under his eyebrows, but said nothing in response. Instead, he held his hand out for the needle. For a moment the leader looked as though he would refuse. Then, Marti let out a small gasp, her eyes blinking open. As her face began to contort in pain, the leader passed the needle of what Catherine assumed was Med-X to the doctor.

"It winged her. I've seen worse," Mike muttered as he went to work, carefully applying small doses to the gaping wound in the girl's stomach. Even before he'd finished, the girl began to relax, the powerful numbing agent did its job.

"Hello Marti," the doctor greeted with a friendly smile. "My name's Doctor LePeine. I heard you had an accident and I thought I'd try to make you feel better." As he spoke, Mike bathed his hands in liquid from the nearest bottle of alcohol. "I bet it's working already isn't it?"

"That's a funny name," Marti replied, nodding her head. As she spoke, the doctor retrieved a set of tweezers from his bag.

"Tell me about it," Mike replied, still smiling. As he spoke, the girl's eyes drooped. "Marti, I need you to stay awake okay?" An iota of worry entered the doctor's voice. "How about I tell you a story? You have to promise to listen very carefully okay?"

Again the girl's head nodded, though she didn't open her eyes any further. Mike went about removing small pieces of blood soaked cloth from the girl's stomach. As he went to work Catherine took a seat next to the girl's father, noticing the way the man stared at the doctor with a mixture of hope and fear.

"Once upon a time, a long time ago, all the dogs got together and decided they were going to throw a party. They build this big cabin out in the woods," the doctor explained, setting the tweezers aside and grabbing a needle and thread. All the while, Marti's eyes stayed on him, the faintest of smiles playing at her lips.

"Well, they get to partying and suddenly there's this problem. See, all the dogs are wagging their tails and getting dirt all over the place." Whether it was the Med-X or the doctor's story, Marti seemed entirely engrossed with Mike, oblivious to the sutures he began to sew in her stomach. "So the leader of the dogs tells them to take their tails off."

"They took their tails off?" Marti asked, evidently more than a little shocked. "Didn't that hurt?"

"Nah," the doctor replied confidently. "There's a trick to it. I'll show you with my thumb later. So the dogs take their tails off and hang them outside the cabin, and the party gets going again. Before too long, a pack of wolves show up." Without missing a beat in his tale, Mike made the final stich, tying it closed with practiced ease and reached for a roll of tape in his bag.

"They want to join the party. Of course, the dogs refuse, and tell the wolves to go away. Well, the bears don't really like getting kicked out, so they climb onto the roof really quietly. The wolves pull back the edges of the roof and yell 'Fire.' And all the dogs go running out as fast as they can, grabbing any old tail within reach and plucking it back on."

Seemingly coming to the end of his story, he gently applied a series of bandages that looked like cannibalized sweater to the girl's wound.

"So from that day on, dogs had to search for their tails. That's why when two dogs meet for the first time, they sniff each other's' hindquarters. They're still looking for their tails." Laughing, Marti covered her mouth with her hands. Though there was quite a bit of blood on the table, and most likely quite a bit more in the dirt pavilion, the girl looked like she was ready to jump off the table. Even though she knew a great deal of the girl's comfort had come from the Med-X, Catherine felt mildly awestruck by what she had just witnessed.

"Get some rest, okay?" Mike asked cleaning his hands with a rag. He turned to the girl's father. "She'll be fine. It wasn't as bad as it looked. She'll probably need some good old fashioned bed rest for a week or two but…" He was promptly cut off as John wrapped him in a bear hug. Even from where she sat, Catherine could hear bones in the doctor's back pop as the town's leader squeezed Mike around the shoulders.

"If you need anything, and I mean anything, you just let me know," John promised as he looked between his daughter, Mike and Catherine. Though John stayed behind with his daughter, one of the men who'd cornered them in the greenhouse arrived, promising to return reward Marti's good health with food and a place to stay for the night.


A/N: I'd like to add to this that the story Mike tells is an Inuit legend and not of my own creation. I'm not sure where it came from originally, but it has been told by word of mouth for generations and was hear by me in the summer of 1998 in the Wolf Preserve in Spokane Washington. Thanks for reading, please review.