They tread a landscape existentially threatened by human wreckage yet are drawn to their fellow species, intriguing and strangely self-destructive. They decipher human scents, collaborate with people to survive, protectively sleep at their bedside and sometimes attack. But above all, as the keenly self-aware canines narrate their journeys through a torn world, they stand apart as reflective witnesses of human pathos.
In Paul Yoon’s new novel, Etna, a mixed breed shepherd speaks with a spare, impressionistic calm tinged by nostalgia as he recalls being seized from his idyllic farm life to serve in a global war where he’s conditioned to be a stoic killer. Yet Etna gazes sensitively upon the vulnerable American soldiers who command him. “Maybe every human had their own song they carried with them,” he muses, “like it was another heart, the way the men in my unit sang by themselves, wearing their headphones at night.”Article continues after advertisement
In John Berger’s King: A Street Story (1999) King physically defends a vulnerable, elderly homeless couple stranded in a street encampment but he sustains them even more by patiently listening as they recall their former lives of security. And in George Saunders’ tragicomic short story, “Fox 8” (2013) the enumerated storyteller (qualified to narrate by shared canine ancestry) becomes infatuated with a human family eavesdropping at their doorstep but is achingly disillusioned when hard hat-wearing humans clear-cut his forest home.
