Waggit Forever Read online

  Peter Howe

  Waggit Forever

  Drawings by Omar Rayyan

  This book is dedicated to the Good Uprights who devote their lives to the welfare of all creatures, and especially to those who rescue dogs from the Great Unknown.

  Table of Contents

  Map

  1 Hunger Pangs

  2 Tazar Makes a Plan

  3 Tazar’s Desperate Decision

  4 Crossing Boundaries

  5 Rescue and Resolution

  6 Tazar Meets Beidel

  7 The Sad Farewell

  8 The First Haven

  9 Lowdown’s Limo

  10 The Return of a Friend

  11 Danger at Night

  12 Reunited

  13 Disaster, Destination, and Dismay

  14 Advice from a Stranger

  15 Home at Last

  16 The Curse of Damnation Hill

  17 Restored

  18 A Turn for the Worse

  19 Wisdom from the Ancient One

  20 The Death of the Curse

  21 Life Is Good

  22 Brown One Meets Gray One

  23 Lost and Found

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Other Books by Peter Howe

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Map

  1

  Hunger Pangs

  Lowdown sighed and laid his head on his paws.

  “It’s all over,” he growled, in an uncharacteristically gloomy voice.

  “What is?” asked Waggit, disturbed by his friend’s mood.

  “Life as we know it,” said Lowdown. “Just look at them. Wherever you look they’re doing stuff: fixing things, clearing bushes, changing everything. Nothing good’ll come of it, you mark my words.”

  The two dogs viewed the activities of the park workers from a vantage point in one of the scrubby bushes that still remained. They were members of a pack of dogs that lived in the park by themselves, without the company of humans, using their own wits to survive. The authorities described them as “wild” and “a menace,” although it would be hard to imagine two less ferocious or threatening dogs than Waggit and Lowdown. Waggit was a young, creamy white animal of uncertain breeding, like most of the dogs in the pack, and certainly like his best friend, Lowdown, who had very short legs—for which he was named—and always looked as if he’d just gotten up. He was very old and had lived all his life in the park. Although Lowdown was cynical by nature, he was rarely as depressed as he seemed to be today. Waggit could see that the park was changing, but it hardly seemed to forecast the doom that Lowdown described.

  “They’re just cleaning things up a bit,” the younger dog said cheerfully. “It’s not like they’re making the park smaller.”

  “Maybe,” said Lowdown, “but as soon as they’ve opened up the paths and fixed all the broken stuff, the Uprights’ll come flooding in here, you mark my words. You show Uprights an empty space, and they’ll come and sit in it or throw balls at each other. Then the next thing you know, the Ruzelas will be all fired up, trying to catch us in order to protect them, and we was here first.”

  It was true that one of the things that made this part of the park an ideal place to live was that very few human beings ventured into its wild reaches. And if there were no people, there were fewer park rangers to harass the pack of stray dogs to which Waggit and Lowdown belonged, a team called the Tazarians, named after their fearless leader, Tazar. When Waggit thought back, he realized it had been a similar effort to clean up the park that had caused them to move from their previous location farther south. Their old home, an abandoned tunnel, had been turned into a storage shed housing lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and other tools that kept that part of the park in its newly pristine condition.

  The move north had proved to be successful. Known to the team as the Deepwoods End, it was wilder and, as its name implied, much more heavily wooded, with thicker underbrush. This not only kept the humans away, but it also provided a home for the small animals that were the dogs’ main source of food. The area even had streams and ponds from which the team members could drink and in which they could play. All in all, it was as close to an ideal life as homeless dogs in the middle of a big city could hope for.

  “But even if they clean it up,” mused Waggit, after thinking about it for a while, “they probably won’t cut down all the trees. I mean, they wouldn’t, would they?”

  “There’s no telling what Uprights will do,” said Lowdown glumly. “At the very least life will change. It’s bound to.”

  It was in this despondent frame of mind that the two animals returned to their home, a large drainage pipe that at one time had emptied water into one of the many pools in the area. At some point in its past it had broken and no longer functioned, but it made a very decent home for all the dogs, except for Lowdown, who was too old. His actual age remained a mystery, but most of his teeth were worn down, patches of fur were missing, and he had arthritis that caused him pain. His frail condition made it impossible for him to climb in and out of the pipe, so he had found a home in the bowl of a dead tree not far away.

  When the two friends arrived back at the clearing near the entrance to the pipe, the other team members did nothing to lighten their mood. It was one of those days when everything seemed to be going wrong.

  If you were a free dog and lived without humans, your number one priority was always food. Meals came in two ways: hunting or foraging. Before they were forced north into the Deepwoods End, the dogs could rely on human wastefulness as a source of food. There were always leftovers from the restaurant in the park; the food vendors with their carts regularly threw away goods at the end of the day; park visitors filled trash cans with discarded food. But where the dogs lived now was far from these sources, so they mostly relied on hunting. This was not a problem, because the conditions that made the Deepwoods a good place for dogs to live benefited small animals as well, and so the hunting was relatively easy—but not recently, and certainly not today.

  “I can’t believe it,” complained Cal. “It wasn’t that I was hunting bad—it’s that I wasn’t hunting at all. There was nothing.”

  “I think I saw one scurry the whole time we was out,” said Raz, Cal’s closest friend and constant companion. “He didn’t look too fat either.”

  “Where have they all gone?” asked Lady Magica, one of the team’s three females and an accomplished hunter. “The Deepwoods used to be thick with them.” It was true that when the team first moved to their present location, they would choose what they wanted to eat that night and then go looking for it. It was almost like having a menu. Nowadays they had to take what they could get.

  “It’s all this cleaning up that’s caused it,” grumbled Lowdown, “all this chopping and fixing and sweeping.”

  “I blame the youngsters,” said Gruff, the team curmudgeon, who was bad tempered at the best of times. “They ain’t got the fortitude we had when I was a pup.” Nobody was quite sure what this had to do with anything, but since Gruff always blamed the woes of the world on the younger generation, they paid him no attention.

  Just then a cheery voice was heard above their heads.

  “Oh my, oh my, what a sad and sorry team I have.”

  They looked up to see their leader, Tazar, standing proudly upon the rock that formed one side of the clearing. He was a magnificent, strong black dog with an impressive plumed tail. There were now many more gray hairs around his mouth and nose than when Waggit had first met him, but these only seemed to increase his dignity and authority. He leaped from the rock with an agility that showed no sign of age.

  “Why all the drooping whiskers?” he asked with a chuckle. “What disaster has befallen
you all? Has Gordo lost weight, or is it something more tragic?”

  “No, boss, he ain’t,” said Lowdown. “But he might if we don’t get any food soon—like we all might, and I ain’t got it to lose.”

  Gordo was an enormously overweight dog who never seemed to get any slimmer however meager the team’s rations got. If he ever became skinny, it would be a sure sign that the team was in desperate trouble.

  “No luck hunting today?” Tazar inquired.

  “Nothing,” replied Cal. “We never saw nothing.”

  “It’s probably just a temporary anomaly,” said Tazar, who loved long words and even knew what some of them meant. “More than likely it’s just seasonal.”

  “I don’t know what season that would be, boss,” Lowdown remarked. “We’re in the Warming. It’s not even the Long Light yet, and no animal slumbers before the Chill, no matter how small they are.”

  It was true that those creatures that hibernated would wait until after the first frost before burrowing down for the winter. Tazar was determinedly upbeat, however, and he wasn’t going to let Lowdown’s logic destroy his good mood. He also knew that keeping up the dogs’ morale was his responsibility as their leader.

  “Well,” he cried, “even if there’s no prey, we’re coming into the Long Light, and that means plenty of Uprights, and Uprights mean waste, which means full trash cans and Dumpsters, so, dogs, let’s scavenge.”

  But Tazar’s enthusiasm fell on deaf ears. Despair is often infectious, like measles, and most of the team seemed truly affected—even Waggit, although he tried to hide it.

  “I’m up for it,” he said to Tazar. “Where shall we start?”

  “Hmm,” Tazar murmured. “Well, where do you think would be good, Waggit?”

  This was a technique of Tazar’s that the team knew well. If he had no idea of the answer to a question, he would turn it around by asking one of his own. In this manner not only did he never have to admit he didn’t know something, but it gave the appearance of caring about what the other team members thought.

  “Well,” Waggit answered, “that’s the problem, Tazar. We’ve already checked out the trash cans around here, and there’s nothing worth considering in them.”

  “Nothing?” Tazar said with surprise. “No half-eaten sausages? No crusts of bread? No cheese? No discarded hamburgers?”

  As he went through this litany of food choices, he could see the distress on the faces of the dogs in front of him. Some were drooling, and Gordo looked as if he were in actual pain just thinking about such morsels.

  “Don’t go on, Tazar,” the chubby animal pleaded with his leader. “There’s nothing in them at all. Trust me on this.”

  Since Gordo was the team authority on the subject, Tazar reluctantly believed him. He turned to Cal, Raz, and Lady Magica.

  “And you say you saw nothing worth hunting?” he asked them.

  “Nothing,” replied Cal, “not even a nibbler.”

  “Not even a flea,” said Raz.

  “Oh,” wheezed Lowdown with a chuckle, ferociously scratching beneath his chin, “I could’ve given you a lifetime supply of those if you’d only asked.”

  Tazar, however, was not amused. He knew only too well how team morale could be affected by hunger, how restless and bad tempered they would get if they went too long without food. It was during one such bleak period that Gordo had nearly killed both Lady Magica and himself by sharing a rat with her that he claimed to have hunted, when in fact park workers had poisoned it. Something had to be done, thought Tazar, and quickly.

  The decision as to what exactly that would be was put on hold by the breathless arrival of Lady Alona.

  The dogs who made their home in the park were divided into two distinct groups: team dogs and loners. Loners, as their name implies, lived by themselves, hunted by themselves, and had little contact with any other dogs. Their solitary existence was hard. It was difficult to hunt alone, and they were more easily captured in the sweeps that the park rangers did from time to time to round up stray dogs and take them to the pound. It was during one such action that a shy female had come to the team and asked to join them. She had been a loner for as long as she could remember, but now she wanted the security that being a team member would give her.

  The Tazarians gladly took her in and gave her the unimaginative name Alona. Because of their isolated lifestyle, loners were always socially awkward, often eccentric, and frequently suspicious. This was true of Alona. She took some time to fit in, but now she played an important role that was somewhere between a team dog and a solitary one. While she lived as a Tazarian, she also spent many hours by herself, scouring the park for information and gossip, and she was a valuable source of intelligence, often giving them crucial warning of events that would affect their lives. Now as she caught her breath, the dogs gathered around, eager to hear what she had to say.

  “It’s Olang, sir,” she finally said to Tazar. “Your son.”

  The atmosphere suddenly went electric with tension. Alona had just uttered the word that no dog ever said in Tazar’s company. It was the name of his estranged son, who had left the group to lead a rival team that was the Tazarians’ bitter enemy.

  “I have no son,” Tazar growled, his eyes blazing with anger. “That treacherous, deceitful wretch is nothing to me now.”

  “Yes, sir, I understand,” said Alona, “but he and his team are suffering as we are, and he wishes to have a war council with you, leader to leader. He says that this situation will never be resolved unless the teams work together.”

  “The words that come out of his miserable, lying mouth are of no consequence to me,” Tazar snarled.

  “That may be so, sir, but the actions he takes could affect all of us.” One of the advantages of Alona’s complete lack of social awareness was that she would often continue a conversation with Tazar well past the point beyond which other dogs would dare to go.

  “How so?” inquired Tazar.

  “Well, sir, you know Olang,” she replied. “He could cause a whole heap of trouble that we’d be blamed for as much as his team.”

  “I also know,” said Tazar, “that talking to him is a waste of time and breath.”

  Now it was Waggit’s turn to join in.

  “Tazar, you’re right,” he said. “But even if you can’t change his behavior, it would be good to know what he intends to do.”

  “Waggit’s got a point, boss,” Lowdown chimed in. “What’ve you got to lose?”

  “What I’ve got to lose,” snapped Tazar, “is my peace of mind and my equanimity.”

  “If you don’t mind me saying so, boss,” Lowdown continued, “I don’t know what equa-thingummy is, but your mind ain’t too peaceful right now, so you might as well meet with him and get it over with.”

  And so it was that Alona was sent back into the woods to seek out one of Olang’s lieutenants and arrange a meeting between the two leaders—a meeting that everyone knew would be fraught with hostility and mistrust.

  2

  Tazar Makes a Plan

  Because of the urgency of the situation facing the two teams, the encounter was arranged for the day following Tazar’s reluctant agreement to meet. The site chosen for the occasion was a large outcrop of rock overlooking the road that ran within the park. The arrangement was that the teams would stay on opposite sides in the heavily wooded areas that bordered it, while the leaders and their principal deputies would be the only dogs to come face-to-face on the outcrop.

  Tazar, accompanied by Waggit and Lowdown, arrived early. The big black dog felt that there was an advantage to be had by staking claim to a position, thereby forcing his opponents to take the only spot left. He made sure that the sun, which was shining brightly that day, would be in his adversaries’ eyes. But even with his advanced planning, Tazar was restless and irritable. It would be the first time that he had met with his son since Olang’s defection, and the anger Tazar felt toward him had not diminished over time. Suddenly he stood up, his ta
il and ears erect and the hair on his back bristling with tension.

  Scrambling up the side of the rock came Olang. He was an impressively ferocious dog, heavily muscled and, like his father, completely black, except that he had a large white patch over one eye that was strangely disconcerting. Accompanying him were his two sidekicks, Wilbur, who had been the evil lieutenant of the team’s former leader, Tashi, and a new dog none of the Tazarians knew. He was called Whippety Will and was the thinnest dog Waggit had ever seen. He looked like a fur-covered skeleton, as if he had no flesh on his bones at all. Even his tail was like a rat’s, and he shivered constantly, although it was a warm spring day. Whether his emaciated body was the result of starvation or simply his natural state was hard to tell, but neither Olang nor Wilbur looked like they needed feeding up.

  “Father,” Olang said when all three were on top of the rock, “how are you? You look good; older but good.”

  Despite his size and ferocious look Olang had a thin, reedy voice that sounded whiny and sarcastic at the same time.

  “I didn’t come here to exchange pleasantries with you, Olang,” Tazar snarled. “I came to see what solutions, if any, you and your miserable companions have to this situation that we all face.”

  “My, my, Father.” Olang smirked, appearing to enjoy the effect his presence had on Tazar. “This hostility will get us nowhere. I came here in the spirit of friendly cooperation and hoped that you would too.”

  Waggit stepped in between them.

  “We want to see if there is a way we can all continue to live in the park in peace, and if that means we must pool our resources, then so be it,” he said.