"And Dick said wolves."
"Wolves or maybe coyotes... but he thought it was unlikely coyotes would have done such a job, and I agree."
Stu patted Kojak on the rump and Kojak rolled back onto his belly. "How is it almost all the dogs are gone and there's still enough wolves in one place - and east of the Rockies, at that - to set on a good dog like this?"
"I guess we'll never know," Glen said. "Any more than we'll know why the goddamned plague took the horses but not the cows and most of the people but not us. I'm not even going to think about it. I'm just going to lay in a big supply of Gainesburgers and keep him fed."
"Yeah." Stu looked at Kojak, whose eyes had slipped closed. "He's tore up, but his doings are still intact - I saw that when he rolled over. We could do worse than to keep our eye out for a bitch, you know it?"
"Yes, that's so," Glen said thoughtfully. "Want a warm gin and tonic, East Texas?"
"Hell, no. I may never have gone any further than one year of vocational-technical school, but I'm no f**king barbarian. Got a beer?"
"Oh, I think I can scare up a can of Coors. Warm, though."
"Sold." He started to follow Glen into the house, then paused with the screen door in his hand to look back at the sleeping dog. "You sleep good, ole boy," he told the dog. "Good to have you here."
He and Glen went inside.
But Kojak wasn't asleep.
He lay somewhere between, where most living things spend a good deal of time when they are hurt badly, but not badly enough to be in the mortal shadow. A deep itch lay in his belly like heat, the itch of healing. Glen would have to spend a good many hours trying to distract him from that itch so he wouldn't scratch off the bandages, reopen the wounds, and reinfect them. But that was later. Just now Kojak (who still thought of himself occasionally as Big Steve, which had been his original name) was content to drift in the place in between. The wolves had come for him in Nebraska, while he was still sniffing dejectedly around the house on jacklifters in the little town of Hemingford Home. The scent of THE MAN - the feel of THE MAN - had led to this place and then stopped. Where had he gone? Kojak didn't know. And then the wolves, four of them, had come out of the corn like ragged spirits of the dead. Their eyes blazed at Kojak, and their lips wrinkled back from their teeth to let out the low, ripping growls of their intent. Kojak had retreated before them, growling himself, his paws stiff-out and digging at the dirt of Mother Abagail's dooryard. To the left hung the tire-swing, casting its depthless round shadow. The lead wolf had attacked just as Kojak's hindquarters slipped into the shadow cast by the porch. It came in low, going for the belly, and the others followed. Kojak sprang up and over the leader's snapping muzzle, giving the wolf his underbelly, and as the leader began to bite and scratch, Kojak fastened his own teeth in the wolf's neck, his teeth sinking deep, letting blood, and the wolf howled and tried to struggle away, its courage suddenly gone. As it pulled away, Kojak's jaws closed with lightning speed on the wolf's tender muzzle, and the wolf uttered a howling, abject scream as its nose was laid open to the nostrils and pulled to strings and tatters. It fled yipping with agony, shaking its head crazily from side to side, spraying droplets of blood to the left and right, and in the crude telepathy that all animals of like kind share, Kojak could read its over-and-over thought clearly enough: