Innocence

We had traveled two-thirds of that mile when the dogs began to appear. Labradors, German shepherds, golden retrievers, and various mixed breeds came from the fields and woods, angling ahead of us, bounding onto the shoulder of the road and then running alongside the car, grinning up at us, tails lashing the air. We counted twenty of them, and we couldn’t imagine whose dogs they were or where they had come from, but their joyful behavior assured us that they were no threat.

The pavement ended at a line of metal posts spaced close enough to one another to prevent the Rover from passing between them. Beyond lay a dirt road rutted, rocky, and unpromising.

When we got out among the dogs, they were without exception eager and affectionate, panting but neither growling nor barking. They milled around us, pleading with their soulful eyes for a touch, a scratch. The four children were enchanted by the animals, and for the first time I saw the three younger ones smiling.

We had nothing to carry other than granola bars and cellophane-wrapped packets of peanut-butter-and-cracker sandwiches, with which we stuffed our pockets.

The map promised to guide us through the wilds by a series of nature’s landmarks. The dogs seemed to think they had been hired as scouts, for they gathered in a pack and set out ahead of us, glancing back to be sure we were following.

The dirt road began in a curve, and when we rounded it, we came upon the gunmen.

79

FORTY FEET AHEAD, A JEEP WAGON HAD BEEN PARKED crosswise to the dirt road. Four men outfitted in hunter’s camouflage and carrying fully automatic rifles were gathered near the tailgate, but when they saw us, they separated and took up defensive positions, three of them using the vehicle for cover.

The one still exposed shouted at us to halt. He said we could come no farther, that there was no disease in their land and that they meant to keep it that way. But though they might have been too distant to be turned violent by our difference, I thought that the speaker was pale and gray-lipped as Telford had been, and in this cool air there seemed to be a thin sheen of sweat on his face, so that I could only conclude that they were in denial of their peril.

I told them that the six of us were not infected, that we only wanted to pass through to a place of our own a couple of miles to the west, but they were not disposed to believe me or even to care whether I told the truth. The leader squeezed off a burst of four or five rounds, over the heads of the dogs and wide of us, and demanded that we retreat.

As if the gunfire must have been a summons, more dogs began to appear out of the tall grass in the meadow to both sides of the road, startling the four men. They seemed not to emerge from hiding, but instead almost to effervesce out of common wild grass. Twenty or thirty of them came forth to join those already leading us, until there were perhaps fifty in the pack.

The mysteries and wonders of the city were the mysteries and wonders of the world, as prevalent here as anywhere, as we would learn in the days to come. The dogs gathered around us, to all sides, as if they were our praetorian guard, the extraordinary nature of the pack evident in the animals’ perfect silence and in the way in which every one of them turned its gaze on the Jeep and the gunmen gathered around it, not in threat but as if challenging them to set aside their fear and behave humanely.

I wasn’t sure what we should do, but when the dogs began to move, Gwyneth said that we must move with them. They led us into the meadow, where rabbits bounded away but did not distract our guardians, and in a wide arc around the Jeep wagon before returning to the track.

The gunmen watched in silence, and if one of them thought the safest course was to cut us down with a spray of bullets, he didn’t act upon that opinion. Whatever happened to those men, we never saw them again.

Into primal woods where afternoon sunlight laddered down through branches, the dogs led us along winding deer trails. Feathery ferns, like an aviary of immense green wings that might catch a draft and soar, arced away into the piney gloom. Ahead of me, the children followed Gwyneth, all of them repeatedly melting into shadows and reconstituted in sunlight, as if the forest wished to remind me that what had been given could be lost.

The cabin wasn’t as simple as it sounds, a sprawling structure of tightly fitted logs caulked with what might have been elasticized stucco, under a slate roof hung with copper gutters that had acquired a green patina. A veranda encircled four sides of it.

While we stood in the large clearing that the house occupied, before going inside, Gwyneth said that of the many provisions stored therein, included were three years’ worth of food. But she wondered how we could possibly feed fifty dogs as well.