My spy Maddie  sees a pack of slave catcher’s hounds menacing a little boy in the forest. One of the dogs, I call him Bog, sees her.

A Hound’s Tale

We was all howling high like we’d lost our young to the hunter’s snare when the master started in beating us with his stick that has the head of a rattler and the red eyes of the devil himself. It ain’t the pain as I am used to that. My back is rutted with scars like the Ballston Road in winter. It don’t even bleed easy anymore, not like the master’s new hound he calls General Lee. Now that hound is green and don’t yet know the ways of the master and sure don’t know the pain if you don’t track right or stop to lap water out of the spring.  He’ll learn surely, but I am old and pretty near soon I’ll be a pile of bones in the hen house. The master shoots the ones like me that is wore out and laughs so his fat self sets his stomach to bobbeling and his eyes bug clear out of his face. Now when I was young and I could grab hold of a Negro’s leg without tearing it clean off, the master would throw me down a hunk of  pork belly. Instead of a kick, I’d get me a pat or two. Hard, mind you, but not as bad as all that.

See, when the pack comes on a running slave, you ain’t supposed to maul them so’s they can’t do no work. Those hounds that do are punished straightaway.

It was night, see, with hardly a smirk of a moon in the sky, but we was on a scent. “Haw! Dogs, Git!” The master yelled, his rot gut voice sounding loud, his stick glancing off the heads of most all of us. “Bog, you old bone bag, he shouts to me, keep moving!” I wanted to tear his throat out then and there for all the beatings and for the time he drowned my mate’s young in the well just for fun. As they were suckling, mind you.

When I spied the white girl trying to coax the little Negro we’d treed, I was in the lead as I can run when I force my legs to the task. Something about her young hand reaching toward the child, her face all fixed and kindly in the shaft of moonlight, the way his little body shook like he had the Saint Vitus and the plain fact that she saw me and didn’t run, made me stop dead. This ain’t a brag but I still see real good even at a distance. ‘Let them go,’ said a voice in me, like God or something was stamping through my head.

She grabbed up that child and handed him off to a big Negro man dressed pretty fine. They was moving fast toward a carriage when –  “Haw! Haw!” The master was closing in as was the pack. So I turned tail and started off howling into the brush with all them dogs and my fat master behind me, his poke nose rifle raised up. “Lost the damn scent! Some hound gonna pay!” He was mad as a rutting boar.

The sight of those three escaping was, well, I had the taste of salt coming out of my eyes and running down my nose and a feeling in me like, hell, I don’t know.

If this is to be my last night on earth, I want to remember the taste of swamp mud, steaming chicken innards, and the face of that young girl in the night. Ain’t no one gonna rescue me like that, surely.

So I whisper to the pack that we should fix to kill the master, tear him to shreds for all the wrongs he’s done us. “Don’t talk crazy, Bog,” they say. They are flat cowards, all.

I think I did a good thing back there in the trees. That is one slave child who won’t get the lash.  If I see tomorrow, I’ll ponder that. If I see tomorrow.