New Orbit Magazine Issue 08; Feb 2020, The Future of Animals

surviving yearling pup – took the lead with easy,
sweeping strides, hunching her head low beneath
broad, powerful shoulders. Unlike Red’s glaring
bright patches, her lean, hunterly shape was not by
design – for generations the Dog packs in this park
had been exhibiting more and greater wolfish
features, some in complement to (and others at
odds with) their carefully calculated ancestral
designs.
Grey Dog didn't think this, because she didn't
know. Instead, she watched with hawklike
precision as Black Dog and White Feet put
themselves between the fat doe and any route back
to the centre of the herd. Loping easily a hundred
feet behind Red Ears so as not to set off a
stampede, she sensed the triangulation of the rest
of the pack around her, silent and deliberate,
watched suspiciously by the dim, baleful eyes of a
hundred deer, and yet totally unseen.
The fat doe let out a sharp warning bark when
she finally spotted the danger on all sides, and took
off at a sprint as Red Ears barrelled after her over
the coarse, dewy grass.
Too slow. With the cumbersome limp on the
doe’s front leg – probably nothing more than a
twisted ankle – Red Ears was able to latch on to
her powerful haunch in only a second, drawing a
salty spray of blood from the hard muscle. Red
easily dodged a kick and fell back, slowing the pace
for No Tail to take a pass, then Long Hair, then
Blue Eyes.
Taking the lolling tongues and hard breaths of
her family as the sign they were nearing their
threshold, Grey Dog shot forward with her reserve
of deadly energy. She pierced the formation of Dogs
at the fat doe’s heels, and zeroed in on her sweatbeaded,
heaving neck as she fought for just a few
thundering steps more –
Jemima watched with distaste as the ugly
grey Dog locked jaws on the throat of a deer,
which stumbled to a halt and was mobbed by
no less than eight other scruffy ferals.
“You can turn that off,” she said,
uncurling her lip, as they started taking
chunks out of the deer’s still bellowing sides.
“I've seen plenty”.
“And it’s the animal rights goons that are
promoting this mess,” one white-haired
lawyer spat incredulously, waving a remote at
the screen. “The animal rights ones. They're all
for just leaving our property to go feral in the
wilderness and massacre livestock like this,
year-round.”
The video, which he had not turned off,
whipped around to an unflattering angle of
the game trapper that had filmed it, who was
voicing similar, louder, and significantly
more obscene complaints. “…six years ago,
these wolves were fucking Bigfoot… ridiculed
for talking about them – ‘Wolves?’ They said,
‘In 2048?’ – well now bloody look! Would you
look at what they're doing to my fucking
livelihood” –
“They’ve cut the deer population by
almost a third in the ten years we’ve
estimated that they’ve been free roaming in
Grand Cascadia,” a second lawyer
interrupted. “The deer are technically wild,
but they're contracted out to the registered
trappers and hunters that live in the park, so
he’s not wrong to be getting upset”.
“This is the third lot of indisputable video
evidence we've had of the feral Dogs in two
years – probably the twentieth worth
considering. The population’s getting high
enough now that we can no longer rely on
the public believing it’s all an urban legend.