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You should sleep. It will be a long climb. And cold.
“I slept for two hundred and fifty thousand years, I’m hardly tired,” Stack said. “Why did
you pick me?”
Later. Now sleep. Sleep has other uses.
Darkness deepened around Snake, seeped out around the cave, and Nathan Stack lay down
near the warming-stone, and the darkness took him.
13
SUPPLEMENTARY READING
This is an essay by a writer. It is clearly an appeal to the emotions. As you read it,
ask yourself how it applies to the subject under discussion. What is the writer trying to
say? Does he succeed in making his point? Does this essay cast light on the point of the
subject under discussion? After you have read this essay, using the reverse side of your
test paper, write your own essay (500 words or less) on the loss of a loved one. If you
have never lost a loved one, fake it.
AHBHU
Yesterday my dog died. For eleven years Ahbhu was my closest friend. He was
responsible for my writing a story about a boy and his dog that many people have read.
The story was made into a successful movie. The dog in the movie looked a lot like Ahbhu.
He was not a pet, he was a person. It was impossible to anthropomorphize him, he wouldn’t
stand for it. But he was so much his own kind of creature, he had such a strongly formed
personality, he was so determined to share his life with only those he chose, that it was
also impossible to think of him as simply a dog. Apart from those canine characteristics
into which he was locked by his genes, he comported himself like one of a kind.
We met when I came to him at the West Los Angeles Animal Shelter. I’d wanted a dog
because I was lonely and I’d remembered when I was a little boy how my dog had been a
friend when I had no other friends. One summer I went away to camp and when I returned I
found a rotten old neighbor lady from up the street had had my dog picked up and gassed
while my father was at work. I crept into the woman’s backyard that night and found a rug
hanging on the clothesline. The rug beater was hanging from a post. I stole it and buried
it.
At the Animal Shelter there was a man in line ahead of me. He had brought in a
puppy only a week or so old. A Puli, a Hungarian sheep dog; it was a sad-looking little
thing. He had too many in the litter and had brought in this one either to be taken by
someone else or to be put to sleep. They took the dog inside and the man behind the
counter called my turn. I told him I wanted a dog and he took me back inside to walk down
the line of cages.
In one of the cages the little Puli that had just been brought in was being
assaulted by three larger dogs that had been earlier tenants. He was a little thing, and
he was on the bottom, getting the stuffing knocked out of him. But he was struggling
mightily.
“Get him out of there!” I yelled. “I’ll take him, I’ll take him, get him out of
there!”
He cost two dollars. It was the best two bucks I ever spent.
Driving home with him, he was lying on the other side of the front seat, staring at
me. I had had a vague idea what I’d name a pet, but as I stared at him, and he stared
back at me, I suddenly was put in mind of the scene in Alexander Korda’s 1939 film The
Thief of Bagdad, where the evil vizier, played by Conrad Veidt, had changed Ahbhu, the
little thief, played by Sabu, into a dog. The film had superimposed the human over the
canine face for a moment so there was an extraordinary look of intelligence in the face
of the dog. The little Puli was looking at me with that same expression. “Ahbhu,” I said.
He didn’t react to the name, but then he couldn’t have cared less. But that was his
name, from that time on.
No one who ever came into my house was unaffected by him. When he sensed someone
with good vibrations, he was right there, lying at their feet. He loved to be scratched,
and despite years of admonitions he refused to stop begging for scraps at table, because
he had found most of the people who came to dinner at my house were patsies unable to
escape his woebegone Jackie-Coogan-as-the-Kid look.
But he was a certain barometer of bums, as well. On any number of occasions when I
found someone I liked, and Ahbhu would have nothing to do with him or her, it always
turned out the person was a wrongo. I took to nothing his attitude toward newcomers, and
