Animal Appetite

One

     
    I first encountered Hannah Duston on a bleak November Sunday afternoon when my car died in the dead center of Haverhill, Massachusetts. A handsome woman of monumental build, Hannah towered above me. She wore a long, flowing dress with sleeves to the wrists. Her hair fell in waves over broad shoulders and down a muscular back. With her right hand, she maintained what looked like a familiar grasp on a hatchet. Her left arm was outstretched to point an index finger of apparent accusation at my two Alaskan malamutes, who were relieving themselves within the precincts of the Grand Army of the Republic Park. The dogs ignored her. Rowdy, my male, continued to anoint a nearby tree, and Kimi, in the manner of dominant females, lifted her leg on a Civil War cannon directly ahead of Hannah, who stood frozen in her rigid, athletic pose. Although Hannah had every right to object—my dogs were, after all, on her turf—she said nothing. Finding her bland expression impossible to read, I studied the massive stone base on which she stood:
     
    HANNAH DUSTON
    WAS CAPTURED
    BY THE INDIANS
    IN HAVERHILL
    THE PLACE OF HER NATIVITY.
    MAR. 15, 1697
     
    A bas-relief showed a house from which two women were being led by a pair of men depicted as just what the words said, Indians, as opposed, for example, to Native Americans.
    With the dogs now on short leads, I moved to Hannah’s left, directly under her pointing finger. Here, eight children clustered behind a man on horseback. He aimed a gun at a half-naked and befeathered figure. I read:
     
    HER HUSBAND’S DEFENSE
    OF THEIR CHILDREN
    AGAINST THE PURSUING
    SAVAGES.
     
    Continuing my counterclockwise circuit, I found beneath Hannah Duston’s back a trio of people in colonial dress, two women and a boy, and on the ground outside a wigwam, ten prostrate forms rendered in a manner that would not have pleased the American Indian Movement. The words cut into the stone were:
     
    HER SLAYING OF HER
    CAPTORS AT CONTOOCOOK
    ISLAND MAR. 30, 1697
    AND ESCAPE.
     
    The last bas-relief, the one located under Hannah’s hatchet, simply showed two women and a boy in a canoe. The engraved words, too, were simple:
     
    HER RETURN.
     
    In 1697, Hannah Duston had been captured by Indians. She had slain her captors. She and two companions, a woman and a boy, had come back alive. I felt immediately drawn to Hannah: In her place, I thought, my own Kimi, my dominant female, would have done the same. I felt ashamed to find myself the helpless damsel who waited for Triple A under the shadow of Hannah’s bronze figure. My shame increased when my deliverer diagnosed the problem: The fuel gauge had broken. My car had run out of gas.
    That same evening, when I’d finally reached Cambridge, fed the dogs, and unloaded half the firewood I’d been hauling back from my father’s place in Owls Head, Maine, my friend and second-floor tenant, Rita, and I sat at my kitchen table splitting a pizza and drinking her contribution, an Italian red wine far better than anything I could have supplied, meaning, at the moment, anything costlier than tap water.
    “It did seem to me,” I told Rita, “that I was getting awfully good mileage.” I chewed and swallowed.
    Bizarre though this may sound, Rita was eating her pizza with a knife and fork, and from a plate, too, not from the carton. Furthermore, ever since her last trip to Paris, she’s been keeping her fork in her left hand instead of transferring it to the right to get food to her mouth. Even when she was first learning the technique and accidentally stabbed her tongue with the tines, I didn’t laugh except to myself. Ours is a friendship of opposites. You could tell at a glance. For instance, if you’d magically peered in at us sitting at that table, you’d have noticed that Rita’s short, expensively streaked hair had been newly and professionally cut, whereas my unruly golden-retriever mop showed the signs of having been styled by a person, namely yours truly, with considerable experience in grooming show dogs. From Rita’s brand-new navy blue cashmere sweater and coordinating pants, and my Alaskan Mala-mute National Specialty sweatshirt and holes-in-the-knees L.L. Bean jeans, you’d have drawn your own conclusions.
    As you’d soon have guessed if you’d listened in, Rita is a clinical psychologist. A Cambridge psychotherapist. I train dogs. I also write about dogs, not just for fun but for a pittance that Dog’s Life magazine passes off as