The Dog Stars

“Only us for at least a radius of eight miles, which is the distance of open prairie to the first juniper woods on the skirt of the mountain. I just say, Hey. Above the juniper is oak brush then black timber. Well, brown. Beetle killed and droughted. A lot of it standing dead now, just swaying like a thousand skeletons, sighing like a thousand ghosts, but not at all.”

Here, Hig introduces the setting for the first half of the novel: Erie, Colorado, at the airport where Hig and Bangley have spent the past nine years. Hig calls this area “the perimeter.” Heller establishes the theme of ghosts, along with the prominence of nature, when compared to the smallness of man. It’s inside this perimeter Hig and Bangley feel as safe as they can feel, given the near-constant state of danger and need to protect the perimeter from any outsiders at all costs.

“What can I say to Bangley? He has saved my bacon more times. Saving my bacon is his job. I have the plane, I am the eyes, he has the guns, he is the muscle. He knows I know he knows: he can’t fly, I don’t have the stomach for killing. Any other way probably just be one of us. Or none.”

This quote presents an early characterization of the codependency that Hig and Bangley feel for one another, while at the same time continuing to establish Hig’s voice. Hig and Bangley’s relationship is a central nerve in the novel, and Hig’s feelings about Bangley go from friendly to less friendly to the feeling the two are family by the novel’s end. Worth noting here is the sense Hig could take or leave this relationship: “saved my bacon” is not such an endearing turn of phrase. However, Hig understands the necessity of keeping Bangley as a friend, a concept Bangley also seems to understand.

“I started sleeping on the ground because of the attacks. Survivors, it seemed like they picked it out on the map. On a big creek, check. So water, check. Must have fuel, check. Since it was an airport, check. Anyone who read anything knew, too, that it was a model for sustainable power, check. Every house with panels and the FBO run mostly on wind. Check. FBO means Fixed Base Operator. Could’ve just said the Folks Who Run the Airport. If they knew what was coming they wouldn’t have complicated everything so much.”

Here, Hig starts to speak of the reason he chose the airport as a place to live when the flu killed almost everybody and blood disease killed more. This quote characterizes Hig as a practical thinker, as concerned with logistics as with a love for nature. At this very early point in the book, many questions remain as to what happened in the world that causes Hig to begin living at an airport and some preliminary information is offered here. This quote also begins to establish the range of Hig’s voice, which spans from poetic to pragmatic. In the previous paragraph, Hig says the survivors are mostly not nice, so right away Heller establishes the sense of survivalist thinking by which Hig must abide.

“I once had a book on the stars but now I don’t. My memory serves but not stellar ha. So I made up constellations. I made a Bear and a Goat but maybe not where they are supposed to be, I made some for the animals that once were, the ones I know about. I made one for Melissa, her whole self standing there kind of smiling and tall looking down on me in the winter nights.”

If Hig no longer remembers the name and location of constellations, and the world as Hig knows it has long been disappearing, Hig must recreate his own world in order to survive and make it his own. The sentence structure here speaks to how broken both Hig and the world are: there is a disorder to the diction, with punctuation purposefully dropped, thereby illustrating Hig’s internal chaos. Here, one can sense how far away the life Hig once knew is.

“Sometimes back then, fishing with Jasper up the Sulphur, I hit my limit. I mean it felt my heart might burst. Bursting is different than breaking. Like there is no way to contain how beautiful. Not it either, not just beauty. Something about how I fit. This little bend of smooth stones, the leaning cliffs. The smell of spruce. The small cutthroat making quiet rings in the black water of a pool. And no need to thank even. Just be. Just fish.”

In this quote, both Hig’s sense of loss and love of nature are apparent. This sense of simplicity, of being reminded of the pure beauty of what once was, and finding joy in simple pleasures, like fishing, becomes a major theme. Hig also expresses his love for Jasper, his dog. Jasper is Hig’s last connection to the days before the collapse; later in the novel, it’s Jasper’s death that causes Hig to leave the perimeter with no sense of when or if he will return. 

“And for a time while flying, seeing all this as a hawk would see it, I am myself somehow freed from the sticky details: I am not grief sick nor stiffer in the joints nor ever lonely, nor someone who lives with the nausea of having killed and seems destined to kill again. I am the one who is flying over all of it looking down. Nothing can touch me.”

This quote presents one of the first moments in the book where Hig expresses a sense of freedom and forgetting in the face of nine years of post-apocalyptic living. It’s a feeling that at least until he meets Cima, Hig only experiences while flying. A few pages before, Hig talks about how this is a new world with new rules, and so to survive Hig must become a new man. Never before did Hig think himself capable of murder, yet as the novel progresses it’s clear Hig has murdered before and will do so again, in order to survive. 

“Bangley always wears a belted sidearm, I’m sure he wears it to sleep. I have never seen him asleep but I wonder how many nights he has watched us at the base of the berm snoozing. There is much about the man that creeps me out but this is the worst, the unrelenting sense of being surveilled.”

Hig offers his irritation and genuine uneasiness over Bangley’s survivalist tactics and general character. One can feel Hig growing tired of Bangley here, and the difference in their respective characters is foregrounded. Hig’s creeping sense of being surveilled by Bangley proves true later in the novel, and this surveillance will save both men’s lives. 

“I gently lifted the back of her head off the pillow and laid it back down on the stained sheet and brought the pillow around and said I love you. More than anything in God’s universe. And her eyes were on mine and she didn’t say a word and I covered her face and used it. On my own wife.”

This quote illustrates the moment when Hig suffocates his wife, Melissa, after she asks him to do so, in order to alleviate the suffering Melissa experiences from the flu. Hig at once can remember this act in great detail and at the same time seems barely able to accept that it’s actually occurred. Heller’s decision to have Hig kill is own wife is a way in which Heller is able to make the pandemic more intimate, and more horrific; in a moment of tragic irony, Hig is forced to kill the person he cares most about, in a world where everyone is dying. 

“Still we are divided, there are cracks in the union. Over principle. His: Guilty until—until nothing. Shoot first ask later. Guilty, then dead. Versus what? Mine: Let a visitor live a minute longer until they prove themselves to be human? Because they always do. What Bangley said in the beginning: Never ever negotiate. You are negotiating your own death. Me versus him. Follow Bangley’s belief to its end and you get a ringing solitude. Everybody out for themselves, even to dealing death, and you come to a complete aloneness. You and the universe. The cold stars.”

Bangley’s hyper-pragmatic attitude toward life in a post-collapse setting is at odds with Hig’s overarching philosophy, which retains a far larger sense of humanism. Hig believes that to think and live like Bangley drives one towards solitude and a sub-human state of being.

“Breathe, I want you to breathe. They are stalking you Hig. They have all day. The way they see it. No rush. You are moving slow, they will close the distance. Little by little. Then they will charge you. They have done it before. They move like they have done this before.”

Seeking reprieve, Hig goes on a fishing and hunting trip at the beginning of Book Two. On his way back to the airport, Bangley radios Hig to inform Hig that he is being stalked by a group of survivors who mean him harm. If in the previous quote, Hig is able to air his grievances about Bangley from the safety of their shared shelter at the airport, here we see how Bangley’s vigilance, in regard to surveillance, pays off and saves Hig’s life. The tradeoff is that Hig is forced to kill yet more people, and, in turn, make himself just a bit more like Bangley. 

“It was this new relationship to a person of any gender: that I was under no obligation to kill them. Or let Bangley kill them. I mean this was their house, not mine. I was a visitor.”

This quote presents a major narrative shift and introduces a new central nerve of tension in the novel, as Hig decides to fly away from the perimeter for a few days and from the air notices smoke rising from a stone house, outside of which stands a woman. Hig feels a great sense of joy that Bangley is not around to tell Hig to kill the woman, and it’s evident Hig longs for human relationships not based on survival, which communicates the sense of loss Hig experiences, post-collapse.

“When you fished, that’s what you were seeking huh? Connection. Think of the cost to the fish. The fish did not want your connection and if a trout could have killed you with one gulp he would have. Pops is that fish. He can swallow you.”

For much of the novel, Hig’s outlook on the simple beauty of nature and fishing fails to consider how those fish feel while being tricked into eating a sharp object that will lead to their death. Here, Hig’s outlook on “back to nature” is stood on its head, with Hig turned from predator to prey with the arrival of Pops, who is a crack shot with a rifle, so much so that he is able to shatter the Beast’s windshield and force Hig to land. 

“From this angle through the mist the little canyon looked like Eden. Green and bounded, waterfed, remote from death. How was I going to get down that? Was he going to lower me by my bound arms—up behind me and tear out both shoulders?”

Here, Pops has captured Hig and while Pops will let Hig go, this initial act speaks to the need for self-preservation in a post-collapse world. The comparison of the canyon to Eden is a complicated one, as Eden is a manmade construct (being part of a theological narrative in the Christian Bible. Further, Eden is broadly perceived as a positive if not idyllic place, yet Hig finds himself in his version of it with his shoulders bound and a rifle at his back. 

“The world opens suddenly, opens into a narrow box canyon with four sheep, and we grieve. Two shepherds, maybe not in their right mind and we grieve. The relief of company not Bangley, not the blood disease, we grieve. We grieve. That this was once the middle of nowhere and now it’s not even that. And I am not even that. Before I could locate myself: I am a widower. I am fighting for survival. I am the keeper of something, not sure what, not the flame, maybe just Jasper. Now I couldn’t. I didn’t know what I was. So grieve.”

Hig’s loss of any real identity is more profoundly revealed to him when he comes across Pops and Cima, who are, at first, strangers to him. With the death of his pet, Jasper, his last connection to his past life is severed, and at this Hig can feel only sadness. With grieving, however, there is also the act of beginning to process that sadness, and, in turn, provide something resembling a return to emotional normalcy, which his relationship with Cima, by the end of the novel, seems to provide. 

“To be offered cold milk. To have your blue enameled plate filled again. By a woman. To have her walk from an outside fire bearing your dish. To sit in the shade of a big old tree, not a metal hangar, and eat. To hear the bleat of a sheep come through the loud rustle of the leaves. To have an older man sitting across from you in silence, eating also, enemy or friend not sure, it doesn’t matter. To be a guest. To break bread. The pleasure almost split me like a baking stuffed tomato.”

The emotional sustenance Hig is being provided via his connection with Cima is symbolized by the food on his plate and the other references to food (“breaking bread” and a “stuffed tomato). Simple human connection inspires joy in Hig, and it is one of his happiest moments in the last nine years. 

“I saw you studying the creek. You stood right where I would’ve stood so as not to spook the fish in the pool. But killing is something you can get used to. Isn’t it, Hig?”

Here, Heller characterizes Pops as a man who thinks, acts, and speaks like Bangley. In many ways, Pops serves as a double, replacing Bangley’s absence in Book Two. At this point in the relationship, Hig’s respect for Pops grows, as Hig becomes impressed with the old man’s survivalist tactics. Pops also shows Hig respect, since Hig chooses the same place to stand that Pops would have chosen. Heller creates a terse but amiable bond between the two men, with Pops seeing that Hig harbors some ability to survive in a post-collapse world while also remain guarded, for his own protection and the protection of his daughter.

“She talked to me like that. I mostly listening. He worked. Passed me without a word. I never offered to help. Something about his look prohibitive. I hiked up to the Beast and got my sleeping bag. The nights were clear and cool, full of stars, the stream of stars framed by the rim of the canyon like the banks of a dark river, dark but swimming with light. Through the leaves of the big cottonwoods. I slept in the hammock with the leaves above me a rustling roof. They moved the stars around and gave them voice.”

Here, Hig’s life in the canyon takes on a sense of normalcy, as Hig and Cima share their histories and grow closer. Once again, Hig’s sense of nature’s pristine beauty, untouched by the human devastation caused by the flu, is strong. Note also the sense that Hig, Cima, and Pops each has their place. Hig feels no need to help Pops and senses Pops would not want—and might even resent—help. At this point in the novel, the three prepare to leave the canyon, and Hig allows himself to soak in the natural beauty of the setting, prior to departure.

“Seems from here that was the sweetest time ever vouchsafed to two people. Ever. On earth. While we waited for him to finish his degree, for me to have a child, to do the real work of living […] We are fools, you know.”

This quote from Cima is in regard to her husband, Tomas, a musician who was studying for his Ph.D. Prior to collapse, Cima and her husband were waiting for life to begin, as though the life they led at the time was unreal, and compare this to the reality of all that’s been lost. In this way, Cima voices a degree of melancholy and slight regret, as she did not realize at the time how precious that time was.

“That is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears. Ha. Admit it: you don’t have the slightest idea what you are doing, you never did. With all the nets in the world, real or unreal. You swam around in a flashing confused school following the tail of the fish in front. Pretty much. Nibbling at whatever passed, in whatever current you swam into. Even the love of your life felt like luck, like she might vanish in the fanning crowd at any moment. Which she did.”

Here, Hig compares his life before the devastation to a fish nosing a net. At play are themes of identity and self-exploration mixed with the inability to never fully know who one is. This quote reads like Hig’s philosophical understanding of himself.

“I wanted to ask her: What did you all know about the flu, about the coming pandemic. Did you? Did it really take everybody so by surprise? Why was it so fast? What was the blood disease that came right after and why did so many who survived contract it? Wanted to ask her all that since she first told me she was a doctor, that kind of doctor. But then she preempted with the story of her husband dying without her in the ward and I didn’t want to reopen old wounds etc […] She had brought it up. But then she was crying. I would’ve cried too probably but to tell the truth I was cried out. Wrung out like a human rag.”

In this quote, Heller begins to explore a major question in the novel: how did the flu start? Thus far, there has been almost no information regarding this matter. There is a subtle tone of conspiracy in Hig’s logic, which suggests the anger of not knowing after so many years, and indicates the possibility people believe that there must have been some like Cima, a New York City doctor who knew the flu was coming. However, Hig knows better than to ask Cima this, which illustrates Hig’s empathy.

“That’s what the press reported. Mutation of a superbug, one of the ones they’d been watching for two decades. In the water supply etc. Combined with bird flu. We called it Africanized bird flu, after the killer bees. First cases in London and New Delhi. But that’s probably not where it originated. We heard rumors that it originated at Livermore […] The rumor was that it was a simple trans-shipment. A courier on a military flight with a sample taking it to our friends in England. Supposedly the plane crashed in Brampton. Nobody will ever know—she looked around the box canyon and let the absurdity of those words trail off in the wind with the smoke.”

About fifty pages from the end of the novel, Heller provides the second passage concerning the origins of the devastating flu. No character knows the truth about what happened, suggesting the unexpectedness of the outbreak mixed with a degree of chaos that followed in subsequent years. At best, information rises only to the level of rumor. That a simple trans-shipment may have been the cause suggests that the flu was a global problem. This lack of knowledge adds to the sense of loss that pervades the novel’s mood.

“They maybe never imagined a world eighty years hence when their plane would be a Noah’s Ark for sheep. She rolled, broke inertia, almost balking at first, way too slow, and the thought flashed No Way! And then she bounded, gathered the runway, reeled it in, the trees at the end came, grew dark, larger, maybe halfway to them I felt her break ground, the airborne moment and I pushed the nose down hard, pressure, she wanted to lift off, climb, but I held her down, held her three feet off the track hard in the ground effect where she could gain the most speed.”

All of Hig’s calculations, made using the Pilot Operating Handbook, prove wrong and Hig takes off with Cima in the cockpit. At play here is imagery of Noah’s Ark—of surviving great devastation—which surfaces in Book Two and Heller subtly weaves through Book Three.

“And so when I left, he knew exactly the increase in threat, in danger. Could probably calibrate it to an exact lethal degree, the way he would calibrate wind age and elevation for one of his long shots from the tower, knew with chilling precision just how in danger he would be living here alone without me and Jasper, then just me, as a warning system. I mean the symbiosis, the extent to which I hadn’t even been aware. And that somehow made the surly and ultimately brief resistance to me leaving even more touching. The basket of grenades. Telling me I was family. Telling me in my own way to have a good one, to be safe, not for him, but for me.”

Here, Hig’s thoughts communicate one of the final iterations in Hig’s shifting opinion towards Bangley. Hig realizes how difficult it must have been for Bangley to let Hig fly to Grand Junction, and this touches Hig, who at this point thinks endearingly about Bangley. Hig’s love for Bangley will become strong in subsequent pages when Hig flies over the perimeter and sees half of the hangar destroyed. Hig fears Bangley’s dead, and Pops believes it true, until they discover Bangley in critical condition resulting from an attack on the hangar’s perimeter.