God Is Dead by Ron Currie Jr. Page B

the Feral Dog Pack Which Fed on God’s Corpse
    And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.
    â€”Mark 4:11–12
    Â 
 
    Author’s Note: Interview conducted in the Sudanese desert, near the town of Nertiti, in early June 2006. After five months of searching Southern Darfur for———————, who by then had already passed out of any verifiable contact with people, I’d set out for Nertiti from Nyala, but managed to travel only seventy kilometers before the jeep I’d purchased for the trip bogged down in a sand lake. I didn’t last much longer than the truck. Lost and disoriented, to escape the heat I crawled into an abandoned animal den. With no idea where I was in relation to Nertiti, and no strength to get there even if I’d known the way, I assumed I would die. It was at dusk on the second day that———————entered the den, and the interview began.
    It should be noted that this interview took place through extrasensory means; that is,———————and I communicated without either of us actually speaking. Also, owing to my burgeoning delirium, many of the questions I put forth to——————were more or less nonsensical (though he was able to intuit what I was asking and answer accordingly). For the sake of readability I represent those questions here with the simple device of an uppercase bold Q . The substance of the queries can, for the most part, be inferred from———————’s responses.
    My absolute recall of the interview, as well as my eventual emergence from the den and arrival in Nertiti, less than half a kilometer away, can only be attributed to some intervention on———————’s part, the nature of which I won’t pretend to understand.
    â€”RFC
    Q?
    Locating you was fairly simple, really, and has less to do with whatever abilities I gained from eating the Creator than with the abilities I already possessed as a feral dog. Contrary to what people believe, I’m far from omniscient. There are huge gaps in my knowledge of things, as I presume was the case for our Creator. For example, I was aware that you sought me out, and I knew you were somewhere in Darfur, but beyond that I was more or less in the dark. Among dogs, though, those of us with the best noses can detect the smell of a dying animal at ridiculous distances. Despair, like its cousin fear, carries a bitter scent, and just a few molecules of it, driven across the plains on a gusty afternoon, are more than enough for me to trace its source. Finding you was not difficult at all.
    Q?
    No. I’d expend more calories in the effort of chewing you than I would gain. Too thickly muscled. The inevitable result of obsessive weight lifting. So please, don’t worry; though you’d make an easy meal, easy meals are plentiful for us during the hot season. I’m sated. But that’s not the only reason I won’t eat you.
    Q?
    Oh, this whole application-of-morality-to-animal-behavior problem I’ve been grappling with since eating the Creator. Compassion is a coat of fur I find particularly ill-fitting. Just doesn’t mesh well with the nature of a dog. To feel pity for the young, old, weak, injured, and infirm—and as a result to abstain from killing them—not only contradicts that which is feral dog directive number one, but also is poor strategy from the standpoint of self-preservation. I’m still in the early stages of sorting it all out, and honestly it often makes me unhappy.
    Then there’s a third reason I won’t eat