Keep the Change by Thomas McGuane

continuous, bubbling drone. Joe could have shot it where it was. Getting the corpse out was one thing, but the idea of killing something which had retreated to a final crevice not one other creature desired was insupportable.
    Sometimes Joe sat outside the cabin until the dog thought he had gone. Then he would hear the dog moaning to itself, a whimpering agony as its parasites gnawed away at it. Joe put a piece of meat on a pole and shoved it up under the cabin so that he could feel the jarring of the feeding dog, and its agony resumed like a great outside force.
    He went to the vet and bought an aerosol can of boticide, antiseptic, and a pair of sheep shears. He now had forty-three dollars tied up in the dog. Then he bought a T-bone. That brought it to almost forty-nine. He drove out to the cabin.
    When he played his light underneath the building, the wolfish eyes burned yellow. The dog growled on, both inhaling and exhaling. Around its face, a thick corona of matted fur extended for half a foot in all directions. Joe pushed a pole up in there at the end of which he had arranged a noose of broken lariat. The dog shuddered back to the ultimate inch of recess,driving dust forth in a swirl around the beam of light as the pole approached. It snapped with lightning speed at the end of the pole but the loop kept on coming forward until it was around the brute’s neck. Joe tightened the loop slightly, then slipped the pole out. Now holding the nylon rope, he could feel the throb of life at its end. A peculiar quiet reigned in the dusty yard as Joe looked around in an attempt to foresee the consequence of pulling the creature into the light of day. Maybe the dog had the right idea. But Joe had grown up with dogs and this one had lost all shadow of the old alliance with mankind and had become an instrument of secrecy and fear.
    The time had come. Joe began to pull. A scrambling could be heard from within and a faint dust cloud rolled out, accompanied by the most piteous tone, a pitch of voice rendingly universal. Joe was about to overwhelm all of the dog’s accumulation of temper and habit and to drag him out into the daylight.
    The rope was as hard as a stick in his hand. It yielded a degree at a time. Sweat poured from Joe. It runneled down his laugh lines. It stung his eyes. As the dog advanced to meet its fate, it occurred to Joe that he didn’t know what it looked like, except for that big wedge of muzzle. For a split second, a part of him wondered what would happen if the dog weighed a thousand pounds. Joe regained enough rope to be able to coil it at his feet. He made one coil, then another, and while he was making the third, the dog shot out from under the cabin, hit the end of the rope and snatched Joe onto his face. Joe held on while the dog ran baying in a great circle, its hindquarters sunk low to scramble against the restraint of the rope.
    Joe got to his feet with the rope still in his hands, his palms burned and stinging. He retreated until he reached a pinetree that once shaded the yard of the cabin. Here he was able to take a couple of turns around the base of the tree, and bracing his weight against the rope draw the dog to the tree and snub its head against it. Joe’s heart ached at the suffering of the animal in its captivity, the misery which broad daylight seemed to bring. The dog lay there and howled.
    Joe bound the dog’s mouth shut with twine, narrowly avoiding being bitten, and began to clip the fur with the sheep shears. As soon as he broke the surface of the matted fur, he hit a bottomless layer of pale, thick maggots and felt his gorge rise. He drove back his loathing until he had clipped the dog from end to end, down to its festering skin. He got an old rusted gas can from the shadow of the cabin and went to the small creek that ran past to fill the can with water. He rinsed the dog over and over while the dog, thinking that it was drowning, renewed its moans. Once Joe was sure the dog was clean, he