Essential Short Stories: "Brushdogs" by Stephen Graham Jones
After The People Lights Have Gone Off is one of the best single-author short fiction collections I've ever read, in any genre. It's a marvelous distillation of the imaginative leaps and creative risks Stephen Graham Jones is willing to take in his fiction, and each story in its pages is worth multiple reads.
But "Brushdogs" is the one that's moved into my brain, set up shop, animated itself into a shadowy thing lurking in the trees up there between my ears.
It's not the best known Stephen Graham Jones story, but it might be my personal favorite at this point, and it's a great example of some of Jones' best storytelling instincts.
Like many other great Stephen Graham Jones stories – Mapping The Interior and "Father, Son, Holy Rabbit" chief among them – "Brushdogs" is a father-son tale, chronicling that delicate, often fraught relationship with just the right amount of ambiguity. When we meet our two main characters, Junior and his 12-year-old son Denny, they're out hunting. Denny's skittish about it, even moreso when he discovers what seems to be a bear's personal, gore-strewn dining room in the trees. As for Junior, he's just hoping he can do better than his own father, as all fathers do, and he's hoping he can make Denny into a proper hunter by steering him in just the right direction to land a good kill this season.
A brushdog is meant to scare game up out of the treeline and into the open, give the hunter something to shoot at. In the story's opening scene, Junior's hoping he can be that for his boy, but something's not quite right. Something's out here that shouldn't be: A cairn, perched on a low hill in the shadow of a massive mountain, a ziggurat of dark stones, a portent. This, taken together with Denny's general anxiety and the visit to the bear's hunting ground with its ancient bones and rotting strands of leftover flesh, makes for a strange hunting trip. What the father and son can't know, of course, is that they're both brushdogs now. They've scared something out of the trees, something that might not bolt so much as pursue.
I'm not going to tell you any more about what happens next, or how, but growing up around hunters, watching treelines and low hills myself, this story just instantly does something to me. There's something remarkably tactile about it, the way Jones' characters know their particular strip of hunting ground, the way Junior tries to manipulate that ground just so for Denny, helping the boy to help himself. There's a comfort to it, a rhythm that's at once tense and undeniably pleasing, and as anyone who reads horror stories knows, that comfort is made to be twisted up and thrown away.
The setup of "Brushdogs" – from the father-son dynamic to the hunting to that weird cairn on a hill – could spin out in a few different ways. This could be survival horror, folk-horror, maybe even something more cosmic, but Jones is in no hurry to place his tale in a particular subgenre. It's not about the monster or the ghost or the dark force, it's about how that force makes Junior in particular feel. We don't know a lot about Junior's past, but we know he's got a burn on his arm from some past injury, and we know he's determined to be a good father, and we know that with Denny's mother out of town, he's got free rein to do things his way. His focus is on his son, and more importantly who his son will eventually become, and there's a warmth to that which staves off the cold of a morning hunt. We want Junior to succeed. We hang on that desire.
But no matter how skilled you are as a hunter, no matter how comfortable with the natural world, there is always that feeling that something entirely inexplicable, jarring, and unwelcome will come out of those trees. You don't have to be a hunter to understand this. If you're a hiker, or a camper, or just someone who grew up out in wilder country, in those places where the night sang back to you from way past the fence line, you get it. These are things we cannot tame, cannot ever fully understand, cannot anticipate. If you've ever had one of those impossible moments happen to you out in the middle of nowhere, you've felt this peculiar mix of awe and dread.
"Brushdogs" is about what happens when that feeling rears its head and then follows you home. It's a story about a man who takes his son into a place with which he's absolutely, completely comfortable, then finds his worst fear – that the universe will somehow stop his quest to be a better father dead in its tracks – lurking where the elk should be. It's a story of remarkable depth, and in that classic Stephen Graham Jones way, the scares sneak up on you like a predator crouched on the forest floor. I've read this story at least 30 times at this point, and I'm still fascinated by its execution. I probably always will be.
