I am, like a suddenly sick old man, hoping that this young man will end up finishing what I so belatedly started with the Sons of Arуas project. Citing the ancient sources of the classical era, such as Xenophon and Aelien, as to the importance of the dog in the psychology of Arуan warfare the author demonstrates a clear grasp that something other than technology, something more than “Guns, Germs and Steel” accounted for the thrilling victories of third-stage [1] European Warriors [being the Indo-European or Arуan] from the conquest of India and the subjugation of the Semitic folk, a warrior tradition born of a different stripe of pastoralism, in early antiquity. Most touching is his examination of the fantastical use of speaking animals in C.C. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia series as a barometer as to the importance of animals in ancient Arуan heroics, as Lewis was one of the foremost mythological synthesizers of the sacred Arуan traditions of the last age.

He then goes on to relate the extreme divergence in warrior psychology between the Arуan way of war, in which the dog serves so prominently, and the view of the dog as emergency camp cleaner [eating human feces and fish scraps] food [usually in low protein crisis such as the Aztecs lived in perpetually and the North American hunter encountered periodically], and as a hair towel for wiping grease from one’s fingers.

Like myself, the author is particularly taken with the prominent use of the dog as a war beast among the Conquistadors of New Spain, men who in their hundreds boldly took down armies numbering in their tens of thousands from Florida to Peru. My personal favorite war dog was Bruto the “bravest soldier” in Hernan de Soto’s Entrada, who was always first into battle and his master “never third.” [2] With this most ruthless of Conquistadors, who annihilated the Mississippian Civilization and single handedly slew up to 1,000 Incas in a day at Cajamarca, we are treated to a man acting as a general following his dog into battle!

“Dogs found us when we were young,” writes the author of On the Hound, after introducing into the discussion a German term from Blitzkrieg warfare, which is in many ways the apex expression of the Arуan way of warfare, combining the psychology of the hunt and of the socially-justifying confrontation in one concept, schwerpunkt, the operational and moral pivot point of battle, like the left hook that Frazier used to send Ali to the canvas—the explanation point placed mid-point in the narrative of battle, where it belongs.

Here, in the Arуan determination to use the very beasts of the earth to subdue their enemies, a mastery of intent is achieved in 1520 Mexico as it was in Bronze Age Europe, India and the Near East, leaving this reader with the impression that the author of On the Hound, understands that the tradition that first ruled the field of battle from the deck of a chariot and now from the deck of a carrier, the cockpit of a jet, or the turret of an Abrahams, or even from a swivel chair before a video display half a world away, had a more ancient ancestor, being the huntsman and his hound.

I do have one question. Did the CroMagnon, the huntsmen who had failed to displace the Neanderthal for some 100,000 years, did they benefit from the domestication of the dog in their final turning of the tables on their ages old foe, a foe who raped their women, had no missile weapons, seemed to have night vision?

Was the real Grendel of prehistory, the original Man of Europe, the Neanderthal, four-times our strength and incapable of throwing objects and hence inhibited—despite superior brain size—from making the mental leap from thrown stone, to sling, to bow and arrow to gun?

Was Europe conquered once with the hound and then again with the horse, and then finally reordered into a war-making machine combining the two into a world-wide scourge?

I precede, for now, by way of examining poetics, primarily, and am hoping to combine the insights gleaned with the produce of a keener temporal mind considering their liturgical opposites. [2]

Notes

-1. This writer is working from the understanding that Old Europe was a divided land where archaic descendants of those who displaced and eradicated the Neanderthal faced off against the “Anatolian” farming societies still represented in the human Genome by the Sardinian.

-2. So complained a priest and chronicler and critic who accompanied Soto

-3. Lack of vocal range, and also extreme robustness of frame, may have inhibited Neanderthals from developing a canine partnership—indeed most of mankind have failed on this count since their extinction. Yet they once must have terrorized us, for all of their remaining DNA is paternal. If any readers have information on dog DNA I am interested. Marvin Harris reckons fully realized human vocalization coming at about 40,000 YBP, just before the Neanderthals, with bigger brains but slight vocal rage, were wiped out. It is a pet theory of mine that the dog-human partnership doomed the Neanderthals. Even if it did, it need not be vocalization that was the key. I have no problem leading dogs with body language while hiking. They also seem to cue on intent, whether through posture, gait or hocus pocus.

In any case, here stands the overture of the Hounds of Arуas:

Arуans pioneered the domestication of the Horse and Elephant and Dolphin and seem to be the only folk to use the dog for war and active hunting. Indeed a story from Pausanius related a dolphin delivering a man to Corinth after he was tossed overboard in antiquity. Could, the pathetic dog park, the yipping lap dog, the non-breeding dog parent of postmodernity, actually be the twisted child the Arуan’s signature legacy of martial dominance?