Wake up!

Day 1

You wake up with a start, suffocating, your face wet with sweat. By the time your consciousness leaves the limbo of this nightmare, you understand why you have emerged so abruptly from sleep.

Buck!

That damn dog is clutching the hem of your pants and shaking his head in all directions, tearing your leg off

"Hey calm down!" you grumble, massaging your temples.

Your companion, visibly delighted, releases you but immediately begins to spin around in pursuit of his rat tail, all the while emitting plaintive yelps.

"What the hell is wrong with you!" With your mind still foggy and feeling the beginnings of dizziness rising, you decide to go back to bed, feeling irrepressibly nauseous. But Buck doesn't seem to be willing to leave it at that. As soon as your hair touches the jacket (rolled into a ball) that serves as your pillow, this stubborn mutt rushes back to manhandle your ankle. You prefer to give up in spite of the tiredness.

"Okay enough, I'll get up, you tyrant!" Why on earth to have encumbered itself with this effete bastard! Maybe because you took pity on him by pulling him out of the rubble under which he was dying. Maybe he's more like you than you'd like to admit. His name, Buck, was given by you. It's not very original, but The Call of the Wild is a novel that marked you as a teenager and Jack London remains one of your favorite authors.

And then, to get by in this devastated and unforgiving world, it was better to follow the path of the dog Buck than the wolf White Fang. The latter allows himself to be meekly domesticated, out of friendship, while the former, tested by the **** of men, unleashes his deepest nature. Here he is fighting with his weapons in the cruel reality of his environment, by a wild mimicry. It was necessary to do the same for all the survivors. To emancipate himself from his sanitized condition of modern individual, city-dweller dependent on his soft comfort.

To harden quickly, from one day to the next, without procrastination, without learning. Adapt, always. But your Buck is not really built to pull sleds on the icy expanses of Alaska or to fight against belligerent fellow creatures. He has a narrow body and protruding ribs. His thin, tapered muzzle ends a small pyramidal head illuminated by minnow eyes and topped by two pointed ears. To tell the truth, it was he who adopted you. When you pulled him out of the ruins, he was even thinner than now. A poor, sickly beast that limped along without complaining. You had done nothing to make this dog follow you, nor had you tried to stop him.

Fate seems to have agreed that your paths were bound to converge and mingle, for a while anyway. Unless this meeting was just the fruit of chance, agglomerated by altruism and survival instinct. It always came back to that, the survival instinct. You are about to throw your old perfecto on the muzzle of this stubborn animal, when you hear the hum of an engine that is getting louder by the second. You leap to your feet before rushing to the only window of the hunting cabin, the providential shelter of the past night. Buck remains as nervous as ever, but as he meets your gaze, he sits down beside you, his nose erect, satisfied.

"I owe you one," you whisper to him as a battered SUV appears on the forest trail leading to the cabin.