I received a pat on my head from my master, who praised me each time I barked a warning about the squirrels. The bubonic-plague-infested squirrels, nasty fluffy-tailed tree rats that they are. They chitter-mocked me whenever I was pent up indoors, but oh how they ran and hid from me when I was released into the back yard!
1348. The Year of the Black Death. I had been a midwife trying to keep women alive on the shores of the Thames just east of London. We didn’t know what caused it, why it spread so fast… I succumbed after my fifth patient.
1400. A child on the streets of Paris.
1439. A leatherworker in Barcelona.
1531. Surviving several waves of the plague, I died as a laundress right at the end of the last of the current waves. I did learn that frequent washing with soap on my hands seemed to help prevent the disease.
1546. A donkey pulling a cart through the Black Woods of Germany. Although, to be absolutely fair, it wasn’t the bubonic plague that had killed me in that life, so much as it was my master dying from the plague mid-journey while I was still in the traces for the cart. I wandered off into a meadow, ate the grass around the bit–and tangled the axle wheels, so that when a pack of wolves sprang at me, I was unable to escape.
1565. Another child, too young to know better.
On and on…death after death. This life, I was just a dog, but I knew the scent of the Black Death inhabited those squirrels. My doggy nose did not lie.
So I watch. And I growl. And I warn softly softly, but menacingly. This is my watch. This is my post. This time, the Black Death will not pass me by.
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