Every Boy Should Have a Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

now he took a long slurping sip from it, gurgled, and gave the stuff caught in his teeth another good suck through. “Your man is pregnant, in case you didn’t notice. As I told you, they are only good for two things, hunting and giving birth. She has been sneaking out of your yard to take company with one of their mans. Now she is pregnant and her litter belongs to them,” he proclaimed airily.
    The mother seethed. “That is the very height of cruelty to mans! I will not sign to have her give up her child!”
    “But you have already signed, Madam Pinhead Oaf!” taunted the kennel boss, snatching up the papers the mother had signed and waving them in her face.
    When she lunged for them, he pushed them into a drawer, locked it, and coolly ordered her and the boy to take their man and leave.

3
    A Proper Kennel
    The sermon was about loving all creatures great and small, and the boy, who usually fidgeted in church, listened today with attentiveness to the sacred speaker’s words. It seemed to the boy that the sacred speaker, who was also his history teacher at school, was addressing the message especially to him as they kept making eye contact.
    “And now we come to the mans,” spake the sacred speaker. “Of all great nature’s creatures, he is the most like us in appearance and habit. There are those among us who say that the mans are related to us. In truth, they are like unto us in appearance. Their life span is but a third of ours, but the stages they go through are identical to those that we go through. Like us, they are hunters. Left on their own in the wilds, they dominate the other creatures, hunting and harvesting them as they see fit. They can use simple tools. They can build shelter, of a sort. Indeed, some among the educated say that mans are related to us. Some go so far as to speculate that we are descended from them. That they are an unevolved form of us. Or that from the mixing of their blood and angels’, came we. I don’t know anything about that. I know only that great scripture says that we have dominion over them as we have dominion over all beasts. This does not mean that we are to abuse and mistreat them. This means that we must be wise stewards of the land and all the creatures in it. We must not abuse them when they are our pets. We must not overhunt them in the wild. We must see to it that their natural habitats in our forests and our swamps, in our seas and our mountains, in our deserts and our frozen places, are protected from overhunting and from the encroachment of our civilizations. The other day, I took my son on an adventure to the southernmost end of our continent, just before the place where the great sea abuts the sandy shore and to the west where flows the great river of grass. And we did walk in our water shoes to the very end of our civilization where the land becomes more water than soil. We were in the swamp of the crocodilians and the mans. We were in the swamp that is named the Eternal Grass. There were birds aplenty, amazing aviators and hunters these. Wading with legs like long reeds in deep water, these feathered fowl of the water and of the air hunted with long snakelike necks and sharp swordlike beaks the abundance of fish swimming in schools around their submerged feet. There were enormous turtles there with leathern shells and varicolored faces, sunning themselves on the rocks as they watched the hunting of the birds. There were creeping creatures, furry rodents scurrying up the trees and slithery snakes making their way through the grasses. There lurked by the hundreds the large somber scavengers in black, the hunchbacked and hooked-face vultures. And there were other birds, hundreds of other birds, flitting through the sunlit skies, loudly singing their various songs, their boisterous cacophony of joy—joy at being alive—alive, yes, alive and happy to be in that moment right then and there in that holy tabernacle of nature. In this wet place, in this place of