The Dog Stars

The group goes to Grand Junction. A feeling that something’s wrong sweeps through Hig, despite the pure glee Hig experiences when a voice from the air tower at Grand Junction airport responds, giving Hig landing instructions. Hig realizes he’s flying right into a trap, as someone has strung a taut line across the runway, which causes planes to wreck. Instead of following directions, Hig lands one hundred feet past the line, and Hig and Pops stealthily make their way along the runway. Pops shoots the person in the tower through the gun port the person uses to shoot at survivors once their plane wrecks. Hig and Pops reach the tower and discover the shooter is a man older than Pops, now sobbing and holding his guts in his hands. In the tower, aside from many cats and the stench of their urine, Hig and Pops discover a plush, meticulously clean one-room windowless apartment. Hig thinks, “I understood the shock of seeing Grand Junction. It was one thing to lose the whole world as you knew it, another to see, to maybe smell your old neighborhood as charnel house and killing field” (273). Hig, Cima, and Pops return to Hig and Bangley’s perimeter in Erie, to discover “charred husks of […] houses […] foundations, […] one half of my hangar ripped open as if by a tornado and burned” (291).

Hig thinks about how Cima must feel seeing the devastation below. Years ago, Cima and Pops left for their canyon, covering their tracks, and employing dynamite to make it nearly impossible to cross the creek when the water was high. Hig references Noah’s Ark as he thinks about the lambs Cima has brought in the Beast. Bison graze below, and a grizzly bear chases deer, as other deer swim in the river.     

Heller characterizes Hig’s “warring emotions” (291) after roughly six weeks away from Bangley:

And I felt a surge of—what? Of something for Bangley who I realized in that moment had become my family. Because it was to him, like to my mother twenty years ago, I was returning home. Not my wife, my child, my mother, not anything but Bangley with his gravel voice (291). 

Hig, Pops, and Cima arrive in Erie to find Bangley’s house standing, “but the windows were shot out and there were scorch marks around the second floor dormer which was splintered, and next to it was a gaping hole in the roof” (293).

Pops thinks Bangley’s dead, but Hig finds a blood-covered Bangley, who describes his fourteen attackers. With Cima’s medical help, Bangley’s situation improves. One of the first things Bangley does is call Cima Mrs. Hig, to which she replies, that’s “Dr. Hig.”Hig hears two 747s roaring overhead that he tries to contact each time the planes fly over, though to no avail.

This final chapter spans from June into autumn. Hig often drops Cima off to care for nearby, diseased families. Cima informs Hig that the families’ condition is not contagious, and Hig comments on the irony that it is this misperception that kept potential marauders away. The final pages take on an almost Home On The Range atmosphere, as Hig comments that their lives are now “some post-apocalyptic parody of Norman Rockwell” (309).

Heller also dedicates much of the chapter to describing surroundings, as it’s clear that describing the world—all that’s been lost and what remains—is a key element of Heller’s narrative strategy. A little boy’s room in the home of the blonde family where Bangley lives becomes an important part of the landscape, as much as the creeks Hig longs to fish are important to this world of The Dog Stars. The novel closes on a poetic note, as Hig recalls his favorite poem, a piece by ninth-century Chinese poet Li Shang-Yin, which Hig refers to throughout the novel. Closing the novel with this poem provides a heartfelt ending, part sorrowful, part optimistic, and concerned with beauty.