Haint: A Tale of Extraterrestrial Intervention and Love Across Time and Space

By Joy Ward and William Wegman

How did we evolve? Did we have help? In a world torn apart by cataclysmic climate changes, survivors learn answers to these immortal questions as they join together based on their love of various dog breeds. Two voices, the weimaraner Haint and his mistress Amanda, tell the story of how each in their own way come to the realization of what they mean to each other. Along the way, Haint explains how his species came to help humans along in their evolutionary development. Haint also reveals that the world is becoming inhabitable for humans and dogs so he and his kind must make the decision whether to save themselves and what they have learned over the thousands of years on Earth or stay and take their chances with the doomed humans.

Amanda, accompanied by her friends Kern and Liddy and their canine familiars Haint and Cloudy, travel across a landscape with violent weather and competing tribes as they look for a way to save their "breed" from drought. During the trip they take on an enigmatic young girl who is much more than she appears.

Haint is the story of lives entangled over thousands of years and hundreds of lifetimes as dogs and humans discover the depths of their love for each other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Sep 19, 2005
• ISBN: 9781412235501

Joy Ward

Joy Ward was raised with Weimaraners and currently lives with two Weimaraners, Sol and Cloudy. Annie, a redbone coonhound, completes the family. Ward has written for numerous publications including international, national and regional magazines. Her credits include Mother Jones, On the Issues, Commerce, and Governmental Review.

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© Copyright 2005 Joy Ward.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Note for Librarians: A cataloguing record for this book is available from Library and Archives Canada at www.collectionscanada.ca/amicus/index-e.html

ISBN 1-4120-5675-6

ISBN 978-1-4122-3550-1 (ebook)

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Haint

Chapter 2: Haint

Chapter 3: Haint

Chapter 4: Amanda

Chapter 5: Haint

Chapter 6: Amanda

Chapter 7: Haint

Chapter 8: Amanda

Chapter 9: Haint

Chapter 10: Amanda

Chapter 11: Haint

Chapter 12: Amanda

Chapter 13: Haint

Chapter 14: Amanda

Chapter 15: Amanda

Chapter 16: Amanda

Chapter 17: Haint

Chapter 18: Amanda

Chapter 19: Haint

Chapter 20: Amanda

Chapter 21: Haint

Chapter 22: Amanda

Chapter 23: Haint

Chapter 24: Amanda

Chapter 25: Haint

Chapter 26: Amanda

Chapter 27: Haint

Chapter 28: Amanda

Chapter 29: Haint

Chapter 30: Amanda

Chapter 31: Haint

Chapter 32: Amanda

Chapter 33: Haint

Chapter 34: Amanda

Chapter 35: Haint

Chapter 36: Amanda

Chapter 37: Haint

Chapter 38: Amanda

Chapter 39: Haint

Chapter 40: Amanda

Chapter 41: Haint

Chapter 42: Amanda

Chapter 43: Haint

Chapter 44: Amanda

Chapter 45: Haint

Chapter 46: Amanda

Chapter 47: Amanda

Chapter 48: Haint

Acknowledgments

Although many people deserve thanks for their assistance with this book, one stands out above all others. Jeannette Ward, my mother, has given more than any one could ask in making Haint possible. So to her I say

Thank you for passing your light on to me.

Others who must be thanked are the people who kindly read and edited this book: Richard Knaub, Lynn Hartke, Mary Samuelson, Judi Sharp and, of course, Jeannette Ward.

I want to thank my brother, John Ward, who has been a great source of information and ideas.

My special thanks to Patty Vinyard for her thoughtful cover art and advice on typefaces and other graphic concerns.

I cannot forget my canine inspirations over the years: Maggie, Mischka and the original Haint, Bodi, Maeve, Deborah, Sol, Cloudy, Reba, Annie and above all my much missed companion, Nigel. I hope I’ve done justice to your thoughts and lives.

Foreword by

WILLIAM WEGMAN

If you live with weimaraners as I do, if you were raised with weimaraners as Joy Ward was, in no time they begin to cast a spell on you. Gray becomes colorful. You become hypnotized. They invade your mind and tell you all sorts of things leading you to construct imaginary worlds. They may tell you that they are tall and walk on two legs. Their laser opal eyes pierce your brain and show you how you need to organize your life around them. You will be choosing furniture THEY like. They may start wearing your clothes. You will need to change your schedule. No more two hour movies or dining out. You may have a yard, a field, a pasture, the entire valley and if you are not out there with them, they will come and get you. No use hiding in your car. They can smell you a trip away. You will never be alone even if you want to be. They have become your private home theatre.

If you are me, you will spend a lot of time thinking up names. You will take pictures. Over time you will look deeper and deeper into their fur and observe the light and reflective color that is the weimaraner. While borrowing their bodies, which they generously and eagerly lend, you will try to look into their minds. The observable blinks into the unfathomable. This abyss of yearning over time will lead you to a narrative. If you are Joy Ward, raised with weims in Memphis, they lead to a startling cautionary tale set in the future where weimaraners have taken over the world. And that’s a good thing.

January 2005

Prologue by

HAINT

Your time is coming to an end. And the experiment we began over 50 million years ago.

We saw it coming centuries ago but we couldn’t stop it. Humans were bound and determined to destroy themselves. There just wasn’t anything we could do. We tried to help, but, well…

It has been almost a century since those times, the time of the Warming as it’s called now. No one really knows how many humans are left alive. The humans have lost count, but not hope.

I’m Haint and I’ll lead you through this time, when humans look to us to give them meaning, direction and hope. I wish we had some left to give.

Chapter 1: Haint

They are so frail! Not their bodies, those last longer than ours. Their souls, their minds, their hearts. Those things are so much weaker than ours. They seem to fade with each death.

We live ten, fifteen of their years. They hold on for 60, 70, 80 years. And yet, it is as if they must rewrite their existences each time they are born. How so different from us. How so, so, there is no better word than frail. Frail of spirit.

I know the bodies we’ve formed make us targets for abuse and pain, but our spirits have memory. We are of stronger stuff than the humans. When we love, it is with memory of other times and lives. When they love it is like children searching for a misplaced light in a dark hallway. It’s almost a perpetual game of hide-and-go-seek. They die and then they must find each other all over again.

We, on the other hand, are creatures of much sturdier essence. Our memories, and our spirits, stay with us throughout time. We are born knowing who and what we are. We recognize each other through various lengths of muzzle or change of skin. We watch our humans as they change, sometimes growing in spirit and sometimes not. We love, and follow them through their lives.

Maybe follow is not the right term. We are their silent teachers, their subtle leaders and their unseen guides. We follow in the sense that a piano teacher follows the career of a talented pupil or a proud father follows his child’s development into adulthood. This is what we do as a species—lead others’ into their own adulthood.

Some, like my Amanda, are closer to us. I have followed her for thousands of years and hundreds of lives. She is as close to me as any of my own species, here or back on our world. From the moment we met, both of us became more. For me, her presence increased my then-new physical senses so that I could see more sharply and feel more deeply. For my part, I have done what I could to help her grow and come more than human. At least more than most humans.

Poor humans. Poor, frail humans. They have become more to us than we ever expected. We love them at our own peril and pain. We love them even though we know their souls are more ephemeral, and thus more subject to withering away, than our own. We love them even though we know they will soon disappear.

And above all, I love Amanda. She is my anchor to this world. I can no more imagine life without her than I could willingly relinquish my sense of smell that paints the colors of my world. She is the spirit I follow in life, and the essence I teach in the times between. Hers are the smells I seek out every time I am reborn in this form. Hers is the touch that calms my back. Amanda is as much me, as this four-legged form I wear.

But we, I, must make hard choices. In time that is all too short.

Chapter 2: Haint

They’re coming. I sent the message almost a year ago and it won’t be long before they’re here. We have to leave soon or not at all. But it won’t be easy.

We spent so many generations raising humans up from apes that to leave them now feels like we’re abandoning our own. I guess they really are our own, if you think about it. We shaped them, trained them and now we’ll leave them to face their fates without us. I hope they can get along, but I know they won’t.

Their little monkey minds, bedazzled by technology and gadgetry, slowed them from learning what we could teach them about community and love. They just couldn’t see beyond the next technological toy to the harm that lay beyond. Oh no! We tried to warn them, to help them, to lead them, but they wouldn’t listen. We tried. We really wanted to help them evolve but maybe it was their limited senses or the fact so many of them could tune us out and go on without noticing us. I don’t know what kept them from learning more. I wish I did. Not that it could help now.

Not much can help the humans now.

I’ll miss them. Especially the Listeners, like my Amanda. They are our highest accomplishment with the species because the Listeners have truly evolved.

Granted, it took millennia and generations beyond counting to breed the Listeners into the species, but we did it. We did it. And now we have to leave them here to face the fate of the rest of their species. It doesn’t seem fair. I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to leave the families I’ve overseen for so long. I don’t want to leave the souls I’ve joined and rejoined. I don’t want to leave this planet that has been my home for longer than this human species can know or ever understand. I want to stay.

If I stay, I throw away all I’ve learned and what I’ve become. I want to stay, but I know I can’t. I can’t!

Chapter 3: Haint

You asked how we, your species and mine, got to this point. We got here when the opossums were making a break for top of this world’s evolutionary ladder. It was a lush, green world ripe with possibilities. It was just what we wanted-a world with options and countless species. We knew we could find at least one species among so many to work with and teach.

Our transport left us here with the agreement that when we were threatened or our mission completed we were to send the message back to our home. We planned on being here for as long as it took.

So we looked and we waited. We watched many species begin the expansion afforded by the amazing potential these species possessed in their DNA. Some became more interesting than others, and then faded away, due to this cataclysm or that allergy. Some couldn’t breed fast enough and all the progeny got eaten before they could reproduce. Other species couldn’t or wouldn’t leave their home turfs and an earthquake later they were nothing more than a fading memory. We watched. We waited. We grew tired but we kept watching and waiting. We’re very good at watching and waiting. We can do it for hours, days, years and even millennia. So we did.

We agreed to stay here until one species could be brought to the point in their evolution where they could understand the potential nature bestows. Just one species, that’s all we asked. Just one.

The humans say that a dull mind needs constant amusement, but the great minds can feed off their own devices forever. It felt to us that we might be feeding our own minds forever on this blue planet. And then it happened. The primates gave us hope that maybe, just maybe, they had a future with us.

It was the grooming they did, you see. Other species cleaned their young or made some other attempts at physical grooming. But the newer primates did much more.

They spent hours grooming each other. As we watched, we realized the grooming was not just to make them feel better or catch the ever-present fleas. The grooming, the constant touching, helped their small groups stay together. It added cohesion. As we watched we saw that, in this way at least, they were like us. But that was just one sign that maybe we had our species. There were others, like they ran in packs. We liked that because it told us they were sociable, something we have always valued highly. I mean, if you can’t find someone to help with that errant burr or that particularly wet area on your leg, what good is life?

So we waited some more. See, we couldn’t just stroll in and start completely changing the planet’s natural course of evolution. That wouldn’t be right, and we have a very strong sense of right and wrong. In fact, that would have been wrong. It goes back to our belief in the natural order of the universe. The universe has it’s own designs and plans, at least that’s what we believe, and it’s best not to get in front of a universe with a plan. Of course, once we thought we saw the next evolutionary winner, well then, all bets were off.

Besides, the species we chose had to develop enough on its own to make it a viable winner. Oh yeah, we could have gone with the opossum but they are just too solitary and unfriendly for us. Or the tree shrew. But have you ever seen a friendly tree shrew? If it’s over the age of two days, it’s probably ready to take off parts of your flesh, even if it’ not hungry. They are just that mean. Not our kind of species at all.

As we waited, we changed. We can change quickly or slowly, depending on what is needed. In the beginning, the change was slow as we watched how our changes affected us and the species around us. Later, we would change our bodies and their capabilities much faster.

But for now, everything was changing slowly so we matched our pace to this planet’s.

We watched. We waited. And millennia passed.

Finally, it became apparent that the primates we had watched were definitely evolving. Their social interactions became more involved and their relationships became more intense. They lost much of their body hair; a trait we would find useful later on as we gained the humans’ trust and affection. They began setting up more permanent dwellings, not just wandering behind herds of game.

We knew the time had come to begin choosing our forms to interact with the humans. But what forms or form would serve our purpose?

We have been blessed with the ability to access the potential of our genes. In other words, we can accelerate the evolutionary changes that might take this planet’s species millions of years. Once we know where we want to go, genetically speaking, we can move there fairly quickly. We focus evolution, so to speak.

So choosing a form or forms was the important thing if we were to gain this emerging sentient’s trust. Our original forms are mainly composed of light, rather than matter, so we had to absorb some of the earth’s substance to add it to our own. Sort of like adding flour to meat drippings to get gravy. (One of this planet’s finest culinary inventions I might mention. We will be sure to try that human creation at home, when we get there.)

That process, absorbing the matter, took some time. We began forming small bodies that looked like stick figure drawings I’ve seen the humans make. To them, I guess we looked like large, somewhat cast together insects. When we approached those early humans, they usually screamed and ran. The braver ones froze in place.

Then our skeletons began to develop. That seemed to be even more upsetting to the humans because now, I suppose, we looked like miniature skeletons. We were trying new forms and experimenting with possibilities. Some of us looked like bipeds and others looked like rodents or lizards that had been dropped in acid. It was obvious these collections of forms, too, were inappropriate.

So we kept evolving, mixing in this planet’s matter with our own forms. Thicker