Princess

Princess is the dog who attaches herself to Ish during his first lonely days after the disaster, becoming both his companion and an unlikely guide back toward human connection. Her exuberant courtship, stubborn unpredictability, and eventual place in the community’s memory make her more than a pet: she links Ish’s solitary survival to the life he builds with others, then becomes a measure of how quickly even a cherished past can recede.

Arrival and Adoption

Ish notices Princess as he is preparing to leave with the station wagon. Dogs have been everywhere in the emptied world, and he has tried not to dwell on their suffering: some are starved, others unnaturally well fed, and many appear frightened or hostile. Princess stands apart at a cautious distance, a small, long-eared, white-and-liver hound that Ish guesses may be a beagle. She wags her tail and whimpers, offering a tentative appeal to a man already trying to protect himself from further attachments that must end in loss.

When Ish orders her away, Princess moves closer instead. She lowers her forequarters and rests her head on her paws, looking up at him. The posture breaks through his resistance: he smiles, perhaps for the first time since the snakebite except in irony. Princess then rubs against his leg, darts away as if frightened, loops back in a playful display, and finishes by leaning against him for a pat. Her quick reading of his changing mood turns an attempted rejection into a meeting. Ish recognizes that she expects affection, pats her forehead, and accepts that the encounter has made them companions.

Princess jumps into the station wagon and settles on its front seat as if it were already home. Ish finds dog biscuits at a grocery and feeds her by hand, but she accepts the food as though feeding her were simply part of a person’s function. Only then does Ish realize that the dog is female. The exchange establishes the relationship’s characteristic comic balance: Princess needs Ish’s care, yet behaves less like a grateful dependent than a creature who has quietly appointed him to the job.

Companionship on the Road

Ish gives the dog her name while setting out again. The name’s familiar, old-fashioned sound connects him to the world that existed before the disaster, while Princess’s expectation of good treatment gives their companionship an everyday shape. Ish jokes inwardly that he has acquired a dog, then revises the thought: the dog has acquired him. The reversal captures the emotional importance of her arrival. He had been trying to avoid attachment; Princess makes solitude harder to maintain without requiring him to make a deliberate decision to seek company.

When Ish stops for the night beneath a mesquite bush, Princess sleeps beside him after a tiring run. Her legs twitch as she dreams of chasing a rabbit. The small scene places the two together in a landscape where familiar shelter and social life have disappeared: Ish lies in his sleeping bag on the sand, while Princess rests close by, absorbed in her own animal rhythms. Her presence accompanies his gradual release from fear and self-absorption.

Instinct and the Changed World

In the city, dogs are part of the new ecological order rather than simply remnants of domestic life. Near the waterfront, Ish observes small, active terriers and terrier-like mongrels scavenging in stores, sometimes eating crackers where rats have opened cartons and apparently preying on the rats themselves. The dogs have also driven off or killed cats. Unlike these wary, self-sufficient groups, which keep their distance from Ish, Princess remains closely attached to him. After she gets into a rough fight with one of the bitches, he keeps her leashed or inside the car when driving through those districts.

Her boldness has limits. When a large billy-goat confronts her on San Lupo Drive, Princess rushes at it barking; the goat lowers its horns and charges. She immediately uses the quick, rabbit-like dodge she has shown before and races back to Ish, while the goat calmly resumes eating. The encounter is small but revealing: Princess can initiate a challenge without being a formidable fighter, and when threatened she turns to her human companion. The goat then strolls along the sidewalk as if it owns the street, a comic reminder that the old arrangements of human control no longer define the neighborhood.

The Bark That Leads to Em

Princess’s attachment has consequences beyond Ish’s private comfort. One night, Ish stops outside a house where he sees light and hesitates over whether to approach. Princess suddenly leaps past him and runs toward the house barking furiously. Her outburst exposes his presence and forces him to act. Ish is unarmed, so he reaches into the car for his old hammer and advances after her; someone inside moves, and the door opens with a flashlight trained on him. The encounter is tense because the dog has made a cautious, possibly avoidable approach impossible, but her intervention carries Ish toward the people he has been reluctant to find.

The following morning, Em has put Princess out for her run while she prepares breakfast. Ish asks where the dog is, a practical question that also shows how naturally Princess has become part of his new domestic routine. Her barking at the house was the action that drew Ish onward; in retrospect, it had taken him to the home where he found Em. The dog who first interrupted his effort to remain unattached thus helps open the way to a human partnership and a shared life.

Aging, Death, and Memory

By the time the community is naming the year in which Princess dies, she has been ailing for some time. No one knows exactly how old she was when she first attached herself to Ish: she may have been one year old, or three or four. The qualities that defined her have endured into old age. She still expects to be treated like a princess, remains unreliable, and may disappear after the trail of an imaginary rabbit just when someone wants her nearby.

Her descendants are now numerous. The narrative attributes the many dogs around the community largely to Princess’s repeated disappearances and apparent encounters with wild dogs; generations of inbreeding and outbreeding have produced animals of many sizes, colors, and temperaments, unlike the beagle-like newcomer Ish first met. Her story therefore extends beyond her individual companionship into the changing animal population around the settlement.

The older people argue that the year should be called the Year When Princess Died, because they remember how important she once seemed on San Lupo Drive, almost another person. The children regard her instead as an old dog with an uncertain temper and favor the Year of the Wood-Carving. Ish supports the children, despite the special place Princess holds for him. She had drawn him out of himself in the first bad days, eased his fear, and barked him toward the house where he found Em. Yet he understands that she belongs increasingly to the past: younger children may never remember her, and eventually she may be forgotten altogether. Her fading from shared memory anticipates Ish’s own fear that he, too, may become only an unregarded link to an earlier world. Princess’s death is thus both a personal loss and a quiet measure of generational change.