Hottentot

Hottentot is Pete Kozka and Fritzie Kozka’s prized chow and the unlikely center of a feud between the Kozkas and Fidelis Waldvogel. His repeated trips to Fidelis’s shop begin as an argument about what dogs love and become a contest of teasing and retaliation, with consequences for both households. The dog’s appetite is real, but the human rivalry built around it is what gives his visits their force: Hottentot crosses the boundary between the competing shops again and again, carrying the quarrel home in the form of the remains he has been given.

Identity and Background

Hottentot is a snuff-brown, purebred chow, described as the champion progenitor of the line Pete and Fritzie raise. Their other dogs include Nancy, his first mate, and Zig, his second, whose name is short for Ziguenerin. Zig sleeps near Fritzie’s piano and has a musical howl that children can prompt by singing nursery rhymes in a minor key. Hottentot’s place in this household is not incidental: he is both a breeding dog and the animal at the heart of Pete’s conviction that dogs can love their people personally.

The novel sets that conviction against Fidelis’s skepticism. Fidelis believes dogs’ devotion rests chiefly on their stomachs, while Pete regards their loyalty as genuine affection. Hottentot seems to confirm both views. He fawns on whoever holds a bone or might provide a tidbit, but treats people who do not feed him with contempt. He is suspicious and quick to snap, and his biting makes him unpopular with those who have experienced it. Yet Pete and Fritzie are sufficiently well-liked that Hottentot avoids the fate of other troublesome dogs in Argus that are poisoned.

The Rival Butchers and Hottentot’s Visits

After Fidelis establishes his shop in Argus, Hottentot begins turning up at its rear loading plank, where scraps are sometimes available. The dog’s visits intersect with a separate difference between the butchers: Pete saves even small remnants, including offal and guts, to sell to a dealer, while Fidelis distributes waste. That practice draws dogs, itinerants, and poor townspeople to Fidelis’s shop. Hottentot becomes one of its recurring visitors, and Fidelis takes satisfaction in seeing Pete’s favored dog cross town to seek food from him.

At first, Fidelis gives Hottentot scraps and a large cow bone to carry home. He then turns the feeding into a sustained joke, offering more and more substantial remains: skulls, femurs, and ribs, followed by a heifer’s spinal column carefully trimmed so its ligaments keep it articulated. Hottentot drags the prize through Argus and settles near the warm, sunny entrance of the shop to chew. The spectacle spreads the story of the dog’s visits throughout town, while the odor of the bones makes the prank impossible for the Kozkas to ignore.

Pete tries to take the spinal column away, but Hottentot growls. Pete warns him that he will turn the dog into a skin on the wall; Fritzie, watching from the doorway, tells Pete to save the remains and tie Hottentot up. The response turns the joke into a struggle over control. Hottentot chews through a rope and returns to Fidelis for another meal. Pete next chains him, but the dog works the chain until its links break and is back at the Waldvogel home by morning with another carcass remnant.

Escalation and Consequences

When Pete reaches for an oozing boar’s skull Hottentot has brought to the stoop, the dog bites him badly enough that Doctor Heech must close the wound with ten stitches. The doctor advises Pete to shoot Hottentot, but Pete does not blame the dog. He concludes instead that Fidelis has corrupted Hottentot’s loyalty, and he begins thinking about revenge against the man he once hired. The incident changes the quarrel’s stakes: what began as a joke about a dog’s appetite now includes injury and a personal accusation of betrayal.

Fidelis nevertheless continues the prank. He gives Hottentot a braid of chicken feet he has been saving, and the dog carries the gift home. Pete, unable to find a way to stop Fidelis by escalating his own response, eventually accepts that the joke will continue and builds a wire pen. It limits Hottentot’s escapes without ending them: when the dog does get away, he still returns with pieces of carcass from Fidelis’s shop, and Pete continues to vow that he will get even.

The effects reach beyond the men. Eva Waldvogel resents the bones’ intrusion into her household, which she keeps distinct from the butcher shop and orders around cleanliness and domestic life. She tries a range of cleaning measures, but the smell lingers in the bedding. She also associates Hottentot with her husband’s knee trouble and tells other women that Fidelis has been forced to wear a brace and undergo painful adjustments. She considers taking the matter to the law. Hottentot’s trips thus connect the practical and emotional worlds of the two families: he carries shop waste across town, while the feud follows it into private homes.

Character and Narrative Significance

Hottentot has a stubbornness that gives the humans’ contest a life of its own. Rope and chain do not reliably keep him from returning to the Waldvogel shop, and the wire pen only rarely prevents his escapes. His recurring journeys are not simply the result of Fidelis’s plan: they also depend on Hottentot’s appetite and persistence. The dog is therefore more than a prop in the men’s rivalry, even as the novel shows him through sharply contrasting human interpretations—an opportunist to Fidelis, a beloved and loyal creature to Pete.

The rivalry’s comic machinery also exposes its capacity to become consequential. Fidelis treats the joke as something to keep extending; Pete sees Hottentot’s changed habits as evidence that a trusted employee has turned against him. The dog cannot settle which account of canine affection is right, but his movements give each man material for his belief. As Hottentot repeatedly crosses from one butcher’s shop to the other, an apparently minor disagreement becomes a lasting estrangement between businesses that, for a time, divide the town between them much as its Catholic and Lutheran churches do. The episode makes an animal’s ordinary desire for food the hinge of a human conflict that neither butcher can keep merely playful.