Bones Hottentot brought home

The Bones and the Rivalry

Bones Hottentot brought home are the recurring spoils of a feud between the butcher shops of Fidelis Waldvogel and Pete Kozka. The dispute begins with differences over dogs and butcher’s waste: Pete treats his dog’s loyalty as personal devotion, while Fidelis doubts that dogs act from the heart. Pete also saves even the smallest scraps to sell to a guts dealer; Fidelis distributes offal and other leftovers to dogs, itinerants, and poor people in Argus. Hottentot, Pete’s prized chow, becomes the link between these opposed practices when he begins visiting the back of Waldvogel’s Meats for scraps.

Fidelis takes satisfaction in the dog’s visits and turns them into a deliberate joke at Pete’s expense. After feeding Hottentot, he sends him home with a cow bone, then escalates to skulls, femurs, ribs, and a heifer’s spinal column carefully trimmed so its ligaments keep the bones connected. Hottentot drags the spine through town and chews it outside Pete’s shop, where it becomes a public nuisance. The joke depends on the dog carrying Waldvogel’s discarded remains back into the Kozkas’ space, but Fidelis’s amusement also provokes consequences he does not control.

Escalation and Domestic Consequences

Hottentot’s trips back and forth turn the feud from a joke between rival butchers into a problem neither household can keep at the shop door. After the dog brings the heifer’s spine to Pete’s, Pete tries to take it away; Hottentot resists, and Pete is injured badly enough that Doctor Heech stitches his arm and advises him to shoot the dog. Pete refuses to blame Hottentot, deciding instead that Fidelis has corrupted the animal’s loyalty. The bones thus acquire a second meaning: to Fidelis, they are material for a prank, but to Pete they become evidence of betrayal by a man he once hired and trusted.

Fritzie’s response begins with the pile of remains Hottentot leaves at the Kozkas’ shop entrance, a spectacle that deters customers and makes the couple a target of town laughter. She gathers the bones into a gunnysack and sends Pete to return them. Finding Waldvogel’s Meats closed and deserted, Pete assumes Fidelis can afford a vacation because business is thriving. Envy and wounded trust turn his errand into retaliation: he enters the Waldvogel home and hides the decaying bones in Fidelis and Eva’s bedroom, beneath their bedding. The remains cross the boundary between the public butcher shop and Eva’s carefully ordered household, making a commercial rivalry intimate.

For Eva, the hidden bones violate the distinction she maintains between the shop’s work and domestic life. She tries bleach, lye soap, vinegar, sunlight, lavender, orange essence, and lemon juice, but the odor remains in the sheets. Afterward she has no sympathy for the Kozkas and says she would drive them out of business or make their lives unhappy if she could. Her response makes the prank’s consequence lasting: even when the bones are removed, their trace persists in the household and in Eva’s memory of the feud.

The Joke Continues, but Its Terms Change

The retaliation does not end the exchange. Fidelis remains committed to the joke, treating it almost as a work that must be completed, and continues to blame Hottentot’s unruliness for the Kozkas’ troubles. When the dog slips away again, Fidelis gives him a month’s accumulated braid of chicken feet. Hottentot carries the gift proudly past Sal Birdy’s drugstore, where people watch and wonder where in the Waldvogel home it might eventually appear. The bones have already crossed into Eva’s bedroom; the chicken feet show that Fidelis is still extending the prank even after it has become personal.

Pete, having tried to stop the joke by retaliating inside the Waldvogel house, finds himself unable to dictate its ending. Fidelis treats the new gift as another turn in the same game, and Pete is left frustrated enough to accept that Hottentot’s escapes cannot be fully prevented. The Kozkas eventually build a wire pen, which contains the dog most of the time. Yet whenever Hottentot gets loose and returns with another piece of a carcass from Waldvogel’s, Pete renews his vow to get even. Eva, meanwhile, darkly threatens to take the matter to the law and tells women in town that she holds Hottentot responsible for Fidelis having to wear a knee brace and endure painful adjustments. The remains are no longer merely shop waste: carried into homes and public streets, they keep the feud alive, divide the town between the two butcher shops, and expose how a joke can outlast the control of the person who began it.

Material Remains and the Persistence of the Feud

The bones matter because their movement makes the rivalry tangible: what one butcher regards as disposable becomes, in another household, an unwelcome sign of violated boundaries. Fidelis’s practice of giving away offal contrasts with Pete’s careful collection and sale of every small scrap, but the remains travel beyond either man’s intended use. Carried by Hottentot through Argus, they turn the butchers’ disagreement into public spectacle; hidden beneath the Waldvogels’ bedding, they make that disagreement part of domestic life. Their persistence is not only physical. Although Eva tries several cleaning methods, a faint odor remains, and her resentment toward the Kozkas lasts with it.

The repeated returns also deny either rival a clean ending. Pete’s retaliatory act does not stop Fidelis from sending Hottentot another bundle, and the wire pen only limits the dog’s escapes rather than preventing them altogether. Each return renews Pete’s anger, while Eva’s threats to involve the law and her insistence that the dog caused Fidelis to wear a knee brace attach further consequences to the same chain of events. The bones therefore serve as the feud’s recurring carriers: scraps from the trade repeatedly cross the boundary between the two shops, making private hostility visible to the town and leaving domestic traces that outlast the original prank.