Pete Kozka and Hottentot

Pete Kozka and Hottentot are joined by an attachment Pete regards as genuine canine loyalty, though the dog’s appetite and repeated excursions to another butcher complicate that belief. Hottentot’s visits to Fidelis’s shop turn an abstract disagreement about whether dogs love their owners or follow food into a personal rivalry. When Hottentot injures Pete, Pete still protects the bond by blaming Fidelis for having corrupted it.

Pete’s belief in Hottentot

Pete and his wife, Fritzie, raise purebred chow dogs, and Hottentot is the champion stud at the head of their line. Pete sees dogs, especially his own, as exceptionally faithful creatures whose loyalty comes from personal love. That conviction distinguishes him from Fidelis, who thinks canine devotion depends more on a dog’s stomach than its heart.

Hottentot’s character makes Pete’s faith difficult to sustain. The dog is greedy and suspicious, readily fawning on whoever might provide a tidbit while treating those who do not feed him with contempt. He may snap or bite, and people who have felt his teeth dislike him. The contrast between Pete’s idea of Hottentot’s loyalty and the dog’s opportunistic conduct gives their relationship its central tension without making Pete’s affection any less real.

Hottentot’s visits to Fidelis

After Fidelis moves his business across Argus, Hottentot begins turning up at the loading plank behind Waldvogel’s Meats, where scraps are available. The visits bring the men’s contrasting views of dogs into contact with a practical disagreement about butchery waste. Pete saves even the smallest scraps to sell to a guts dealer; Fidelis distributes offal and other waste to dogs, itinerants, and poor residents. Hottentot becomes one of the recipients.

Pete and Fritzie are popular in town, and the narrative notes that their friendliness means Hottentot is not poisoned, as other offensive dogs in Argus sometimes are. But his trips to Fidelis give Pete another reason to take the dog’s behavior personally: Pete is fond of Hottentot and satisfied that the dog crosses town to visit him, yet Fidelis’s supply of scraps also offers an obvious reason for the visits.

Fidelis plays along with the dog’s appetite and his own teasing streak. He gives Hottentot scraps and a large cow bone, then continues furnishing him with increasingly imposing remains, culminating in a heifer’s spinal column. Hottentot drags it through Argus and chews on it outside Fidelis’s shop, making the dispute impossible to miss. When Pete tries to take it away, Hottentot resists. Pete warns the dog that he could end up as a pelt on the wall, while Fritzie orders that Hottentot be tied up and says she has an idea for dealing with the bones.

Loyalty tested by appetite

Restraint does not hold Hottentot for long. He chews through a rope tied to a clothesline pole and returns to Fidelis for another meal. Pete next chains him, but the dog gets free again and reappears at the Waldvogel home with another bone. Each escape makes Hottentot’s independence plain, while Fidelis’s continued feeding keeps the conflict between the two butchers alive.

The breaking point comes when Pete finds Hottentot at his home with a boar’s skull and tries to take it away. In the ensuing struggle, the dog bites Pete’s arm, leaving a wound that Doctor Heech closes with ten stitches. Doctor Heech advises Pete to shoot Hottentot. Pete does not follow that advice or treat the dog as the source of the betrayal. Instead, he decides that Fidelis has corrupted Hottentot’s loyalty.

A bond redirected into rivalry

Pete’s response preserves his understanding of Hottentot as faithful by relocating the cause of the problem to Fidelis. That interpretation is consistent with the affection Pete has for the dog, but it also turns a dispute over scraps and bones into a personal grievance against a man Pete had once taken in and hired. He considers Fidelis responsible for turning Hottentot against him and stealing the dog’s affections, then begins planning how to get even.

The relationship therefore works as both a portrait of Pete’s attachment and the hinge of his conflict with Fidelis. Hottentot’s conduct can be read as loyalty to the person who feeds him, as Pete believes, or as appetite overriding allegiance, as Fidelis argues. The narrative leaves the disagreement active: even after Hottentot injures Pete, Pete’s faith in the dog remains, and it is Fidelis—not Hottentot—whom he holds responsible.