Phil Burbank's death
The Power of the Dog (Thomas Savage Edition)Phil Burbank’s death from anthrax is both a medical mystery to the doctor treating him and the concealed outcome of Peter Gordon’s knowledge and actions. The narrative first leaves the cause unresolved, then gives the reader the information needed to understand how a diseased hide, a damaged hand, and a braided rope connect Phil’s death to Peter’s effort to protect his mother.
The approach to the death
Before the fatal illness, Phil had begun to draw Peter close. Peter’s offer of rawhide had seemed to Phil evidence that the boy wanted to imitate him, and Phil responded by promising that everything would be clear sailing for Peter. He finished the rope that night despite a fresh wound on his hand, while Peter watched. The scene gives Phil’s gesture the warmth of a new intimacy, but its practical details acquire a different meaning after the ending: the rope is made from hide, and Phil’s hand is not uninjured.
Phil’s invitation to closeness also carries an older emotional history. He interprets Peter’s wish to braid as a desire to emulate and merge with him, and recalls his own past longing to become one with someone who is gone. He understands Peter’s experience of being treated as an outcast, and this recognition makes their contact feel, to Phil, like an answer to a need he has kept concealed. The reader knows more than Phil does: the apparent bond is also part of the circumstances leading to his death.
Illness and uncertainty
After Phil is admitted to hospital, his doctor takes blood samples and cultures them. The resulting material is sent to the State Hospital for analysis, but the doctor does not yet know what has gone wrong. Phil’s final convulsion is brief but severe; the doctor expects to learn the result in a day or two and regards sending the culture away as belated action. This clinical uncertainty delays the explanation without making the death itself uncertain.
The culture is expected to provide an answer, but Peter already knows what it will reveal. That contrast makes the illness a point where two kinds of knowledge diverge: the doctor follows a diagnostic process whose result is still pending, while Peter has already joined the medical explanation to the events at the ranch. Phil dies before the laboratory’s answer can settle the matter for those around him. The reader, however, is given the cause and its connection to Peter before the investigation is complete.
The knowledge behind the cause
Peter’s understanding comes from his father’s medical books, kept in the shed attached to the inn where Peter built a private world apart from school taunts. The shelves sagged under the weight of Johnny Gordon’s books; the shed also held Peter’s slides, chemical equipment, and specimens. There, his scientific interests were not merely a pastime: they gave him a body of knowledge that could be applied beyond the small laboratory he had made for himself.
Johnny had possessed an exceptional gift for diagnosis and had recognized that Alma’s illness was not consumption. The narrative describes this ability as something he passed on to his son. The transfer is more than a resemblance in aptitude: Johnny’s medical attention to Peter and his declaration of love establish their closeness, while the books preserve a practical inheritance after his death. Peter’s knowledge of animal disease and transmission is therefore linked both to his father’s medical legacy and to the solitary study that school had driven him toward.
In one of those books, Peter had learned that anthrax, called blackleg in the region, could pass from an animal to a human through a cut or break in the skin when someone handled an infected hide. The explanation identifies the relevant conditions in Phil’s case: an animal hide used in braiding, and a hand damaged while Phil worked. The narrative does not present the doctor as having discovered this chain before Phil’s death. It places the decisive understanding with Peter, whose knowledge makes the rope’s role legible to the reader.
Revelation and aftermath
The ending joins the medical explanation to Peter’s intention through his reflection on the Prayer Book. He considers adding its lines about deliverance from the power of the dog to Peter’s scrapbook, replacing rose leaves that have lost their scent. In his understanding, his mother has been delivered through his father’s sacrifice and through the sacrifice Peter himself was able to make using knowledge from Johnny’s black books. His concluding recognition that the dog is dead gives Phil’s death the force of a completed act, not simply an unexplained illness.
The revelation is deliberately uneven. Phil’s doctor has a blood culture awaiting analysis; Peter has already understood the mechanism; and the reader receives the explanation only at the close. The rope that Phil treated as a promise of companionship becomes the material link between Peter’s scientific learning and the death of the man who threatened his mother. Phil’s apparent welcome of Peter thus ends in a reversal: the intimacy he believed he had found does not save him, while Peter’s inherited knowledge helps accomplish the protection he sought.
