Fifteen Dogs

Chapter Five follows Prince’s journey before and after Hermes bestowed human intelligence on him. Apollo becomes anxious that he will lose the bet and intervenes to ensure that Prince is unhappy at the time of his death.

Prince spent the first two years of his life in Alberta with Kim, the boy whose family adopted Prince. Kim encouraged Prince’s playful, intelligent qualities. When he grew up and moved to the city, Kim brought Prince with him. One day when they were out for a walk, Prince chased a squirrel and lost track of Kim, and another family eventually took him in.

The abstractness of language interested Prince from the beginning of his experience with consciousness. He recalled that “treat” meant biscuit, perhaps explaining why he took such “joy in language” (153). The dogs in the pack who feared Prince’s poetry did so because they could not clarify where Prince’s skill placed him in the hierarchy. His talent was clearly “different than the traditional canine ones” (154), and they could not assess whether this posed a danger. 

In his exile, Prince found solace in “his pack’s language” (154), the one thing left to him with everything else lost.