37 pages • 1 hour read
The Dog Stars
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Book 1, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 1, Chapter 1 Summary
In the opening chapter of The Dog Stars Hig, the narrator, introduces the eight-mile area in which Hig, neighbor Bruce Bangley, and Hig’s dog, Jasper, have survived the nine years since a devastating flu, and then blood disease, wiped out the majority of the human and animal populations in the world. Hig and Bangley live at an abandoned airport, still stocked with supplies. Within their secure area are also nearby homes. Hig flies a 1956 Cessna 182— nicknamed the Beast—to patrol the perimeter, “which is the distance of open prairie to the first juniper woods on the skirt of the mountain” (4).
These patrols provide safety from neighboring groups like the Mennonites, who Hig helps sometimes, and also allow Hig to fly to different airports for supplies. As the chapter progresses, Hig jumps back and forth between present action and memory, describing the surroundings and providing backstory that contextualizes the dire situation he finds himself in. The chapter closes as, in the middle of the night, five individuals approach Hig’s house and hide ninety feet away, behind the cover of a dumpster placed there by Hig and Bangley. Hig counts to two hundred, knowing Bangley never takes longer to arrive with help. Narrative tension rises when Hig passes the two hundred mark and shoots the five intruders, including a nine-year-old boy. Hig says he plans to bury the boy; the others’ limbs become jerky for Jasper to eat. Bangley tells Hig that he was watching Hig through the rifle scope, leading Hig to wonder how often Bangley watches Hig from afar, while Hig sleeps.
“The tiger left,” Hig says concerning the disappearance of animal life, “the elephant, the apes […] the collared dove. Sad but. Didn’t cry until the last trout swam upriver” (3). Hig enjoys nature, yet is also able to endure without painful sentimentality. He still remembers life nine years ago, living beside a Denver lake, before his wife, Melissa, succumbed to the flu. Hig quotes country and folk songs, as well as poetry, infusing the narrative with intertextual strategies, which provide moments of relief from the devastation and violence.
“In the beginning there was fear” Hig says, “two straight weeks of fever, three days 104 to 105 […] The flu killed almost everybody […] The ones who are left are mostly Not Nice” (8). Three years ago, Hig heard a response over the airplane radio, but nothing since.
Book 1, Chapter 2 Summary
This brief chapter explores Hig’s early days flying and recounts the first time Bangley joined Hig on a perimeter patrol flight. Bangley remains silent after learning Hig knows the people below, who are Mennonites. This is an example of the subtle tension between Hig and Bangley, who are two different types of men: Hig is the more humanistic, and Bangley is the more survivalist, shoot-to-kill type.
Hig thinks humans’ love of flying relates more to “some kind of treetop or clifftop gene than with any sense of unbounded freedom or metaphors of the soaring spirit […] From up here there was no misery, no suffering, no strife, just pattern and perfection” (47), where even emergency lights of passing vehicles “pulsed with the reassuring rhythm of a cricket. And for a time while flying, seeing all this as a hawk would see it, I am myself somehow freed from the sticky details […] I am the one who is flying over all of it looking down. Nothing can touch me” (48). Hig also comments on the differences between he and Bangley, the latter of whom loves his solitude: “Lives for protecting it the way a peregrine lives for killing other birds midflight” (48).
Book 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Here, Hig wonders why he’s telling this story. It’s mid-April and he walks west, almost to the mountains bordering the perimeter, and remembers the simple beauty he used to experience fishing, which Hig first started doing after his father’s death. The lyrical, nostalgic tone creates contrast to the scenes and language of devastation and violence so far, as Chapter 3 further develops discrepancies between Hig and Bangley. Bangley dislikes Hig fishing and calls it recreating, meaning “anything that didn’t directly involve our direct survival, or killing, or planning to kill” (54).
Hig recalls building a tower with Bangley, since Erie airport does not have one. In Hig’s eyes, Bangley was more excited to finish the tower so he could begin hunting: “There is much about the man that creeps me out but this is the worst, the unrelenting sense of being surveilled” (50). Hig recalls this construction as he passes a spot on the trail “stained the way the place in a yard or dirt drive where a man changes the oil in his car is stained” (52), about fourteen hundred yards from the tower. This is the spot where many animals and humans fall victim to Bangley’s guns.
As Hig walks, he loses himself in reverie, recalling sushi dinners on his wife’s birthday and his pain over not being able to bury Michelle, as she was incinerated like the others who were sick. Waxing poetic on various elements of nature and fishing, Hig recalls, “a stretch of woods that had not died, or that was coming back […] The smell of running water, of cold stone, of fir and spruce” (54-55). Hig discusses the ritual of fishing:
These motions, the sequence, the quiet […], the riffle of the stream […] As I strung the rod. I had [done it] hundreds, probably now thousands of times. It was a ritual that required no thought […] Meaning that in fishing I had always all my life brought the best of myself (55).
Hig wishes for a time he does not have to bring a gun with him, to satisfy Bangley’s fears, when he goes fishing.
Book 1, Chapters 1-3 Analysis
The first three chapters of The Dog Stars introduce the bleak, post-apocalyptic setting of life in the abandoned Erie airport nine years after flu and blood disease have wiped away the majority of the world’s population. The chapters establish the setting and introduce the central nerve of tension between Hig and Bangley, two different kinds of men forced to depend on one another for survival. At play are themes of environmental destruction (and regrowth), isolation, and violence. Hig’s poetic images of mountains and creeks and fishing mix and contrast with the grimmer aspects of this new world, and against Bangley’s aggression and seeming love for guns and violence.
Chapter 1 gets readers up to the present moment and provides backstory. The lyrical imagery of Chapter 2 and 3 communicate Hig’s deep sense of loss, as well as Hig’s love for nature. That Hig helps the Mennonites characterizes Hig as caring and hopeful. At times, the joking between Hig and Bangley, like when Bangley teases Hig about Hig's cooking, provide moments of relief from the bleakness, as well as humanizing Bangley, thereby making him a dynamic character. Chapter 3 shows that Hig longs for a time when he can be himself, as opposed to acting in a way that appeases Bangley. But Hig believes this behavior necessary for his and Jasper’s survival. Heller’s attention to building dramatic tension and conflict in Chapter 3 suggests this tension between two different types of men occupies The Dog Stars’ central nerve of tension, serving as its narrative engine and driving plot forward.
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