DAY 16

Amy crouched behind the bush, peering through its branches towards the tiny figure of Runner, far ahead of her on the outskirts of the chosen farm.

They had spent yesterday backtracking to farms more distant from the mountains. It was not clear whether any farmer to date had been alarmed at the loss of any stolen articles -- things were always being misplaced, and "there's a runaway girl from the breeding pens breaking into our homes" would not be the first idea to spring to local minds -- but Amy was uncomfortable with the possibility that she and Runner might set out in plain sight on the approach to the mountain trail carrying stolen articles right in front of the farmers they'd stolen them from.

In any case, Runner had finished, after visits to two farmhouses, gathering the needed items from the short checklist she and Amy had decided on, preparatory to stealing a doggirl and attempting the mountain crossing. After that, they had picked a sufficient number of peaches to fill the basket of their newly-acquired cart. At the end of the busy day, Runner had prevailed on Amy, as she usually did, to "show me another sex way." Amy was starting to run out of favorite positions, but she showed Runner one she and Megan had often enjoyed. With Amy and Runner both sitting upright on the ground, their arms and legs around each other, Amy's right leg over Runner's left and her left under Runner's right, so that they could grind their pussies hard against each other, they kissed with growing passion, grinding with rising fervor... Amy had found, in the past, that the pressure on her pussy, with the movement of both Megan's and her own hips, put just the right pressure on her clit that she could come to orgasm without needing to touch it directly. More than any other position, Amy found it worked best with a partner to whom she felt both very close and very attracted -- mainly with Megan and Linda. And now with Runner.

Afterwards, as they traded kisses more languidly, Runner, flushed from her orgasm, had asked Amy to promise they could do it that way again soon. Amy had smiled and said with mock reluctance, "Oh, okay," as they settled to the ground for a night's sleep in the mutual breast-sucking position, of which Amy was growing very fond. Amy had experienced a few nightmares since being stranded on the island, but so far none when she slept with Runner's breast in her mouth.

Now, watching Runner, Amy took in a quick breath, her heart pounding. Runner was backing towards Amy's position, bent over. Amy couldn't see around Runner, but she assumed... yes, there she was. A doggirl was following Runner's slow retreat, obviously interested in the bite sized chunks of girlmeat and peaches Runner was holding out for her.

It was Amy's hunch, based on the behavior of the doggirls who had earlier menaced Amy until Runner had rescued her, that doggirls were always kept a little hungry during their working hours, the better to keep them in the cranky mood necessary for keeping slavegirls in line. It seemed possible the doggirls might even be more motivated, in that case, to bite a recalcitrant slavegirl's leg, and that the slavegirls were fully aware of the danger of this happening. In any case, this doggirl did seem to want the food Runner was offering her.

As the doggirl came closer, Amy could see she had light brown hair, slightly curly, in the very short style enforced on all females on the island. Rather than a metal collar of the sort Amy wore, the doggirl had a buckle-on leather dog collar, with no lock -- a doggirl had neither the physical ability nor the inclination to remove her collar anyway. She had the leather doggirl booties on her feet -- all four of them -- that Amy had seen before. The girl had a pretty face, and seemed to be fully of mainlander blood, with no hint Amy could see of the islander genes so dominant in Runner -- she looked like any teenager Amy might pass at the mall, laughing with friends, walking fully dressed on two legs rather than trotting naked on all fours. She looked not much older than Runner, if at all, and had probably been working at the farm a very short time. Amy had suggested Runner try to attract the youngest doggirl who came anywhere near her. It seemed to Amy that the most recent additions to the farm's "staff" might not have had time to develop the bonds with other doggirls that would prevent their wanting to leave, and that the newer a girl was on the job, the more likely Amy was to succeed in the behavior-modification experiment she was about to try.

Amy took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. So much depended on what happened in the next few minutes. And it wasn't without its own danger.

When Runner and the doggirl were within about twenty feet of Amy's position, Amy squeezed her eyes shut and forced herself to move. She rose to her feet from behind the bush that had hidden her.

The doggirl, seeing past Runner to the unexpected movement ahead of her, froze and glared at Amy, baring her teeth, filed to points like the ones Amy had seen before. A low growl came from the back of her throat. Obviously Amy had no business being here, so far beyond the farm's outer boundaries, and the doggirl was determined to correct the situation.

The girl barked twice, and Amy was amazed again at how authentic the sound was. Of course, as high-pitched as it was, it was really the bark of a dog much smaller than the girl, but slavegirls here had no basis for making that comparison, and to any slavegirl, and now to Amy, it was a sound indicating danger to whomever it was directed.

They were far enough from the farm that no normal conversation would be audible from there, over the background noise of the ever-present crickets, but prolonged barking would be heard and investigated. Amy and Runner had planned for this. Runner knelt quickly beside the girl and said sharply, "Stop!" As Amy had hoped, it worked. Amy assumed that doggirls, trained as they were to obey males, would understand a variety of simple verbal commands, and the word Runner had just used could hardly fail to be one of them. The girl quieted, though she continued growling softly, and made no move to advance on Amy.

Runner offered the girl some more bits of sliced peaches. While the girl was licking the treats out of Runner's hand, Amy reached down quickly, picked up the vest from the pile of clothes beside her and began dressing. The vest was the one Runner had given Amy last week, and it was now supplemented by the standard floppy hat and a bolt of leather fabric Amy could use as a wraparound skirt.

As Amy finished, she saw that the girl was looking at her with the first completely human expression Amy had seen on any doggirl, one of pure puzzlement.

Beside the girl, Runner began undressing -- dropping the hat, kicking away her moccasins, dropping her pants and shrugging out of the vest, and finally unwinding the leather wrap she used to compress her breasts.

The girl looked helplessly back and forth between Amy and Runner. Runner in particular seemed to befuddle her -- the bearer of delicious snacks, previously accepted as a boy, now standing next to her as naked as any slavegirl. The girl made an uncertain "rff" sound, trying to process a situation for which no previous training suggested a response. Any upright-walking person with whom she had contact was either a master or a target. She had had no idea that anyone could change teams.

Runner reached into her bag for more food. As she knelt again beside the girl and held out some meat slices in her hand, Amy came closer, knelt on the other side and began petting the girl. The girl gave Amy that same puzzled look, but let Amy continue stroking her hair and rubbing her back, as she licked food again from Runner's hand.

Amy, encouraged by the girl's reaction to this point, decided it was time to put the second phase of the plan into action. Reaching underneath the girl, she slid her hand slowly down the girl's stomach, to her crotch.

The girl seemed to want to pull away at first, and Amy stopped for a moment. The girl bent her head down and looked between her breasts to see what Amy was doing with her hand. Amy waited, holding her breath, to see whether the girl would run.

She did not. Amy's hand was already close enough to the girl's crotch that she had to be feeling some tingles. She looked up now, straight into Amy's eyes, and made a new sound, something between a puppy-whimper and a sigh of desire.

Amy slid her hand farther down now, gave the girl a moment to get used to the feeling of Amy's hand between her legs, and gently slipped a finger inside her.

Slowly, Amy searched with her finger, feeling the increasing wetness. Where is it, where is it... there!

Amy didn't have to guess whether her finger had correctly located the right spot. The girl's whole body spasmed, and the air went out of her in a single whoosh. She began breathing in rapid, shallow sips, accompanied by that same whimpering sound.

Leaving her hand, and finger, where it was, Amy leaned in closer and softly kissed and licked the girl's neck, just behind her ear. On the opposite side of her, Runner now did the same, and reached under the girl with one hand to begin stroking the girl's breasts in alternation, and playing with the nipples. Amy had decided that, in the absence of knowing exactly what kind of stimulation the girl would find most arousing, a full sensory overload was called for.

It was another of Amy's hunches that no doggirl had ever experienced this level of intense sexual attention. It was apparent that she wasn't a virgin -- no doubt one or more of the farmers had been at her -- and she had probably had oral-genital sexual encounters with other doggirls. But no doggirl was physically capable of doing what Amy was doing, no slavegirl would think of touching her this way, and men probably wouldn't know how even if they were so inclined.

The girl was moaning now, her eyes closed, her mouth open, her hips twitching in a rhythm that matched Amy's finger ministrations, her head bent down to expose more of her neck to Amy's and Runner's tongues.

She cried out suddenly, another fully human sound, and her entire body quivered as a jet of fluids from her crotch soaked Amy's hand. Her stubby forearms could no longer support her and she dropped shakily onto her elbows, breathing in gasps.

When Amy was sure the girl's orgasm was over, she withdrew her finger, knowing that for many girls continued stimulation at this point could be painful, but she continued, with Runner, kissing the girl's neck. The girl, her face red, turned to Amy and licked her cheek, then turned the other way and did the same to Runner, who giggled.

Amy looked at Runner and nodded. The licking was an excellent sign -- the girl had almost certainly never before offered any affection to anyone other than another doggirl.

They both stood, Amy undressing now and restoring her clothes to Runner's bag, while Runner dressed. Runner picked up the bag, and together she and Amy began walking away. It was time to see whether the plan had worked.

Trying not to appear to be looking at the girl, Amy gave a couple of quick looks to the side as she walked. Out of the corner of her eye, Amy could see the stunned expression on the girl's face. Seconds later, with an anxious-sounding bark, the girl came galloping after Amy and Runner.

They both knelt as the girl reached them, offering warm hugs and back rubs as she licked their faces again, wriggling and whimpering with excitement.

It worked, Amy told herself. We've made a new friend.

Runner, laughing again as the girl's tongue lapped against her chin, asked, "Why doesn't she talk, Amy? I never heard any doggirl talk."

Amy, giving the girl a one-handed shoulder massage, said, "You have to learn when you're a baby, Runner. When they took the Big Girls away and you got your littles to take care of, they couldn't talk at first, right?

Runner nodded. "They mostly just cried. But after awhile they could talk."

"Right. They had to learn, and they really needed to do it when they were babies. It's something special about babies, the way they can learn to do things they see and hear older people doing around them. This girl just grew up around other doggirls like her. She does what they did, but just like her, they didn't talk." Amy had read about cases of people who had grown from infancy to adulthood, or adolescence, in non-verbal environments. Despite efforts of experts, most of them never learned to speak.

It suddenly occurred to Amy that the girl was not, however, truly without language. She actually did have one, though it wasn't as rich as the one Amy and Runner spoke. It was a language of pure emotion, consisting of barks, growls, whines, and any other sounds a dog might make, and she used it to say how she felt about things happening around her and to her. It was, indeed, the language she had learned as a baby -- no wonder she could do it so well -- and it had been passed down through generations of doggirls, learned from the real dogs with whom the first baby doggirls had lived.

As a Hanging Girl, with her training in reading people, Amy realized she could probably do much better than most people at learning to understand this girl's language.

We need to give her a name, Amy told herself. After a moment's thought, she said, "Let's call her 'Puppy.' "

"What's that mean?"

"In my part of the world, we have girls that are called puppies. Puppygirls. They walk on four legs just like her..." Amy gave the girl another affectionate squeeze, and decided to leave out explaining to Runner about the surgically implanted tails, "...but they wanted to become what they are. They're really friendly, and they just try to make people happy. I want her to be like that."

"They can't talk either?"

"Well, they can, but they don't. That's part of being a puppygirl. So that's another way they're like her."

Amy sat back a little, and when the girl looked at her, she put her hand to her own chest. "Amy." She reached and touched Runner's shoulder. "Runner." Then she touched the girl's shoulder. "Puppy." She repeated the cycle in a different order, and then a third time, and then said, "Runner?"

Amy smiled as Puppy turned immediately to Runner and licked her face once more. She said, "Amy?" and laughed as Puppy lunged for her to give her a few more licks. Finally she said, "Puppy?" and clapped her hands when Puppy barked, as if calling attention to herself.

She did catch on to that a lot faster than a real dog could, Amy told herself. She's not an animal. She's human. Maybe she'll never speak our language, because she's past that age when she would try to imitate anything we do. But that doesn't mean she can't learn anything.

Amy stood again, and grinned at Runner, who was also rising. "I think we're ready."

With Runner beside her, and Puppy trotting behind, they headed back towards their camp by the mountain trail.

When they arrived back at the camp, where they had left the cart, Amy judged, more from a feeling of the time that had passed than from any useful environmental cues, such as the position of the as-usual-hidden sun, that it must be late afternoon. She was sure it had taken hours for Runner to creep up on the farm, wait for a doggirl to come sufficiently close to entice her away, more time to establish rapport with Puppy, and hours more to return to their base camp at the slow pace always enforced on Amy's movements. Runner was no more interested than Amy in the idea of having to stop partway up the mountain trail to spend the hours of total darkness with a doggirl of uncertain temperament who might panic at her blindness in such a novel and dangerous environment, where a step in the wrong direction might send her tumbling down the rocky slope. They agreed it would be best to wait for morning.

Amy saw that Puppy was watching closely as Runner, as always when their travels for the day were done, took off her farmer's outfit. Amy stroked Puppy's back in case any calming was needed when Puppy saw Runner as a naked woman again instead of a farm boy, but it appeared that Amy and Runner had been permanently successful in short-circuiting Puppy's training that had told her who was a friend and who was a foe. Maybe, Amy thought, despite Puppy's upbringing having been so alien from anything experienced in Amy's world, the tendency to question, suddenly, everything one has ever known or been taught was just something hard-wired into human teenagers. Lucky for us, Amy told herself.

Amy and Runner ate dinner from Runner's bag, taking turns letting Puppy eat from their hands, after which they played a few more repetitions of Runner's pebbles-in-the-circles game, with the usual result.

As Amy looked over the smoothed-out area on which she and Runner had been sleeping for several nights, she absently back-handed away a twig that had fallen from the overhanging tree into the midst of their bed, then looked up in surprise as Puppy, with a brief bark, sprang after it, picked it up in her mouth, and trotted back to stand in front of Amy with a hopeful expression.

Amy gave the girl an astonished look. She wasn't sure whether games of fetch were instinctive to dogs or a matter of training, but she felt pretty sure they weren't instinctive to humans. Maybe, she thought, a century or so back when doggirls were raised alongside real dogs, men had played the game with the dogs, the doggirls had learned to play along, and then men kept doing it, as the generations went by.

It is going to be really disconcerting, Amy thought, to keep seeing signs of Puppy's humanity in one instant, and then in the next instant see her behave, once more, more like a dog than all but the most dedicated puppygirls. In the case of playing Fetch, Amy wasn't sure she wanted to demean the girl by treating her like a mindless animal. On one level Amy understood the appeal of puppygirls, but personally she had never felt that appeal herself.

But as Puppy stood in front of her, whining hopefully, Amy was less sure it was really demeaning. It certainly didn't seem to be so to Puppy. Puppy was giving the impression that it was an enjoyable game, occupying a place in her heart identical to the pebble game in Runner's.

Amy reached for the stick, and Puppy happily relinquished it. Amy threw it about twenty feet, and with an excited yelp, Puppy turned and raced after it again.

Runner took turns with Amy throwing the stick. Before long, whichever of them had thrown it, Puppy would return it to the other. She's being human again, Amy thought, in the midst of acting like a dog. Puppy had quickly understood that Runner and Amy wanted to take turns, and was accommodating them. Amy didn't think any real dog would have caught on that quickly.

At last Puppy dropped the stick at Amy's feet and ran to the nearby stream for a drink. When she returned, Amy had the impression she had something in mind other than continuing the game. She stood before Amy and whined in a different, more breathy way, a small smile curling her lips. She dropped her head and looked under herself towards her crotch, then looked up and whined again.

Amy choked back a laugh. One way or another, thought Amy, she does manage to communicate. "You want sex again, Puppy?"

Puppy had no particular reaction to the never-before-heard word, but whined and looked back between her breasts to her crotch again.

Amy smiled at Runner. "We'd better do her again. We need to stay friends with her." Looking at Puppy again, she said, "Puppy likes sex." Let's see how long it takes to teach her the word, Amy decided. As before, she reached under Puppy's stomach to her crotch, her index finger curling.