ABSTRACT

The chapter explains that careful observation of canine behaviour The Dog is, however, also an attempt to bring together art and science and make use of and produce knowledge in the widest possible sense. The Dog was originally published as Hunden in Swedish in 1986 and tells the story of a small puppy that gets lost in a wintry forest while following its mother. The dog learns how to survive in the forest but is found by a hunting party and slowly comes to trust one of the hunters and returns to human habitation to live as a hunting dog with him. Ekman's insistence on bringing that which she sees as existing beyond the human into literary form while keeping to a humanist framework foregrounds the idea of concurrences rather than disruption. Ekman's prose evokes a similar distinction between a space recognizable to her human readership and the environment created through the sense perception of the dog.