Painted Wolves
By Ray Cluley, first published in In Dog We Trust
A man is forced to witness the brutality of nature during a trip to Africa to film content for a documentary. When his coworkers begin treating the only woman on their team like prey, he must grapple with his own understanding of animal vs. human nature.
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Jenny, a former contestant on the reality show Big Brother, joins a group of men as they film content for a nature documentary. The men, Tony, Eddie, and Tom, have been working together for years and are a close knit friend group. Tony and Eddie are more defensive about the addition of Jenny to the team, making sexist comments and assuming she is incompetent, despite clearly showing some level of sexual attraction to the sole woman of the group. Tom is more gentle, lusting after and attempting to befriend Jenny. As they are filming a herd of zebras in Africa, a pack of African wild dogs, or painted wolves, approach the herd. Wild dogs are extremely rare to capture on camera, and so the crew is excited to be there. The dogs single out a weaker zebra and take down their prey. The crew captures the entire thing on film, with Jenny provided commentary as the face of the operation throughout the hunt. At the end, they celebrate together, the noise causing the dogs to look up and at the humans gathered in the distance, watching. After spotting the dogs, the crew heads to another site to film, but then decides to stop along the way to rest for the night, making a camp in the wilderness. Tom feels uncertain and becomes convinced that the wild dogs have followed them, and are circling the camp ready to go in for the kill. He pulls out a night vision camera and can see the wild dogs surrounding Tony, Eddie, and Jenny, from his place in the truck watching them. He tells them the dogs are back, and the men make fun of him for letting the hunt earlier that day get to him. They begin to settle in and Tom joins them, joking, and the rest of the group talks Tom into letting them drink the alcohol he has been saving for their final day. They drink some, and as tension rises between the men and Jenny, Tom heads to the truck to sleep. Soon after, he hears Tony and Eddie sexually assault Jenny, mirroring the violence of the wild dogs hunting the zebra. Being a witness to the violence leaves Tom in a mentally unstable state, haunted by Jenny's victimization and the brutality of nature, especially unable to let go of the fact that he has done nothing to protect the innocents from the violence of the aggressors.
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