Telling the dog to stay, he went a kilometer or two through serpentine gravel and dirt roads until he found a raan aharn (outdoor restaurant under a canopy) to obtain some meat to assuage its hunger; however when he returned with the food, the dog was not to be found. His were merely good intentions that came to no avail in an intransigent world of changes. Had there been an obscure god whose oblique influence was in urging humans of means to help the weak and vulnerable, beneficence would have been a frequent activity instead of the rarity that it was. In this situation his attempt had not only been futile but it had exacerbated misery since now, somewhere, there was a dog that had been humbled by a god (a god who earlier had stepped on one of its feet and a tail) only to be reproached with a monosyllabic, "stay," and abandoned to stray away disillusioned.
This dog, suffering from malnutrition and lack of grooming, was prey to parasites. They laid siege on and within him. As all that were at a disadvantage, were neither the strongest nor the fittest, and had a vulnerability exuding from them that made their brief lives ambulatory carcasses that would fall with a brief amount of time, he believed he was like this. And it seemed to him that despite being immured in talents and wealth, that his vulnerabilities would bring him down like a sick hound; and so he suffered for the dog in that spot he had found him in. He was bent as though seated on the ground but with his buttocks never quite reaching the dirt and he stayed this way numb and thoughtless staring into nothingness.
The worn, gaunt dog had left him a half hour earlier and yet as if compelled to attend to it still, he remained in the same spot within the same squatted posture as before while his thoughts remained apprehended in remote, dark cells of his opaque mind. His actions (or a lack of, which in this perspective would be equally inexorable) were even peculiar to him, so more with a general feeling of apprehension rather than any specific isolated thoughts, he felt that he might be, rather than questioned whether he was, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, even though nothing like this had ever happened to him before-- not that such a history had to be a prerequisite for frayed nerves in the incessant Heraclitus nightmare of shifting ground under his feet, or within the stress of life's chaotic disturbances, to make him impervious to the impact of tragedy.