Gerald Seymour: Holding the Zero

He pulled the dog from behind him, grasping tightly at the nape of its neck and dragging it into his body. It was only an animal, a trained beast that was eager to please, but it had the power to destroy the future and maintain the present. He held it against his chest and murmured the commands in its ear. It was the moment for which, over many hours, he had trained the dog.

He trusted the dog, as he trusted his rifle. He trusted that the dog and the rifle would hold the zero. He had no other chance but to lay his life with the animal. He saw the bright light in the eyes of the dog and felt the whip of its tail.

With a sudden movement, as he whispered to the dog, he threw it out from the cover of the cavity under the stone slab and towards the track he had come down in the night. It landed, stumbled, then pounded away from him. He could not know whether the dog would respond to what he had whispered in its ear. A great void settled around him, with its warmth and its breathing gone.

He could not see it. Lying under the slab, its descent on the track was hidden from him.

The void was filled. Aziz had never known such pumped-up, electric excitement.

As Gus tracked over the lengthening shadows, there was a fleeting movement at the extreme edge of the lens’ view. He breathed hard, then edged the ’scope back. His breathing came faster. He found the spaniel.

The end had started and, if he missed the trick of it, he was the loser, and dead.

Its head was low on the path as it came down, as if there was still a scent to be found after the rain, and still bootmarks to be recognized. It came fast, without hesitation. He thought it a fine animal, but pushed the distraction from his mind. His view was off the slope and the plateau across the valley, where the man waited with his rifle. Gus must follow the dog’s run. Everything that had seemed of importance to him now rested with the dog.

It came to the stream and the crows scattered from the body, rose above the bloodied carcass. It leaped into the fast-water pool beside the smooth stone and he saw that it cooled itself, bathed, and drank. The crows shouted at the interruption and flew circles round the dog.

As the dog came onto his bank of the stream, there was a sudden rainbow cloud over it as it shook the water beads, diamonds, from its coat. He thought that the dog was the man’s last throw. The dog was there to be shot, to be sacrificed, had been loosed for Gus to fire at, and show himself. When it had shaken itself it squatted and defecated, then began to circle and to search. The dog was a decoy, as important as a plastic pigeon in corn stubble, as valuable as a papier-mache head poking up over a parapet. He wondered how long the dog had been with the man, how much love had been given it, how much care, and how much misery the man now felt having loosed it, or if the life of the dog did not matter to him.

The crows were back again on the body, their feast resumed.

The dog found the scent in rocks and mud and grass. It came up the path that shepherds had made over generations with their goats and on towards the plateau. Gus was torn: he must follow the dog, watch its progress. He had not seen the point from which the dog was sent, but he had taken note of the strata of the plateau where he had first seen it.

Which trail must he follow? The one that would lead him to the man, or the one that would save himself? Near to where he had first seen the dog was bracken, a bush and a bilberry patch; close by was a stone slab with a dark curtain of shadow beneath it.

The dog came up the path and followed his boots’ tread from the night.

His attention, concentration, was divided and he knew that that was the man’s intention. The sun teetered on the far ridge. If he should lift his gaze, he would be blinded by it.

Gus held the rifle so that the ’scope sight covered the ground where he had first seen the dog, but he twisted his head fractionally so that he could watch its approach. He thought he was losing and was out-thought.

… The memory came back – he should have shut it out and could not – of the officer who had come to the school in his last year. Gus, the sixth-former – Gus in the current-affairs session – Gus listening to the paratroop officer, a Falklands veteran of the previous year – the officer talking about combat, but dressing the reality up in the jargon of duty, stoicism, patriotism because that’s what he would have thought was right for the kids to hear – Gus realizing that the officer was using fantasy bullshit, not telling them the truth of clinging to life, game time over, survival – Gus, afterwards, alone beside the cricket pitch, wondering if the ultimate truth, never spoken of by the officer, was total and exhilarated, heart-pounding ecstasy…

Across the valley, did he feel the mind-bending, addictive, narcotic excitement – or was he sad that the dog might die?

The dog paused at the point on the path where Gus had come off it, where he had started to crawl away from it, and searched, and Gus’s finger tightened on the towel rope.

Sarah said faintly, ‘It’ll find him, the dog will find him.’

Joe said, ‘Don’t interfere, just watch. It’s like nature, it takes its course. You are not a part of it.’

Rybinsky said, ‘If you interfered you would break the bet. And, more important, if you interfere you destroy the supreme moment in the lives of them both.’

The dog – Gus was forty yards from it and saw it clearly – scampered in a small loop round that place on the path. Its nostrils were up, flared.

He had been told that a dog could find ground scent and air scent; there wouldn’t be much from the ground for it to work off after the night rain, but the air scent would be heavy with his sweat and urine where he lay, and from the rucksack, which lay ten yards away.

It turned off the path, came slowly towards the rucksack and towards Gus, following the trail on which he had made the slug crawl. The care he had used to avoid breaking the twig stems of the bushes was sufficient to have hidden his movements from later discovery by a ’scope at long distance but was wasted effort against a dog coming close.

It knew the source of the smell was near. He recognized the quality of the dog’s training because it did not blunder forward or bound right up to the source of the smell. From a long way back, out with old Billings – and from a short way back, in the pub with the sergeants – he had been told of the difficulty of teaching a dog not to run over the smell source. It hesitated and strained against its instinct, then it went rigid, with the right paw cocked and the eyes wide, its neck stretched out, and it pointed. The body of the dog pointed towards the rucksack. He could see every hair on its head, the claws on the paw, the saliva at its neat little mouth.

The aim of the rifle would be on the dog and on the ground ahead of it.

He thought the man would now be breathing hard, squinting into the ’scope, locking the butt against his shoulder, feeling for the trigger, and searching the shallow area of ground the dog marked for him.

The end of the towel rope was between his fingers. He gripped it, took up the slack until it was taut, then jerked it.

It was a slight movement. The cap filled with stones and embedded with bracken fronds would have juddered. The polished Full Metal Jacket bullets would have rolled.

The rucksack would have swayed. Only the keenest eye, at 750 yards, aided by a sight, would have seen the motions of the hat over the rucksack and the gleam as the low sun caught the twisting bullets.

He hoped, had to, that he had trapped the attention of the man.

The dog’s chest heaved, and it maintained the point.

He pulled sharply. The hat would slide away. The bullets would shimmer and fall. The rucksack would surge sideways as if a hunted target tried better to hide himself from the dog.