C Fletcher - A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

Visibility was good, and I should have been able to see him as I cast around the empty sea in front of the boat, but I couldn’t. Given the strength and direction of the wind, it only made sense that he would be running south, and so I concentrated on getting up our speed and making sure I had as much sail spread as the boat would bear, and then, when I finally felt the kick of the strong air catch the canvas and heard the water begin to really fizz past on either side of the cutwater, I ducked below to grab the binoculars.

Jip must have seen Brand before I did, because he’d stopped barking and was just standing stiffly on the bow, still on point, back legs shivering with what Dad called terrier-shake, which I always took to be a controlled excitement. I found the dark sails a minute or so later, far ahead of us and racing for the horizon.

Something happened in my stomach when I finally saw them, a sort of flip and a dropping sensation. I think if I had not seen the sails again then Brand and his theft would have become a nightmare that would have haunted me for the rest of my life. Though maybe that life would have been longer than the one I’m now facing. I would have begun to think his disappearance was too sudden, too impossible to be real and perhaps even begun to wonder if he had been something supernatural. That was half of what was behind the flip and drop I felt inside—relief that the careful walls I had built around my sense of the world had held. Maybe in your busier world with more distractions like the internet and football matches and other people, you never felt the tug of the uncanny the way that I did. Now I am alone and stuck here with little to do other than write all this down and think, I realise how much time I used to spend with my head in a book, filling the emptiness of my world and letting the pages distract from the darkness in the shadows behind me. I put a lot of effort into not letting myself believe in the supernatural. I think we all did. Of all the stories we used to take turns reading out loud around the fireplace, none were ever ghost stories. I know that was no mistake. Every empty house we passed might easily have been full of ghosts, if we chose to see them that way. But Brand disappearing into thin salt air would have been just the kind of thing to put a fatal chink in that protective wall.

The other thing in my belly was fear, not so much fear of Brand himself, for my blood was still up and against him, but a fear of what I now had to do. The truth was I had no plan. I had an aim, which was to get my dog back. My eye caught the long gun and the bow I had thrown down into the cabin. The fear was not for myself. I was young and angry enough not to feel that, though this wasn’t courage: young and angry is not the same as brave. I was not scared of Brand at that moment, and that was a further stupidity. The fear was fear of myself. Of how far I would go.

You, in the picture I found, have nothing but sunshine and laughter in your face. Your eyes shine with it as you hang there caught in your star jump, forever lighter than air, caught between grass and sky between a sister and a dog who love you. Your thoughts can never have borne the sudden dark burden I felt when I looked at the gun.

A sea chase with the wind at your back is a long thing, and there was plenty of time for thinking as the miles flew past. In the open water that stretched between the last of home and the southern islands and mainland proper, it was also cold. I had a long sleeveless coat in the cabin, made from three sheepskins stitched together, with the wool on the outside. I got it and cinched my belt around the middle to hold it close around me. The smell of the wool reminded me of home. So did the cap I pulled over my ears, a stretchy knitted thing Bar had sewn for me made from an old jersey we had found preserved in a plastic bag at the back of a tall cupboard in a low house on Eriskay the summer before. The yarn was more than a century old, and Bar had overstitched it so many times to keep it together that it was easily as much stitch as sweater, but there was something of her in each of those tacks, so I felt a little less alone when I wore it. I’d watched her painstakingly working on it over a winter month and had come to secretly covet it as she did so. Then she unexpectedly and casually gave it to me, as if it were nothing.

You need a hat, she said. And that was that. Except that for a moment, and in truth a long time after that, it was everything. Bar didn’t talk much, but she did a lot. It was in doing that she showed what she thought. That kept me as warm as the hat itself.

Thinking of Bar made me duck back into the cabin and get the mackerel line. There was no telling how long this might go on, and Bar would say there was no sense in going hungry. I could do more than one thing at a time.

Not well, as it turned out, because in grabbing the line I felt a sharp stab as one of the hooks went deep into the side of my finger.

There was no choice other than to grit my teeth and get out my Leatherman. The Leatherman goes everywhere with me, same as the dogs. It’s my prized find, a long small and still stainless steel rectangle that unfolds into a pair of pliers and a wire cutter with knives and saws and screwdrivers and all sorts of useful tools that are tucked away in the handles. I found it in the rotted glove box of a car on Eriskay. It’s a wonderfully useful thing. Swearing at myself for the stupidity, I pushed the hook all the way out of the pad of flesh on the side of my finger until the barb was clear, and then snapped it off with the wire-cutters. Then I was able to pull the hook back out without tearing myself up with the barb.

The long mass of the next two islands ahead was looming when I was done with my de-hooking, and I put the mackerel line overboard. I had to keep half an eye on the distant red sails which suddenly became camouflage as the land ahead became background. By the time the gap between the islands had revealed itself, cutting the long mass in two, I had thirteen gutted fish in the bucket at my feet and my hands were bloody with the work.

There’s an old lighthouse on the shore and as I passed it I realised that I was now as far south as I had ever been in my life. The island on the other side was another like Barra, to be seen and not landed on. When we had come this far south before, we were looking for turbine parts in the fallen thicket of windmills on the north end of the island. But the sea was suddenly humped with bobbing corpses of seals, maybe thirty or so. We had smelled them before we saw them, and when we did see them Dad had simply turned the boat for home, saying the sea was sour here. And the sour sea was why we never came down this way again.

I had been small when that happened, and excited to be going on an expedition. I had thought I would return home with some exotic find of my own, maybe viked from the little harbour township said to be on the eastern side of the island. Instead I took home something equally unfamiliar—the memory of the fear I saw flash across my father’s face before he remembered to hide it.

The sea didn’t look sour, nor were there now any sea-bloated seal bellies to be seen. The air was fresh and the wind kept its strength up. Only the light was beginning to fade as I made what was really the choice that changed everything. It seemed small enough at the time, a matter of navigation, just the best way to sail through the sound ahead without going aground. Because I’d never crossed that southern limit of my world.

Somewhere in the back of my head, a voice told me that this threshold was a place to turn back. I looked at Jip and thought of Jess. She was every bit as tough as he was, but where Jip always kept the tiniest bit of himself reserved, even when allowing himself to be scratched or when choosing to sleep tucked in close to me in the winter months, Jess gave herself without keeping anything back. Her tail wagged that bit faster, and she was always a step ahead of him when running to greet us when we returned home. The voice in my head wondered if it was maybe that less guarded nature that allowed Brand to grab her. But thinking of her sweetness was not doing anything other than making the tears prick behind my eyes, so I pushed the voice away, far out of hearing, and watched the unknown passage ahead for shoals or skerries. And so, by concentrating on the job on hand, I sailed past the known boundaries of my world without noticing the exact moment when it happened.