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

I didn’t. But I did wonder who in the whole wide empty world he had learned this from. Or done this to. Maybe it was something he read.

My silence unsettled him, I think.

Say something, he said. Are they coming after you?

Saga barked at me and the shock of the deep noise and her teeth so close to my face sort of jumped the words out of my mouth without me meaning to let it happen.

Where’s Jess? I said.

Who? he said.

My dog, I said. The dog you stole.

Jess, he said. And he leant back, smiling a little, scratching Saga’s ears, rewarding her for frightening the words out of me.

I didn’t know her old name, he said. I was going to call her Freya.

What have you done to her? I said.

She needed discipline, he said. She bit Saga.

Good, I thought. Good dog, Jess.

Locked her in a shed over there, he said, pointing into the dark. Small room, no food, hard floor. She’ll be better behaved come light, or she’ll stay hungry.

That was a relief. It flooded through me like warm water, washing away the images I’d made of her lonely death in the waves.

This was a holy place, he said looking around. That table up there was the altar. Where they made their sacrifices and such. There’s a metal board with writing on it out there by the shed. It explains it all. If you can read. Not just the church. The whole island.

I didn’t want to listen to him talk. Especially in the way he’d started to, all easy and friendly, like he hadn’t recently threatened to cut my tongue out.

Just give me my dog, I said.

I own her, he said.

No, I said. You stole her.

He looked at me oddly. And then he grinned and threw back his head and chopped out a short laugh.

No, he said. The name of the island.

And he grinned some more and spelled it out.

I-O-N-A, he said. Iona. Not I-own-her.

And then his eyes got cold and serious again.

Though I do that too, he said. That’s just a fact you need to get used to.

I want my dog, I said. You stole her.

You keep saying stole, he said.

I do, I said. You’re a thief.

It sounds like I was being brave, writing down what I said then, in that dark echoey place by the fire. That’s not true. I was angry and scared and felt very unprotected with my hands tied behind me. All I had for a shield was words.

A thief now, is it? he said. And he said it as if this was a word he had never heard before. A thief? Well now. That sounds bad.

Don’t mind what it sounds like, I said. Give me my dog. And the fish. And my dad’s coat.

He smiled then, looking down at the yellow oilskin.

It’s a good coat, he said. But it’s mine. I traded for it. Same as the dog that was yours and is now mine.

You did not, I said.

And how would you know? he said. Seeing as you were asleep at the time.

His eyes were level. Open, even. There was no real accusation in them. Maybe a bit of disappointment.

Ah, Griz, he said. I thought we were friends. Your father is a man who understands the nature of a proposition. There’s more to a trade than like for like. He really wanted that windmill part. And while you were sleeping, we came to an agreement.

Just for a moment I let the warm smile and the soft words make me doubt myself. Had I rushed off before anyone could tell me I had grabbed the wrong end of the stick? Had I missed the turbine offloaded and waiting on the shore? Had everyone been too sick to stop me with the truth?

And a liar, I said. Thief and liar.

Ah, Griz, he said again. Words like that can poison a friendship, you know?

I know you’re lying because if you had made a deal, you wouldn’t have run off so scared, asking if the others were there, I said. An honest man wouldn’t have done that.

To his credit, he didn’t drop the smile much.

Well, he said. Well. No one likes to be badly thought of.

They are coming, I said. They were right behind me. So you better let me go.

He shook his head.

Two liars now, he said. And us in a church. Double the poison, don’t you think?

I didn’t answer. None of the replies bubbling up in my throat made sense enough to be let out anyway. He stretched and then prodded a chair leg deeper into the fire.

They poisoned the dogs, you know? he said. At the end. They gave them something harsh and vicious to their wellbeing. That’s why there aren’t more of them. Why they’re rare.

I kept quiet. He didn’t like quiet. If he had a weakness—and I still don’t know if it was really a weakness—it was not liking quiet when there was company to be had. He liked to talk. He liked being the centre of any attention that was going. Maybe because he was on his own so much. I had lived with four—once five—others. I had no need to be heard. If I wanted to know what I sounded like, I had Dad and Ferg and Bar to listen to. They sounded just like me.

Brand carried on. The old bastards were frightened of dogs turning into dangerous packs, he said. So they dosed them.

I could have asked him how he knew that. Because of course it can only have been a story he had heard from long before either of us were alive. A traveller’s tale. A rumour. A lie. A story. I didn’t say anything.

Whatever they gave the dogs did for the bitches more than the males, he said. Way I see it, what bitches remain have litters with fewer females in them than they used to. So, fewer females, fewer dogs in the long run. Males on their own don’t breed. Males in a pack with no breeding to be done? Well, Griz, you can see how they’d get mean. You’re tall enough for a person to think your body’d be telling you what I’m talking about, but then you haven’t started with the hairs on your chin yet, so maybe it hasn’t come on you yet, the wanting and the not having. But when it comes on you, you remember what I say. Men with no breeding to be done are the meanest creatures in the world.

I didn’t like the look he gave me then, but it passed quickly, like he was as surprised by it as I was uncomfortable, and he just shrugged it back into whatever box it came out of.

So anyway, he said, scratching away at Saga’s ears again. What dogs there still are may be thinner on the ground, but they’re more dangerous. It’s like as if in trying to cure the problem they boiled it down and made it thicker and darker. Like a bone broth.

I’d never heard that term before, but I knew what it meant. We always had a stockpot on the go by the range, and the thought of it came hard, like I could smell it, and like a smell it took me on a short cut right back to a place where I had been safe and happy enough. A place exactly the opposite of where I was: in deepest danger with spirits low enough to match it.

And maybe dosing the dogs was not a story. Maybe it was true. Maybe not. Mucking up how a poor creature can or can’t have a normal litter seems awfully like what happened to humankind. If I’d been of a mind to talk to him I’d have said that the Gelding was a much more likely cause of there being less dogs than there should be. I didn’t think old dying mankind—the Baby Bust—would have had time or inclination to go about poisoning dogs just for the meanness of it.

I didn’t know then exactly how mean some Baby Busters found time to be. I just thought, who would want to poison dogs? It didn’t make any kind of sense. But then I’d grown up on an island. I hadn’t seen what a bunch of dogs or wolves could do when they were hungry and their blood was up. That came later.

He reached behind him and pulled a pack close enough to yank a sleeping bag from it.

I’m sleeping now, he said. You do too. A night sleeping on the stones here by the fire won’t do you much harm. And if you get cold, you’ve only yourself to blame. You keep to your side of the fire and don’t try anything because while I might not be a person who could cut another person’s tongue out, Saga here would take your throat out in a heartbeat. Seen her do it. And that’s not a lie.