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

There was just a slightly raised bump on the horizon, too far away to see if there was any building on it. I unfolded my map and used my compass to orientate it. Then I took a bearing on the line I had marked with the bottle tops, and then I used the straight edge of one of the crutches to draw a line from the tower, right across the map.

And then—since the orange light had been broadly on the way to where I had decided Brand was based—I knew where I was headed. I could check it out, and keep right on going until I got to the other side of the land where I was sure he really had his home.

Jip was happy to get back to ground level. I pulled the kayak inside the hall of the palace. The building might be on its way to falling down now that the weather and the saplings had found a way in to the ballroom, but I reckoned it would take time, and the kayak would be safe enough for a while. Certainly until I walked back to get it on my way home.

I wonder if it’s still there.

We set off inland. I wanted to look back, but I didn’t because I knew if I did I’d start having doubts, and I had made my mind up. And there was quite enough to fill my eyes and my head as we walked through the charred skeleton of the town, Jip running ahead, quartering back and forth, nose to the ground on the hunt for new and interesting smells.

The shells of the broken houses leaned against each other as the road rose away from the seafront. The fire had burned the vegetation that had overgrown them right back so the old cracked tarmac had been revealed again, broken and buckled both by time and the bushes and small trees that had pushed through and which now survived as flame-stripped trunks and branches. The place smelled of fire char, but not a clean woodsmoke smell. More of a greasy, oil smell. Walking into your world, thinking of how many people had lived in this one street and then thinking how many other streets just like it must lie ahead did give me a strange feeling. But the blank window sockets didn’t look at me in the same way the empty houses on the islands did. Maybe the fire had burned out the last residue of whoever had once lived there.

Where the burn stopped and the houses continued, some still roofed and more or less intact, it was different. Just as empty but more alive again. Going was slower because the snarl of small trees and bushes got in the way, but it was still easy walking, though I would lose sight of Jip for minutes at a time. When glass survived, it winked the thin sunlight back at me as I passed. I remember one house had GONE sprayed across the front in yellow paint in letters that were higher than me. Birds flew in and out of the upper windows where I imagined they had been building their nests now for generations. It was a cheerful thing to see, as were the squirrels that loped freely along the roofs and tree branches. Life was making use of what you had left behind.

I’d never seen a squirrel except in a book, but the moment I saw the long bushy tails, I knew they weren’t rats. The speed and deftness with which they ran and kept their footing so high above the ground was exhilarating. At least to me it was. To Jip it was another affront, and he barked excitedly and tried to get at them, jumping up and even at one point trying to climb a tree. He didn’t have much time for books, so maybe for him they really were just rats with fluffier tails. Either way, they immediately got added to the list of things he knew he was born to hunt. I wonder what they made of us as we passed beneath them. They can’t have seen people before. It seemed like they were studiously oblivious to us as they hurtled smoothly from branch to branch—occasionally making wild and gravity-defying leaps from tree to tree, landing and carrying on as if they had not just performed a miracle of balance and surefootedness. I could have stood there and watched them all day. I decided I liked squirrels just as much as Jip did, but in a completely different way.

Once we left the edge of the town, the countryside sort of closed in, just when I would have imagined it would open up. The reason was, again, the trees. They got bigger and crowded in over the old road which was fully grown over, covered in moss and grass. As I said, at home on the islands there were no trees to speak of, and those very few that did survive were wind-shorn and stunted things, cowering behind whatever windbreak had allowed them to survive. There was one plantation of dwarfish pine on a hillside on North Uist, but it was a tangled and dark place into which I did not go.

Walking beneath real broad-leafed trees was something I had never done. And on this first day it was exhilarating. After an outdoor life spent under grey or blue skies, it was a novelty to find myself beneath a roof of green, and not just the one green, but so many different kinds of green. It wasn’t just the variety of trees that led to the medley of shades and intensities of colour—it was the sunlight beyond that turned some of the leaves into bright tongues of emerald that outlined the darker mass of the shadowed leaves beneath. They were tall, the trees on that first stretch of road, broad-trunked and ancient. The spread of their branches supported a thick canopy which must have kept down the younger generation that was trying to burst through the old tarmac road beneath the moss and grass. As if to prove this, after a couple of klicks I came to a place where two huge trees had blown down across the road and, where they let the light in, a new tree had already grown taller than the shaded saplings around it. The roots of the fallen trees had ripped great discs of earth out of the ground when they went down, and examining them made me realise that there was a huge system of roots beneath the surface to match the spread of branches high above it.

It’s a marvellous thing, a tree.

Rabbits had dug homes into the newly exposed earth, and Jip caught two before I could persuade him to come along with me. I was keen to get as many klicks behind us as we could before nightfall, and so I gutted them and hung them on my pack to skin later.

Good dog, I said. That’s our supper taken care of.

Many of the houses we passed were roofless shells, overgrown with brambles or cracked apart by the vegetation that had taken root in them decades earlier, but there were others that seemed less affected by time and neglect, at least until I got a closer look. Stone-built houses seemed to stand up better than brick, and brick better than houses made of frames covered in plaster. The walls of these houses had burst with damp long ago and here and there the remnants of the plastic sheeting they had been lined with fluttered like white flags. I remember coming out of the trees for a section of road, and found myself reflected in the long glass wall of a building that was, I think, a place for buying petrol or charging a car. It was an odd thing to see myself so small in a landscape, Jip at my side. Of course I’d seen myself reflected in mirrors and house windows before, but this was by far the biggest window I’d seen, and it made me look very small against the landscape stretching away all around me. Just me, my pack and my bow and then trees that towered above and a patchwork of brambles and hedges and scrubland beyond. The world looked very big. I looked tiny. Jip looked even smaller, but he also looked like he belonged in the wildness more than I did. The scale of me was somehow wrong, too big and too little at the same time. I looked like something not quite myself, like a character in a story. As I walked on, I wondered if that was what it was like seeing a movie or a television—a small person in a giant frame. Dad said that’s what people used to do, sit in the dark with lots of other people and watch a huge story take place on the screen hung in front of them. You’ll have seen movies. I wonder what you’d have made of Jip and me.