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

I’d had enough time to leave the ram, whistle in my dogs from their rabbit hunting and sail the narrow sea mile back home to warn the others long before the traveller came ashore. I could have taken my time, because sharp-eyed Bar had seen the red sails too and they were ready and waiting, which meant that she and Dad were at the shoreline and Ferg was nowhere to be seen. Bar was not sure it was necessary for him to be hiding and watching over us with the long gun because she thought the boat under the red sails looked like the boat the Lewismen used, and that maybe they had just found new sails. The Lewismen were a six-person family who lived five islands north, the closest people we knew, and we knew them well. Bar wore her hair in a long plait that now reached down her back and she would, in time, pair up with one of the boys. This was what she had decided, though being Bar and thus contrary in all things, said she did not see why she should be in any hurry making a choice as to which of the four it was to be. It was not as if they were going anywhere, or as if there were four other girls they might pair up with instead. They were a practical family, and we sometimes joined together to do things that needed more than four pairs of hands, but we never took up their suggestion that we move to be closer to them, and they never thought of moving south. Or if they did think of it, they did not think well of the idea. But they were our neighbours and the only other people within a hundred miles. They were just the Lewismen to us, though they had a family name which was Little. And when the red sails got closer we all saw Bar had been wrong, that it was a different boat beneath them altogether. It was bigger and the man at the tiller had hair that streamed behind him like a banner in the wind. All the Lewismen cropped their hair close to the skull for cleanliness, even Mary the mother did so, though she was in fact more mannish than woman, for all that she’d borne four boys.

The long-haired traveller proved to be the only person on the boat, though at first sight it seemed too big for one person alone to sail. He neatly drew into the shallower water in the lee of the small headland that topped our beach, showing a good eye for a sound anchorage, and hailed us as he dropped anchor. His voice was hoarse but strong, and he said he was alone and wished to come ashore if we would have him. He had things to trade and indeed had been told of our whereabouts by the Lewismen, who he had left two days before. He bore a letter from them, which he waved in the air, the paper white against the darkening sea behind him.

Dad beckoned him in, and he dropped a small dinghy over the side and rowed in to the beach. I helped him ashore, and we pulled the boat above the tideline together.

I felt Dad’s hand like a warning on my shoulder, as if I’d been too enthusiastic and unguarded, but then he ruffled the short hairs on the back of my head which he only does when he’s feeling kind.

I’m Abraham, said Dad, nodding at the stranger. Call me Abe. And this is my boy, Griz.

Hello, Griz, he said with an answering grin that I liked the moment it split his thick red beard in a flash of white.

And then the dogs barrelled down to surround him before I could ask his name. They barked and snarled and arrived in a great tangle of teeth and tails and then, as he knelt to greet them, the tails started thumping and the snarling turned to whines as each dog seemed to want to be patted and petted by this stranger from the sea. He had the way of dogs, and he told us he had lost his own one only weeks ago, over the side in a storm around the North Cape and he missed him like an arm. She was a half Husky crossbreed called Saga, clever like a man he said, white, black and brown with a brown eye to match her ears and a blue one to match the sky. He’d had her safely kept below in the small cabin, but when he fell and hurt himself as the boat slammed into the trough of an unusually big wave, Saga heard him cry out in pain and—being a clever dog—pawed the latch and came to help him. The next wave took her over the side and he never saw her again, not even a head bobbing on the face of the mountainous seas piling up behind the stern as the wind blew him beyond any chance of finding her. He showed us the scar on his head, and we could see in the gentle way he ruffled the fur of our dogs as he spoke that the hurt was deeper than the healed skin.

Like I said, it was a good story. And—as I found out later—some of it was even true. The dog with one brown eye and one blue being clever as a man, that was true as death itself.

Looking at a new person is not something you would have found as interesting as we do, I expect. You lived in a world full of new people all the time. If you lived in a city, they must have flowed round you like a great mackerel shoal and you’d be just one of thousands or millions, still yourself alone in your own head no doubt, but part of something much bigger too. Here, every fresh face is an event, almost a shock, every new person rare enough to seem like an entirely new species. The traveller looked like no one I had ever met. His long hair, for a start, was thick and wavy and the colour of flames. A redhead. Something I’d read about and seen in faded pictures but never met in real life. The hair was a startling colour, as alien and abrupt as the explosions of orange flowers we found on the other islands, always close to old gardens, flowers my mother called crocoz, when she still spoke. She knew all the flowers and plants. Bar told me she said crocoz weren’t native to the islands, but were tough survivors, like us. And he was not just a redhead, but a redbeard too, a slab of a thing that jutted as far down in front of his face as his hair hung behind it. His skin was pale but weather-beaten and his eyes, which peered out at the world from beneath the high cliff of his forehead, were dangerous blue. I don’t know why I thought the blue was dangerous, but that was the word that jumped into my head as I saw them. Maybe it was because they turned on me in the same instant and just for a moment, as he caught me looking at him, I saw them without the smile that followed, and I do know I thought it then and that this is not something I added later, after things happened: I definitely thought dangerous blue, but then I thought better and discounted it.

Maybe you, swimming in a world full of difference and choice, were better tuned to believing your gut when it came to people. I had—still have—little to compare people with. So I dismissed the dangerous blue in his eyes when he smiled at me an instant later, and decided it was just different, the blueness, only having seen brown or green eyes before. And when he smiled it was hard to think of those eyes as cold, but maybe that was part of why he was hard to keep a hold of in the mind, juggling the two things at once, the fire in his hair and the shiver of ice in his eyes. The face that was hard as a hammer when it was not smiling and the smile that seemed to warm the world when it found you.

You look like a Viking, were the first words I said to him. And he did. I had seen him, or faces like him, in history books and old pictures, men in horned hats carrying axes and plunder.

And the second words he said to me, this man who had sailed out of the north, were:

What’s a Viking?

Which shows that even a question can be a lie if asked in the right way.

It was one summer while we were a-viking ourselves that I found you. When Ferg began to tease me for wanting to write things down because who in the whole empty world was going to read it, Dad said that it was a natural result of reading so much. He said if you read a lot you start to think like a writer, the same way as if you grow up with a fiddle player in the house you start whistling and learning the tunes without thinking, like Ferg had. I read a lot. I’ll get to that. Dad plays the fiddle. I told him Ferg maybe had a bit of a point, since I didn’t know who I would be writing for as everyone I knew already knew my story because they’re a part of it. But I wanted to maybe keep a diary sort of thing, and so he said then just write like you talk, don’t be fancy, and I said but when you talk you do talk to someone, at least most of the time, and he said then just use your imagination: he said imagine a someone and keep them in mind as you write and I thought of you, the boy with my face.