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

And sleep I did. Long and deep, right into the heart of the night.

And then I was awake, and very still, listening to the low growl coming from Jip.

It was the kind of noise you definitely don’t want to wake up to. It put a cold chill right down my spine.

It was pitch-dark, but when I put my hand out I felt he was standing rigid, hackles raised, quivering.

I sat up and found my knife.

I let my other hand stay on his back, telling him we were okay by touch and not sound. I wanted to listen for whatever it was that had roused him. He stopped growling, but he stayed on his feet and the bristle of fur at his shoulders remained erect.

There was something moving outside the windows, down on the ground. I could hear a kind of rubbing and moving noise—nothing specific like footfalls or breathing, just the noise of movement, faint and almost inaudible, more like a disturbance in the air than an actual sound. But it was definitely there and it was the noise something larger than a rat or a squirrel would make. I edged to the window and tried to look down and get a sight of whatever it was, but the angle was too steep and I couldn’t have seen what was there, even if there had been more light. All I could do was sense that the noise seemed to be travelling towards the front of the building. The front of the building with the unlocked door.

I went and got my bow and arrows as quietly as I could and took Jip with me out on to the stairhead. I told him to stay close, which is one of the suggestions he knows to follow from our time hunting on the island. He sat next to me as I knelt in the dark, facing the main door below. I nocked an arrow without thinking and laid the others where I could grab the next ones without looking, and then we both did a very good job of mimicking the stillness of all those statues and reached out into the night with our ears.

The thing (or the person—Brand even, because I was half thinking he had tracked me) scuffed its way up the steps and on to the portico. I swear I heard sniffing, and immediately knew they were examining our campfire and discarded rabbit carcass. There was a horrible sound of bones crunching and then silence, after which came more of the general sound of something moving, this time closer to the front doors. Then there was more silence, so long that I had to switch knees to stop getting cramp, and longer still until I began to wonder if we had imagined it all and relaxed enough to rest both knees by sitting on the top step of the stairs instead of kneeling.

Then there was a loud bump and a creak as something barged the front door and Jip took a step forward, fur bristling again, his warning growl rumbling low and unmistakable and I had the bow drawn and ready for whatever was coming in.

And then nothing did.

Just nothing and more nothing and then the sound of some bird hooting in the distance, a noise I knew was an owl, a noise so perfectly recognisable that even though I had never heard an actual tuwit-tuwoo there could be no mistake. And then more silence.

I don’t remember relaxing, though I do know that Jip sat down after a very long time. And I certainly don’t remember going to sleep in such an awkward position.

I woke with sun in my eyes and a bad crick in my neck from where I had slumped against the wall and slept half sitting, all crooked and folded in on myself.

I thought I would go and see that it was safe before I let Jip out, but the moment I opened the inner glass door he bolted through my legs and darted out onto the porch, casting left and right.

I felt strangely foolish peering out of the half-open door, bow held ready as I scanned the square for the night visitor, trying to see if he was lying in wait for us.

Jip had no such qualms as he raced back and forth, furiously intense as he tried to get the scent of it. He disappeared round the corner, and was gone for several minutes, then he came back looking much happier than when he’d left. He cocked his leg on the corner of the museum where we had heard the thing rubbing along, and then he trotted to the centre of the square, nose down, until he discovered a large pile of fresh shit. It wasn’t recognisable as human, which I felt relieved by, but I had also never seen its like. Jip didn’t seem to mind what kind of new and unseen animal it had been. He just cocked his leg and put his scent on it too.

He seemed pleased with his work, and I too felt cheered up by his attitude. With that and the sunlight, the night’s fears seemed to disperse. If my arm hadn’t been so itchy and tight it would have been the perfect beginning to the day.

I said goodbye to the lady in the yellow dress, taking care to close all the doors behind me so weather and animals wouldn’t get in to bring the museum down before its time. When I was far enough away to look back and see more of the building, I did notice that there was already a pair of saplings sprouting from one side of the roof, so that time was coming. If I’d had the Sweethope , I think I might have taken the lady with me. I would have liked Bar and Ferg to see her looking at them. Dad would have thought it fanciful nonsense. Mum might have liked her smile for company.

I didn’t have to find my way to the river to fill my water bottles because we crossed a stream running down the middle of a street, and the water there was fast and clear. Sometimes when it has been hot and dry for a long time and then it rains, the water slides right off the land and doesn’t have time to soak in as fully as it would do if it was landing on damp earth. I was bottling the rainfall from the thunderstorm I’d seen from the top of the tower.

We walked up out of the city, back into the countryside, heading for the distant notch in the hills. The land here rolled gently up and down. We were walking cross-country now, not following an old road, though we did share direction with a railway line for a few pebbles, marching alongside it.

Sometimes I lost sight of the notch as we dropped into a low valley, but it was always there when we climbed the other side. I gave myself landmarks that were closer but still in line with it as we went, so we stayed on course throughout the morning. The landscape was lightly wooded with broadleaf trees. The open spaces between them which had likely once been farm fields had become heathland, criss-crossed with wide strips of thicket that had begun their life as hedgerows. My new trees book told me they were mainly hawthorn, beech or hazel. And where they weren’t, they were mainly bramble. Enough bramble for me to put my boots on. Though it was easy enough to negotiate the thickets because animals had worn their own paths through them over the years, and though I couldn’t help but look for a human footprint among the hoof and pad marks, I never expected to see one, and nor did I. In between there were wide spaces of grass and bracken dotted with low shrubs. Jip loved this open heath because it gave good hunting and all the rabbits he could dream of.

He ran so hard I began to worry about him damaging himself. Dad said terriers could sometimes be so stupid they’d run themselves until their hearts burst, but I don’t really think that’s true. Now I’m far enough away, I realise Dad was a worrier who hid his fears in sternness and bouts of bad temper that blew in without warning or sense, like dark storms from out of a clear blue sky. Worrying about terriers having heart attacks was thinking out of fear, though fear of what I don’t know. Maybe he was just worried about losing a valuable dog. But Jip brought back three rabbits before he tired enough to just walk alongside me, and when a hare exploded from a gorse bush we were passing he took an instinctive couple of paces towards a sprint after it, and then stopped and looked back at me, wagging his tail, tongue lolling from his panting mouth. He was happy in the sunlight, and so was I.