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

I drank deep from my water bottle and got up a little too fast which made me retch. My legs felt bendy in all the wrong directions, and the room swam alarmingly around me as I tried to walk. I took off my soiled clothes and took them downstairs with me, holding on to the wall as I went.

I climbed out of the window and carefully walked to the pond. It was fed by a small stream that came off the slope behind it, so it wasn’t stagnant water. I drank some more and then set about cleaning my clothes. It took a lot of scrubbing and rinsing and doing it over again and again to get them clean, but I did it. The stink wasn’t just the mess I’d made: it was the sweat with which I’d soaked the rest of my clothes, lying asleep in my fever. And of course it was also me. Leaving my clothes spread out on a bush, I got into the pond and washed myself too, ducking below the surface and giving my hair a good scrub as I did so. It was deep-bone cold but I’ve never swum in warm water so the ache and tingle of it was familiar and, in its own way, comforting. I turned on my back and swam to the middle of the pond, where I floated, looking up at the sky and feeling that great sense of exhilaration that comes when you’ve been so ill you had forgotten what well feels like. I wasn’t strong, or even really over it, but I was definitely over the worst. On the mend, as Dad used to say.

You can work today because you’re on the mend.

The warmth of the day was going, however, and the sun dropping. I realised as I floated there that I must have been asleep for almost a full twenty-four hours. And it would be dark again soon.

Jip brought a rabbit to the edge of the pond and dropped it with a bark that said it was for me.

I got out and took the rabbit and my wet clothes back to the house. I broke up some more furniture and got the fire in the bathroom going again. I was feeling well enough to poke around, which got me a couple of cooking pots and a good knife from the kitchen, and in the bathroom cabinet a curved plastic pot with a flat lid and a faded label that said it was DR HARRIS ARLINGTON SHAVING SOAP. It still had the ghost of a smell, clean and sharp. I decided there and then to heat water in one of the cooking pots and re-clean my clothes with some of this soap. The lid cracked when I opened it, but I still have a much smaller puck of the soap with me wrapped in a piece of cloth. I think the smell must have really gone but I sometimes take it out and sniff it and imagine I can get the faint outline of what it once was.

That night, I wrung out my newly fragrant clothes and hung them in front of the fire to dry as I slept. I boiled the rabbit meat with a sprig of rosemary I broke from a bush by the kitchen door. It didn’t taste of much, but I ate it all and slept long and deep, waking once to see Jip lying across the door, facing the stairs, on guard just in case anything came in to see what we were up to. Comforted, I quietly told him he was a good dog and went back to sleep.

He was gone when I woke.

I got dressed and waited for him by the pond. And then I walked around whistling and then calling for him until my throat went raw. When waiting got to be unbearable, I left my pack so that he’d know I was coming back if I missed him, and then I took my bow and went looking for him seriously. I tracked back along the way we’d come, and then I returned and walked ever widening circles around the house, still whistling and shouting and listening. I froze many times, ears straining at a distant noise in the woods, convinced that at any moment it would turn into an excited crashing through the undergrowth that would end up with an exhausted but happy Jip bounding back to me. But that never happened. I ate berries when I remembered to, but I didn’t have the heart to go hunt a rabbit or find anything else to eat, maybe because I couldn’t think of anything sadder than the lonely meal waiting for me at the end of the day if I didn’t find him.

But I didn’t find him, and he didn’t find me. All that did was a darkness that seemed to come earlier than I’d expected, and a long night back in the house without a fire. I didn’t light it because I didn’t want the crackling of the wood to drown any sounds outside that might be an injured dog trying to get my attention. But in truth I knew then that I’d likely never know where he went. Or why. Or if he meant to come back and couldn’t. I told myself that accidents happen, even to terriers. Thinking of what that accident might have been kept sleep away for more than half the night.

I was awake before the dawn, waiting for the greyness to take over from the dark, but first light brought nothing but a short and depressing rain shower and no dog at all.

I was feeling physically stronger, but my spirits could not have been lower. I was so worried and sad that my thinking was nearly as muddled as it had been when I was gripped by the fever. Once the shower had passed, I sat on the stairs and listened to the water dripping sullenly off the trees pressing against the windows and tried to think realistically and practically. Again, I don’t know if it was the right choice, but I decided to look for Jip again for one more day—and then move on.

In my heart, I think I would have waited for him for ever, if I truly believed he was coming back. But it wasn’t just the house and the woods around it that I was circling. It was the nasty, heartbreaking truth that Jip would never run off and leave me. It was the very opposite of his nature to do something like that, and while he might stay away hunting all night, he would always have returned if he could. Nevertheless I spent hours walking around the woods, looking into rabbit holes, listening even, just in case he had dug himself into a tunnel he couldn’t get out of. I’d seen how far he would dig into the sand dunes at home if he thought there was a chance of a rabbit at the end of it—ten feet or more sometimes.

It was while crouching silently by one of these holes that I looked up and saw the badgers. Two of them across a patch of nettles, staring back at me, unmistakable white heads with two thick black stripes running from either side of the muzzle up across the eyes to the ears behind. The first badger I saw was in a book about a rat and a mole that went on a great adventure. That badger was wise and tough and stern and a good friend in need. I don’t know if these badgers were wise, but they looked tough and stern enough and while not unfriendly, they didn’t seem especially concerned by the sudden arrival of a human. But they did look larger than I had expected a badger to look in the flesh. They not only looked quite big but more than sturdy enough to give as good as they got in a fight with a terrier the size of Jip. As they lost interest in me and shambled of into the undergrowth, I began to wonder if there were other ways Jip might have got into trouble than digging too enthusiastically.

I found the corpse at just about the time I was going to give up. I almost missed it, but the tail of my eye must have noticed the fur and the brown paw sticking up in the air against the grey-green trunk of a beech tree. Or maybe it was the geometrical regularity of the bones of the ribcage among the chaotic shapes of the undergrowth. Without thinking, my head swung back to see what I’d so nearly walked straight past and I felt my stomach flip and something unswallowable appear at the base of my throat.

I went very still for as long as I could manage, and then found I was moving towards the body, pulled by a magnet I couldn’t escape no matter how much I wanted to.

Jip was more than my dog; he was my friend, my family, my brother.

He was not this freshly dead fox at the foot of the tree.

Relief hit me so hard that my legs went and I dropped painfully to my knees in the rough tangle of fallen twigs and beechnut shells. I found myself gasping for air as if I’d been holding my breath for a long time. Maybe I had. Since I was little, since Joy was taken from us over the high cliff at the back of the island, I’ve always prided myself on not crying when things hurt or get tough, so I don’t think I was crying, but the sobs of air I took in might have sounded like it if anyone was watching.