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

I spent one more night in the brick house, which I had come to hate because it was where I had lost my other dog. I sat beside the bathroom fire on my bedroll and read the book on trees by the glow off the flames. That’s where I learned the name of the beech the fox had died next to, and the fact that the little three-sided nuts spilling out of their hairy cases were called beech mast. And that they were edible. That’s about all the good I got out of that night, and again I did not sleep well. There was a wind, and the trees that were slowly squeezing in on the house from all sides rustled and scratched away at the windows all night. When I did sleep, my dreams were full of things trying to get inside the house, and trees that walked, and triffids—which were from a book I read about a very different end of the world than the one you and I are on either side of. Your world didn’t end because of meteorites that blinded everyone, or killer plants. Although Ferg said one theory he’d heard from the Lewismen was that what did it was something your lot put on the plants, something that got into everybody’s bodies and then became infectious and stopped breeding happening. That was just something he said. To me that sounds as fanciful as triffids. Or krakens. That was another strange book by the same writer. Maybe if I’d been sleeping by the shore, I’d have dreamed of krakens. But I was far inland, and my eyes hadn’t seen the healthy sea for days. I think I was as soul-sick for the sea as I was feverstruck. And now I look back on it, I also think my mind was reeling from all the new things I had seen, not just the novelty of bridges and churches and towers and trees, but the sheer, relentless immensity of what had been left behind. It was the volume of it all, pressing in on my head like the big bench vice in Dad’s workshop.

I did a spiteful thing when I left the brick house. I feel bad about it even now, though I don’t know exactly why I should feel like this, any more than I know precisely why I did it. I regretted it the first time I looked back and saw the column of black smoke rising into the still air behind me, but by that time it was far too late to do anything about it. I had walked four pebbles without turning because leaving a place that Jip had been and just might one day return to was so hard I think I might have broken and run back and waited—as I said—for ever. I had broken up the empty chests of drawers and left them spilling into the fireplace when I left, waiting until they had caught before leaving, hearing the thrum of flames vibrate through the ceiling above me as I climbed out of the downstairs window for the last time.

It was a cremation. A fire burial. A Viking funeral. An end, marked. A farewell signal put into the sky for what was left of the world to see, to honour a dog and then to be dispersed and blown away in the wind. Those were some of the high thoughts I had as I walked away towards the notch in the hills, definitely not crying. Then, when I did stop and look back, I saw it for the meanness it was. I had just hated the house for what had happened in it and had not thought of how it had sheltered me while I got better. I had burned it and the homes of the animals that lived in its walls and under its floors, and the birds that had nested under its eaves, and I had burned the crowding trees too. The trees had done nothing bad, other than grow where they could. A bad thing had happened to me in that house, but it had happened as blamelessly as the rain. The bad thing that had been done in that house, to the house, that was done by me. I walked onwards, sickened at myself, the nasty feeling that I had somehow called down bad luck on my future growing with every pace.

You know the rhyme about the ancient sailor that stoppeth one in three? Dad used to read it to us by the fire in the winter, and it chills me now to think of it as much as it did when he did the voices, and described the icebergs on the polar ocean and the other warm and sluggish sea that trapped them later, thick with sea snakes and ghost ships. It seemed to be describing another planet entirely. I felt just like that poem. Like that ancient mariner, in my case at sea in a land whose rules I did not quite understand until it was too late. I never understood why the mariner shot the albatross that had saved them, and I still don’t know why I burned the house that had sheltered me. But I did. And I did it on purpose, in a kind of vicious lashing out at something just because I was scared and confused and sad. I didn’t need to see the bright lick of the red flames at the base of the black column of smoke towering over the copse and the pond to know that, just like the rhyme said, I had done a hellish thing.

I had shot the albatross.

I walked away from the accusing finger of smoke with the thumpity-thump delivery Dad had always read the mariner poem with pounding away in my brain. If you listen to someone reading a poem often enough, it hammers itself into your mind and makes it not only easier to remember, but also harder to forget. I would really have liked to have forgotten the lines that kept going round and round, the ones that said something like:

Well, I told myself. At least I don’t need breezes to get me moving. All I need is my legs.

And I did punish them, walking more pebbles in that first day than I had done in two before I had lost Jip. I walked hard to make my body ache enough to distract me from the heart-wrenching question of why I had set off on a probably futile search for one dog and then lost the other. In shame and self-loathing, I walked through the dusk and on into the darkness, lit by moonlight until the clouds came and then I rolled into an uncomfortable bundle beneath a little rounded bridge that had once taken a small road over a single railway track. It was dry and like a house without walls on two sides. I slept well and woke to the sound of birds in the trees all around me, and stepped out into the sunlight feeling that this was going to be a good day. The feeling lasted through most of the morning, and even raised a bit as my nose caught a whiff of woodsmoke blowing into my face as I climbed the first proper slope I had so far encountered on my walk from the coast. I knew from the direction of the wind that I was not smelling Jip’s funeral pyre behind me. And I knew I must be close to the spot I had marked what seemed an age ago on the rain-lashed viewing platform on the tower, the source of the distant firelight I had seen winking at me in the storm, the spark of hope and mystery that I’d been so excited about when I had been confident and angry, and had a good dog to travel towards it with. Before I lost Jip and shot the albatross.

Some part of me must have been thinking straight and acting cautious, because I crested the slope with my bow in my hand, arrow ready.

The fire had not been manmade. Ahead of me was a burn mark just like the ones on the heather-covered slopes at home. It had blown through the bracken and gorse in the same long distinctive tongue shape. I walked the length of it, from the widest point to the narrow tip where it had begun. There I found a small stand of trees protected from the wind in a crease in the land just below the ridgeline, and half of them—on what must have been the windward side—were still green. The others were charred and it was easy to see where the lightning had struck and ignited the fire. One tree still stood—taller than the rest but dead on its feet, split in two by the strike. The halves leaned away from each other exposing the burned-out heartwood. It was somehow terrible—both the sight and the thought of the power it must have taken to do that, electricity jagging out of the sky. Even at the time, it seemed like another bad omen. I did not know that one day I would know exactly what the tree had felt like, riven in half by a bolt from out of a clear blue sky.