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

The burn scar stemming from the lightning tree was still fresh. No growth had begun to fill in. The smell was new and strong. The fire had been nature, not man. The spark of distant hope had been an illusion and the adventure it had lured me into was a mistaken ordeal instead. It had also killed my dog.

I was still as alone as I had ever been. I sat on the ridge and looked down at the countryside spread out below. I decided the best way to deal with the disappointment was to look at the map and try and work out how far I had come, where I was, and how far I had to go to get to Brand’s hideout. I was thinking of it as that by then—a hideout. A place thieves and pirates took their plunder. It was fanciful, but at that point I was not seeing the world as it is, because I had still seen so very little of it. I know that now, now that I have had a long time to do little else but think. I was still seeing it through the lens of the books I had read about it before it died, and that coloured things. It was like the old pair of sunglasses that Bar used to wear when fishing, the ones that made the water look different. It’s not exactly like that because Bar’s sunglasses actually took away the reflection on the surface of the water and let you see what was happening below. My lens of books didn’t seem to be helping me see any hidden things below the surface.

The map was both helpful and confusing. I had a rough idea of where I was, even though I had messed up my distance counting while I was feverish, on the days when I had futilely plodded away counting steps but forgetting to mark them with my clever-but-actually-not-so-clever-if-you-forget-to-do-it pebble trick.

Before I laid out the map, I climbed as high as I could, out on to the edge of an area of high moors, and looked down. My compass gave me north, so I was able to lay the map down at my feet and orientate it in the right direction. I weighted the edges against the wind and spent a long time carefully trying to match up the features that were so confidently marked on the map with the much blurrier details time and vegetation had overgrown. It took me most of the rest of the daylight to put it all together in a way that at least half made sense, but even as I went to sleep I was not sure I’d got it right. My plan was to walk to the curving line of trees about five klicks away and see if it was, as I guessed, one of the important roads the map showed and numbered beginning with the letter M. If it was the one I thought, then walking along it would take me to a very big city in the middle of the country, and then if I confirmed that I could make my way east by following the path of old roads and a railway line until I hit the coast more or less where I wanted to. It would be better than steering by notches in the hills. Especially because on the downside of this high ground there would be no more slopes rising ahead of me.

I woke and looked for Jip and then remembered he would not be greeting me on any more mornings, and so I drank some water, checked the map and got going, my stomach telling me it needed filling and my legs wondering why they couldn’t have a few hours more rest.

I hit the M road where it cut into the shoulder of the slope I was descending. The deeply cut sidings were a vivid slash of purple and green, and as I pushed through the head-high plants, the seed-pods snapped noisily, firing seeds in every direction. It made me jump at first, but then I decided it was quite a cheery thing and even whacked some of the plant heads as I passed, just to see the sharp little explosions.

Grass and moss had invaded the roadbed, but I could see it had originally been many cars wide and had once had a low barrier of metal and thick steel cables running down the middle of it. It made a sort of green road that ribboned away between purple banks for several klicks ahead and I wove my path along the old road, checking my compass every pebble to make sure it was the one I imagined it was, and wasn’t a different road snaking me back the way I had come.

I saw two strange and differently wonderful things on that road, before the next bit of albatross luck happened. The first was a true marvel.

As the roadway passed through another deeply cut groove in the surrounding high ground, there was an impossible bridge. It was beautiful, as if made from two thin ribbons of stone which I expect were concrete. One carried a road that ran straight across the chasm, continuing the line of the slope that had been removed. The other ribbon supported it in a breathtaking arch that sprang from the right hand side of the cutting, barely seeming to touch the top piece before curving back down on to the left-hand side. It was obviously rock-solid, having stood there in all weathers for more than a century, probably a century and a half, but it was so light and joyous it seemed more like movement than something built. It was like a leap made from stone. A leap and a balancing act. Would it have looked so wonderful to you? Or would you have driven a car beneath it and not noticed? With so many marvels around you, did you stop seeing some of them?

The other wonderful thing was what was on top of the bridge looking down at me. It was a black bull. Or maybe a big cow. It looked male though, and it had stubby horns and a huge hump of muscle around its shoulders. It wasn’t nearly as interested in me as I was in it, because as I walked under the bridge and looked back, it did not bother to come to the other side to watch me on my way. I had never seen a bull or a cow before. I didn’t feel particularly frightened by it, though I definitely doubted I would be able to kill one with an arrow if it decided to attack me. A pony was the biggest animal I had seen thus far in my life, and the biggest one I had hunted was the deer. The bull was rangy and bunch-muscled at the same time. It looked like all it would have to do was flex those muscles and arrows would bounce off it. And if the arrows didn’t bounce off, there was too much body between the outside and the vital organs within for even the most powerful bowshot to penetrate. I looked back at the empty bridge behind me and was glad that cows and bulls were plant-eaters. Something that size with a taste for smaller mammals would have been terrifying.

On the other hand, something that size would feed a person for a year if you could kill it and smoke or salt the meat. And there were other ways of killing and catching than shooting with a bow. Traps, for example. I was thinking all this as I walked, maybe because the universe sometimes has a warped sense of humour—or perhaps just a really sharp sense of timing.

Before the end of that day, I was the one in the trap.

It started with being hungry. The diet of berries was fine enough, though it wasn’t entirely agreeing with my stomach. I reckoned I was about half a day’s hard walking from the big city where I would have to take a turn from the M road and follow a railway line towards the coast—if I could find it. I had made good time so far and decided to see if I could find some rabbits to shoot. With that in mind, I waited until the road bottomed out into flatter land surrounded by heath that had once been fields. Then I turned off the road and walked parallel with it, bow ready. I saw a hare that ran too soon and too fast for me to fire at it, and then a couple of white tails turned up and ducked into thickets before I could aim properly. There was enough game around for me not to worry about firing at every opportunity. It just wasn’t worth the risk of losing a precious arrow loosing off at anything but a certain hit.

I walked off the heathland onto a small built-up area beside the M road, this one connected to a similar collection of single-storey buildings on the other side by a bridge that was too thin for cars and which had buckled in the middle and fallen onto the roadway. I suppose it was a bridge for walking on. It was covered, like a big pipe you’d have to go through. Probably to keep the rain off. A huge rectangular canopy had fallen in and landed drunkenly on top of some rusted boxes that I recognised as petrol dispensers from the couple I’d seen back on the Uists. It was tilted up on one corner, propped on a tank. This was my first tank, and I knew it by the long gun-barrel and the tracks rusted to the wheels on either side. I don’t know why an army tank would be on a petrol station. I climbed up on it and tried to open the big metal hatches, but they were corroded shut. I hopped down again and then froze as I saw a child’s face in the end of the gun-barrel looking at me. And then I realised it was a toy doll’s head that someone had put inside it. Again, I don’t know why.