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

Before there was a tank there, this must have been a place that travellers came to eat and refuel when going along the M road. The low building smelled damp and earthy. I didn’t trust the saggy roof, but through the broken window walls I could see the rusting skeletons of chairs and tables.

A faded plastic sign told me to try a Whopper.

I don’t know what a Whopper was. Maybe you tried one once. I hope it was good.

I walked on, hungry, skirting the M road, still tracking it in the hope of rabbits. A few pebbles later I saw something in a stand of white-barked birches and stopped walking. It was a deer, smaller than the ones on the island, with a lighter coat and much shorter antlers. I carefully shrugged out of my pack and took two arrows. One I put through my belt at the back; the other I nocked as I began to carefully move into bowshot.

The wind was in my face so I knew I couldn’t be scented and the deer seemed totally absorbed in cropping the grass between the birches. I moved slowly, keeping an eye on the ground in front of me to be sure I didn’t tread on anything that would make a noise and spook my next week or so of meals. The deer moved away, and I thought I had lost it, but it had only decided to graze on a different patch of grass. I entered the birch wood carefully, trying to calm my breathing. Beyond the thin strip of birches was a taller mass of vegetation, a steep rampart of brambles and creepers rising above the silvery leaves like a dark thunderhead.

The pale deer was easy to see against it. It was entirely unaware of how close I was getting. I slowly raised the bow and said the silent apology and thanks that Ferg had taught me when he and Bar first took me hunting, the one that calms your breathing and brings good luck. And then I shot it.

I don’t miss much. And the deer was close and perfectly broadside on. I saw the arrow feathers thump home exactly where I had aimed, just behind the shoulder. The deer gave a couple of instinctive steps forward, and then fell. I dropped my bow and the spare arrow and ran in, unsheathing my knife in case it was lung-shot and needed a quick mercy. Ferg said every second you left an animal in pain when you could end it for them was a curse on you. But the deer was heart-shot and dead, and looking as suddenly sad as all prey does when the life is gone. I said another silent thanks and promised the meat would not be wasted, which was not something Ferg or Bar had taught me, but something I had added myself when I shot my first deer.

I should have dragged it out the way I had come, but I would have had to step over fallen logs to do so, and there was an animal track winding through the trees that looked clearer. Because I wasn’t paying too much attention to anything other than the light and whether I would have enough time to gut and butcher it before dark, I didn’t see the boar until it was too late. Jip would have seen it. He would have warned me. But Jip was gone.

I heard the huff and growl before I saw the small eyes and the large tusks turning towards me from the brushwood just ahead. I went still and the eyes and the tusks raised themselves off the ground as the boar stood up. And up. It was much bigger than I had imagined a boar could be. Not as big as a bull, but just as solid and hard-muscled. It just looked like trouble. I don’t know what you would have done if you had met a giant boar on a remote woodland track, but I do know that whatever the right thing was, I didn’t do it. I kept looking at it, and backed away slowly.

It’s okay, I said, putting all the soothe I had in me into my voice. It’s okay.

The boar huffed and grunted some more, pawing the ground. Its eyes looked really angry. I didn’t know boars got so big.

I didn’t know how fast they could run either. There was a spit of dirt as it launched itself at me. I twisted away and ran and everything that happened next happened in a jumble I still can’t quite get straight in my head. I ran and there was no room really, nowhere to run to. I felt the boar’s breath on the back of my leg and tried to dodge sideways. I hit the trunk of a tree that I hadn’t seen and then I was on my back, and the boar was sort of turning round in its own length and charging at me and then I was on my feet and instead of the boar’s breath I heard its teeth snap together and felt the tug on my leg as it bit at my trousers, and I stumbled because though the bite had missed my flesh it had tripped me. And then as I corkscrewed to my feet, brambles ripping at me and trying to keep me pinned in place, the boar leapt at me and hooked its tusk into my thigh. That tusk must have been keen as a shaving blade because I felt the air on my leg as the material was cut from knee to inner thigh as I was jumping in a forlorn and desperate attempt to save myself—and even though I was going up and away from the boar’s head, the tusk punched into me like I was being hit with a sledgehammer. It wasn’t a sharp feeling like a cut. It was a horrible dull punch and I knew the damage was bad even as my fingers found the branch above me and I swung out of the animal’s way. It turned and twisted, ready to slash me again, but somehow I lifted myself high enough so my feet were clear of it. And then, with a last grunt of pain, I swung one of my legs across and got a precarious toehold on another branch and held myself there, shakily parallel with the ground,

Where the tusk had got me was close to the big artery on my inner thigh. In that moment, as I held myself in an awkward horizontal position, stretched between two thin branches, I knew that blood loss would very soon make me lose my grip. And I knew that the position in which I was desperately clinging to safety was also ridiculous and undignified. Maybe that’s always the way death comes. I made myself look across at my thigh.

There was no sheet of blood. Just a ruined trouser leg.

It made no sense. I had felt the blow. And then I craned round to see what the boar was making such a noise about, thrashing this way and that below me.

He had my little book of trees and my tin of beeswax impaled on the tusk. I’d been carrying the book in my front pocket so I could identify what kind of trees I was walking past. I took advantage of the fact he was so occupied with clearing his tusk and scrambled closer to the trunk of the tree, where I managed to get the right way up and climb higher.

There was blood, but it was not mine. And it was the thing that had made him angry enough to attack. He was hurt. Something had taken a great scoop out of the flesh on his back leg, close to the tail. It was nasty wound. I could see the dried blood on his leg from haunch to trotter, and as he shifted I could see the torn up and exposed muscles flex and move. I didn’t have much time to feel sorry for him because he finally got the book and the tin off his tusk and started circling the trunk of the tree, looking up at me and butting it. It wasn’t a very big tree, and I don’t think his butting and rooting at it had as much effect on it as my weight as I scrambled around getting on the other side of the trunk from him. To my horror the whole tree began to tilt alarmingly. Very aware that I had used up any good luck that was due to me with the trees book, I knew it wouldn’t be very long at all before this tree fell over and dumped me right back at tusk level. As the tree began to topple towards the cliff of brambles, I scrambled as high as I could and then leapt desperately towards it.

Hurling yourself into a bramble patch is not to be recommended, not unless the alternative is dropping into range of a murderously angry wild boar in so much pain that nothing will do but inflicting even more of the same on you. I know the thorns tore at me because I still have some of the scars, but at the time I felt nothing, fear numbing me as I grabbed desperately at the high bank of greenery and briars. It must have been ten metres high. Even as I had jumped, I had a vision of myself tumbling into the centre of it, the briars ripping at me but too insubstantial to hold my weight. Instead I hit something so solid it nearly jarred both wind and consciousness out of me. I held on and scrambled into the bramble cliff, half stunned and unsure what I was seeing.