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

She gestured again with the gun, and then grimaced as if my not responding was causing her actual pain.

Veet , she said. Veet .

Okay, I said. Okay. I’m coming.

The boar was dead. The gun had blown an ugly chunk out of its face. It was just like the chunk blown out of its backside, only fresher. I didn’t know then but I found out soon enough that this wasn’t a coincidence. She had tried to kill the boar the day before, but only wounded it. If Ferg was right about the curses that piled up as long as you left an animal hurt before finishing it off cleanly, then she was drowning in them. And there was nothing clean about the way the boar had been finished off. It had tried to disembowel me, but now I looked at its poor hacked-about body I felt sad. It had been in pain. A human had caused that pain. I don’t blame it a bit for attacking the next human it saw.

But I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at it, or even thinking about it. There was too much else to take in. Her horse. The other two horses behind her, riderless, roped together, with great bundles hanging on either side. They were all pale grey, dappled with whiteish blotches and long white manes. They were much bigger than the little ponies we had on the islands. They stood very calmly, not even that interested in me.

Oo son lays owe-truh? she said, pointing around the landscape with a questioning gesture. She grimaced again and I realised that she was actually in pain.

I don’t understand, I said.

The rain was easing and she pushed the hood back off her head. My first thought was that her hair matched the horse’s—grey, strong and wild-looking as the wind blew it round her face. My second thought was that she had a face that was really two faces, the first old and weather-beaten but one that had also kept alive within it the second, younger face it had once been.

She grimaced again and pointed at the dead boar.

Sallo! she said, spitting at it. Pew tan de sangliay.

And she spat on it again and then turned her horse so that I could see the other side and the thing that made her grimace every time she moved.

The side of the horse was pink with blood. My first thought was that it was injured, but as I followed the irregular fan of blood back to its source I saw the wound was in the woman’s side, a gash in her buttock that she had tried to bind with a sash.

I had not expected to meet anyone on the mainland, or at least not until I got to Brand’s home. I had been brought up in the sure and certain knowledge that the mainland was empty. It made sense to me. I had, as I said, been made to do the maths to calculate how vanishingly few people remained in the world. And there was an unspecified sense that something had happened there that made it mysteriously hostile to man. I had in fact seen nothing that supported that on my journey so far, and had been wondering if it was really true or just a story our grandparents had told to make sure we kept safely out of the way, on the fringes of the world as the Baby Bust died away. I had been a dutiful enough child, but maybe all children have an urge to go where they’re forbidden, or to touch the things they have been warned away from. I think that was how my secret wanting to travel and see the forbidden world began. Even though I was now grown, I had still felt a sense of excitement as well as righteous anger as I’d set out on this journey. And though I hadn’t expected to meet anyone, I had of course thought about what it might be like if the unlikely happened. But of all the things I had imagined, I had not anticipated that we would not be able to speak to each other.

You would have thought of this possibility, coming from a world still crammed with people talking in a whole mishmash of different languages. In fact, when I now look at the photo of you, I realise I don’t even know if you and I would have been able to talk if we had met. I had just assumed you spoke the same language as me. But maybe you were from somewhere else, like she was. This mainland was no more hers than it was mine. As I eventually found out, she came from across the sea channel dividing it from the bigger mainland to the south. She was French. But before I knew that, I knew three much more important things about her: she was badly hurt, she needed help and she was extremely bossy. I think the long word that describes her best was imperious. She carried herself—and her gun—as if she were in charge of the world. And she hated to be seen with any kind of weakness.

Communication was hard at first. She seemed both frustrated and slightly offended that I didn’t speak her language, which was an odd thing since later she had me dig a small book out of one of the packs: an English/French dictionary. She wouldn’t have brought it along with her had she not anticipated the problem. Once the book was found, we moved from communicating by sign language alone to doing so by sign language and pointing at words in the dictionary. But that was long after she had showed me how to put up her shelter and had managed to painfully get off her horse.

The shelter was a rectangle of oiled cotton, with metal-ringed holes in it from which hung long strings. She showed me where to tie it off between two trees, and then she threw me some aluminium pegs so I could pin down the back to make a sloping roof. Then she waved me away, again with the gun, and got off her horse. She dismounted on the other side of the animal, and I think she did that so I wouldn’t see her wince and cry out as she did so. Imperious meant that she was proud before she was anything else.

I went to help her, and again she waved me back.

She took two steps towards one of the horses, obviously intending to get something from the packs, and then she stumbled and yelped and fell hard, and then lay there.

She’d fallen on the gun and was panting with the pain from her wound. I leapt across and yanked the gun out from under her. It wasn’t the gentlest thing I could have done, but I wanted it out of the way quickly in case she grabbed at it.

She gasped and then growled and glared at me as if she wanted to scorch me with her eyes as a punishment.

If I’d been a really good person, I would have looked to see if I could help before doing anything else, but I’m not a really good person. I’m just me. Not bad. Just good enough. So the first thing I did was take out my knife and cut Jip free. The second thing I did was check to see why he was limping. It wasn’t deep, but he had a cut running three quarters of the way around his foreleg, as if something had caught it in a noose. He licked my hand in thanks and looked at the woman and then back at me.

I know, I said.

I opened the gun and saw there was only one shell in it, and that was the one she had fired to kill the hog, so she’d been bluffing when she ordered me around with it. Hadn’t really felt like she was threatening my life anyway, but it was good to confirm that was so. I left the gun on the ground and went to her packhorses.

She started shouting at me, but her voice was weakening and I ignored her. I found her bedroll and placed it under the shelter she’d had me put up. Then I pointed at it and used sign language to try and tell her I was going to help her get to it. She batted my hands away when I first tried to get hold of her. I stepped back and made calming gestures with my hand, the same gestures I used to make when approaching the half-wild ponies on the islands when we needed to get a halter on them. I said the same things to her that I said to them, using the same calming voice.

It’s okay, I said. It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.

Maybe it was the tone but she allowed me to drag her across to the shelter. I laid her on her bedroll and tried to look at the wound. Again she batted me away, pointing at the horses. She wasn’t talking much now and maybe that was because she was gritting her teeth to deal with the pain. I got that the horses should be unburdened and that they should then be hobbled and left to graze. The packs took some unbuckling, but the hobbling ropes were on top and the horses let me slip them on their legs with very little fuss, being used to it. They wandered off and began munching the grass noisily.