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

So the torches became the loo garoo sticks, and were—to me—a sort of quaint pointless ritual she liked. Until of course they weren’t.

Several things became clear as we waited for her wound to heal. One was that Jip had got caught in a snare she had set for rabbits around her camp. I found a bunch of them, made from the thin wire in one of her bags. She pointed at them and then at Jip’s leg with a shrug of apology. Another was that she had seen the burning house I had left behind us and had ridden to see what it was, in much the same way that I had been drawn to the fire I had seen from the tower. Like me, she had been drawn to a possible sign of other people—but unlike me she had found it was so. She said she had thought the fire might have been Kel Kun Demal.

One afternoon she pointed at the horses and asked, by miming, if I could ride one. We don’t ride the ponies on the island, just use them for carrying and walking beside them. But since I had ridden them as a small child, perched between the panniers carrying the peat, I nodded.

The next day, we ran out of honey and she decided the wound was knitting well enough for her to start walking and trying the horse. She was grey-haired but she was tough, and now that the pain had subsided and the infection—if it had been infection—had gone, she was energetic again.

By a mixture of mime and dictionary-pointing, she made it clear that she wanted me to go with her into the city, where she had seen a big nest of bees. She pointed to my jar. She wanted to repay me by replacing the honey that had healed her. I was in a strange state of mind—in a hurry to get to Brand, overjoyed to have Jip back, but also not wanting to go our separate ways, and since the city lay more or less in the right direction I nodded. She spent the day reorganising the packs, and then she put one horse-load’s worth on a tree, close in by the car stacks where she indicated she would find it when she returned, and then made me get up on the second bag-free horse and ride around a bit.

Jip barked to see me riding, and the horse snorted in something between ridicule and frustration, as if it could sense how suddenly nervy I was, but she said something to it and her words seemed to work like a spell and calm it right down. There was light left in the sky, but after a couple of wide circles to get used to the feeling of being carried across the landscape on such a high and swaying seat, we returned to the camp and spent a last night feasting on boar and berries.

She didn’t look so cheerful the next day as we saddled up and set off down the hill. Her face was set and sour as the horse lurched over the rough ground, and once again I saw her teeth set against any sound of pain that might try and escape. It was a misty morning, and she rode with her hood up. Jip criss-crossed the slope ahead of us, surprising some early rabbits, but his heart was more in chasing than killing and anyway we had all eaten well the night before, him included.

By the time we descended to the old M road, the sun had driven away most of the mist and as the day warmed, so did she. She dropped back to ride beside me, watching me with a disapproving eye. By the time we had gone five klicks or so, she decided that the various instructions she had communicated in mime to me—things like sit up, squeeze with your knees, relax your hand, don’t pull the reins and so on—had turned me into a slightly less disappointing rider than I had been at the start of the day and she grunted in approval.

Bravo, Griz, she said.

I don’t know which made me more surprised and unexpectedly happy. Her approval or the fact that she’d used my name for the first time.

She rode ahead, leading the pack horse. My horse was happy to follow as they wove in as straight a line as they could through the saplings and larger trees that were invading the old M road. It’s a strange thing, riding another animal. I hadn’t really thought about it when I had been given rides on the peat ponies, but now I felt it strongly. It wasn’t so much the sensation of moving along without doing much—that was familiar enough from being driven by the wind on the sea—it was the fact that the motion which carried me was obviously the particular movement of another living thing. It was a controlled lurch, always—or so it seemed to me—on the point of tripping or at least losing its own special cadence. But as the day progressed, I stopped fighting it, and then by forgetting to worry about it I relaxed and slowly began to feel a part of the horse, rather than apart from it. Which probably doesn’t make sense unless you rode horses and felt what I was feeling. But you probably drove around in cars instead. Did that feel as exhilarating, or were you always worried the engine might run away with you, the same way I had worried about the horse stumbling?

As we headed onwards, the city slowly started to rise around us, as if it were a growing thing crowding in on either side. Once again, the scale of who you were, the sheer number of you, began to wash over me. There were hulks of long, low buildings that must have been factories, and then mazes of regularly divided vegetation that must have been more overgrown streets of identical box houses and then in the distance, converging with us, another raised roadway striding across the intervening wasteland of shrubs, trees and tumbledown buildings on stubby legs of concrete.

What did your cities sound like when these roads were full of cars? Was it a whine or a rumble or a growl? Or a roar? Did all the different kinds of car and lorry sound different? Could you tell what was coming without looking? And seeing all the roads there were, how did you stop bumping into one another if you were travelling at the speeds I’ve read about?

I couldn’t keep my wits about me or stay alert to danger, and I was just riding one horse. If I had been able to, maybe I wouldn’t have ridden right into it.

But then not all danger looks bad on the outside. We were just going to get some honey.

Not everything sweet is good for you.

It started off as a great day. Sun was high but not too hot, the birds were making a lot of noise and enough rabbits were running to keep Jip happy as we wove our way closer to the centre of the city.

Birdsong like this was still a new thing to me. On the islands, there were occasional shrieks and caws and the lonely piping of single birds flying across the moor, but the birdlife was too thinly stretched to make anything at all like the constant noise that you get on the mainland. To begin with, I found the songs of the different birds was like a tumble of conflicting sounds, none of them particularly loud on their own, but relentless in the way they pecked at your attention from all sides—a coo here, a tweet there and a warble from somewhere else. And because they were all different noises, I kept twisting around, trying to spot where they were coming from, to see what bird made which noise. And then after a bit the fact the noise was always there seemed to blur those distinctive bits together into a wash of sound, like the sea. It became background and not something I spent any more time trying to unpick into the individual parts it was made of. By the time I met John Dark, the ever-present din of the birdlife all around me had become—like the sea too—a comforting noise. I had also got used to the fact it sounded different at dawn to the way it did as the light left the sky at the end of the day. And although I hadn’t got very far with identifying the various species, I had worked out which birds were pigeons and which were magpies from the small book I’d found in the museum shop.

There was one different-looking bird that had sandy feathers mottled with darker brown ones that flew across our path as we rode down a sloping ramp that took us off the raised M road. I think it was a song thrush. It made a happy piping sound as it flew high above us, and when I looked over at the woman I saw that for a moment she’d lost her stern mask and let the younger face she kept hidden behind it have a moment in the sun as she too watched the bird jink and climb over our heads into the clear blue sky, looking as if it was singing and flying just for the joy of it.