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

Someone, long, long ago, had buried a water tank in the field. A big one. It had stayed there as the field turned into a wilderness of hogweed, and then it had corroded and waited and then John Dark had taken the wrong way round a stalk and fallen through the roof, jolted off the saddle as her horse impaled itself, landing in about a foot of water.

I could see her face looking back up at me, fish-mouthing in shock. So I knew she was the right way up and not about to drown. I ran for the packhorse and grabbed the rope she kept in one of the panniers. I looped it around the base of the thickest hogweed stalk I could find and ran back to the hole.

Jip was barking and John Dark was shouting my name, though the splashing and the screaming of the horse made it impossible to hear what else she was saying. I quickly tested the rope to make sure it was anchored, said a prayer to a god I don’t believe in and slid down the rope into the tank, which made Jip bark even more urgently.

Everything in the tank happened badly, and it happened fast, and even now I can’t quite remember the order of things. It’s like a broken pot in my head. I can see the shards, but they’re not quite joined up into a complete object any more.

It was dark in there and the sky above the hole in the roof was bright, so my eyes kept trying to adjust to the stark contrast in light levels.

It’s probably good that I couldn’t see everything clearly, but seeing it in fragments and flashes made it even more like a nightmare.

John Dark had blood streaming from her head, and her nose was mashed sideways. She was trying to crawl through the black water towards the horse, but something had happened to her leg.

I tried not to think of the horse, but it was stuck and struggling on its spit of rusted pipe and its front legs were bent in all the wrong directions.

It huffed pink bubbles of blood and foam as it panted and screamed.

Its rolling eyes were the whitest things in the world. Brighter than the sky above.

I stumbled through the water to John Dark. She had managed to throw herself across the horse’s neck.

It bucked and twisted in her arms.

I thought she was trying to comfort it. I wanted to shout at her.

I remember I was angry. At least I think I was angry, for a flash.

I wanted to tell her it was beyond comfort. Tell her what we had to do, what I had to do now, fast, before anything else. But I didn’t have the words. I just had the knife, already in my hand, without knowing I’d drawn it.

Even now I can see it as a living nightmare. Like I’m still there.

A fragment of her face staring at me.

I think she doesn’t understand.

Non, Griz! she shouts.

I think she doesn’t want me to do it. I think she doesn’t understand how very, very terrible the hurt to the horse is.

Then I see she isn’t trying to comfort the horse. She’s desperately trying to reach her arms round it. She can’t. Her fingers point for me.

They shake with the tension; they stab at what I should be seeing, what I should have thought of.

I hurl myself across the tank and try and pull the gun from the scabbard.

At first it won’t come, then the poor horse spasms as it tries to stand one more time and the gun slides free.

Veet, Griz! she screams and buries her head in the mane of her horse, looking away.

Veet!

I lean over her and jam the barrels awkwardly behind the horse’s head, where the spine meets the brain. It’s an awkward position. I don’t have the butt properly seated on my shoulder. I don’t have time for perfect.

I pull the trigger.

As I said, it’s not unusual for old ammunition to just go click and not fire.

In this case that prayer to the god I don’t believe in must have found an ear, because the metal tank bucked and exploded in a thunderclap. The butt of the gun jerked off my shoulder with the recoil and smashed into my cheekbone.

The horse dropped and went slack as the death twitches

set in.

I was deaf, ears ringing. I didn’t know yet that the recoil had split the skin over my cheekbone. I didn’t know yet that I would have a black and bloodshot eye for many days to come. I still don’t know if the faint sobbing I could hear was me or John Dark.

It was probably both.

Getting her out of the tank was almost impossible. If she hadn’t had the rope on her packhorse, it would have been. Her leg was broken, and she’d taken a really heavy blow to her face and head when she landed. She was also as soaked as was I from the foul water in the bottom of the tank. There was only about of foot of it, but every bit of it stank, and now it had the horse’s blood in it too.

Thankfully she passed out the first time I tried hauling her out of the tank with the rope looped under her arms like a sling.

Lifting someone’s deadweight is brutally hard, and I couldn’t do it by myself. I lowered her back down, wincing as she ended up slumped across her horse’s body. I untied the end from the hogweed anchor and knotted it to my horse’s saddle, then walked the horse away.

It took some trial and error, and I’m afraid she took some more knocks as I tried to manage the horse and keep the line taut enough to run back along it and grab her before the horse moved and lowered her out of my reach.

Finally, I snatched hold of her hood and managed to get her out of the hole before the horse backed up again. She got some extra scratches and grazes as I did that, but she ended up in the air, breathing oddly, eyes closed like she was never going to wake.

I didn’t know what to do about her leg. I didn’t know what to do next. She was alive though. Doing something is always the best way to think, so I dropped the rope down again and went back down to get her saddlebags and rescue the gun, and also the knife I had dropped, which took a bit of finding in the water.

Her horse had stopped twitching by then. I patted its warm neck in apology and left it there as I climbed out. She was still unconscious.

There was no neat and tidy way to do what I had to do next. So, hoping she’d stay unconscious, I went into the wood that edged the field and cut some straight poles and brought them back to her. I measured them against her leg and cut them to length. I had seen this done when one of the Lewismen had fallen off a roof on North Uist. I had been small, but it was a simple thing. I took off my belt, and I took off hers. I made some new holes with the point of my knife.

And then I hurt her badly. She whimpered and flinched and at one point opened her eyes without seeing anything as she made a deep groan like a man might make. But she didn’t wake properly as I slit her trouser leg to see the damage, and then felt for the break and laid it as straight as I could. Then, not sure if this was right, I braced myself and pulled her leg until the broken bits seemed to line up as best as I could get them. She moaned a lot as I did that. And then I lashed the poles on either side of the leg to keep it straight. Once I’d used the belts to cinch the first two poles tight, it was easier to tie the other poles around it, so her leg was held in place and protected in a bundle of rods.

I looked down at her face, wondering if I should try and put her nose straight while she was unconscious too, but I didn’t have the nerve for it. I was sweating with the effort and fear of it all. I decided if I was going to wake her it should be while doing something useful, because I probably had one chance. So I brought the packhorse over and rearranged the saddlebags on either side so their tops made a kind of flattish bed at right angles to the spine of the horse. And then I used the last of my strength and luck to lift her on top of the horse, and lash her to it. I used the rope and criss-crossed her body with it so there was no chance of her falling off.