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

Jip kept looking up at me and then stopping and looking back at the house, and then running to catch up and look at me again, as if asking me a question I had no good answer for. Once the sound was gone, I picked up the pace, moving faster than we had before. Now the decision was made, there was no good to be had from taking any longer than necessary.

We got many klicks beyond the hogweed field before night fell, and found ourselves on the edge of a more varied terrain that stretched away flat and featureless ahead of us.

I watered the horses in a pond and hobbled them for the night.

Only when I had eaten and laid out my bedroll did I take out the note. It was too dark to read by then, but I poked the fire back into a blaze and turned myself so that I could read it. It didn’t say much, but in a way it broke my heart and made me feel terrible about leaving her all over again. I still have it here in my other hand as I write this.

YOU TO LIE TO ME, GRIZ.

IT OK. I TO UNDERSTAND.

BUT I TO KNOW WHY YOU ARE SO STRONG.

YOU TO REMIND ME OF MY DAUGHTERS.

And yes, my eyes were stinging as I closed them to start chasing sleep that came in unsatisfactory fits throughout a long cold night. And no, it wasn’t because of the woodsmoke.

I know reading has made me sentimental. Dad doesn’t read much other than practical books that don’t have stories in them, and apart from sometimes sitting with Mum and holding her hand by the fire when he thinks we aren’t watching, he is not a needlessly tender man. He’s brisk, often curt, and decisive. He gets things done, like he has a list in his head that he is always adjusting, adding to and ticking things off.

I made myself more like him as I rode away from the Homely House and John Dark. I stopped myself from wondering each night as I made the campfire if she had died during that long day, if she was lighting her own fire as I lit mine, or if the Homely House was quiet again, and now the home of a new corpse. I didn’t read any of my books, not even the new ones. I told myself I didn’t need to soften myself with distractions like that, but that if I succeeded in my wild quest I would allow myself as much reading as I liked as a reward. Instead of reading, I just used the map and the compass and tried to make sense of where I was, to keep on track for where I was going.

My biggest piece of luck was looking for shelter one night as the rain set in again, and finding what I took to be a big metal lean-to, overgrown with creepers. There was room for me and the horses under it and it was only when I lit the fire that I saw the underside and the giant writing and realised it was a large, miraculously still legible road sign which had fallen and ended up tilted against the trees that had grown up around it. It took a night of lying there thinking, but once I worked out what to do it made it very easy to get a sense of where I was: I just looked at the distances to various towns, and used a piece of string to measure those distances against the scale printed on the bottom of the map. Then I found the towns named on the sign and drew circles of the right diameter to match the distances—and where they all met had to be where I was.

Knowing my position gave me an added sense of purpose as I pressed on. I ignored the houses that I passed and wasted no more time viking through any of them. I slept under the stars, or under John Dark’s tarp shelter, and I disciplined myself to focus only on what lay ahead. I suppose it was like what being a soldier must have been, preparing to go to war. Not wanting to fight, but getting your head straight so you were ready and as unsurprised as possible in the face of whatever fate held in store. Every morning, I woke and practised with my bow, fifing three quivers before I ate and moved on for the day. At midday, I fired three more. At night, just before dark, I fired a final three. Jip often stood and watched me, as if wondering why I was hunting tree trunks, or how many times I expected to bury arrowheads in one before I killed it.

I sharpened my mind by trying to remember every moment I could of those I’d spent with Brand, so I would be able to read him better when we next met. I practised the arguments I might have to make. I also sharpened my knives.

I tried to make myself go cold inside, methodical and unemotional like my dad. Jip made that difficult because he was having such a happy time, running all over this new terrain, exploring the sights and the huge variety of new smells that the changing landscape must have presented him with. Even with a simple human nose, I could tell things smelled different: for him the mainland must have been like me discovering the bigger music on the record player. The islands are simple—sea, salt, heather, wildflowers in the machair. They were like music made with a guitar or a tin whistle, or Brand’s single violin. The mainland with its variety of plants and flowers and trees must have been like a huge orchestra for him. Tannhäuser through the nose. He hunted with me and he slept close, sharing the warmth. His happiness was infectious. He brought me rabbits and a rat and early one morning chased a hare over the low ridge ahead of me, and when I crested it, ten minutes later, he was standing, hare-less, silhouetted by the still rising sun, nose to the light breeze, tail stiffly behind him, staring at what should not, according to my map, be where it was.

It was a sea marsh, and beyond it, sending a tang of salt even I could smell, was the sea itself. Much closer than the map had led me to expect it might be. The land had gone, swallowed by water that had risen as the world had got hotter. On Eriskay, you can swim and look down on the old ferry jetty sunk a metre or so below the waves. On Berneray, you sail in and moor your boat to the chimney stack of houses that used to line the foreshore. So although the world is still a big place, the dry bits of it are, I suppose, smaller than in your time. And the flat lands on the east, one bordering the North Sea, had now gone under it.

Which made sense of the map which had put Brand’s base so very far up the river from the estuary. Because now it wasn’t hidden away so far from the sea at all. The sea had come and found it. That explained lines I had thought slapdash, the ones that “flew” over dry land. Because that land was not dry now, but marsh or seabed. I got off the horse and found the new binoculars, steadied them on a low tree branch and took stock of the terrain ahead. The trees thinned out and gave way to a sort of in-between land where dry spits and peninsulas jutted into the marsh. The marsh was covered in great expanses of reeds in some places, like flat islands in the water, dotted with wading birds, and in other places you could see the shape of the huge fields that had once been here by the skeleton remains of old hedgerows with their feet in the shallower water. The carcasses of several old buildings were tilted and half collapsed in the water here and there all across the marshscape, looking surprised to find themselves shipwrecked. Some of the old giant electrical pylons had survived a century or so of storms and the power cables they had supported as they marched in heroic swags all the way across the land curved down into the water here and finally lost themselves in the incoming waves.

The sound of gulls was distant, but immediately recognisable, and the noise sent a treacherous wash of nostalgia through me to soften the hardness I had been practising. I’ve read that smells are the most evocative things, but the right sound can take you out of yourself too. For a moment my mind went away, back to Mingulay and my simpler life. And then Jip barked and I jolted back to the present.

He was looking up at me, head cocked. Like I was missing something. Then he barked again and looked out at the landscape again, nostrils flared, tasting something on the wind.