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

I pulled out the map and tried to make sense of what I was seeing the marks the map makers had made, but it was very hard, especially because I had only a sketchy sense of where I was. I took the time, because I was still on slightly higher ground. Once I approached the new coast, it was all going to be flat and wooded and impossible to make out any remaining landmarks.

It was the low sun that gave the overgrown town away. I saw a flash and looked at it, and saw the house windows dully reflecting the light back at me through a stand of willows, far in the distance. It was so far that I hadn’t been able to see the river beyond. But once I fixed on the houses and the overgrown ruins beyond, I scanned slowly around them and saw two things. The first was a wind turbine turning very slowly. And then, just beyond it, there were uprights that were too regular to be trees that I first took for headless light-poles, and moving further on from them I saw another dull flash of water, which must have been the river, and just seaward from that I saw the thing that made me realise the light-poles were masts and I was looking at a mooring along a river’s edge.

I was thinking it was perhaps not more than a morning’s ride away when I saw the sails further along the bank.

The red sails.

It was always a gamble.

Ever since I’d stolen the map, a little part of me had known I might be making a huge mistake. The lines that radiated from the place I was now overlooking might not have been Brand’s home at all, and even if they were, there had never been any real guarantee he was heading back there. He might have been off on another years’ long voyage to other unexplored parts of the world. Or they might not have been lines that marked his comings and goings at all—they might have been someone else’s lines, some long dead sailor’s tracks left on an old map that Brand had later viked.

As I had travelled down across the broken spine of the mainland, I had certainly had enough lonely nights and days to consider these possibilities. I’d begun to ask myself whether my quest was more to do with what I wished than what I could rationally expect. And as the wear and tear and the losses had mounted up—not just the loss of Jess that began it all, but the Sweethope , and even John Dark—I had started to dread rather than wish for the moment of arrival. I had reason enough to suspect very strongly that my luck had gone, but since my boat was burned I had no choice other than to try and finish what I had started. And then when the accident with the buried water tank happened, I think I knew for sure that fate was against me. And still I had plugged on, not really through doggedness or the courage of my convictions, but because I didn’t know how to make sense of those horrible losses—other than by playing out the hand I’d chosen, clinging to a wild hope. Which is another way of saying I was too stupid to know what else to do and I should have cut my losses, but I didn’t know how.

I had always been bad at card games. Ferg or Bar almost always won because I usually held on for a bit too long, forever sure that the next or even the final card would be the one in fifty-two chance I needed to complete my own winning hand.

Hope less, count more! Bar would say.

But keeping a tally of cards like it was a maths problem never seemed like a game to me. It was more like a chore. And so I enjoyed playing for the companionship of it, but seldom won. Though on the rare occasions when I did beat them, the infuriation that it sparked in my more careful siblings made victory all the sweeter.

Seeing the red sails was like that. A hoped-for but actually totally unexpected win. Very, very sweet. So sweet that I shouldn’t have dropped my guard and stopped expecting it to turn sour.

I had to get closer. I had to lie low and spy out the land. I had to be clever and quiet and match the headlong recklessness of my decision to set out on this hunt in the first place with a cautious and well-thought-out plan to make it end well. I had to not squander this unlikely turn of luck.

I went forward carefully now, making sure the horses and I stayed in the woodland and didn’t expose ourselves in the open areas. I wanted to get close enough to lie up and watch before I did anything else.

Now I kept Jip close by putting a long rope on him. As I did so, I explained we needed to be quiet, that he shouldn’t bark and this was just to stop him running off on a hunt and giving us away by mistake. Of course I was really talking to myself, but I had always spoken to the dogs and explained things, and I think even when they didn’t understand the details, they understood the tone in my voice. Jip hated being leashed, but after a bit he gave up tugging the line taut and trotted beside me, the rope slack between us. Every now and then, he would look up at me as if to ask if it was time for this game to stop, but I shook my head and told him it was necessary.

After a couple of hours of quite slow progress, I hobbled the horses and climbed a tree. You probably climbed lots of trees. Maybe you even had a tree house. For me this was a first. Jumping into a tree to escape the boar didn’t count. I tested each branch as I hauled myself higher and higher, and then I stopped, held myself steady with one arm around the trunk and peered east through the thin screen of leaves. Towards the mooring.

Again, at first I thought I had gone astray, because I couldn’t find it. There was a light breeze, and the branches moved in a slow heave like the sea that made the clouds of leaves all around me murmur and rustle. It was quite peaceful. I took another look through the binoculars and this time I found the sails and the buildings, which were closer than I had expected.

In the distance, at the very edge of my hearing, I thought I could hear a dog.

I climbed down the tree as fast as I could, worried that Jip would start to answer the distant barking and give

us away.

The wind was coming over our shoulders, and down on the floor of the wood the noise was more muffled, so he didn’t get a smell or hear any sounds that might set him off. However, I was determined that he shouldn’t give us away by mistake, so I retraced our steps about a klick and then—greatly to his mystification and outrage—tied him to a solitary tree and left him with the packhorse. The tree was an old and very tall pine. Its red bark zigzagged into the sky and supported dark green shoals of needles and cones that were moving gently in the breeze. Older brother and sister pines had fallen around it, their greying trunks and roots making a kind of natural stockade around its base. It would be an easy landmark to find on the way back, and would be far enough away for Jip’s protesting barks to remain unheard. I left him a pan full of water and then I knelt and ruffled his neck fur with both hands as I looked into his eye.

I’ll be back soon, I said. It’ll be okay. I can only do this by myself.

And at the time, I meant every one of those three lies.

I felt odd setting off without him. Naked almost. He always came hunting with me. Not having him cutting back and forth in front, looping forward to see what was ahead and then coming back to check on me, felt odd. Like I was missing a limb. Like it was making me walk funny. Self-conscious. Unnatural even. I felt lopsided. And unprotected.

But I pushed on, carrying my bow and keeping my eyes and ears open.

I was just scouting. I wasn’t planning on doing anything rash. This is what I kept telling myself. Though I did think if by some miracle Jess came to me we would make a run for it and trust that Brand, who wouldn’t have horses, would never catch me in the wide maze of emptiness and ruin that lay between me and home. In my mind, even if I couldn’t find enough of a boat to mend and retrace my steps back once on the west coast, I could ride to the ruin of the old Skye Bridge and swim across to Skye with the dogs. From there it would be easy to get to the westernmost edge of the big island and start burning things until Dad or Ferg or Bar—or the Lewismen even—came over the water to see what was going on.