Red Dog (10 page)

‘No worries,’ said Don.

Later on the vet made a slide of a tiny sample of Red Dog’s blood, and placed it under the microscope. He was having a campaign against heartworm, and he found the whole business of detecting it and then getting rid of it to be quite exciting. It was a well-known problem further north, but in this region he was something of a pioneer, and it was proving to be more widespread than anyone had suspected. He adjusted the focus with the knurled wheel, and there, sure enough, were dozens of the heartworm microfilaria swimming about in Red Dog’s blood. ‘Gotcha,’ he said.

The vet did not particularly want to have Red Dog living with him whilst he underwent treatment, because it was bad idea to have him biting his other customers.
He also realised that Don would be unable to keep Red Dog confined, because he would escape at the first opportunity, and that would spoil the effectiveness of the treatment. Then he had a brainwave, and he rang the ranger.

The ranger was responsible for rounding up stray dogs and keeping them in a pen until their owners came to collect them.

‘Right, mate,’ said the ranger, when the vet had told him what he wanted, ‘but, you see, Red Dog isn’t really a stray, is he? He’s a sort of professional traveller.’

‘But he doesn’t belong to anyone, so he must be a stray.’

‘I see your point, but I can only hold dogs in the pound until the owner comes for them, and then they have to pay for the upkeep. So who’s going to pay for Red Dog?’

The vet was slightly shocked; ‘Red Dog doesn’t have to pay! Red Dog’s in common.’

There was a pause at the other end of the line, and then the ranger sighed. ‘Well, I dare say,’ he said, ‘I can keep him in the pound while you do the treatment. I can’t say I’m happy about it, ’cause the budget’s tight enough as it is, but since it’s Red Dog we’re talking about …’

So it was that Red Dog was confined to the dog-pound with the stray dogs of Roebourne Shire, and funnily enough, he seemed quite happy about it. He appeared to know that whereas the other dogs were
humble captives, he was an honoured guest, and so he shamelessly lorded it over the other dogs, keeping them in their place and being firm with them if ever they got out of line. For the time being he gave up his yearning for constant travel, and relaxed as if he were on holiday. He was so good that he even went out with the ranger to look for strays, sitting up in the front seat of the ranger’s yellow ute, whilst the strays were tied up in the back. In the meantime he submitted to all the tests and injections as if he were good-naturedly humouring the vet.

Back at the single men’s quarters of Dampier Salt, Don told the others about how Red Dog was confined to the pound whilst he was being treated. Someone from Dampier Salt told someone else that Red Dog was in the pound, and then someone told Vanno at Hamersley Iron.

Peeto, Vanno and Jocko were horrified. ‘Jeez,’ said Peeto, ‘ain’t that where they kill the strays?’

‘Only if they can’t find the owner,’ said Jocko.

‘Red Dog, he ain’t got an owner,’ said Peeto. ‘Only Red Dog owns Red Dog.’

‘They wouldn’t put down Red Dog,’ said Vanno.

‘The world’s full of people who’d put down Red Dog,’ said Peeto. ‘The world’s a bad place, and it’s only getting badder.’

The men thought about it for a while, and before long their anger and concern got the better of them. ‘There’s only one thing to do,’ said Jocko at last.

That night, at two in the morning, the three men drove to Roebourne. Outside the ranger’s pound they put on gloves, and Vanno took a large pair of boltcutters from the boot of the car. They were three foot long, capable of cutting through thick iron rods, and they seemed to weigh a ton.

They felt just like commandos as they crept towards the wire. An owl shrieked in a Christmas tree, and they nearly jumped out of their skins. Peeto tripped over Vanno and they all said ‘shhhhhhh’ to each other. The dogs began to bark, and Peeto said, ‘We gotta be quick.’

Vanno cut the hasp of the lock with his boltcutters,
and slipped inside. Hastily he pulled a torch from his pocket, and flashed its light from one dog to another. They were barking like crazy, making a terrible noise and fuss, and he began to regret coming on this expedition at all. It occurred to him that not only might he get caught, but any one of these mutts might give him a good biting. ‘Red,’ he whispered, ‘Red, where are you?’

He felt a muzzle nudging at his hand, and he snatched it away because he thought he was about to be attacked. He looked down, and there was the unmistakably robust shadow of Red Dog. He thrust the torch back into his pocket, picked the dog up, tucked him under his arm, and ran out, making sure that none of the other captives escaped with him.

His co-conspirators patted him on the back and whispered their congratulations. They piled back into the car and sped away, whooping with relief and happiness, and Red Dog licked their faces and nipped at their hands. Back in Dampier they went to Peeto’s hut and drank a few stubbies to celebrate, repeating the highlights of their exploit.

‘Jeez,’ said Peeto, ‘that owl near killed me with fright. I almost had a little accident.’

‘I thought we were done for,’ said Jocko, ‘when the dogs set to barking.’

‘Hey,’ said Vanno, patting Red Dog on the head, and cupping his chin in his hand, ‘just look what your mates are prepared to do for you,’

The next morning the ranger glumly rang up the vet and told him that Red Dog had been kidnapped during the night.

‘Oh no,’ said the vet, ‘it’s a disaster. I’ve only done half the treatment.’

‘We’ll have to find him and bring him back,’ said the ranger.

‘Yes, but how? You know what he’s like. He could easily be in Carnarvon by now, or down at Tom Price.’

‘We’ll just have to ask around,’ said the ranger, ‘and follow up any leads.’

‘Why would anyone kidnap him?’ demanded the vet, exasperated. ‘It’s so damned stupid.’

‘Probably thought we were going to put him down,’ said the ranger. ‘That fella’s got lots of friends.’

The two men resigned themselves to having lost their patient, and to leaving him full of the lethal worms until he showed up again, and the ranger hung up. He got his keys from the kitchen, finished his cup of coffee and went outside into the blazing light. In the distance there was a beautiful mirage of a sailing ship in full sail above the horizon, and the ranger stopped for a moment to marvel at it. Then he got into his vehicle and drove off in the direction of the Miaree Pool. He stopped for petrol and went inside to pay the cashier.

When he came out, he stuffed his wallet back into his pocket and then walked towards his yellow ute. The ranger could hardly believe his eyes, because there was Red Dog sitting next to the passenger door, asking to
be let in. The ranger put his hand to his forehead, shook his head, and laughed.

So it was that Red Dog finished his treament for heartworm and took on a new lease of life. He went to find Don at the Dampier Salt Company, and made friends with the men there. They were the same kind as those who worked at Hamersley Iron: exiles, foreigners, transients, people earning a fast buck so that they could start a new life elsewhere. They seldom stayed for long, but always the tradition and custom of caring for Red Dog survived.

He was allowed to stay in whichever hut he liked; all he had to do was scratch at the door and he was welcomed in. The blokes made him a member of the union and the sports and social club, they kept a timesheet and they gave him a book of canteen tickets. His job was to polish off the leftovers. Don opened a bank account for him with the Wales Bank, under the name ‘Red Dog’, and money was paid into it whenever the lads had a whip-round to raise funds for his vet’s bills. Don also registered him with the shire, so that he would no longer run the risk of being classified as a stray, and his official title became ‘The Dog of the North-West.’

That may have been his official title, but at Dampier Salt he acquired another name altogether. In Australia anyone with red hair shares the common fate of being called ‘Bluey’, and that’s what they called him, too.

RED DOG
AND THE DREADED CRIBBAGES

Back in the time when there were almost no houses and only two caravan parks in Karratha, Red Dog liked to call in on the caravans that belonged to his many friends and providers. He would expect to be washed, de-ticked, and fed, and then he would stay a couple of days until he felt like setting off on his travels once more.

Red Dog particularly liked one of the parks, because that was where his mate Red Cat lived, as well as Nancy and Patsy, but, and it was a big
BUT
, there was one small problem. Actually, the truth is that there were two big problems, and they were married to each other.

Mr and Mrs Cribbage were the caretakers of the caravan park. They lived off pigsnout sandwiches, sweet milky tea, and cigarettes, and it was their duty to keep the place tidy and neat. They would sort out any
difficulties that people might have with water-supply or electricity. If the bulbs blew in the dunnies, Mr Cribbage would sigh with irritation and change them. If Red Cat raided a bin and overturned it, it was Mrs Cribbage who would sigh with irritation and set it upright. This is all to say that they were fairly typical caretakers, who were seldom pleased when their leisure was interrupted by their jobs, or when their cups of tea had to be abandoned in mid-sip.

The unfortunate thing about Mr and Mrs Cribbage was that they were pernickety about enforcing the rules, even the stupid ones that any normal person would ignore, and one of these rules was ‘
NO DOGS
’.

The first time that Mrs Cribbage met Red Dog, he was just about to scratch on the door of Patsy’s caravan. ‘Hey, you!’ she called, rushing up to him and waving a dishcloth in his face. ‘Be off with you! Shoo! Shoo!’

Red Dog looked at this fat woman and her dishcloth, and decided that she was probably mad. He ignored her politely, and scratched once more on Patsy’s door.

‘Off! Away!’ shouted Mrs Cribbage, and at that moment Patsy opened her door. She looked from the dog to the woman, and asked, ‘What’s up?’

‘
NO DOGS
!’ announced Mrs Cribbage.

Patsy regarded her pityingly and told her, ‘This isn’t any old dog. This is Red Dog.’

‘A dog’s a dog,’ replied Mrs Cribbage, ‘and I don’t care if it’s one of the Queen’s bloody corgis. This is a
dog, and that’s that,
NO DOGS
.’ It occurred to Patsy that Mrs. Cribbage’s voice sounded rather like a kookaburra.

‘Red Dog has privileges,’ said Patsy. ‘Everyone knows that.’

‘If you don’t get rid of that dog,’ said Mrs Cribbage, her voice rising still further, ‘you’ll have me and Mr Cribbage to answer to.’

‘If you try to get rid of Red Dog, you’ll have the whole of the Pilbara to answer to,’ replied Nancy, ‘so if I were you I wouldn’t get my knickers in a knot.’

Mrs Cribbage huffed, ‘And if you don’t get rid of that dog, we’ll shoot it, and evict you too. So don’t say you didn’t get warned.’

Mrs Cribbage turned her back and walked away importantly, confident that she, and only she, was queen in this little kingdom. Over the next few days, however, she kept thinking that she saw Red Dog out of the corner of her eye, and she mentioned it several times to Mr Cribbage, who was a small man with a toothbrush moustache rather like Hitler’s. His moustache and his fingers were a nasty shade of yellowy-brown, rather like a pub ceiling, because he liked to smoke all the time, rolling himself tiny, tight little cigarettes. When he finished smoking one, he would open the butt-end and take out the unsmoked tobacco so that he could use it again in another cigarette. He had become hollow-chested, and you always knew when he was coming, because of his perpetual dry cough.

The couple went into Dampier and bought a stencil
from the stationer’s in the mall, and then they spent a happy morning making lots of notices and signboards that said ‘
NO DOGS
’. These they stuck up on every available tree in the caravan park, after which they felt that they had done a good day’s work indeed. The people in the park shook their heads, and agreed that from now on they would have a coded alarm, so that the caretakers would never catch them out when Red Dog was about. Patsy proposed that their code-word should be ‘pussycats’, and this was soon adopted. Mr and Mrs Cribbage wondered for quite a while why it was that people shouted ‘pussycats’, without provocation, every time that they passed by with their buckets and bins. ‘I reckon they’re all barking mad,’ observed Mr Cribbage.