The Dog (7 page)

be found.

In the days that followed he could only hunt in the cleared

area. The rough terrain made it difficult to find anything.

Tracking prey was impossible. The buzzard could strike from

the air but the dog had to make his way on the ground

through brambles of brush and muddy tractor ruts.

Hunger made him clumsy and overexcited. He found a

couple of mouse nests with litters of young. Once the ache

in his belly let up he started listening for squeaks from the

nests instead of the rustling of adult animals scurrying under

the brush. He never caught enough to fill him up and make

him sleepy. The constant hunger in his belly drove him on

through lacerated terrain where the smell of diesel overpowered

the scent trails he tried to follow.

The sun burned down on the cleared area during the day.

He tried to find shade by the piles of brush. At first there had

been water in the tractor ruts but it had dried up. Thirst

drove him out into the heat. At midday the only sound was

the monotonous buzzing of the horseflies, a dull song from

no apparent source in the scorching air. The buzzard didn't

appear at midday and the dog could roam without its

screeching surveillance.

One night he walked a long way in the dim light, driven

by thirst. Nose to the ground, he searched for moist patches

but found only dryness and debris. Often he felt apprehensive,

as if something were after him.

There was no wind to pick up a scent. He walked in

loops, frequently twisting round to detect a pursuer. Hunger

and thirst made his muscles tire easily. Sometimes he wanted

to curl up by a boulder and let weariness overpower him, but

the nagging sensation of having something on his trail drove

him on.

When the darkness over the cleared area lifted at dawn and

the piles of grey brush shifted to red again, he heard running

water. He started off at a trot but remained on guard. Water

in a brook rippled among stones. The air was different. Dawn

had brought the sound of birds.

He reached the murmuring water, running across stones

and the trunks of small, felled spruces, but he didn't dare

stand in the open and drink. Pushing on to a place where

the brook ran in a crevice between some rocks, he found a

sheltered spot where he could lap the cold, sparkling water

until the burning in his throat subsided. Then he listened.

The wind had awakened, bringing bird calls and the fragrance

of pine needles. The forest was close by. But the one

whose presence he sensed was not discernible and there was

no rustling.

He crept along the brook to find better protection before

drinking his fill. He was now going upstream towards the

smell of forest. Then the wind changed, bringing back his

early-morning apprehension. It blew from the opposite

direction through the brushwood by the brook and there

was a loud crackling in the leaves. The dog caught the scent

of predator. It stung in his nose.

He never saw her. She was resting on the boulder where

he'd first stopped to drink. Eyes wide, she watched him

crashing forward. The tufts in her ears quivered. Then she

glided down and crossed the brook in the opposite direction.

Her large cat pads left their marks in the damp sand of the

brook.

When he got to the forest it didn't engulf him, just forced

him on. He took the first hill in leaps and bounds. Large

stands of blue sowthistle snapped. He heard birds flying up,

shrieking. For a long time he ran along a ridge, hearing only

the surge of blood in his ears.

Now the wind picked up, singing high above in the

spruces. Surging wind, surging blood. No quiet. He was

frantic. Forgetting was remote and the memory of the unfamiliar

scent was near. It was the scent of a creature that

attacked; his body knew that instinctively. Now he was running,

but he wasn't following a trail. He ran to escape the

memory, to forget.

The loon called out from above a distant lake. Up here the

waters were cold. The loon's cry lingered in the air, a quivering

ribbon of sound.

He sometimes returned there, to the steep, straight banks,

but the intervals in between were long. He'd become a rambler,

a rover.

There were no abandoned pastures this far up, no dense

coverings of grass where voles rustled. Hunger drove him

on. He covered long stretches each day. At first he had nothing

to eat. He was dizzy and often had to rest.

Day by day he adapted to this new life, always on the

move. He started finding wood grouse hens and their

broods. He herded the frightened, peeping chicks, running

rapidly in a wide circle where he'd heard the cackling and

the hen taking flight. He grabbed each chick by the neck

and chomped. The fluttering wings and twitching body

excited him. His jaws clamped down again. His teeth ripped

through feathers and down, reaching warm flesh.

He rarely caught game birds, surviving mainly on rodents.

At the foot of the spruces he sniffed out mouse nests and

tore out the young, but up here he never found very much

in any one place. He loped on, a muscular grey body, almost

invisible in the sheets of fog across the marsh at dawn.

Sometimes he crossed his own tracks, returning to places

they'd disappeared, where only the scent of an old marking

clung to a stump. This wasn't enough to make the place

seem familiar. Only where the loons were: there he often

stopped, lying on the steep northern banks above the tarn

and listening. He rarely saw the loons, just their streaks in the

water, but he heard their cries from far away as he roamed

the ridges; that made him want to turn back.

He covered more ground than hunger compelled. When he

was running long distances he had an economical, slightly

uneven lope that didn't tire him out. It took him deep into

a different area, into belts of forest in the mountains. Under

high stands of blooming sowthistle he listened for lemmings.

They were easy to catch: prey that went limp when he bit

them across the back, revolting little bags of patchy skin. If

he was hungry he swallowed them, otherwise he let them

be. Some of them didn't run away; instead they sat on their

haunches, chattering furiously. At first this bewildered,

almost frightened him.

He ate cloudberries that had ripened in the sun. At dawn

he sneaked up on game birds out on the marshes but he

never caught anything in such open terrain. When he'd

frightened them off he did as they did, gobbled wet cloudberries

until his belly felt heavy. He knew the foxes came

here to eat. When he got farther up the mountainside he

caught another scent that he avoided, of something heavy

that made enormous, deep tracks in the marshy soil. This

scent made him veer and get as far away as he could.

The marshes were narrow, running between the ridges

and the islands of birch forest where the ground was dry. Up

here the wind had more bite. Black-beard lichen fluttered in

the birches and the lady fern and sowthistle rustled. There

was rarely a period of calm between the gusts, and the wind

from the mountains carried a whiff of snow.

One day he crossed the last of the marshes, coming up to

a treeless slope. The ground was hard, covered with brush

and heather. The wind pressed his ears back, making him

uneasy. He could hear nothing but the whining in the air.

When he scared up a grouse he was startled. It seemed to

come out of nowhere, tearing at the air with its flapping

wings. He started noticing rocks and thickets of dwarf birch

and willow. He kept a lookout by them, crouched and listening,

but the grouse always came from unexpected

directions and he could never catch them. Frustration made

him more and more restless and irritable as he ran.

He came to a large field of snow that was trampled down

by hooves and speckled with droppings. The snow was

coarse, porous and sunken. He sniffed at reindeer hairs and

ate some snow but was afraid to walk on the expanse of

white. Disturbed by the roaring wind in his ears, which

deafened him and made his surroundings unreliable, he

turned and began loping downward.

That night he slept under one of the first large spruces became

to once he was back in the forest. The days had grown

shorter and no insects tormented him, but he was stiff when

he awakened in the morning and the bump on his hind hock

hurt. Below him the marsh lay under a layer of frost. Each

blade of grass was pristine and powdery when he started

nosing for the sickly-sweet smell of overripe cloudberries.

He was heading down, running long stretches each day. The

mountain wind at his back carried his own scent ahead,

making it impossible to pick up whatever was moving or

hiding in front of him, but he paid no attention since he

wasn't hunting. He loped along unevenly and purposefully.

His paws got used to the gravel of the logging roads. His

pads became hard and slick, his claws dull and worn down.

He'd turned back just before the first night of frost when

he encountered a sharp wind on the mountainside. Since

then he'd only hunted at dawn. Even if he didn't catch anything

he started running after a while. What drove him was

a stronger incentive than hunger.

After drinking from a brook he would doze for a while

under a spruce, but never for long. Soon he was on his way

again. He didn't know where he was heading, but an inner

sense told him he should run towards something more compelling

than the cry of the loon above a distant mountain

tarn.

Not all the days were strong, bold days for running.

Confusion seized him sometimes, making him run aimlessly,

not knowing if he was hunting or just following something

distant he'd caught on the wind. When the rain washed the

logging road clean from gravel and dug furrows in the sand

he stayed off it.

Long, cold rains blew in off the ocean beyond the mountains.

Clouds shrouded the jagged ridges in grey mist, not

dissolving until they had emptied all their water over the

forests and marshes. But the one caught in the downpour

didn't know where it had come from or where it was going.

He was in a chamber of swirling water, trapped and miserable.

His coat was drenched nearly down to the skin, a

thick, unpleasant wetness that made him so cold he shivered

all night no matter how tightly he curled up around himself.

His hock ached.

When it wasn't raining too hard he would run anyway, at

a measured, steady pace, a dark grey body with worn paws

and a tight belly. He was running from the pain and his

hunger and confusion, which pursued him like persistent,

raw fog.

By day, the one who swooped down was in the spruce

tree, dozing. The one who hunted voles was by the edge of

the marsh. The little ones who cheeped and fluttered busied

themselves in the trees. Each was where it belonged. They

circled, roamed and fluttered, each in its own domain, and

they always returned. But he was the one who kept running.

One

night he slept near the logging road in a jumble of

roots and stones. There were raspberry seeds between his

teeth. He was engulfed in a freezing fog that muffled all

sounds. He slept curled up, stiff from the cold.

At dawn the wind lifted the fog, carrying with it a complex

fabric of smells that penetrated his sleep. His paws

twitched and he started whimpering like a pup.

When he woke up he stood facing the wind, taking in the

scents. It was all his. It was far more compelling than the cry

of the loon. He took off running before he had even peed,

before he had even found a stream to drink from.

He reached the marsh up above the pasture before the last

clouds of mist had risen from the sedgegrass. The higher

ground was orange after the frost, and the pit holes were

black and saturated with rain. He sniffed. Everything was

familiar. His paws knew every bump in the ground and

nothing frightened him. His markings were still there in the

wood of the barn. He peed on it again. It was all his, but he

needed to mark it once more.

Although he was hungry he didn't feel like hunting. The

scent of a hare hung in the wet grass. It was quite fresh but

he didn't follow it. He needed to ring in the whole area first.

Nose to the ground, he ran in circles. Lots of others had

been through this grass. The enormous grey creatures had

left huge prints. They'd broken the stalks of meadowgrass

and ploughed through the dark green blanket of leaves covering

the wetlands, now starting to turn brown.

Everything that happens is inside him. It has already happened.

Everything that happens is vivid within. He knows.

It flares up, flashes like a wing in the dark night, settles again.

It encompasses a lite that has been lived.

Remembering and forgetting are the same murky depths.