Chapter 17 #2
I looked at the strangely dislocated tail and wondered how that could not be painful, but she never let us get close enough to touch it. And after a while we stopped and got on with something else.
At supper that night Storm asked us if we’d seen the kink in Digger’s tail, and we said we had, and Cat said not to worry because we didn’t think it was hurting her too badly, and I said she was probably healing herself and was likely on the mend.
And Storm shrugged and said maybe, but that tail looked too weird to be comfortable, which was hard to argue with.
Cat and I went to bed that night believing that, or maybe just having convinced each other of something we wanted to be true.
And though I don’t remember how many days after I first noticed the dog’s odd behaviour all this was, I do remember that it was the night after that conversation reassuring Storm that we woke up to find Digger’s back-end was leaking pink smudges wherever she sat down.
That’s not good, I said. She’s hurt.
I don’t know, said Cat. Maybe it’s just her blood coming in. You know. Like me. Maybe that happens with dogs.
Never happened before, said Storm who had come up behind us in that silent way she had, the thing that made her a good hunter. Hope she’s not hurt…
What do we do? I said.
Nothing, said Cat.
We should help her, I said. If she’s hurt.
We should just let her heal herself, Cat said. She really doesn’t seem that upset.
And it was true, though as I watched her over the next day she did spend a lot of time licking herself the same way she had done when she got a thorn in her paw-pad.
And then the next day after she was still leaving damp patches where she sat but now the blood had gone from them, so we took that as a good sign and decided that whatever had been bothering her was now really on the mend.
See, she knew how to make herself better, Cat said with a grin. Animals are clever like that. They don’t stay sick for long. You never see a sick animal, do you?
That’s not because they don’t stay sick, said a creaky voice from the shadowy end of the room.
We all looked round to see Freya looking at us like we were the stupidest things she’d ever seen.
You never see a sick animal because they just go away and die, she said. They’re not healthier than us or better at healing. They’re not magic. They’re just more private.
So you think Digger is sick? I said.
She stared at me with a renewed intensity, and then shook her head as if trying to dislodge the sight of me from her head, as if I was the very stupidest of the stupid, as if my extra stupidity was the last straw and wholly beyond her ability to bear.
I don’t think about it at all, she sniffed. Not one single bit. It was his dog. Not ours. I don’t care one way or the other.
I care, said Storm. It wasn’t her fault the bastard Russian caught her any more than it was ours he got us, was it?
Freya turned away. Cat and I exchanged a look with Storm, and it was the first time I remember the three of us silently sharing a moment about Freya being a pain. Maybe it was easier because it was a silent moment and so Storm didn’t have to say anything actually betraying her only-one out loud.
But the thing is, I did care about the dog.
I liked Digger a lot. I liked it when she got up and slept on our bed, even when she wormed in between me and the wall, and then slowly pushed her legs straight over the course of the night, shoving me to the edge of the mattress so that in the morning I would be almost falling off the other side.
I liked hunting with her because she was clever and alert and knew how to keep close and not flush anything until we were ready for it.
And I liked her because she was just a dog, I think.
I liked her because she liked me, or at least was comfortable around us to stay close and share our lives.
She wasn’t needy or a bother, and sometimes when I was sitting up with a book after everyone else was asleep, she’d just come over and lean against me, using my legs as a chin rest and go to sleep herself.
It was the sort of thing I thought a friend might do, though I’d never had one of those, because Cat was more than a friend, my only-one, and the girls, for all they tolerated us, never quite seemed like friends, even though Storm did sometimes get close to it, before pulling herself back behind the impenetrable barrier of reserve they lived behind.
It was when she came hunting with me that we seemed closest to friendship, maybe because we were away from Freya and her sniffs and glares; more likely because you have to trust the person you’re hunting with to move with you and not startle the animals you’re after.
So we had to work together, which might not be actual friendship, but always felt like it might be the beginning of it.
And Storm tagged along later that day as I went to check my traps in the hope that we’d be eating rabbit stew for supper.
The babies were tetchy and grizzling and getting out seemed the right thing to do.
Digger had been too preoccupied with licking herself again to join us, so we set off across the Tanglewood, following the zigzag path through the bushes which rose above our heads as we followed them over the old runway towards the low hill beyond.
I’d set a new line of snares in a low thicket of hazels that skirted the crown of the hill just below the older growth trees and was keen to see how they had done.
As usual I was walking with an arrow nocked and ready, just in case we came across a deer or a hare, and Storm was walking quietly behind me when something burst out of the undergrowth, but instead of running away it barrelled down the track right at us, breath chuffing explosively out of a mouth that was full of bright white teeth and a tongue whose pinkness was almost as bright as the two eyes that were, I realised, focused on something behind us.
It came at us so fast I nearly shot it on instinct, and might have done had the small and not immediately identifiable furry projectile not jinked to run wide of us.
We might have been shocked by the way it had burst into our morning, but it clearly had no interest in us at all, other than something to be run round and not into as it crashed through the undergrowth on the trail of something much more important.
And even in that first moment, before I could even think what it was, I instinctively knew from some quality in its focused intensity that it was running towards something, not away from anything.
My next thought was that it was a wolf – then I saw black broken fur and registered the size and thought it was a big badger for a fraction of a second, then I saw the flash of ginger as it blurred past us, jinking again round the bend in the trail we’d been walking on, and decided it was perhaps a fox.
Was that a dog? said Storm, looking at me, then back along the track ahead of us.
I nearly shot it, I said.
Maybe should have, said Storm, still staring at the bush out of which the possible dog had erupted, eye squinted over the feathers of her arrow.
What are you going to shoot? I said.
I don’t know, she said. But if it was a dog…
Oh, I said. Of course…
I felt slow for not having recognised it now she said the word. I’d seen enough dogs in old pictures to know better. Maybe if I’d seen more than one in real life, I’d have been quicker.
And the only other time I’d seen a dog it was with the Russian.
I found I had raised my bow too and was mirroring her aim down the track.
Dogs mean people, she said, as if I hadn’t already got it.
We walked slowly backwards to the kink in the track.
It was only about ten steps, but it felt a lot longer, probably because we were now both expecting someone to come running out of the bushes, hot on the dog’s trail.
Someone larger, someone dangerous, maybe someone with tattoos and a gun.
Maybe more than just one someone. When we got to the bend in the trail, I let Storm move past me and stayed watching the undergrowth, my mouth suddenly dry.
Home, I said, I’ll…
I risked a quick look round to make sure Storm was listening. She wasn’t there. I could hear her feet running back towards the Bunker.
I watched the bushes for another minute and then turned and ran after her, a cold feeling crabbing up between my shoulder blades, a feeling I couldn’t dispel by telling myself there was no one following the dog other than in our imaginations.
The closer I got to home, the faster I ran, because as I crested the hill and hit the downslope path I could hear a terrible noise of animals in distress, one of them yelping and making the strangled noise I now know was her kind of barking.
A lot of barking, each bark seeming as abrupt and ominous as that gunshot had on the day I killed the Russian, brutal in the way it chopped right into the normal quiet of the afternoon.
It was a disturbing wild noise and it spread that coldness down my spine and round my chest until it seemed to curl round my heart, making a hard icy fist for it to knock against, thumping faster and faster as my feet slammed the uneven track ribboning homewards.
I just knew one thing: Something abnormal was happening ahead of me, abnormal meant bad, and I wasn’t there to look after Cat.
I heard myself say a bad word, and then immediately, as if I was being instantly punished for the profanity I stumbled on a root, bounced painfully off a tree trunk, scraping the hand I flung out to protect myself and banging the side of my head on a branch as I did so.
I didn’t waste breath swearing again. I just put my head down and ran faster.
I careered out of the edge of the woodland where it gave way to the overgrown airstrip and nearly ran straight into Cat’s back. She and Storm were standing stone-still, staring at the source of the unholy yelping and barking.