‘What’s in the injection?’ asked Emmy. He didn’t want to say. Brutally, he had a picture of the little girl leading the dog round by the ear, many years ago.
‘It’s a medicine that will make his heart go slower and slower; and then it will stop.’ He didn’t have to say that it wouldn’t hurt the dog because of the way he said this thing.
‘Like when it stops raining?’ she said. Nothing had ever moved him more in his life than the beautiful questions of children.
‘Yes. Like when it stops raining.’
Far away Gareth had heard the horn and knew the vet had come and he’d started straight away to walk back to the farm. Trying to move quickly through the bog, even though it was dry, was very hard. When he heard the vet’s old van grumble into life and the stretch of tyres over the loose grit in the yard he knew the dog had been put down. He looked up the slope towards the farmhouse and could see the dust rise off the lane where the old van threw it up. Then he turned back again, and went back towards the bog.
the Cow
The cow walked lazily up the track between two rails of blackthorn. She’d heard the vet come and go. She hadn’t liked the bog, which for a long time had been full of hide-behinds, which were brought across from the lumber camps of Wisconsin, and which Gareth’s father had learnt about from the American troops he served with. No matter how quickly you turned around, how hard you looked for them, these creatures always stayed behind you, so no one had ever described them. The cow had only sensed them. She was slightly demented now. She felt she should give the calf but her body wouldn’t. It was a strange feeling to the cow. Her breath was rasping, and she was puffing loudly through her nose.
She kept walking in the sun and grubbed the hedge here and there because now the flies were driving her silly, landing on her face all the time, and the cow was very thirsty. She was trying to find water now, and just walking.
Chapter Eight the Beast
They said there was a beast in the bog. There was a whole fauna created to keep the children away from the dangerous places, but they were told of with amusement, incredulously, so that the thing was a game, and the children could play the game of staying away from these places without being drawn to them, by being curious of fear. Gareth did not know that he could tell these stories until he told them, and it delighted him. But he had grown up here, and had been allowed always to make-believe, because the countryside does not refute pretend things in the brutal way a town does.
The beast in the bog was like a kangaroo, but with the feet of an elephant. It didn’t have the head of a kangaroo though, the long, rabbit-like face. Its face was like a pug’s, smashed into a grimace, with its tiny eyes not telling you how it felt. Only its teeth could give away its emotion. Needless to say, the beast fed on children.
A snake lived in the slurry pit, except it wasn’t so much a snake, more a being of muck and skin that moved and bloated like a worm dropped in a puddle. It demanded feeding, all the time, and lived on a diet of poo from the cows. It’s why they kept the cows, they said, to make poo for the snake, so he didn’t consume the farm. So it was that Emmy came up with the theory that she knew which cows produced more poo than milk, from the black and white ratio of their bodies. You should never go near the pit, they said.
Gareth had fought with the beast from the bog and the beast had taken his finger. When they did go near the bog, Gareth showed his children the bones and the leftovers of animals so they knew the truth of the stories. It is hot now. It drips with heat. This damn cow, he thinks. A dry heat like holding your hand close to an iron.
__
He thought hard about the dog. He was sure he had not hoisted death on him, that it really was time. That they hadn’t had Curly put down because, though they tried not to admit it, he had begun to repulse them. Animals are put down for the sake of their owners. He did not believe that animals complicated pain in the way humans do. He’d also watched animals for long enough to know that they fight death violently, or else simply lie down and die. He believed in dignity though, that this was a right in life not just human. He knew that having Curly put down was about dignity. He hoped that Emmy would not be too sad and was sure Kate would have explained things to her gently, while the vet was there.
__
But Kate slept. Sleep turned the pain for her. Awake, it was like a kettle of rolling water; sleep turned her pain to steam.
She thought of Gareth’s finger, shining like a healed blister. She thought of his shoulders and the cords of his arms, and the rough hair. Compared to her body, she loved his body, like she loved the exquisite smallness of her daughter, and the broadening shoulders of her son. She loved them physically, as objects; but she could not love her own.
As she lay asleep she thought of her son stretching into his long life and of her daughter growing and becoming more beautiful and complicated, like one of her pictures, as life added to her. She thought of the farm, turning. She felt the headache starting to clear.
__ Dylan
Dylan had come back and couldn’t find Emmy and found his mother sleeping in bed. It was a while after the vet had been but he didn’t know about the dog. He could not believe his father was still looking for the cow.
When he got back to the farm he turned on his mobile after driving and found that he should have got a gas bottle and figured there would be nothing nice for tea. His mother in bed and there being no gas it would just be cheese and leftovers and bread. He should go and get the gas but he thought — it’s too late to go and get gas now, on a Saturday. Because it was summer there were a lot of camp sites open and he would have got gas very easily, a small bottle at least. But he didn’t think of it because he didn’t want to go out and get gas.
On the lane he’d seen a family of stoats, playing in the dust. They were no longer than his hand, bounding loose and cantilevered along the track, now and then ambushing each other, lifting and watching, bouncing at the passing flies or overhanging heads of grass. Watching them, it was difficult to recognise they were capable of killing things twice their size.
He knew he should go and help find the cow, or find Emmy and play with her, but inside he felt not part of the day that had happened here. He had gone to see his friends all day and when he drove back into the farmyard the whole flight of pigeons had taken off from the yard at the sound of his car. He walked into the house and he could just tell it had been a day.
He picked up his car keys because he felt very far away all of a sudden, and he went again. In a few years he will want to be back on the farm, but for now he left a note saying ‘gone out, hope that’s ok’ on the table.
__ the Pigeons
As he drove away the pigeons went up into the air again. The curious slowness of pigeons on land; their energy in the air: like two different animals with two different purposes. The white dove looked like a flower amongst them. The family wondered if the pigeons would ever go, would leave one day as strangely and as together as they’d arrived. They seemed to bounce and tilt in the light.
In a pigeon’s cells, somewhere in their head, tiny magnetic crystals survive, tiny pieces of iron ore called magnetite. Invisible lodestones, tinier than dust, creating a compass, sensing polarity, the inclination of magnetic fields around the earth.
The electronic particles in the crystal, moving between different ions in a structured path, turn the ore magnetic and tell the pigeons their way. They’ve also found this in the brains of bees.
They’ve found iron too in their otolith organs, in their inner ear — the things which give them a sense of where they are in the air, of the space they move through. If the earth’s geomagnetics are wrong, they get lost.