The bitch was dragging itself along the veranda growling: instinct is like a sense of duty-one can confuse it with loyalty very easily. He avoided the animal simply by stepping out into the sun: it couldn't turn quickly enough to follow him: he pushed at the door and it opened-nobody had bothered to lock up. An ancient alligator's skin which had been badly cut and inefficiently dried hung on the wall. There was a snuffle behind him and he turned: the bitch had two paws over the threshold, but now that he was established in the house, she didn't mind him. He was there, in possession, the master, and there were all kinds of smells to occupy her mind. She pushed herself across the floor, making a wet noise.
The priest opened a door on the left-perhaps it had been the bedroom: in a corner lay a pile of old medicine bottles: small fingers of crudely coloured liquid lay in some of them. There were medicines for headaches, stomach-aches, medicine to be taken after meals and before meals. Somebody must have been very ill to need so many. There was a hair-slide, broken, and a ball of hair-combings-very fair hair turning dusty white. He thought with relief: It is her mother, only her mother.
He tried another room which faced, through the mosquito wire, the slow and empty river. This had been the living-room, for they had left behind the table-a folding card-table of plywood bought for a few shillings which hadn't been worth taking with them-wherever they'd gone. Had the mother been dying? he wondered. They had cleared the crop perhaps, and gone to the capital, where there was a hospital. He left that room and entered another: this was the one he had seen from the outside-the child's. He turned over the contents of the waste-paper box with sad curiosity. He felt as if he were clearing up after a death, deciding what would be too painful to keep.
He read: The immediate cause of the American War of Independence was what is called the Boston Tea Party. It seemed to be part of an essay written in large firm letters, carefully. But the real issue (the word was spelt wrong, crossed [135] out, and rewritten) was whether it was right to tax people who were not represented in Parliament. It must have been a rough copy-there were so many corrections. He picked out another scrap at random-it was about people called Whigs and Tories-the words were incomprehensible to him. Something like a duster flopped down off the roof into the yard: it was a buzzard. He read on: If five men took three days to mow a meadow of four acres five rods, how much would two men mow in one day? There was a neat line ruled under the question, and then the calculations began-a hopeless muddle of figures which didn't work out. There was a hint of heat and irritation in the scrumpled paper tossed aside. He could see her very clearly, dispensing with that question decisively: the neat accurately moulded face with the two pinched pigtails. He remembered her readiness to swear eternal enmity against anyone who hurt him-and he remembered his own child enticing him by the rubbish-dump.
He shut the door carefully behind him as if he were preventing an escape. He could hear the bitch--somewhere-growling, and followed her into what had once been the kitchen. She lay in a deathly attitude over a bone with her old teeth bared. An Indian's face hung outside the mosquito wire like something hooked up to dry-dark, withered, and unappetizing. He had his eyes on the bone as if he coveted it. He looked up as the priest came across the kitchen and immediately was gone as if he had never been there, leaving the house just as abandoned. The priest, too, looked at the bone.
There was a lot of meat on it stilclass="underline" a small cloud of flies hung above it a few inches from the bitch's muzzle, and the bitch kept her eye fixed, now that the Indian was gone, on the priest. They were all in competition. The priest advanced a step or two and stamped twice: Go, he said, go, flapping his hands, but the mongrel wouldn't move, flattened above the bone, with all the resistance left in the broken body concentrated in the yellow eyes, burring between her teeth. It was like hate on a deathbed. The priest came cautiously forward: he wasn't yet used to the idea that the animal couldn't spring-one associates a dog with action, but this creature, like any crippled human being, could only think. You could see the thoughts-hunger and hope and hatred-stuck on the eyeball.
[136] The priest put out his hand towards the bone and the flies buzzed upwards: the animal became silent, watching. There, there, the priest said cajolingly; he made little enticing movements in the air and the animal stared back. Then the priest turned and moved away as if he were abandoning the bone: he droned gently to himself a phrase from the Mass, elaborately paying no attention. Then he switched quickly round again: it hadn't worked: the bitch watched him, screwing round her neck to follow his ingenious movements.
For a moment he became furious-that a mongrel bitch with a broken back should steal the only food. He swore at it-popular expressions picked up beside bandstands: he would have been surprised in other circumstances that they came so readily to his tongue. Then suddenly he laughed: this was human dignity disputing with a bitch over a bone. When he laughed the animal's ears went back, twitching at the tips-apprehensive. But he felt no pity her life had no importance beside that of a human being: he looked round for something to throw, but the room had been cleared of nearly everything except the bone; perhaps-who knows?-that had been left deliberately for this mongrel; he could imagine the child remembering that, before she left with the sick mother and the stupid father: he had the impression that it was always she who had to think. He could find for his purpose nothing better than a broken wire rack which had been used for vegetables.
He advanced again towards the bitch and struck her lightly on the muzzle. She snapped at the wire with her old broken teeth and wouldn't move. He beat at her again more fiercely and she caught the wire-he had to rasp it away. He struck again and again before he realized that she couldn't, except with great exertion, move at alclass="underline" she was unable to escape his blows or leave the bone. She had to endure: her eyes yellow and scared and malevolent shining back at him between the blows.
So then he changed his method: he used the vegetable rack as a kind of muzzle, holding back the teeth with it, while he bent and captured the bone. One paw tugged at it and gave way; he lowered the wire and jumped back-the animal tried without success to follow him, then lapsed upon the floor. The [137] priest had won: he had his bone. The bitch no longer tried to growl.
The priest tore off some of the raw meat with his teeth and began to chew: no food had ever tasted so good, and now that for the moment he was happy he began to feel a little pity. He thought: I will eat just so much and she can have the rest. He marked mentally a point upon the bone and tore off another piece. The nausea he had felt for hours now began to die away and leave an honest hunger: he ate on and the bitch watched him. Now that the fight was over she seemed to bear no malice: her tail began to beat the floor, hopefully, questioningly. The priest reached the point he had marked, but now it seemed to him that his previous hunger had been imaginary: this was hunger, what he felt now: a man's need was greater than a dog's: he would leave that knuckle of meat at the joint. But when the moment came he ate that too-after all, the dog had teeth: she would eat the bone itself. He dropped it under her muzzle and left the kitchen.
He made one more progress through the empty rooms. A broken shoe-horn: medicine bottles: an essay on the American War of Independence-there was nothing to tell him why they had gone away. He came out onto the veranda and saw through a gap in the planks that a book had fallen to the ground and lay between the rough pillars of brick which raised the house out of the track of ants. It was months since he had seen a book, It was almost like a promise, mildewing there under the piles, of better things to come-life going on in private houses with wireless sets and bookshelves and beds made ready for the night and a cloth laid for food. He knelt down on the ground and reached for it. He suddenly realized that when once the long struggle was over and he had crossed the mountains and the state line, life might, after all, be enjoyed again.