Black Dogs (16 page)

She was thirty feet or so behind Bernard, whose shambling stride was as confident as his opinions. She took refuge in guilty, bourgeois thoughts of the house they would buy in England, a scrubbed kitchen table, the simple blue-and-white china her mother had given her, the baby. Ahead they could see the dreadful sheer cliff of the gorge’s northern edge. The land was already dropping slightly, the vegetation was changing. Instead of carefree joy she felt a sourceless fear, too faint to be complained of aloud. It was an agoraphobia, mediated, perhaps, by the tiny growth, the rapidly dividing cells driving Jenny into existence.

Turning back on the basis of a slight, nameless anxiety was out of the question. The day before they had agreed that here at last was the fulfilment of their months abroad. The weeks in the Red Cross packing shed behind them, the English winter ahead, why was she not rejoicing in this sunlit freedom, what was wrong with her?

Where the path began its steep descent, they stopped to marvel at the prospect. On the far side, facing them across half a mile of bright, empty space was a vertical wall of baking rock dropping three hundred feet. Here and there hardy scrub oaks had found purchase and a little soil in fissures and on ledges. This mad vigour which forced life to cling in the harshest of places wearied June. She experienced a deep nausea. A thousand feet down was the river, lost among the trees. The empty air, suffused with sunlight, seemed to contain a darkness just beyond the reach of vision.

She was standing on the path exchanging murmurs of appreciation. The earth nearby had been trodden flat by other walkers stopping to do the same. Mere pieties.
The proper response was fear. She half remembered reading the accounts of eighteenth-century travellers in the Lake District and the Swiss Alps. Mountain peaks were terrifying, plummeting gorges were horrible, untamed nature was a chaos, a post-lapsarian rebuke, a dread reminder.

Her hand was resting lightly on Bernard’s shoulder, her rucksack was on the ground between her feet, and she was talking to persuade herself, listening to be persuaded, that what lay before them was exhilarating, was somehow in its very naturalness an embodiment, a reflection of their human goodness. But of course by its dryness alone, this place was their enemy. Everything that grew was tough, scrubby, prickly, hostile to die touch, preserving its fluids in the bitter cause of survival. She took her hand off Bernard’s shoulder and reached down for her water bottle. She could not speak her fear because it seemed so unreasonable. Every definition of herself she groped for in her discomfort urged her to enjoy the view and get on with the walk: a young mother-to-be in love with her husband, a socialist and optimist, compassionately rational, free of superstitions, on a walking tour in the country of her specialism, redeeming the long years of the duration and dull months in Italy, seizing the last days of carefree holiday before England, responsibility, winter.

She pushed aside her fear and began to talk with enthusiasm. And yet she knew from the map that the river crossing at Navacelles was miles upstream and that the descent would take two or three hours. They would be making the shorter, steeper climb out of the gorge in the midday heat. All afternoon they would be crossing the Causse de Blandas which she could see on the other side, basking in its heat warp. She needed all her strength, and she summoned it by talking. She heard herself compare
favourably the Gorge de Vis with the Golfe de Verdon in Provence. As she talked she redoubled her jolliness, though she hated every gorge, ravine and rift in the world and she wanted to go home.

Then Bernard was talking as they picked up their rucksacks and got ready to set off again. His big, stubbly, good-natured face and protruding ears were sunburnt. His dried skin gave him a dusty appearance. How could she let him down? He was talking of a ravine in Crete. He had heard there was a magnificent spring walk to be made among the wildflowers. Perhaps they should try to go next year. She was walking on a few paces ahead of him, nodding ostentatiously.

She thought that she was experiencing no more than a passing mood, a difficulty in getting started, and that the rhythm of walking would settle her. By the evening, in the hotel at Le Vigan her anxieties would have shrunk to an anecdote; over a glass of wine, they would appear as one element in a varied day. The path was making leisurely zigzags across a broad shoulder of sloping land. Its surface was easy underfoot. She angled her broad-brimmed hat jauntily against the sun and swung her arms as she loped on down. She heard Bernard call after her and chose to ignore him. Perhaps she even thought that by striding on ahead she could somehow dishearten him, so that he would be the one to suggest turning back.

She came to a hairpin bend in the track and turned it. A hundred yards ahead, by the next bend, were two donkeys. The path was broader here, fringed by shrubs of box that looked planted out, they were so regularly spaced. She caught a glimpse of something interesting further down, and she leaned over the edge of the path to look. It was an old irrigation canal built of stone, and set into the side of the gorge. She could see the
path alongside it. In half an hour they would be able to splash their faces and cool their wrists. As she came away from the edge she looked ahead again and realised that the donkeys were dogs, black dogs of an unnatural size.

She did not stop immediately. The coldness spreading from her stomach down through her legs numbed any immediate response. Instead, she slowed falteringly, taking half a dozen steps before she stood motionless and unbalanced in the centre of the path. They had not seen her yet. She knew little about dogs and she had no great fear of them. Even the frantic animals around the remote farmsteads on the Causse had worried her only a little. But the creatures that blocked the path seventy yards ahead were only dogs in outline. In size they resembled mythical beasts. The suddenness of them, the anomaly, prompted the thought of a message in dumbshow, an allegory for her decipherment alone. She had a confusing thought of something medieval, of a tableau both formal and terrifying. At this distance the animals appeared to be grazing quietly. They emanated meaning. She felt weak and sick in her fear. She was waiting for the sound of Bernard’s footsteps. Surely she had not been so far ahead of him.

In this landscape, where the working animals were small and wiry, there was no use for dogs the size of donkeys. These creatures – giant mastiffs perhaps – were sniffing around a patch of grass by the side of the path. They were without collars, without an owner. They moved slowly. They seemed to be working together to some purpose. Their blackness, that they should both be black, that they belonged together and were without an owner made her think of apparitions. June did not believe in such things. She was drawn to the idea now because the creatures were familiar. They were emblems of the
menace she had felt, they were the embodiment of the nameless, unreasonable, unmentionable disquiet she had experienced that morning. She did not believe in ghosts. But she did believe in madness. What she feared more than the presence of the dogs was the possibility of their absence, of their not existing at all. One of the dogs, slightly smaller than its mate, looked up and saw her.

That the animals could behave independently of one another seemed to confirm their existence in the real world. This was no comfort. While the larger dog continued to nose in the grass, the other stood quite still, one front paw raised, and looked at her, or breathed her scent in the warm air. June had grown up on the edge of the countryside, but she was a city girl really. She knew enough not to run, but she was an office, library, cinema sort of girl. In twenty-six years she had had an average share of danger. A V-bomb had once exploded three hundred yards from where she was sheltering; during the early days of the blackout she had been a passenger on a bus that had collided with a motorbike; when she was nine she had fallen in a weedy pond with all her clothes on, in mid-winter. The memory of these adventures, or the flavour of all three distilled into one metallic essence, came to her now. The dog advanced a few yards and stopped. Its tail was low, the front feet were planted firmly. June stepped backwards, one step, then another two. Her left leg was trembling in the knee joint. The right was better. She imagined the creature’s visual field: a colourless wash and one blurred hovering perpendicular, unmistakably human, edible.

She was certain these ownerless dogs would be famished. Out here, two miles or more from St Maurice, even a hunting dog would have a hard time of it. These were guard dogs, bred for aggression, not survival. Or pets that had outgrown their charm, or were costing too
much to feed. June stepped back again. She was afraid, reasonably afraid, not of dogs, but of the unnatural size of these particular dogs in this remote place. And of their colour? No, not that. The second larger dog saw her and came forward to stand by its mate. They remained still for a quarter of a minute, then they began to walk towards her. If they had broken into a run, she would have been helpless before them. But she needed to watch them all the time, she had to see them coming. She risked a glance behind her; the snapshot of the sunlit path was vividly empty of Bernard.

He was more than three hundred yards away. He had stopped to re-tie his lace and had become engrossed by the progress, inches from the tip of his shoe, of a caravan of two dozen brown furry caterpillars, each with its mandibles clamped to the rear of the one in front. He had called to June, wanting her to come back and look, but by then she had already rounded the first bend. Bernard’s scientific curiosity was aroused. The procession along the path looked purposeful. He wanted to know exactly where it was going, and what would happen when it arrived. He was on his knees with his box camera. Nothing much showed through the viewfinder. He took a notebook from his rucksack and began to make a sketch.

The dogs were less than fifty yards away, and coming at a fast walk. When they got to her they would be waist high, perhaps bigger. Their tails were down and their mouths were open. June could see their pink tongues. Nothing else in this hard landscape was pink apart from her tender sunburnt legs, exposed below her baggy shorts. For comfort she tried to force a memory of an ancient Lakeland terrier belonging to an aunt, of how it ambled across the rectory hallway, toenails clipping the polished oak boards, to greet each new visitor, neither
friendly nor hostile, but dutifully inquisitive. There was a certain irreducible respect owed by dogs to humans, bred over generations, founded upon the unquestionable facts of human intelligence and dog stupidity. And on dogs’ celebrated loyalty, their dependency, their abject desire to be mastered. But out here the rules were exposed as mere convention, a flimsy social contract. Here, no institutions asserted human ascendancy. There was only the path which belonged to any creature that could walk it.

The dogs kept to their mutinous advance. June was walking backwards. She dared not run. She shouted Bernard’s name once, twice, three times. Her voice sounded thin in the sunny air. It caused the dogs to come faster, almost at a trot. She must not show her fear. But they would smell it on her. She must not feel her fear then. Her hands shook as she scrabbled on the path for rocks. She found three. She held one in her right hand, and kept the others wedged between her left hand and her side. She was retreating sideways, keeping her left shoulder towards the dogs. Where the path dipped, she stumbled and fell. In her anxiety to be on her feet again, she almost bounced off the ground.

She still had the rocks. Her forearm was cut. Would the smell of the wound excite them? She wanted to suck the blood away, but to do that she would have to let the rocks fall. There were still more than a hundred yards to the bend in the path. The dogs were twenty yards away and closing. She drifted apart from her body when she stopped at last and turned to face them; this detached self was prepared to watch with indifference, worse, acceptance, a young woman eaten alive. She noted with contempt the whimper on each outbreath, and how a muscular spasm was causing the
left leg to tremble so much it could no longer bear weight.

She leaned back against a small oak that overhung the path. She felt her rucksack between her and the tree. Without dropping her stones, she eased it off her shoulders and held it before her. At fifteen feet the dogs stopped. She realised she had been clinging to the one last hope that her fear was no more than silliness. She realised it the moment the hope dissolved in the smooth rumble of the larger dog’s growl. The smaller one was flattened against the ground, front legs tensed, ready to spring. Its mate circled slowly to the left, keeping its distance, until it was only possible to hold them both in her field of vision by letting her eyes flicker between them. In this way she saw them as a juddering accumulation of disjointed details: the alien black gums, slack black lips rimmed by salt, a thread of saliva breaking, the fissures on a tongue that ran to smoothness along its curling edge, a yellow-red eye, and eye-ball muck spiking the fur, open sores on a fore leg, and trapped in the V of an open mouth, deep in the hinge of the jaw, a little foam to which her gaze kept returning. The dogs had brought with them their own cloud of flies. Some of them now defected to her.

Bernard did not derive pleasure from sketching, nor did his drawings resemble what he saw. They represented what he knew, or wanted to know. They were diagrams, or maps, on to which he would later transcribe missing names. If he could identify the caterpillar, it would be easy to find out from reference books what it was up to if he failed to discover for himself today. He had depicted a caterpillar as a scaled-up oblong. Close examination had shown that they were not brown, but striped in subtle shades of orange and black. He had shown only one set of stripes on his diagram, drawn in careful proportion to
the length, with pencilled arrows indicating colours. He had counted the members of the caravan – not so easy when each individual merged into the fur of the next. He recorded twenty-eight. He drew a head-on view of the leader’s face, showing the relative size and disposition of the jaws and compound eye. As he had knelt down, his cheek grazing the path, to stare up close at the head of the leading caterpillar, at a hinged face of inscrutable parts, he had thought how we shared the planet with creatures as weird and as alien to us as any that could be imagined from outer space. But we give them names, and stop seeing them, or their size prevents us from looking. He reminded himself to pass this thought on to June, who even now would be walking back up the path to find him, possibly a little cross.