Running with the Pack (18 page)

We began running west along the beach, and then turned north along the edge of the
rivierette
, a small saltwater lagoon. Then west again for a couple of miles along the
digue
, over as far as the
digue
will go, to the Grande Maïre, the massive saltwater lagoon from which the
rivierette
was born a few centuries ago, the result it is thought of subsidence. Turning north along its densely bullrushed banks, we run for a few more miles, water on one side, fields and then vineyards on the other — the hills of the Massif Central shimmering in the hot distance that lies to the front of us. Then we'll hook up with the Canal du Midi, the incredible engineering legacy of Pierre-Paul Riquet, Béziers' most famous son. The canal stretches over 150 miles, from the
Garonne river in the west to the Etang de Thau some thirty miles east of us. We head along the canal for only a few of those miles, west towards Villeneuve-lès-Béziers, shaded from the growing sun by the mighty sycamores that line its banks. Then, continuing on the dirt tracks through the vineyards to Sérignan, we head down to the beach and a turn to the east that takes us back home.

But these are all just contingencies: distances, directions, times, even landscape. They don't matter. The heartbeat of the run is the essence of the run, what the run really is. Here, on an early summer's morning in Languedoc, the heartbeat is a gentle one. There is the gentle sinking of my feet into sandy ground, the gentle pant-pant-pant of Hugo's breath and the quiet jingle-jingle-jingle of the tags that adorn his collar. There is the whispering rustle of the
tramontane
— the wind of the mountains — in the branches of the sycamores above me and in the vines that surround me. There is the gentle dance of the butterflies in the warm breeze. When the run does its work, I will become lost in its beating heart. We run on.

I remember another run, along some of these same trails, but in a different time, almost a different life. Brenin had lymphoma, the vet had told me, and the prognosis was what in the profession they call ‘guarded'. In other words, he was going to die. It was going to be soon and my primary duty now, the last important thing I could do for my old friend, was to make his death as easy as it could be. As easy as it could be for him, I mean. That probably meant making it hard for me. If he could just slip away in the night, painlessly, unaware … But I suspected that was not the way it was going to be. Not since Max II had any dog of mine slipped away in their sleep and I had been six years old at
the time. I was going to have to make a decision, a final judgement. The judgement would be that Brenin's life was no longer worth living. Not a second less of a life worth living, and not a second more of a life that was not. That was the goal. Then I would have to take him to the vet, and I would have to ask the vet to kill him. I am human. I make mistakes. My decision would always be riddled with doubt. Even now, years later, I ask myself: was that the right day? Did I get it right? Was it too soon? Or was I too slow, too late — too weak? These are questions I have never been able to answer and probably never will.

We had just returned from taking Nina and Tess to boarding kennels for a few days. They were still young then, exhausting to be around; and I had decided Brenin might benefit from a short rest, a break from their grinding effervescence. Upon our return, I quickly noticed a change in Brenin's demeanour. Brighter, more alert, more interested, hungrier than he had been in weeks — I offered him the spaghetti I had made for my lunch and he quickly devoured it. Then he did something altogether unexpected. He jumped onto the sofa and howled.

When he was a young wolf, Brenin had a little party piece that he would perform most days. He would run full-tilt at the settee, jump onto it and then continue his run up the wall. When he had got as high as his momentum would carry him, which was typically around three-quarters of the way up a standard living-room wall, he would spin his back legs up and around — a kind of canine cartwheel — and then run back down the wall. This was his way of letting me know we had been dawdling in the house for far too long, and that it was time for a run. Time had stripped him of this sort of outrageous athleticism — jumping on the settee and howling
had become his middle-aged substitute. Still, I knew exactly what he was suggesting.

There was a ditch at the end of the garden and when we got there Brenin began to run up and down it, over to the trees on the other side and back again: a display of excitement of the sort I had not seen — not from him anyway — in a number of years. When we'd left the house, I had envisaged a gentle stroll, an opportunity to sniff a few smells and mark a little territory. But something in his behaviour, perhaps it was a glint in his almond eye, convinced me that something strange was happening. And so we did something that even now I still cannot quite believe.

I had not been running for the best part of a year. Whenever I'd tried, Brenin, more than a decade old now, would soon start lagging behind. At first, I had tried to incorporate this into the run: running forward for a while, then jogging back to reunite with Brenin, before heading forward again to catch up with Nina and Tess. I think it had been the look of desperation on his face, the desperation that goes with understanding that your body will not do what you want it to any more — I was probably projecting, admittedly — that convinced me to stop doing this. Nina and Tess could still run all day, of course. But I could not do this to my old wolf brother and so my running with the pack had transformed into gentle walks.

That was how we began our last, entirely unexpected, run together. I had quickly put on some shorts, dug out my neglected running shoes and we'd set off through the woods, along a narrow path that brought us out to the Canal du Midi. For the first couple of miles we ran in the shadows of the giant sycamores. If this had been July, the trees would have been a blessing. But it wasn't, and they weren't. This was January; we were only a few days into the New Year. The
tramontane
, this time tasting of the snows of Lozère and Auvergne, swept down between the trees, a sycamore windtunnel. This was a run as cold as death. Every run has its own heartbeat, and this was the beat of a heart that was cold. The barren, leafless branches of those giant sycamore trees danced to the wind of snow and mountains. Our feet were soundless; our breath and the jingle-jingle-jingle of Brenin's chain were lost in the wind. We were not there.

I had expected Brenin to tire quickly. I had expected a quick return to the house. But he did not tire. Not a bit: he drifted, apparently without effort, over the ground beside me, almost like the Brenin of old, almost as if he was floating an inch or two above the earth; almost as if he wasn't dying. In fact, if you had to pick the dying member of the two of us, you almost certainly would not have chosen Brenin. The year in France had, let us say, not been kind to me. I'd spent it writing a little, thinking a lot, but most of all drinking copious amounts of young wine — I had become good friends with the wines of Faugères and St Chinian in particular. I had stopped running, and the wine had been slowly catching up with me. So here I was: soft, slow, staring down the barrel of forty and looking my age for the first time since looking my age had become a bad thing.

We reached the village a couple of miles away and soon after that there was a turn off from the Canal, down a little dirt track that ran along the edge of the village's vineyards. I was getting a little worried, because we were approaching the furthermost point of the run from our house. The cancer had robbed Brenin of a considerable amount of his weight. But even so, he would still have been around 120 pounds, and I really did not relish the prospect of having to carry him three miles home. But he glided on, apparently untroubled by the
death that grew inside him. After about a mile, the track swung south and brought us to the eastern edge of the Grande Maïre. On one side there was the
maïre
, on the other there were fields scattered with the white horses and black bulls of the region. Many of the bulls were up to their knees in water. It did not seem to bother them too much.

The sun warmed us slightly, now we had left the trees behind. Even the
tramontane
couldn't quite take that away from a sun that had begun its slow afternoon descent into the sea, and danced fiercely on the wind-worried waters of the
maire
. After a mile or so of tracking the lagoon, we reached the
digue
. We ran along here for half a mile or so, and then turned south again and we soon reached the beach. It was there that we rested and sat in the dying January sun, watching the waves wash gently onto the golden sands, sands littered with trunks of trees and assorted detritus from last week's storm. The sun sank slowly over the snow-peaked Canigou, nestled in the mountains that wrapped around the coast, south down to Spain.

The empty house was waiting for both of us. But, for a while at least, we sat and watched the sun.

I was thirty-nine when Brenin died. That is not, it strikes me, a particularly good year for any of us: an existential
fin de siècle
(in the bad rather than good way). That's when our myelin sheaths start breaking down. They coat the axons — the connections between brain cells. The more these sheaths break down, the worse the connectivity between neurons becomes, and the slower in both thought and deed we become. Thus begins the long road to cognitive and motor decline. The speed at which you are able to process information, and also move your body, increases with the
frequency of what is known as neuronal ‘action potential' (AP). This is an electrical discharge that travels along axons. Fast processing of information, and fast bodily movements, require high-frequency AP bursts. And high-frequency AP bursts depend on the integrity of the myelin sheaths coating your axons. So, as these sheaths break down, you will not only be incapable of thinking as quickly as you once could, you will be incapable of moving as quickly too. Myelin integrity starts to decline at thirty-nine.

Apparently, I will also have lost getting on for 20 per cent of my muscle mass. That is another thing that will have happened to me since I sat on the beach with Brenin that day. At least, that is the standard loss between forty and forty-nine years of age. I am not yet forty-eight, not quite — on the day of this run with Hugo along the Orb delta — but even so. And while it is a truism that different people age at different rates, once decline starts in any given area, that decline is — without some serious intervention — typically linear. In other words, a graph plotting our decline in one or another respect would follow a straight line. The gradient of the line will vary from one person to another, and for a single person it will vary from one capacity to another. But for each capacity, the line's descent is usually, bar a few minor local eccentricities, linear. This is the line of our lives.

I am sure being a mammal brings with it numerous benefits, but also one notable drawback. Many reptiles, for example, do not decline — not in the way mammals do. With all mammals, there is a gradual increased mortality with age: the older a mammal is, the more likely it is to be eaten, or to slow down too much to be able to catch food. The mortality of reptiles does not increase gradually with age — it remains pretty much constant until the reptile is very old.
As mammals get older, they lose the capacity for oocytogenesis — they can no longer produce oocytes, female reproductive cells. There is no loss of this capacity in reptiles. They can keep producing young (more accurately, eggs containing the young-to-be) almost until they die. Some reptiles can regenerate lost limbs; no mammals can. Mammals typically have two sets of teeth, and once they have worked their way through them, they are out of luck. Reptiles enjoy continuous tooth replacement throughout life. Mammals therefore decline in a way that reptiles do not. But mammals evolved from reptiles. What evolutionary processes would have brought about this difference in response to the passage of time?

An animal that has evolved in a hazardous environment — one where there are many predators, for example — will maximize reproduction. That's the strategy best suited to cope with hazard. An animal of this sort will be what's known as r-selected, and this sort of selection will favour rapid development, small body sizes and a short lifespan. An animal living in an environment with few hazards, on the other hand, will face significant competition for resources from other members of the same species. Such an animal will be K-selected, and such selection will favour parental involvement, delayed development, larger body sizes and longer lifespans. In recent years at least, humans, elephants and whales are K-selected; mice, voles and rats are r-selected.

The expression ‘in recent years', however, is a telling one — and the ‘years' in question number, at most, the last sixty-five million. When the dinosaurs were still around — and this period also comprises nearly two-thirds of mammalian history — all mammals were r-selected: they were small, nocturnal animals, growing no bigger than rats and stuck
stubbornly at the bottom of the food chain. So, according to one well-known story, I am declining in the way I am because of r-selection in early mammals, something that my later K-selection was not able to completely erase or overwrite.

So that clears it up: it's all the dinosaurs' fault. It is a little bit unlucky when you think about it. Without r-selection in early mammals, my life might have taken on more reptilian contours. Thrusting and burgeoning I might have remained, right up until I dropped. From this perspective, my mammalian life profile seems just a little unlucky — given that there clearly were other possibilities. If only my earliest ancestors had not been so timorous, then it might all have been different. If intelligent reptiles had co-evolved with us, descendants of the dinosaurs, then I am fairly certain I would be more than a little envious. I'm sure I'd conclude that in the great evolutionary lottery of life I had drawn a markedly shorter straw than them. ‘Unlucky, mate!' a sympathetic post-dinosaur might respond. I suppose I might (in, it goes without saying, some extraordinarily loose sense of ‘might') have been descended from mayflies: two hours and that's my lot. But just because I am luckier than some doesn't mean I'm not unlucky, all things considered.