The Game of Shepherd and Dawse (12 page)

It was Friday evening and Charlie was at Joe’s as usual until Angela had finished work. It had been a few days since Joe had last read about the story of Shepherd and Dawse. They were both sitting in the living room and the light had started to fade. There wasn’t anything on the telly worth watching so Joe decided to get ‘The Chronicles of Us’ down from the bookshelf and share a bit more of the story. This delighted Charlie no end, as he had really been looking forward to seeing what was going to happen to Aman. Aman reminded him so much of his own mum that he felt rather close to the character. Joe put on his reading glasses and opened the book to where he had left off and began to narrate.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE HUNT BEGINS

“
If you expect the unexpected, then it ceases to be the unexpected, just don’t expect it all the time”.

~ Billy Herd

The next morning, Shepherd Wood's best trackers and hunters loaded up a few days’ worth of supplies and made their way to the edge of the wood. There were 10 of them in total: three trackers and seven hunters. They carried two sling-slacks with them just in case. Everyone in the party had an important job to do and this filled them each with an enormous sense of pride and responsibility.

It didn’t take long for the team to reach the spot where they had found Aman, and this brought sad memories flooding back to those who had been on the first rescue mission. The group was new to this type of expedition, as usually they had no need to go deep into the forest since everything they needed was right on their doorstep. After six hours on the move, they were edging more deeply into the forest than most of them had ever been. The farther they went, the easier it was to see the damage done by this new beast called Dawse. Every bush had been practically stripped bare of its fruit and there was nothing left.

The team decided to set up camp for the night, as they could all sense what they had been looking for was getting nearer and they wanted to be fresh for whatever they might encounter the next day. They posted watches and slept in shifts, getting their heads down for an early night and as good a rest as they could have.

Early the next morning, they shared out the food they had brought with them. Makeshaw doled out dried meat and smoked fish, while Teewok handed out nuts and berries. After eating, they gathered up their things and set out in single file with Makeshaw at the front and Teewok at the rear. It was always like this on a hunt, as the oldest member of the party with the most experience led the group. The youngest was always placed at the back, for if they came across an animal that went on the attack, the youngest and most inexperienced would stand the best chance of getting away. As they walked on, the forest took on a darker and more sinister feel which was very different from the friendly wood they were used to. The smells had changed, the overall appearance was different and it was clear to all they were officially entering unchartered territory.

Just to the left of them, they noticed a particularly large amount of devastation. Trees had been uprooted and there were large piles of mud everywhere. They assumed this was due to an unusually heavy rainfall which had created a mud slide about 20 meters across. They carried on walking along the flat ground, when all of a sudden Makeshaw ducked down and beckoned the others to do the same. Hearts were racing, as they all could tell by the way Makeshaw acted that they had now found what they had set out to look for.

Makeshaw was lying on his stomach peering through a slight opening in the leaves. Directly in front of him was a steep drop of about 60 feet. To the left of him was the mud slide that had created an artificial ramp made of mud and debris which wouldn’t have been too difficult to have climbed down. The cliff face stretched for miles and acted as a natural barrier to the rest of the wood with only the mudslide giving access from below. Makeshaw had seen a few things in his time but nothing came close to this. He must have been lying there a good 20 minutes before he beckoned Shiala to come and join him. It would take an hour and a half for all 10 members of the party to take their turn in viewing this spectacle and it would be Teewok, the last one to see it, who would be the most affected by amazement and sadness. For in the distance was a large open dale where there weren’t just a couple of Dawse, there were hundreds.

The Dawse community contained nothing that resembled Shepherd Wood. There were huts of sorts, but they were hardly more than makeshift shelters. There were no fires burning and there was filth and mess in just about every corner. There was no evidence of sanitation, as the creatures just seemed to let go where they stood and then walk away.

The creatures were human all right, in the way they stood and walked and in the general shape of their frame, but they looked nothing like the very pleasing-to-the-eye Shepherd tribe. These people were about as ugly as one can get. Years of inbreeding and incestuous sex had seen to that. Almost every member of the Dawsey tribe had some sort of deformity: some had massive noses, some had strange shaped heads, some had elongated fingers and some had stumpy little arms. Yes, just about every kind of human deformity could be found on this Dawsey dale.

The other odd attribute these ugly creatures had was that they all had (without exception) very beautiful blue eyes. This was something that seemed quite strange to the hunting party, observing them for the first time, because everyone in the Shepherd tribe had brown eyes. They also had, and again without exception, jet black hair. This was another oddity to the onlookers, as everyone in the Shepherd tribe had blond hair.

In the distance Teewok could see two young creatures who had decided to pick up some of the recently deposited faeces and start chucking it at each other. It wasn't long before the larger of the two felt a big splat land on the side of his face. This so annoyed annoyed the creature that he proceeded to batter the smaller being, raining down blow after blow and kick after kick until the tiny creature stopped moving. The larger one then walked away, without even trying to wipe of the faeces of his face and showed absolutely no emotion over his actions whatsoever. No one else seemed to bat an eyelid at this either. When the tiny beaten creature came to – with blood and dirt all over his face – he lifted his head, quickly looked about, got up and darted away. The Shepherds noted this tiny Dawse had survived a harsh beating the likes that most adults of their own tribe would have died from. Yet through all this, the beaten creature had not shed one tear and neither had the one inflicting the pain.

Among the many strange things in this place was the fact that the adult males were all very fat and the adult females were all painfully thin. Teewok could see the males were in control and that it was hard for the females to get at any of the food that may have been about, while the creature children ate only after the males and females had had their fill. The food on offer at this particular time seemed to be a semi-rotting carcass that had been dragged into the settlement. It was impossible to say whether the animal had been killed or whether the Dawse had come across a dead creature and dragged it in.

Many of the fat-looking children running about actually turned out to be pregnant and a number of the adult females were pregnant too. About 10 metres from the rotting carcass, a younger member of the tribe had been pushed over a rock while she was being taken from behind by one of the males. She had been given a raw piece of meat to chew on, so she wasn’t taking too much notice of what was actually happening to her. One of the older emaciated women tried to get close to the abusing male, in competition for his affections, drawn by the smell of the meat the younger one was working on. The male didn’t look at her or even acknowledge her until she came too close. Then he lashed out with a clenched fist that sent her flying. She stumbled back and fell, hitting her head on the rock. After this she just lay motionless. It seemed that even if she was dead, no one was paying her any attention.

This wasn’t the only lifeless body, as there were quite a few scattered about, all at different stages of decay and the place absolutely stank. The inhabitants seemed to group into families, if you could call them that. Each emaciated woman had an abuser male and each child had a set of abuser parents. There were no visible old people in this village, as the oldest seemed to be no more than 35 summers strong. This was a place of survival of the fattest and it seemed that once one of them could no longer dominate the others, they went hungry and died or were killed. However, more had survived than the Shepherds wanted to know about and wherever they looked, they could see the ghastly creatures. We now know in fact that half the world was populated by Dawse and the other half by caring Shepherds.

One reason for the lasting survival of the Dawse was their insatiable appetite for sex. When they weren't sleeping, eating, fighting or killing – they were having sex. Old pushed themselves onto young, male attacked male, and then female - you name it, they did it - and if they were not doing it with other members of the tribe they were doing it with themselves. The death rate on this Dawsey dale was huge but then again so was the birth rate, so this kept a fairly even balance. You would have thought that most of them would have been wiped out through disease, but they had become immune to all sorts of diseases. Had the Shepherd tribe lived in this environment they would have been wiped out within a month's time through disease alone.

The thing that had really sent Teewok into a trance was the sight of an older looking girl squatting as though she were about to relieve herself when all of a sudden, a baby fell a baby onto the ground still attached by its umbilical cord. Seemingly confused, the female simply gnawed the cord in two and left the just-born child where it lay. She never thought to look back at it, though she did look straight in Teewok's direction.

Teewok suddenly felt hands on his ankles pulling him backwards and when he turned around, he was relieved to see Rivereye and Makeshaw looking down at him. He had been so transfixed on what his eyes were seeing that he hadn’t heard them saying they had seen enough and that it was time to go. Teewok didn’t need telling twice.

No one in the tracker party spoke until they had put a few miles between themselves and what they had just seen. It was Teewok who broke the silence.

“A bit of an awful place, eh“? Said Teewok. His overwhelming understatement made the others smile.

“I didn’t like the look of that mudslide, Makeshaw”, said Rivereye.

“Neither did I”, replied Makeshaw.

They could see it was the mudslide which had allowed the Dawse access to Shepherd Wood.

“Well, it is what it is”, Rivereye sighed in an almost philosophical tone of voice. “We have no option but to deal with it the best we can”.

And with that they made their way back to the safety of the Shepherd settlement with relative calm.

It was 7.30 in the evening and Angela wouldn’t be back for another half hour. Joe decided to finish there, as he wouldn’t have time to start another chapter and he always liked to give Charlie a bit of time in case he wanted to ask any questions. This was good because tonight Charlie had a lot of questions. Dawsey Dale had really intrigued him. The beasts reminded him of the Neanderthals he had been taught about in his second year of junior school. Joe did a very good job of answering Charlie’s questions, in fact he answered them in such a fluent way that one would think Dawsey Dale was actually a real place.

CHAPTER NINE

NETTIE

“
Be the change you wish to see in the world.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

‘Spotty Nettie’ was the cruel nickname young Nettie’s classmates had bestowed upon her at the tender age of eight. In truth, Nettie didn’t have many friends – unlike most children in her school. She was ‘Miss Un-popular’, in the very classic sense. Not that it was her fault; she was just a child, and children are only as adorable as we make them.

Nettie had not had the easiest of lives. Her father had walked out on her when she was just two years old, leaving her mother to raise her alone. It wouldn’t be the first time her father would walk out on her, nor the last. It was as though he were on a one-man mission to sow as much ill will into the world as he possibly could. His timing for coming back into his children's lives would be just as cruel as the times when he made his über quick exits. This loser had seven children in total and seven families he heaped his misery upon, repeatedly.

He would turn up periodically with his bag of penny sweets, though never more than 12 pence worth. He would make a bit of a fuss, then off again he went. It was always about him, this man, and what was convenient in his life at the moment. These impromptu visits would always cause great disharmony within each family – both during the visit itself and for some months to come. Then, just when the family had settled back, as if on cue, he would show his face again. He truly was a one-man, family-wrecking machine.