Hello, Stranger
Sonya Hartnett
This place doesn’t look the way I’ve expected it to. It’s much flatter: in every direction, you can see for miles. It’s as flat as a pan, and as dry. The paddocks are yellow and mostly empty, although there is the occasional herd of cows and some sheep. The open ground that hems the road is greener and more densely treed than I’d imagined, with massive silver-trunked eucalypts that have stood here a hundred years and more. The dirt they grow in is rocky, coloured ochre. The sky is huge, brilliantly blue, and uncrossed by birds. It is bakingly hot, and, at midday, shadowless. I don’t see any roadkill on the rubbly verge. The train line snakes alongside the farm fences, a scalding, greasy, burgundy vein. The pale grass growing beside it stands as high as the paddock posts.
Things would have been different when you were here, of course. It was winter then. The paddocks would have been green, the leaf mulch cold, the tarmac black and mirrored by rain. But the sky would have been just as wide above you, and the landscape as unsheltering. The few houses and scrappy businesses on the outskirts of town do not look like they would welcome a stray at any time. For all that it is broiling now, it was doubtlessly bitter then. Summer or winter, this is hard country for a homeless dog.
*
You are Dog the Third. First among you was Zak, a whippet in a time when no-one knew what whippets were except very old men who, at the sight of him, were taken tearfully back to the rabbit-hunting days of their boyhoods. A pizza delivery kid once asked me if Zak was a baby kangaroo. Then there was Shilo, the Black Prince of Hounds, my husky wolf, my beating heart. No-one ever mistook him for anything he was not. Both of them came to me as puppies, Zak like a tiny grey jewel fit for an empress, Shilo so endearing that I couldn’t believe the breeder was willing to let me take him. I was with them for almost every day of their long lives. What they learned, we learned together. I knew where they had come from, I’d seen what they had seen. Their worlds were my world, our lives meshed together. They were my friends and familiars, and they still are, though they are both gone now.
You, however: no-one knows exactly how old you are. No-one except you knows where you’ve been and what you have seen. You are mine, and I am yours – but part of you is unknown to me. Part of you is the stranger who eats from my hand, plays in my yard, sleeps in my bedroom. You aren’t completely mine, not truly, not fully, not absolutely – not the way Zak and Shilo were. For you, there was once somebody else, and an entire other life. And that somebody loved you in that life, I’m sure of this for several reasons: yet you were found outside a country town at the end of winter, and how you came to be there is a mystery known only, of the two of us, to you.
So we have come here, to Cobram, to search for you.
*
What I know of your history, I know as scraps. There’s a frustrating lack of detail to the story, missing people, undefined lengths of time. The ranger who found you is no longer working for the shire, so there’s no-one to ask what you did when the dog catcher’s van pulled up beside you that afternoon, or even if there actually was a van, and if it was in fact afternoon. For all I know you walked into a front yard, or were found curled up in a hay shed, or followed someone home from the hotel. I look at you and try to ask, How did it go? I think it had a great impact, the time you spent as a stray. It’s an experience that has burnt into your bones. I imagine you traipsing an outback road, nose down to a scent, ears up at the sight of birds. You hate bad weather, you would have fretted about the damp and cold. The slightest prick of a burr is traumatic for you, and rain horrifies you to your core: your travels must have been so uneasy. How did you know when to sleep, or which path to take when the road forked? You aren’t particularly forthright, so I suspect you journeyed loosely, buffeted along like a leaf. You didn’t find much to eat, because you were thin when the ranger picked you up, and becoming unwell. Yet you survived those rough, long, drifting days, possibly for weeks. And to do that, there has to be a thread of steel in you.
*
In the absence of facts, I imagine it like this. A bony black and white dog walks the broken edge of a road. All around are towering gums and flat paddocks, clusters of sleek cows. The ranger pulls up in a white van, stones popping away from the tyres. The dog isn’t timid, and comes willingly when the ranger slaps her thigh, its head lowered, tail wagging. It’s a handsome dog, the size of a sturdy whippet, black patches over amber eyes, the coat a mottle of spots. Outsized ears, like a puppy’s. Pointer-cross-spaniel perhaps. Bird dog, certainly. The coat is peculiar, wispy, like the silk of a corncob – it’s so unusual that everyone who sees it will remark upon it. A friendly mutt who leans against the ranger, who’d climb all over her if given the chance, across her shoulders, into her arms. Soft-natured and good-looking, a nice dog all round. There’s no collar, and the animal hasn’t been neutered. At an educated guess, about a year old. The ranger opens the door of the van and the dog jumps right in.
*
The relief you would have felt, I can imagine. You’re not a pack leader, nor a lone wolf. You are a mild and accepting sort of fellow. Rambling, scavenging, hungry, roofless, you had doubtlessly assumed that this was how life was always destined to be.
*
Cobram is 250 kilometres north of Melbourne, on the Victorian bank of the Murray River. It is part of the Shire of Moira, a vast municipality that extends far along the river and deep into surrounding farmland. It’s a comfortably sized country town, with long streets and wide roads. The people are friendly, and nod hello; the traffic, on a sunny Saturday morning, is slow. Cobram has won the Tidy Towns award in the past, and today its grassy median strips are spotlessly clean. I watch you closely as we walk, but you show no sign of recognising anything or anyone we pass. In bringing you here, it has been my greatest fear: that somebody will shout a name that I don’t know but you do. As it is, the only person who takes any notice of us is a shire worker who advises we should keep clear of the Rottweiler chained up in a nearby ute. I look around, and the Rottie is glaring gleamingly at us. Your tail is wagging, as always.
At the veterinarian’s I ask the girl behind the counter where I might find the dog pound. She tells me it’s eight or ten kilometres out of town, and winces. ‘It’s opposite the tip, which is a bit horrible,’ she says. We drive east on the pretty Goulburn Valley Highway, past orchards advertising peaches, plums, oranges and olives, past a very smashed-up car.
A road sign points to the municipal tip, but not to the pound. At the tip sit many more smashed cars, lined up in a snaggle-toothed row. From some of their bumpers flutter ragged strips of yellow-and-black police tape.
The dog pound is a largish area overlooking a field of apricots, or possibly they are nectarines. To the side, a single gum tree casts a blot of shade. There is no-one in attendance, and no sign stating any information at all. There is a high cyclone-wire fence, and then another fence: I can get close, but not onto the actual property. Beside the gum tree there’s a row of eight wire cages, rectangular and tall, tin-roofed and dirt-floored. I don’t know if you stayed in one of these, but they do look long unused. At the end of the cage row stands a spacious Brunswick-green shed, reasonably new. The sun bores down unhindered onto its metal roof. Inside the shed a dog is barking, lonesome and dismayed. I can’t get past the fences to see him, and I’m guiltily glad. Beyond us, at the tip, two men in high-visibility vests are hauling dusty tyres. Here, as everywhere, the sensation is of heat, dirt, insect song, arid stone. It’s not a place where anyone spends one minute more than they have to. Returning to town, I tell myself that inside every car we pass is that barking dog’s owner on their way to collect the poor thing.
State regulations stipulate that a stray must spend a minimum of eight days in the pound before being offered for rehoming, or being euthanased. I guess the ranger watched you while you were in her care, deciding which would be your fate should your owner fail to claim you. Because there’s no doubt that you had been owned: y
ou love people, you love to be fussed over, you can never resist a lap. I’ve never seen you flinch at a raised voice or a lifted hand. You’ve always preferred to travel in the front seat of a car. Someone not only kept you, but indulged and cared about you. And yet you walked the road so long that you started to fade away, and then you spent at least eight days in the pound, and nobody came.
*
If Zak or Shilo had become lost, I would have searched for them forever. I would have walked the world. I would have looked twice at every dog I ever saw. I would have wanted to die. But life can be different in the country – harsher, less sentimental. And people are different everywhere, the things they will do and not do.
I think about what might have happened – I have thought about it a lot. A gundog like you, I think you were a man’s dog. Youthful and adventurous, did you escape a poorly fenced property, possibly not for the first time, and did your owner lose patience with you, and feel unwilling or unable to pay the pound fees even if you were found? Or maybe you were distracted flushing rabbits out of the scrub one evening, and accidentally lost sight of your owner, and he of you? Or did he lose you deliberately, because you were distracted too readily? Were you lost and given up for dead, or were you let go, to live or die as you would?
Neither of those scenarios ties neatly with the man who let you on his lap, who drove with you in the front seat of his car.
*
There are photos of you from this time, presumably taken by the ranger. You sit on wet concrete, eyeing the camera warily. I know you well, and I recognise the expression on your face. Uncomfortable, unsure. You do not like a surface that is wet. There is a rope around your neck, and it’s crossing close to your face. You do not like that kind of carelessness, it might turn out badly for you. The whole situation would have made you unhappy, but I see you enduring without complaint. Good dog.
Everyone who meets you sees your good heart. The first time I brought you to meet him, my vet said, ‘You’ve got a good one here.’ The ranger saw it too. She took the photos and, because the shire was trying to improve outcomes for its strays, and because you were ‘one of the best dogs she had met’, the ranger contacted a city-based rescue group with which the shire had recently begun to work.
*
We’re staying in a motel ten minutes out of Cobram. I couldn’t find a place in town that would take a dog. It’s fine, though, the motel is charming, full of young fruit pickers who smile when they see you, click their fingers to encourage you to come to them. The lady who runs the place says she’s never been busier than since she started accepting pets. She says that dogs have been among the best guests she’s had. She has a bold Jack Russell–cross–Shih tzu which her husband calls a ‘jack shit’.
I tell my hostess I’m writing about rescue dogs, but that usually I write novels for children. Immediately she phones a friend who owns a bookshop in New South Wales, eager to know if he’s heard of me. Her face falls as she listens. No, she tells me, and her husband, and the fruit pickers who sit around listening, her bookseller friend has never heard of me. And she considers me with a tinge of suspicion and dislike. I babble and smile and walk away, face burning. You fly loyally after me, your low and humiliated companion.
All the time you were on the road and in the pound, I was looking for you. Not for you specifically, but for the dog who spoke to me. One who would be different from Zak and Shilo, because I had no wish to replicate or compare. Most importantly, I wanted a rescue dog, because you only get to share this life with a certain number of dogs, and one of them at least should be lifted from the pool of need.
You can send yourself crazy looking at needful dogs. Pound dogs, pet shop dogs, backyard breeder dogs, puppy farm dogs. The most poignant are the ones who are unwanted because of baby, because of job, because of travel, because of getting married, because of allergic partner, because of divorce, because grown too big, because too old, because need too much exercise, because just not right anymore. Dogs who are said to be nice dogs, happy dogs, great with kids, adore walks, car, cats, beach, playful, loving, family member, no trouble, suddenly cast aside. Dogs in the hands of people who don’t think an animal matters. Dogs who smile for the camera without realising their time is ticking. Dogs who haven’t understood that the person they want doesn’t want them in return. Dogs who have had sad lives, and for whom this advertisement on the internet is just another step on that lonely downhill trudge. You can give yourself a nervous breakdown.
It’s easier to look at rescue sites. At least you know the animal is, for the time being, in safe hands.
*
When the Victorian Dog Rescue Group accepted responsibility for you, they sent you to the Cobram vet for needles and a health check. I have the report the group received.
There is wear on your teeth which isn’t typical in a young dog – my own vet would wonder if your time being homeless could be to blame, the weeks spent chewing what you could find. A few days after your first visit, the ranger – this decent woman, this passing guardian angel of yours – brought you back to the vet clinic, because you seemed poorly. You were tested for parvo and found negative, so you were given a course of antibiotics.
There’s no mention anywhere, because presumably it wasn’t known then, that you cough occasionally and terribly, as if the dust of a stony road coats your nose and throat.
*
The group gives names to the dogs they take on, and they called you Coleridge, I don’t know why. The moniker caught my eye, as it would. It’s a ludicrously fancy name for someone of your hobo background and mongrel blood, but you are undeniably distinguished-looking, so the name does suit you. I’d intended to call my third dog Wyatt, but what with your other life and then the road, the pound, the foster care, the country, the city, you’d already endured enough change. So you are Coleridge Wyatt, as there is Zakary Star and Shilo Hagrid. You are Cole, Colly, Colly Dolly, Colly Flower. Once, I told a tiny dog-shy girl that your name was Little Flower, and immediately her fear left her, and she reached out to pat you. Little flower.
*
It was quite the process, getting you. At times it made me doubt myself, as if I had no experience with any animal at all. As if I’d never tamed the wolf lord, nor found a path through a whippet’s eccentric mind. But at some point amid the waiting and the phone calls and the inspections of the backyard you became mine, enduring the labyrinthine application process made you mine, returning to look at your photograph – that droll tolerance at the pound – made you mine.
The first night you stayed, you slept beneath the dining table. When I bathed the dirt out of you, you fought like a steer. You couldn’t catch a ball, you were intimidated by the cat, you couldn’t swim, you were frightened by noisy play. We were strangers, but we belonged to each other now, and I told you I would always care for you. There’d be times when I’d have to leave you, but I would always come back for you. One day, driving along swooping streets with you in the back seat, I glanced in the rear-vision mirror and saw you galloping along the road after the car. Some luggage had toppled across the seat and, to escape it, you’d jumped out the window without a sound. I pulled over and you ran to me, desperate but joyful, absolutely forgiving. My heart smarted with grief for you. Had you once chased a car until you couldn’t see it, and stood in the dust cloud trying to work out what was going on? Why would anyone stop wanting you, Cole? There’s not an ounce of unkindness in you. You ask for almost nothing. You try at all times to be a good dog. I’ve puzzled over it so often and so futilely, how a person could simply not bother to care.
*
We leave Cobram after three days. No-one has tried to claim you, and nothing we’ve seen has seemed familiar to you, but nonetheless it’s a relief to turn the car towards home. Two and a half hours down the Hume, through horse country – Black Caviar country, no less – the fire danger rating signs becoming less lurid the further south we go. You sleep soundly, waking to gaze out the window sometimes. Home to the b
itumen, power poles, car horns, rubbish left by kids in the street: this inner-city suburb is very different from the landscape you came from, but I hope you like it here. I hope you’re glad to be with me, as I am glad to be with you. We didn’t find anything in Cobram, but we also found quite a lot. I think I know you better, yet you retain much mystery. It’s good, I feel happy. Home, you trot straight out to the chicken coop, because chasing the pigeons which congregate at the feeder is the bird dog’s favourite sport.
*
Something happened yesterday. We were walking our usual track along Merri Creek. In the near distance an old man appeared between the trees. He was wearing a broad-brimmed canvas hat and walking in a slow but steady way. The moment you saw him, your tail whirled. You ran – you really bolted – to press yourself against his legs. The old man bent to greet you, and I saw you realise he wasn’t somebody you recognised. The incident was nothing, yet there was something remarkable about it. I said, ‘He thought he knew you.’ The man said, ‘Yes, I think he did.’ And he was a dear old man, with a sweet gentle face, so dapper in his hat and tidy clothes, and it occurred to me then, something I have not considered before. Maybe he died. Maybe your owner, who loved you, couldn’t search for you because he died.
*
Well, who knows: someone might, but I never will, and maybe you don’t know either. I would say it doesn’t matter – sure, it doesn’t matter to me – but it matters to you, I think, and always will. The past has left its shadowy mark on you. Cole, it happens to us all.
But you are here. This bed is yours, this bowl, this collar. You have a microchip, a registration tag, a phone number on a disc. I shift house a lot, house after house after house – we’ve been together only two and a half years, but already we’ve shared three different houses. Probably our roaming will continue, but know this, Cole: where I am, you can be. Bird dog, lost dog, found dog, good dog, you are free to stay.
The Best Australian Essays 2017 Page 4
