Dandelion: The Extraordinary Life of a Misfit

by Sheelagh Mawe

  She saw good willing beasts pulling loads that were far too heavy for them, loads that would have made a team falter, and whipped for their trouble. And she saw beasts so thin and underfed the wonder was they walked at all. And others being teased and tormented by ignorant children, their hands full of rocks and sticks and their mouths with ugly words.

  She saw horses penned in filthy yards with no grazing nor water. And horses tied up so short they could not move their heads to clear out the flies that gorged in the corners of their eyes.

  Seeing those poor tormented beasts was enough to make her heart ache, and yet, her new-found freedom gave her a certain arrogance and, forgetting that she had not had the wits to plan her own escape, she wondered why they did not leave as she had done. Well... she had no way of knowing then that her joy in her own freedom was soon to come to an end.

  NINE

  Huntsmen it was that were the start of Dandelion's troubles.

  She first heard the call of a huntsman's horn on a glorious autumn morning. The air about her was quick and clear from a night frost, and the sound carried from far, far away. A strange, unfamiliar cry it was, sounding like nothing she'd ever heard before.

  Curious, yet cautious, she made her way upwards through the woods in which she found herself. It was a long climb, higher and further than she would have gone for her own pleasure, but she was uneasy and would not rest until she discovered the source of that mournful, unknown sound.

  Again and again as she climbed she heard the long sorrowful wail, and then her ears picked up another sound which, listening closely, she determined to be the baying of hounds. Many, many hounds.

  Panting from her exertions and more than a little uneasy, she came at last to a clearing at the top, and peering out saw, breaking from a covert far below, a fox in full flight. In no time at all the first of the hounds appeared at the back of him and in the blink of an eye the whole of her view was filled with the pack, their throats bursting with noise, and at their heels, horses and riders.

  Fear made her hide prickle. Fear for herself and fear for the fox that ran, a fool could see, for his very life.

  All morning from her hidden viewpoint, Dandelion followed the chase with terrible fascination, and as she watched, her admiration and respect for the fox grew. The cunning of the fellow as he led the whole hysterical pack across an open field only to double back and appear, to her view, behind them! Time after time he threw them off his scent and left them in lost, bewildered confusion while he made off in another direction.

  They caught him in the end though, poor fellow. It saddened her to see so much courage and wit destroyed by the frenzied hounds. And it terrified her to think what they'd do to her if ever they found her. And that was not to be the end of it, as she thought at the death. It was just the beginning. For there were other foxes and other hunts, and it seemed to Dandelion that they were out to catch every fox in Ireland.

  In every kind of weather, no matter how much distance she might put between herself and a pack in the dark of night, there were always others the next day and the sound of their horns came to haunt her dreams. Their persistence forced her to keep to the highest hills out of their way and she became, in her own mind, at least, as hunted as any fox.

  Gone were the idle days of grazing freely and playing in the sun. There was little food for her on the rocky high ground and less shelter. The days shortened, the winds blew colder and, a day at a time, Dandelion's grand sense of adventure left her.

  When the ground froze and the snows came, her hunger forced her, at dead of night, to the low grounds and even to small isolated farms where she searched the hedgerows and farmyards for stray wisps of hay pulled from a passing wagon at harvest time or fallen from a farmer's pitchfork between stable and barn.

  Now when she considered her own pitiful plight, she was reminded of the scorn she had felt for the horses she had thought abused and neglected. A mouthful of food a day, even from the hand of a cruel master, was surely better than no food at all. She envied all such animals and wild ones too, for didn't they have their own stores of food and warm burrows besides?

  Her misery eventually became so great that once or twice she even thought of returning to McCree. With hindsight, her life there seemed charmed with him serving her food twice a day and bringing her in to sleep on a warm bed of straw when the nights grew cold. A better life by far she had enjoyed than the one she was presently leading, alone and starving on a bitter hilltop, with no companion or master to care if she lived or died and her hooves broken and bleeding from digging through ice and snow in search of a pitiful blade of grass. And what a fuss and bother she had made of pulling her small cart and her little plow now and then! Privileged she had been and too stupid to know it.

  The buoyancy that had carried her giddily forward all summer was gone. She became as tentative and unsure as she had been with McCree, but now she had only herself to blame. Each fork in the road left her hesitating. To go this way or that? To go forward in search of food or back to certain shelter?

  The folly of what she had done filled her waking hours and her dreams besides. Self-pity gnawed at her as ferociously as hunger. She grew afraid, and in letting in one fear, others, like leaves before the wind, followed.

  She didn't know where she was going or why. She had no purpose and no destination. She thought herself hunted and knew herself starved. She had thought herself free and yet she found no place to stop and make a life for herself. She was no freer than at the time of her birth or in the thick of her worst days with McCree. And worse than all of it was her loneliness.

  A terrible thing it was, she found, to have no living creature to greet each morning. To have no mother. No friend. No small animals. No insect even with whom to pass the time of day. It seemed that nothing lived or moved in those frozen hills save herself. A hearty welcome she would have given to flies, to wasps, to the devil himself if a moment of his companionship could save her from the terrible, wrenching monotony of her own despairing thoughts.

  Dandelion was lost. As lost within herself as she was in the cold winter landscape. And how was it, she wondered, that she was what she was, alive on the earth and yet belonging nowhere, with no part to play? Then it was she heard her mother's voice in the past saying, “I was born to work.” And the race horses saying, “We were born to race...” Each sure and certain of their place and the meaning of their lives.

  Was she destined to roam her life away, fearing man and cut off from her own kind? Was there no contribution she could make with her hard-won abilities? Was she to be useless and outcast all her life? She didn't know. She didn't know...

  Some days she hurried forward, panic driving her on, searching the sky, sniffing the wind, looking for food, for shelter, for a place to belong. Other days, she was overcome with such black despair she couldn't move, but dozed a fitful sleep that exhausted her, with dreams as barren and frightening as the winter sky.

  At the last she was too light-headed to know what she was doing... couldn't remember where she was going. And then, on a moonless night, stumbling blindly through a snowstorm, she lost her footing and fell. Dazedly and repeatedly she tried to raise herself, but the ice was too slick. Exhaustion finally stilled her and remembering she didn't know where to go if she were upright, she stayed where she had fallen.

  Once again, Dandelion gave up on herself...

  TEN

  A feeling of warmth it was that brought Dandelion back from wherever it was her spirit roamed. The kind of warmth she had known as a foal when at dawn her mother wakened her, her warm breath drifting across Dandelion's small back, setting her scrambling to her feet for milk before Daisy left for her day's work.

  She wasn't so far gone as to think her mother back at her side, yet, weak and dizzy, in a series of clumsy lurches, she staggered to her feet.

  With her senses returning, she had to blink hard to believe what she saw. Before her stood the oldest, dirtiest horse she had ever beheld. Like a fool she sta
red at him, her eyes as wavering and unsteady as her legs, wondering if he was really there or if he was a phantom she had brought back with her from a dream.

  His coat was white, though here and there through the dirt, mottled dark patches remained to show he had once been dappled gray. His legs were gnarled and bent as though they could scarcely carry his body, and his back was swayed. Whiskers festooned his mouth and chin, and his lips hung loose where teeth had once held them firm.

  He was more than old, this horse, he was ancient.

  “Humph,” he snorted, as Dandelion swayed before him. “At least it lives. And who might you be then, lying about out here in the bitter cold as though the life had gone out of you?”

  “I... I am Dandelion,” she said, her thoughts as slow and numb as the rest of her. “I... I believe... I think... That is, I believe I have lost me way.”

  “There'll be no arguing with that,” he said, his eyes crinkling with mirth, as though her sorry state were a laughing matter.

  “And who might you be yourself?” she asked ungraciously, not taking kindly to being seen as a joke.

  “What's that?” he asked, leaning close, the better to hear.

  Unsteadily Dandelion backed off a pace or two, for he was a frightening old figure seen close.

  “Who are you?” she repeated, raising her voice. “And what are you doing here? Are you lost too?”

  “Timothy's the name. Tim if you prefer. And no, I'm not lost. Never been lost a day in me life.”

  “Why are you here then? Have you no master? No place to belong?”

  “I did... I did. And a finer man never lived. But he died, God rest his soul.”

  “Well... Weren't you supposed to stay and work anyway? Didn't someone have a use for you?”

  “No. Nobody wanted me. I was too old to their way of thinking to be of use to anyone. But I am to meself! They - me late master's sons - were after having the knacker come to put me out of me misery, but a life is meant to be lived to it's end, don't you see, so I wandered off and I'll die natural, in me own time. A long while it is now I've lived free, this being me third winter... Though it may well be me fourth... No matter. A grand life I've had of it from first to last.”

  Dandelion hung her head at his words. Another one satisfied with his life.

  “You're very lucky,” she murmured.

  His old head came up sharp. “Luck, is it? And why would you be calling me lucky?”

  “Why... Because you had a grand life and a good enough master and yet... You seem to be your own master as well.”

  “Right you are,” he agreed with a satisfied nod. “Indeed and I am. Always was. All me life. Has nothing to do with luck, though.”

  “But I thought... Well, I always thought that man was the master, and the horse, the slave.”

  “You did, did you? Well, you've been thinking rubbish. Never mind that now. It's plain to see you're about to expire before me very eyes. Come along with me.”

  “And where will you be taking me then?”

  “Why for food to be sure. Just over this next hill. Food enough for an army there is over there.”

  “That's a long way,” Dandelion told him eyeing the hill. “I don't believe I can do it. Why... It's all I can do to keep meself upright!”

  “Sure and you can! Imagine yourself there already and be on your way.”

  Dandelion was puzzled at his words, not making head nor tail of them and she eyed him dazedly, her face full of questions.

  He smiled at her puzzlement and said again. “It's telling you I am to put a picture in your mind. In that picture see yourself standing at the top of yon hill and then go meet yourself. Sure and that's simple enough, isn't it?”

  Dandelion was as confused by his words as she had ever been. They made no sense to her at all and she knew there to be no food on the other side of that hill because she had been there many times. It was as barren and windswept as the one on which they stood. But she didn't have the strength to argue and she was not of a mind to be left alone again. Thinking she might as well die in the attempt as stay where she was, she followed after Timothy's creaking old frame.

  The journey up the hill was a hard one for Dandelion with her broken hooves and her legs behaving as if they'd never walked before and all of her senses wavering with starvation.

  “There. Now what was I after telling you?” Timothy asked as she came alongside him at the top. “Wasn't it easy then?”

  “Easy?” she gasped. “Why, it was more like the death of me, you old fool!”

  A long wheezing laugh that rattled his frame he gave at her words, and it was awhile before he had breath to say, “It's easy to see why you got lost, me poor Dandelion. You've never learned the easy way of this world. It's the hard way you've followed all your life. If you'd listened to me back there and used your imagination the way I told you... The way a mind is meant to be used...”

  Dandelion didn't hear what he said after that, though she knew his voice droned on. Like a dreamer waking to find he lived his dream, she stared at the small valley that lay before her. Grass, not rock, made up its floor, large clumps of it showing green through the snow.

  She was more confused than ever at the sight of it. “So many times I've been this way,” she told Timothy through a full mouth. “How is it I never found this place before?”

  “You didn't expect to, me poor Dandelion. Firm in your mind you had it that nothing was to be found in these hills but stone and cold and only a tuft of dried grass here and there, so that is all you found. Life is always just, don't you see? It gives precisely what you expect. No more and no less.”

  Again Dandelion didn't understand his meaning and soon was out of earshot anyway, lured away by ever larger clumps of succulent grass.

  It took her a long time to eat her fill. Time in which she wondered at the sudden upturn in her fortunes. In spite of what Timothy said, she thought it lucky that he had found her. Luckier still that he brought her to this sheltered valley high in the hills, safe from huntsmen, and with plenty of food and water besides. “A fine life I can live here,” she thought to herself, “and with a companion at me side.” A strange one to be sure, with talk that made no sense at all, but better by far than her own sad thoughts.

  Strange too, she thought it, that in all her wanderings, she had never seen hide nor hair of this old horse. She, who from her high vantage points, had thought there to be no other living creature for miles around.

  Stranger still, in spite of what he said, that she had never found this valley. In mid-mouthful she stopped to think on his words: She hadn't found it because she hadn't expected to? He had to be soft in the head to say such a thing when she had been dying on her feet for the need of just such a place.

  “A rare and happy coincidence you should have found me today,” she called, approaching him when she'd had her fill and no space left for another bite. “Another day with no food could well have been me last.”

  “Coincidence?” he asked opening one eye. “Sure and there's no such thing, me darling. It doesn't exist. The world has no place for it. No, there was no coincidence to it at all. I came looking for you. A creature in distress sends out signals for help, don't you see. I knew you were there.”

  “You mean I was calling out from me dreams?” Dandelion asked, at once amazed and horrified.

  “If you're meaning with sounds, no, you weren't. But you were calling out just the same.”

  “But... How?”

  “With your thoughts, me precious. Strong and clear and urgent they were, and meself the nearest to hear.”

  “You heard me thoughts?

  “Now how could I be hearing your thoughts when there's no sound to them? To be sure and I didn't hear them. I sensed them though. Picked them up as it were, with senses of me own. Thoughts travel, me darling, particularly when there's emotion and need at the back of them. A long time it is I've known of your troubles. It was me old bones that could not hurry.”

  It was diffi
cult for Dandelion to line up her own way of thinking with what he was telling her. She had never heard of such a thing as thoughts going out from her and traveling to others. And if such were the case, why then... the very air about her would be filled, choked, with the thoughts and ideas of others... It was nonsense. Nonsense pure and simple.

  Looking at his gaunt, misshapen frame silhouetted against the darkening sky, she wondered if his age and his time alone had twisted his mind as it had his body. And yet... the things he said struck a chord in her, as though he spoke of things she had once known and forgotten. Perhaps then the opposite was true. Perhaps Timothy was very wise indeed.

  ELEVEN

  Wise he was! The wisest creature Dandelion was ever to know, man or beast.

  Not that she understood the depths of his wit or wisdom all at once. Often she thought him demented. Other times unkind, cruel even.

  In her first days in the valley she hardly knew he was there, being too occupied setting herself to rights as it were. There were her wits to heal with rest and her body with food. But as she grew strong again, she found herself seeking his companionship often, until at the end she plagued him half to death with her everlasting questions. She forgot her first revulsion of his dirty, misshapen body and came to recognize only the essence of him staring out at her through his eyes. They were young, those eyes. And clear. The eyes of youth sunk in an ancient skull.

  Of course Dandelion told him the sorry story of her life, it being the only thing she had, or ever would have, that belonged to her alone.

  Layer by layer, as soon as she could and as fast as she could, she peeled it back for his inspection, her words coming in torrents as she discovered the luxury of a kindly listener.

  Hours it took her and never once did he interrupt. Only his dark, knowing eyes showing that he heard her every word. And when it was all exposed, out there for the two of them to inspect, she sought his approval for all of her actions.

  “You do see how it was with me then, don't you?” she asked, anxious for the pity he surely owed her. “Me being neither work horse nor race horse and having Arab blood besides. And being too small for one and without the proper bloodlines for the other and… not belonging anywhere?”