Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf

by Sonya Hartnett

  The dog stared at him unblinkingly, cocking her head in an effort not to understand. Her tail, however, stopped wagging. “Out,” Satchel repeated. “Go on, girl.”

  She went, jumping heavily to the ground. She didn’t lose hope as he leaned across to shut the door, ready to leap should he suddenly change his mind. Only when the car was coasting along the driveway did she allow her ears to drop and he glanced in the rearview mirror to see her standing where he’d left her, staring forlornly after the car. It was always a tragedy, in her little life, to be left behind.

  He took the old road into town, passing his neighbours’ houses and then the darkened stores, past the war memorial with its three deeply inscribed names, the granite oily with the night’s drizzle. Satchel loved the morning, the sense it gave him of being alone on the earth. He thought of the striped animal: if it was nocturnal it was probably sleeping, having scuttled like a vampire away from the sun. Today, at the clearing, he was going to look for it. He had no idea what he would do if he found it. He would not catch it or harm it, but he wanted its likeness locked more securely in his mind.

  He was well beyond the flour mill and was almost at the turn-off when some intuition made him dart his eyes to the mirror to see Moke hurtling along the road behind him. He cursed and wound down his window; the car slowed fractionally and the dog increased her speed. Her long hair was streaming, her tongue was dashing at her throat and her golden eyes were joyful. She could run for miles, he knew. She was a working dog, and stamina was bred in her bones. She could follow him to the clearing at a gallop without the slightest difficulty. He shouted at her as the car flashed past the turn-off. His concentration skittled, he yelled furiously at her, hitting his foot to the accelerator. Moke, encouraged by his voice, flew faster. Her eyes were on him, not looking where she was going. She was directly below his window and he could have reached down to touch her when she stumbled and went under the car.

  He smacked the brake so fiercely that the wagon skidded sideways, its rear wheels sliding on the bitumen and billowing a cloud of dust. He pulled to the edge of the road and ran back to where his dog lay sprawled. She gathered her feet as he got to her and stood herself up, her tail waving slowly. He dropped to his knees and touched her cautiously. Her right hind leg was broken, hinged lopsided from her hip. He murmured to her as he probed her body for more damage but she seemed to be all right, and he sat on the road and stroked her forgiving face. She had a white blaze down her nose and she had lost skin from it, the blood blotting the hair pink. “Dumb dog,” he said. His hands were shaking. “Dumb dog,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

  She licked her lips, and her tongue was red. Drops of redness landed on the road and glistened. He looked at her, his flesh tingling, and she retched suddenly, coughing out a pool of blood.

  He caught his breath and lurched to his feet. Moke limped forward, pathetically determined not to be left behind again. He picked her up carefully, her jagging leg held away from his body. Long red threads were dribbling from her jaw and sticking to her like cobwebs. He carried her to the car and draped her along the back seat where she stayed for only a moment before shuffling to sit upright. He grabbed a sack from the floor and tucked it around her before throwing himself into the driver’s seat and turning the key. The engine grunted. He bit his lip and jerked the key and the engine clicked and went quiet. “Start,” he hissed. “Damn you, you bastard, start – start—”

  Five times he turned the key, slamming his foot to the pedal hysterically, and on the fifth attempt the wagon made no response at all. It made none of its taunting noises and the only sound was Moke’s panting and the jangle of the keys as they knocked against each other. Satchel stepped from the car and gazed around. He told himself to keep calm. In the distance he could make out the roofs of shops and houses, smaller than lids of pillboxes. In all the other directions there was nothing but hills and grass, fences and farms and, in one, the black form of the volcano. Nothing was moving except the peaks of the evergreens, which shivered against the wind. He looked at Moke, who had hunched to the seat and dropped her ears when she met his glance. She was drooling blood all over the vinyl. He took her paw and felt it was cold. “Moke,” he said, “I’m going to get Mum’s car. You have to stay here, but I’ll come back for you.” He stroked her head and drew the sack closer to her, and shut the car door. He paused just a moment to look at her through the window. She was a pretty dog, and the grubby sacking did not suit her. Her golden eyes were blinking and the hair beneath them was streaked with tears. “I’ll come back,” he promised again.

  And then he heard a sound he recognized, but couldn’t say from where. He swung towards the town and saw the school bus burling along the road. It ploughed towards him, rumbling contentedly, its broad forehead shimmering in the morning light. He stood on the bitumen and held up his arms, and Chelsea dropped through the gears and brought the bus to a stop in front of him. She pulled the lever that opened the doors and said, “Satchel?”

  “Chelsea, you’ve got to take me to see Joshua, it’s Moke—”

  She unbuckled her belt and came down the steps. “What?” she asked. He felt a strong desire to shake her, distraught at her inability to understand everything immediately. He clenched his hands and spoke deliberately.

  “It’s Moke,” he said. “I’ve hit Moke with the car. She’s bleeding, and I have to take her to the vet. I have to get her to town, and the station wagon won’t start. So I need you to drive me there.”

  “I can’t – I have to pick the kids up for school. They’ll be waiting for me.”

  “No, forget them—”

  “Satchel, I’ll lose my job. I need this job—”

  He clutched his fingers in his hair. “Chelsea,” he begged, “please. She’ll die. She’s going to die. Please.”

  Chelsea hesitated. She was remembering that they had parted on bad terms: she had gone home and cried because she always ruined everything, everything she touched she spoiled, everything she attempted she failed. She had vowed to return to the safety of her old, mousy, wordless ways, minding her own business, telling no one of her own. That was the life she was supposed to live. She went to the wagon and peered through the window. “I’ll take you home so you can get your mother’s car,” she said, and then, “Oh.”

  Moke was slapping her tongue around a mouthful of blood. Satchel yanked open the door and dabbed the sack to her jaws. “Chelsea,” he said, and his voice was riddled with panic, “please!”

  She stepped backward. She was going to say something but for a second or two she was silent, as if she first had to find words that were hidden, or lost. “I won’t,” she said faintly. “I won’t drive you to town… You will have to get there by yourself.”

  He looked at her, and she gazed fixedly at him. “Go ahead,” she prompted. “Go.”

  “…Where are the keys?”

  “In the ignition, I suppose.”

  He gathered up his dog and carried her to the bus, Chelsea trailing after him. He settled Moke on the floor and dropped into the driver’s seat. He smiled at Chelsea, who stood in the doorway with her hands in her jacket. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Don’t thank me,” she answered. “I’m protesting about this. You’re stealing my bus. I hope she’ll be all right, Satchel.”

  “Step away from the door,” he said, and she did.

  He turned the key and the bus chundered into action; Chelsea moved clear as it pulled away and watched it barrel down the road, swinging towards the highway and quickly vanishing from view. He was driving fast: the bus didn’t like being driven fast and it could hold a grudge for days, but she smiled to watch it go. She turned on her heels and began the walk into town. In an hour or a little more, when the headmaster arrived at the school, she would ring him and describe what had happened. He would be annoyed but she would say that none of it was her fault, she had done all she could. Satchel O’Rye was much bigger than she was, she could not physically restrain him. She would tell the
principal she had no idea where he might find the school bus but that she expected Satchel would return it eventually. And she would leave it to him to inform parents on distant farmlands as to why, exactly, their children had not yet been removed to school.

  In the meantime, while she waited for the time to come to make the call, she would sit on the heater and have a cup of coffee and perhaps eat some more breakfast. She felt intensely happy, and it made her want to run: she couldn’t run fast and she moved without grace or style, but she ran anyway.

  The animal woke, its ears swivelling to collect sound, their tips bent against the roof of the hollow. It lay in a nest of moss and tangled eucalypt bark and the trunk of a sugar gum obscured its view outside. It felt but ignored the movement of the creature that was blundering in the darkness behind it, searching for a gap that would allow it to wriggle past the animal’s body. The animal sniffed the air thoroughly, opening its mouth so the taste of it flooded its throat. A sparrow perched against the trunk of the tree and fluttered its wings frantically; it fell, rather than flew, from its place, scooping the air before it touched the ground. The light of the sun came filtered through the canopy but the animal narrowed its eyes against the whitening sky. The hollow was not a desirable home: water could work its way through the ceiling and the outlook was scrambled with bracken and scrub. An intruder into this territory had cover to conceal its approach until it stood at the door of the den. And the den itself was flimsy, inclined to rattle with the wind. The walls creaked and moaned unhappily. That night, the animal would go in search of a more secure home.

  It bowed its head to regard the little creature and, after a second of indecision, clasped its teeth around the slender neck.

  Joshua’s truck was parked in his driveway and Satchel pulled the bus in behind it. The vet lived on a small property on the limits of the big town and he spent most of his days driving around the district, paying housecalls and attending those animals that could not be transported to his surgery, mares heaving with difficult births, bloated sheep with stomachs like drums. He was a tall, elderly, pitifully bony man, and he was coming down the steps of his house with his instrument bag thrown over a shoulder when Satchel jumped down from the bus. “Satchel?” he shouted. “What on earth?”

  They took Moke into the kitchen where Joshua cleared the table of jam jars and a box of cereal and Satchel put his dog down gently, sliding his hands from beneath her weight. Joshua hooked on spectacles and bent to examine her. He probed her body with his fingertips and said nothing for several minutes. He filled a syringe with painkiller and slipped the needle in the scruff of her neck. Satchel stood against the wall, nicking a thumbnail nervously. Moke kept her eyes on him and whenever Satchel moved she would slap her tail lightly, absurdly devoted. Joshua lived alone, and had a taste for costly objects: on a shelf there was a chunky handsome antique clock and Satchel could hear the whirring of its innards as it grated down the moments. He could smell coffee beans and insect spray and socks steaming before a fire somewhere, all the odours of bachelorhood. After a time he had to say something and what came out was idiotic. “Her leg is broken, I think.”

  Joshua scoffed. “Her leg is shattered, young man. And that’s the least of her problems. You shouldn’t drive so wildly.”

  Satchel cowered, his arm flopping to his side. He had known Joshua all his life, but only distantly. The old man had lived in the little town when Satchel was a child, but he had moved his practice and his home closer to the big town when the highway severed the small town from passing traffic. The vet had had, some years earlier, a tremendous argument with William, for Joshua was a strict non-believer and William’s ideology had, one day, trampled on what the veterinarian saw as his own ground. Claiming in the pub that God would provide for His people as surely as He provided for the birds in the sky and the lambs in the fields, William had been confronted with the irate old man who listed all the cases he could remember of lambs and birds whom the Almighty seemed to have overlooked. The incident had irreparably soured the men’s opinion of each other but the vet never extended his contempt for the father to the son, or to Satchel’s mother. He did, in fact, feel it his duty to tell them, and anyone who would listen, that he felt for them greatly.

  He put his palms on the table and straightened himself, wincing at the burning of the arthritis in his spine. “The blood,” he said shortly, “it’s nothing to worry about. She’s cut her tongue, that’s all. A few stitches will fix it. I won’t know the full extent of the damage to her leg until I can X-ray her in the surgery. She’s in shock, but not too deeply. It’s her breathing that concerns me. See this?”

  Satchel stepped nearer and the vet pressed his hands to Moke’s ribs. When he spoke, Satchel could smell the sweetness of cigars in his words. “When she breathes in, her abdomen doesn’t expand. It collapses, as if she were breathing out. When she does breathe out, her abdomen expands. She’s doing exactly the opposite to what is normal. She’s ruptured her diaphragm.”

  Satchel looked at him blankly. “Can it be fixed?”

  “It can. Her leg – I can feel pieces of bone floating around in there, and we might get away with pinning it, but my guess is it will need plating. That will be fiddly, but far from impossible.”

  “So you can save her?”

  Joshua went to the sink and washed his hands. “I could try,” he replied. “I could do my best. Her injury is survivable. But I couldn’t promise anything. She’ll need a big operation, and that is traumatic for an animal. I am not a miracle man, Satchel, but I would do for her the best I could.”

  Satchel nodded. “All right,” he said, “I’ll help you carry her to the car—”

  “No,” said Joshua, “wait. Sit down, Satchel, and listen to me.”

  Satchel hesitated, but when Joshua drew a chair out from under the counter he sat in it obediently. The vet went to the fridge and poured a glass of milk, passing it to Satchel reverently, as though it was a potion. Then he leaned against the sink and crossed his arms. In the light coming through the window Satchel could see downy hair scattered over his face, as if what had fallen from his scalp over the years had implanted itself in his cheeks and nose.

  “Your dog has sustained serious injuries,” Joshua began. “But, as I say, all things going well, it’s not beyond repair. What it will be, however, is expensive.”

  Satchel sagged, the glass hovering near his lips. “How much?”

  “I would estimate a couple of thousand dollars. Maybe a bit less, if her leg is not too bad.”

  Satchel felt as though his blood had been suctioned and his veins refilled with air. “I don’t have that much money,” he said.

  “I know. Not many people around here do. And I know your family has been doing it hard for a number of years.”

  “Isn’t there anything – isn’t there some other way?”

  Joshua’s face creased. “You could get your father to pray for help,” he suggested, “or you could have her put to sleep.”

  Satchel stood up quickly. Moke was lying peacefully and the blood had stopped seeping from her mouth. He ran a hand along her body and she made a half-hearted effort to get up. He eased her down again, smoothing back her satin ears. “She’s my friend,” he said. “I want her to live.”

  Joshua nodded. “People become very attached to their animals. But sometimes there’s nothing we can do. Sometimes, our alternatives are all as hopeless as each other. I can keep her comfortable overnight, if you want time to think about it.”

  Satchel said nothing. He looked into Moke’s eyes. He could hardly remember a time when those glittering orbs hadn’t followed him closely, accompanying everything he did. When he looked at her, he hardly registered that what he saw was dog: she was his ever-present shadow. Hers was the face he saw on waking: she was the one who wanted to be with him, the one who watched and waited for him, who felt his absence badly. She was a clown when he needed cheering, the ears for his thoughts and plans. She had given him reason to get up in
the morning, and she had stopped the days from seeming too long. He looked at her, and he thought. He thought about money, how it had strangled his life bloodless for so many years. His mother had once told him not to think about money and to see, instead, all the good things he had. She had given him a puppy, and he suddenly felt that Moke was the only purely good thing he had ever known.

  “Joshua,” he said, “if I could get the money in a few months, would you fix her now?”

  “Where would you get those sort of funds, Satchel?”

  He kept his hands on Moke’s cool body. He thought he’d have to drag the words from himself but they came with surprising ease. “I have a friend who’s offered me a job. I’d have to go a long way from here, but I could send you money every week. It would take a while, but I’d pay you back eventually.”

  Joshua lowered his eyes, considering. Satchel waited, tensing with dread. He did not know what he would do if the vet refused and he prayed that the old man, like Laura, could look beyond money and see something more. If he couldn’t, Satchel wondered where he would search to find worth in anything. There would be no point, any more, in trying to live decently, in being good in the hope that this would bring goodness.

  Joshua finally looked at him, and thumped the sink with a hand. “I’m a soft bloody touch,” he said. “You better keep your promise, young man, or I’ll be after you with a hatchet. Animals I like; people I don’t trust or care for. I’ll fix your friend, but I’ll have my eye on you.”

  Satchel helped him carry the dog to the car, and when the vet had driven off with her and left him alone in the shade of the school bus he sank against a tyre and calmed himself until he was sure he would not cry.

  He drove the bus around the outskirts of the big town hoping the huge silver vehicle would go unseen. He felt lonely without Moke beside him and he was wretched with concern for her, but he tried to put her from his mind. He had told her to be a good dog and knew she would try to be.