How Blue Is My Valley

by Jean Gill

  The girl stood up straight, brushed down her muddy skirts and clutched her brocade parcel to her breast. She knew that following her instinct to run would serve for nothing against the wild mercenaries or, at best, suspicious merchants, who were surely heading towards her. She was lucky to have passed a tranquil night - or so the night now seemed compared with the bleak prospect in front of her. What a fool to rush from one danger straight into another, forgetting the basic rules of survival on the open road. To run now would make her prey so she searched desperately for another option. In her common habit, bedraggled and dirty, she was as invisible as she could hope to be. No thief would look twice at her, nor think she had a purse to cut, far less a ransom waiting at home. No reason to bother her.

  What she could not disguise was that, common or not, she was young, female and alone, and the consequences of that had been beaten into her when she was five years old and followed a cat into the forest. Not, of course, that anything bad happened in the forest, where she had lost sight of the cat but instead seen a rabbit’s white scut vanishing behind a tree, as she tried to tell her father when he found her. His hard hand cut off her words, to teach her obedience for her own good, punctuated with a graphic description of the horrors she had escaped.

  All that had not happened in the dappled light and crackling twigs beneath the canopy of leaves and green needles, visited her nightmares instead, with gashed faces and shuddering laughter as she ran and hid, always discovered. Until now, she had obeyed, and it had not been for her own good. Fool that she had been. But no more. Now she would run and hide, and not be discovered.

  She drew herself up straight and tall. No, bad idea. Instead, she slumped, as ordinary as she could make herself, and felt through the slit in her dress, just below her right hip, for her other option should a quick tongue fail her. The handle fitted snugly into her hand and her fingers closed round it, reassured. The dagger was safe in its sheath, neatly attached to her under-shift with the calico ties she had laboriously sewn into the fabric in secret candle-light. She had full confidence in its blade, knowing well the meticulous care her brother gave his weapons. As to her capacity to use it, let the occasion be judge. And after that, God would be, one way or another.

  By now, the oncoming chink of harness and thud of hooves was so loud that she could hardly hear the low growl beside her. The dog was on his feet, facing the danger. He threw back his head and gave the deep bark of his kind against the wolf. The girl crossed herself and the first horse came into sight.

  My recommendations, if you would like to read another of my books:-

  Someone to Look Up To

  Chapter 1

  Let me show you where I was born. Shut your eyes and imagine skies so blue they dazzle, snow so white the glitter bursts against your closed eyelids, mountains dancing in the winter sunshine, dancing all the year round. In summer, the high peaks swirl their veils of heat-haze and tease with sudden nakedness to catch your breath, the chain of summits stretching beyond the horizon, whispering the ancient southern names, Pic de Viscos, Pic de Néouvielle, Pic du Midi de Bigorre, Pic de Macaupera. The shadow of a cloud drifts on the wind, lazy as a grand raptor surveying its domain, darkening an entire valley, the Val du Lavadon. I was born in the Pyrenees, with my two sisters and four brothers, seven little white rat-sausages jostling blindly to reach our mother’s teats. I’ve seen a few pups born in this long life of mine, so what I can’t remember, I can imagine. The warmth and smell of mother, the sleepy pleasure of a milk-full tummy and the newness of an outside world on this body after nine weeks growing to a curled-up ball inside my mother’s baby-sac.

  So much to learn... stretching, wobbling on four legs, squeaking for food, pushing Stratos off the teat I wanted (if you’d known Stratos, you’d have pushed him too), cuddling up to Snow, Sancho and Septimus to sleep in a pile of puppy fluff. The first thing I really remember was when I was about six weeks. You know how it feels when someone niggles you and niggles you; a push here, a little nip there and then one of those sideways looks just to make sure you knew it was deliberate? One sideways look too many, big brother! I can still feel that rush of power into my brains, paws and, most importantly, teeth, which sank into that plump cushion of flesh like a claw into mud. I’ve tried again and again to explain the pleasure of biting but words just don’t do it. The first time, there’s the slight hesitation as the points of your little teeth puncture the skin and then you’re in! And he’s squirming and squealing ... and then it all goes wrong. He’s spoiling it by asking for help, real help, and he’s your brother so it hurts you to hurt him and you have to stop – and you hate him for making you stop. So you’ve discovered how complicated life is for a dog. You can’t just do what you want because the want splits in two and fights itself, confusing you.

  When Stratos and I met up again, years later, and were telling our stories by the light of the moon, that was something we shared. First bite. One good thing about the animal refuge was that you did get to see the moon. If I think of anything else that was good about the refuge, I’ll be sure to let you know, when the time comes. But each bit of the story has its place, time and smell, and the moment for extra-strong disinfectant, ears oozing pus and dog-breath sweet with worms, has not yet come. What Stratos and I did agree on was that the second bite was more dangerous, sweeter with the knowledge of breaking the taboo, knowing you had to be strong enough to follow through. I’m talking about biting dogs of course, not about – whisper the very words! – biting Humans. Though Stratos and I had to talk about that too, given his situation. He’s my hero, you know? But as I said, everything in its own time.

  So, there we were, puppy-fighting and of course Stratos bit me back as soon as I let up on him. And if you don’t forget the first bite you’ve given, boy do you rememember the first time you got bitten, which is usually the reply to your own attempt! I was so shocked, I screamed before it hurt and then the pain flooded me with rage and I turned right back on him once more. He was shocked in his turn, and stopped biting me, with just that little shake he always gives. From then on we worked out that it was safer to stop at the squealing stage but Stratos’ extra power was already starting to weigh in for him, even as a pup.

  Dominant? Stratos? Maybe when he was little. When he was grown up, he didn’t need to do anything. He’d just walk. And when Stratos walked you felt this urge to roll over in front of him, wag your tail, look at some far-distant imagined mountain, look anywhere but at Stratos himself . You’d want to say, ‘Hey Stratos, did you skip breakfast? Here have my throat. I don’t really need it.’ You’d know that once you’d cleared up the niceties of status, you’d follow him to the ends of the earth and that same big brother would protect you to the death. We were pack.

  Our talents were very different and I could hold my own in some ways. Not always the brightest puppy in the pack, my brother, and he didn’t get the chance to learn like some of us did. ‘University of Life,’ he told me later. ‘Some of us learned the hard way, Sirius, and some of us ARE hard.’ But even then, I wondered. What if things had gone differently for Stratos?

  But that’s me, Sirius, the sort of dog who wonders ‘what if?’ The sort of dog who started as a little rat-sausage, jostling his siblings to reach a teat, unaware that there could ever be more to life than Mother. That’s something else that Stratos and I talked about – Mother, otherwise known as Morgana de Soum de Gaia. She’d been a beauty queen and even though we were dragging her down, ‘draining her haggard,’ she complained, there was something about the way she carried herself that said ‘Princess’. She knew it and she made sure that we knew it too. ‘A Soum de Gaia never does that,’ Mother would sniff contemptuously at some puppy pee or worse fouling the straw, ‘in its own den!’ and then the offender would be picked up by the scruff of his neck and tossed into the yard, where the rest of us would mock and nip whoever was suffering Mother’s discipline, just to show her our support. And because it was fun, of course. And doubly fun if it was Stratos
in trouble and not allowed to answer us back. Not so much fun when it was your own wrinkled rolls of neck fat gripped firmly between forty-two maternal teeth and your own four waddle-paddles pedaling in mid-air, not as keen on flying as you’d thought.

  ‘A Soum de Gaia stands like this,’ she told us and made us practise standing very still, head high and stretched out a bit, front legs straight and parallel, back legs uncomfortably far back, as if you were having a stretch and then someone said, ‘Hold it there!’ and kept you like that. Still, practising ‘the position’ with Mother made it easier when Alpha Human took us one by one, put us up on a table and did ‘grooming’ and ‘the position’. Mother had not prepared us for ‘Show me your little ears,’ when our Human flicked them back and rubbed them clean with olive oil. You can imagine how much fun we had afterwards licking oily ears. I reckon we were the puppies with the cleanest ears in the whole Pyrenees. Nor were we prepared for ‘Show me your little teeth’. In fact Mother tended to be averse to seeing too much of our little teeth and had shown her own once or twice when someone really caught her teat on the raw. We didn’t have much option about showing our little teeth to our Human as she put her fingers to our mouths and curled our lips back. If you’d seen the expression on Stratos’ face you’d have bust a gut laughing. I wasn’t convinced he’d be a Beauty winner, even at that age; no-one checking Stratos’ little teeth could look in his eyes and think how cute he was. And ‘little teeth’ was not the worst for the boys although at that age we weren’t too fussed really. But when I look back, I do wonder now whether Humans ought to be quite so free and easy in checking out our masculinity. But at the time I just thought that it was part of being a Soum de Gaia to have that tickly feeling you get when a Human puts her hands down there and checks there are two. Perhaps I was right, because I’ve met a few dogs since then who feel strongly enough about their rights to consider the very idea sufficient provocation to justify the B-word. I don’t know. I think you have to take their intentions into account with Humans and they mean well, you know, in their own strange way. And Stratos surprised me there. He always got that slightly glazed look in his eyes that meant he liked it. No accounting for tastes. Anyway both of us achieved the ‘one, two!’ tally without any trouble at all. No surprise there.

  Not only was Mother a Princess, but she knew her realm from puppyhood and had grown up with most of the other dogs, the Soum de Gaia aunts, uncle and sisters. But Father was from Away and at twilight, the hour for wolf-tales before dark and real work, Mother would tell us the story of how they met and a slightly abridged version of how they mated. Amados de los Bandidos, my father. The very name was enough to make you want to run off into the mountains and howl with him, according to my mother, and she’d heard enough about him from our Human to make any bitch salivate. Amados this and Amados that and more importantly Amados for THE marriage. Even a Soum de Gaia can look at a rottweiler swaggering along the street, or the local hero with half an ear, mange and fleas, and wonder what he might be like... or so we heard during the twilight stories. But youthful fancies are only that and dynasties are founded on parents like ours, so Morgana accepted her destiny (and so should we, was the maternal message).

  They met at the annual gathering, the Great Show at Argelès-Gazost, with snow sparkling on the mountains and dogs everywhere, not just the Pyreneans, but the little Pyrenean and Catalan Shepherds, and the great Matins with their bleary, bloodshot eyes. There were music, dancing, cafés overflowing with dogs and their owners, festive with horse-drawn tour-carts. Pennants were strung between the houses, the horses were wearing garlands, and even some of the dogs were wearing Béarnaise red and yellow kerchiefs round their necks. Apparently this was all to celebrate the meeting of my parents. And where did The Event take place? Where else but in the Show Ring of course. While she was strutting her stuff with the girls, he was leaning casually against the fence-post, starting one of those competition drools that can reach tail-length if you’re lucky.

  Stratos and I have discussed drool technique and he admits that he loses from impatience. At about half-tail length, the urge to shake your drool is just so strong that he can’t resist it, the way the dewlaps vibrate, the ears flap, and the cool slobber sprays your scent as far as a good head-shake will send it. I have told him that if, like me, you hold out, stay very still, focus your mind on the longest stalactite of drool in history, the satisfaction of the shake is even greater but he just can’t do it. Still, both of us have elicited squeals of pleasure from our masters at the quality of our drool-sprays – I’ve even seen mine rushing round to add some water to what I’ve already provided on his clothes and body. All very satisfying.

  So there was Dad, starting a drool but, as I say, you need a bit of luck, and it wasn’t to be. His Human had the towel clamped to Father’s mouth before he’d even reached a respectable drop and, when Mother sent a flirty look in his direction, what she saw was the sheepish and sullen upper face of her fiancé, his fine head cut in two by the pink towel wiping his jaw. She says it made her laugh so much the judge awarded her ‘best expression’ and commented on how lively and spirited she was in the Ring. She won of course. That goes without saying. I have no intention of boring you with all the Shows and the prizes, and anyway that wasn’t how my life went.

  Then it was her turn to watch him and this time his Human was more of an asset. He knew she was watching and every prance, the lift of his head, every sparkle in his eye was for her and when he took his static pose, he was looking right at her with melt-your-heart-brown eyes and she was won. The judge commented on his fine aroundera and his ‘star quality’ as if he were performing for a special audience. You bet. For those of you new to my world, the aroundera is what we in the Pyrenees call the wheel, that high circle we make with our tails when we’re happy or excited or just saying, ‘Hey, world look at me’. Human words are so limited compared with what a dog can say with just its tail alone, but the gist of it is, aroundera=good mood. And the better the tail, the better the aroundera. Father’s tail was perfect, a feathered curve cascading in perfect proportion but his master-stroke was to stand with his tail in repose – down, relaxed with the little hook in the end ready to rise – then when the judge looked at him, up went that tail and like the great seducer he was, my father timed the moment impeccably. He won of course. That goes without saying. I think that by this stage he was already Champion of France, Spain, the World, the Universe and Everything, so it’s difficult not to be blasé about shows.

  The two of them had a chance for some more personal, nose to bottom, contact while their Humans talked travel and transport, then two months later my mother headed over the mountains. Just because he had ‘won her’ at the show didn’t mean she made it easy for him. Oh no. She enjoyed the chase as much as the next girl and the chase used every gallop of ground she could run round, every bush she could turn behind, and every insult she could hurl at him when he caught up with her. No-one would have given them beauty prizes, or dared to check their little teeth, as Mother finally stopped running away and succumbed to the oldest instinct in the world. And though she hadn’t seen him or heard of him since, she left us in no doubt that his name was on our birth certificates. And what a name. What a dog. Someone for us to live up to.

  ‘No pressure there then,’ I told Stratos. Some of the others drank it all in, the shows, the father from away, the romance of a name – and nothing more than a name and your imagination – but Stratos and I, we always wanted something else. We had no idea whatsoever what we wanted but we were already sure we wanted something else. And we’d reached eight weeks, the age of the Choosing, when our chance for Something Else might come knocking on the door.

  Thank you for reading my work. I hope you enjoyed it. If you would like to continue reading, all my books are available in print and ebook form from most retailers.

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