A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

by C. A. Fletcher

  On the other side of the squall, the visibility cleared enough for me to see that the red sails had been swallowed by a larger bank of rain ahead of us. I pushed back the dripping hood of the oilskin and stared into the weather, for the first time in the long day unable to see what we were chasing. I knew it had to be there—I had been unsighted for a short amount of time but not nearly long enough for Brand to have got away—so its absence unsettled me.

  Looking back on it, I can’t really believe how stupid anger had made me. Other than arguments with my family, which were as natural to us as water is to the fish that swim in it, I had no experience with a serious confrontation with a stranger who wished me ill. Bringing the gun meant I had some unconscious awareness that there was danger ahead, but the bow and arrows always went where I did, much as you would have carried a telephone wherever you went in your more crowded world. It’s quicker to shoot a rabbit than it is to lay a snare for it if you’re caught foodless away from home, and shooting for the pot was second nature to all of us both on and off the island.

  Not having the red sails in sight was alarming, but also jolted me out of my one-track mind. I had to think of other possible tracks that my future might be about to go down. Although the last glimpse I had had of Brand had been that infuriating smile, I had to think that he might hurt me. But I didn’t think he would. If he had been that kind of monster, the kind I had read so many stories about, he would just as easily have killed us in our sleep and pillaged our home at his leisure. But he had just stolen from us and tried to slink away before we woke. So a thief. But not a killer. But a thief when confronted might turn violent.

  Setting out on a chase without a good plan is a very stupid thing to do, as it turns out. Almost as stupid as thinking you’re clever. If I had been clever, I would have either turned back for home, or sailed after him until we were close enough to talk. And then shot him. I was not someone to give up easily. But I was not a killer.

  I’m still not one of those things.

  My clever plan was to fight fire with fire. I had no confidence in being able to talk him out of his thievery. And I would not be able to best him if it came to violence. So fire with fire meant stealing from the thief. Which meant stealth and cleverness. I knew I had one: I thought I had the other. And ideally it meant not being seen. Which is not an easy thing on the open sea. But as I looked around me, I realised that we were no longer on the ocean, but within the inner islands. The sun was dropping behind me, and would be directly in Brand’s eyes. Better still, the dark loom of Coll and Tiree were also at my back as the sun set behind the low hills. I would be hard to see. And having seen the last fingernail sliver of waning moon over the familiar crags above my home yesterday, I knew the coming night would be moonless and dark.

  Looking ahead, I could make out the long hummock of the next island and the mainland beyond stretching away on either side of the squall in which I knew Brand was hidden. Seeing both ends of the island, I was confident that I could see if he went to the right or left of the land, and this knowledge made me try something I thought at the time was the cleverest thing.

  I took down my sails and threw out the drift anchor. Now, as the cone of material filled with water and the line went tight behind me, I could keep the boat stable against tide and wind, and hopefully pause and watch, camouflaged by the dropping sun and the land astern. Brand would think I’d lost him, or maybe been too scared to follow him between the two islands.

  My plan, clever as it was, was based on the fact that no one would sail at night, especially where we now were. I knew Brand was a liar and a thief, but I also knew he was not a fool. These inner waters were rock-strewn and skerry-toothed, and sailing in the dark would turn into drowning in the dark before you knew it.

  The Sweethope lay low in the water, and even though my bare mast stuck high into the air above me, I found I was crouching down with a knee on the companionway, as if that would help me hide. Jip saw something was up and got up off the bed he’d made on the nets to come and stand next to me.

  I kept the rudder hard against my thigh, feeling the way it pushed against the twin forces of wind and tide, keeping us steady. And then, as the sun dipped and the world instantly seemed to get colder, the squall worried off to the right and the visibility cleared enough to reveal Brand’s sails moving round a headland I had not seen against the larger mass of the island behind it. I thought, in my cleverness, that he was running to lay up in a hidden bay for the night, maybe even trying to hide from me as he did so. I stood up. Jip whimpered. I put a hand on his head and asked him to be quiet. Sound can travel far over the water.

  I was excited. What was happening was of course just an accident of timing, but in my cleverness, in my hubris, I thought he was falling into a trap I had set him. You probably already know what hubris means. I had to look it up in a dictionary the first time I came across it in a book. But if you don’t, it means getting such a big head that you miss the bad thing creeping up behind you.

  I was so excited that the moment the red sails disappeared I hauled mine back up and forgot the sea anchor and nearly got knocked off the boat as the scurry of evening wind that always comes in the moment after the sun goes down hit the sail and caught me unprepared. The boat tilted and the boom swung and smacked so many stars into my head that I thought my skull had been cracked.

  I swore and Jip did bark and I let him as I struggled back to my feet and got busy sorting out the mess I’d made of the boat. Three minutes later the dog was quiet, the sea anchor was aboard and I was underway, heading for the small island ahead.

  I made it across the water before it became too dangerous in the dark, but in truth it was not a great spot to drop an anchor. It was on the weather side of the land, and there were skerries all around, hungry reefs waiting to snag the boat and take the bottom out of it. In the end I decided to drop two anchors to hold the boat a little further out than I might have done if the light had been better. I decided I would unstrap the kayak and paddle across. I would leave Jip, which he would not like, but the stealthiness I was anticipating was not one that would be helped if he were to bark.

  I thought this was a thing I would do better on my own.

  So. Cleverness. Hubris. And the sketchiest of plans.

  What could go wrong?

  Chapter 8

  The bay at the back of the ocean

  Later I found the name of the bay I had anchored in on some old charts, but from the water it didn’t look significant enough for anyone to have bothered giving it one. I could hear Jip’s reproachful growling behind the cockpit door as I slipped the kayak over the stern and held it there in the darkening water while I carefully got aboard and pushed off. I’d decided to leave the gun because there was no guarantee that even if I was forced to pull the trigger the bullet would fire. The ammunition we have was made long ago, and about half of it hangs fire and just goes click. I decided that if I took the gun I would be risking going click at someone who might well then take it amiss and retaliate with something more than clicking.

  I was not interested in violence. The worst stories I read were the ones that ended in violence. When I was little I had a stash of old illustrated magazines about superheroes. I loved them for a bit, because they were so bright and drawn with a real joy for movement and design, some so vividly that the people seemed to be about to burst out of the page and into my world. They tended to walk around in really tight clothes and however much the writers tried to hide the fact, and however much they appeared to fret about what to do, all the stories ended up in a huge fight. Dad said they were written for younger boys really. I liked them despite that, until I didn’t. And when I realised I didn’t, I also knew that it was because everything was always a set-up for a punch-up. As if the only way you could solve a problem was by hitting it. Maybe your world liked fighting so much that it thought it had to prepare kids for that by telling them those kind of stories. Or maybe it was the other way round and your world liked fighting bec
ause those were the stories you were given when your minds were young. I didn’t want this story to end with a fight. I just wanted my dog.

  I didn’t feel much like a hero, super or otherwise, as I pushed off from the flat stern of the Sweethope and began to paddle around the rocks lining the curve of land. My mouth felt sticky and my heart was thumping so loudly it almost drowned out the noise of the wind in my left ear as I paddled. My bow, which normally hung across my shoulders so naturally that I never noticed it, now seemed to be digging into my back with every stroke, like a sharp-boned elbow trying to remind me of something I’d forgotten.

  My eyes are good in the dark, better than Bar or Ferg’s ever were, but the light was failing fast. I could see the obvious things to avoid, but I scraped the kayak on a rock lying in wait just below the surface as I cautiously rounded the low headland. The tides had luckily worn it smooth enough that there were no sharp jags of stone to tear the bottom out of the boat and end my plan before it had begun. I paddled on for a few more strokes and then let the incoming tide take me round into the channel without doing anything more with the paddle than keep myself upright. I didn’t want any splashing to alert Brand to my presence if he was on the lookout over the small bay that was revealing itself to me as I quietly drifted into it.

  He wasn’t, and the bay turned out not to be there either. Instead I saw a deckled channel of water separating the smaller island from the larger landmass that loomed on my right. I could see no sign of his boat in the water. My first thought came from a fear, and it was that he had fooled me by sailing straight through the channel and then turned back up the other side of this smaller island. I had a moment of panicked clarity in which I knew he was aboard the Sweethope right now, laughing at me and stealing Jip too, and my muscles had begun to turn the kayak before my mind kicked in and told them to stop, because my eyes had seen something.

  If Brand had not gone ashore, I would have never seen the boat in the darkness. As it was, I caught a strange splash of light from within a building as he explored, and the light was strange because of the window that framed it. It was big and old, old not in a hundred years or just before the Gelding way but old in the way of many centuries past. It looked like a castle window I’d seen in books, not just because of the tall arched shape of it, stark against the night, but because of the stone walls and high-beamed roof I saw for a brief instant as Brand splashed the light of his lantern over it. It wasn’t a castle of course. It was a church. An abbey even. But right then it was more than that. It was an opportunity. Because the other thing that this moment of light appearing like a shape cut out of the darkness with a pair of sharp scissors did was silhouette the mast of his ship on the foreshore. He’d sailed in beside a stone jetty and made fast to it, tucked in so tight that I could easily have paddled past in the blackness and never seen it.

  But now I felt my spirits rise. I could see he was off the boat, and all I had to do was paddle across, tie off to his taffrail and get aboard quickly enough to get Jess out of the cabin where I was sure she must be locked up, then get back to the Sweethope without him knowing what had happened.

  I moved fast, not needing to think much. The kayak moved easy and quiet across the water. Truth is the thing was so much a part of me that I didn’t really think about how to make it go where I wanted any more than you would have thought how to swim or run.

  I slipped in beside his boat and held myself there, soft and quiet, balancing the tug of the tide with my hand flat against the hull. No sound other than wave-lap and wind riffling through the rigging above. I put my ear to the hull, but could hear nothing below decks either.

  I carefully walked the kayak hand over hand to the stern of the boat. Making sure not to have it bang noisily against the hull. And then I tied it off with a knot I could release with one quick tug.

  Walking onto his boat was strange. It felt wrong. Uninvited. Unwelcome. Even though he had stolen from us, this was his home. I pushed the feeling as far away from the front of my mind as I could, crept across the cockpit towards the companionway and put my ear to the hatch, which was closed. There was no noise inside. Not a man’s, not—and this was what I had been hoping for—a dog’s. My fear had been that Jess should get a smell of me and start whining or—worse—barking. I popped my head back up and looked over the cabin towards the island, just in case Brand was silently on his way back, but the light in the church window was still there, and so, I figured, was he.

  I risked a low whistle through the door. There was no answering noise from Jess. Which was not surprising, because once I had eased open the hatch and ventured a look inside, there was no dog, no Brand—but plenty of everything else. The cabin was jammed with things—boxes, bottles, lumps of machinery and sacks that, from the smell and size of them, contained our dried fish. There were bags hanging from the ceiling. The only clear space was a chart table. I would not have liked to be stuck in this cabin on a frisky sea. I ducked below the bags and made my way to the fore-cabin, behind a small door in the bulkhead. The thought came to me that if I was going to pen up a stolen dog while I went exploring on the island, that was exactly where I’d do it. On the other side of that thin wood door with its slatted metal grill.

  I whistled again but there was no noise or movement on the other side. He must have taken Jess ashore with him. My fingers found a padlock with a key in it but it was unlocked, and when I lifted it clear of the hasp the door swung open into more darkness and a worse stink. I could see nothing at all, and something in that deeper stench made me unwilling to blunder in and feel my way around. I dropped the padlock back in the hasp and crouched in the darkness, feeling the soft rise and fall of the sea beneath me, trying to ride out my disappointment. My easy plan was sunk. I couldn’t yet see what to do next. In fact I couldn’t see anything much, deep in this unfamiliar, crowded cabin with a moonless night outside. Could have been the smell of the sacks of stolen fish, but I felt like what’s-his-name in the belly of the whale. Did you know that story? Not the Bible one—the better one. He was a toymaker, and his little boy wasn’t what everyone thought he was. He was a wooden puppet. Pinocchio. That’s what the boy’s name was—not the old guy’s in the whale’s guts. He was a liar and his nose got longer every time he told one. He wasn’t bad though, the boy-not-quite-a-boy. Not mean. Just not grown enough to have a heart yet. I liked that story when I was little. Bar said it sort of fit me, especially after Joy was gone and we did what we had to do to adjust.

  Anyway, what with the fish stink and the darkness, I got an attack of what Brand had called the get-me-outs, and had to un-panic myself for a moment by concentrating on calming my breathing right down. Bar taught me that. She also taught me the difference between fear and panic. Fear’s not a bad thing. It’s quite a useful thing in the right circumstances, where it’s a good response to something dangerous. Panic’s not useful for anything at all except thrashing around and—likely as not—running smack into the very thing you’re scared of.

  I really couldn’t make anything out in the cabin. I felt my way back towards the cockpit, barking my shins on something sharp-edged. Then I tripped on something else and went sprawling across the map table as one of the hanging bags clouted me on the side of the head on the way. The map was clipped to the table with magnets and it shifted and tore a little as I hit it. I steadied myself on the cabin wall and then I put my other hand out to brace myself, felt a pain like a bee sting and found I’d jabbed the needle end of a pair of those things you use for making circles on paper into the fleshy part of my thumb. I yanked them out with a bad word and sucked the tiny but painful hole they’d made.

  As I stood there, I had time to think. The paper that had moved under my hand gave me an idea. The map was important to him. It was how he found his way around. So I would take it. I carefully stood and folded it, shoving it inside my jerkin, and went back out into the cockpit. I thought it might be good to use the knife which I seemed to have drawn from the sheath on my belt and start cutting a
ll the rigging around me, maybe even slash the sails. But breaking things does not come natural to me. Too much of my life, of our lives, has been spent making and mending and trying to rescue broken things and make them useful again. And a good boat that works, even the boat of a bad man, is still a thing I could not feel right about damaging. That’s what’s called a scruple. But there were other ways to slow him down.

  I ducked carefully back into the cabin and picked my way back to the fore-cabin door, taking the padlock. Keeping a close eye on the still-illuminated window on the shore, I crept along the side of the boat until I came to the anchor chain, which I pulled on until I got enough slack to padlock it to a ringbolt set in the deck. If things got to the state where he was chasing me and tried to get underway quickly, he’d have a lot of trouble doing so with an anchor that wouldn’t lift. I smiled as I thought about it. And though I didn’t damage the boat, I did allow myself the small pleasure of dropping the key into the dark water on the other side of the grab rail.

  I thought about taking more time to ransack his lair, maybe to take things to bargain with him for the dog, if it came to that. But I felt unclean being on board. I know that’s a funny word. It makes no sense at all, but that was how I felt. Not because I was trespassing. More because of something about the boat itself. That smell in the fore-cabin wasn’t just a smell you sensed with your nose. There was a story in it, and though I did not know what that story was, I did know it was sad as much as it was bad. As I said, I didn’t believe in ghosts or made-up things like that. But I do believe in atmospheres. And the atmosphere on that boat—on that night, in the deep dark with no one else aboard and no friendly moon in the sky—that atmosphere did feel more alive than it should have. It felt like it was watching me, waiting for me to do something wrong. It was just an atmosphere, a feeling maybe—but it had better night eyes than I did.