They reached a point on the side of a rock face and made their camp in the opening of a cave. They lit a fire and cooked the fish they carried which had been bought in the town and the man made tea in a pot and had to make it four times over for his pot was only big enough for a single serving. With the sun down and the animals tied up, the men sat and drank the tea and the whiskey and talked into the night.
The man told them that his brother was also in the military and that he had suffered an injury two years prior and that his father was too old to tend to his farmland so they could not earn money to eat. He had made that journey across the mountains twice before from his own farm at the east to his father’s farm at the west and that on this trip the goats were being taken there too. He said his wife would not leave their land for her whole family were there and he asked the lord why have a wife at all when all a man needs is his horse and his dogs and his land. They laughed and he said he would not last a single day without her for all her faults. He said he would take the goats to his father and brother for their fleece and their milk and for them to produce more goats and that only in the direst of times would they use them for their meat. Then he added that he didn’t wish for that at all as he had raised all six of the animals himself and their parents before them.
The airmen told stories of their adventures whilst in service and the kid told them of his work and how he had learned in his early years to track animals across open land for research. He told them of his time in Indonesia with the Sumatran tigers and showed them the black outlined tiger tattoo on his flank. The man said that when he was young he had twice seen Temmnick cats in the jungle with his father and he told how he had sat silently on the bank of a river and watched one drinking with its two younglings but he said that now these cats were no more and he hadn’t seen another in twenty years and knew nobody who had. He spoke of his sadness that the progress of man had poisoned the progress of all else and that he was glad he still had his land and his animals. They asked the man if he knew about the devastation that was happening across the globe and the man said that he did know and that there were tremors in his land after it happened and his cattle wouldn’t milk for five days afterwards. They told him some of the stories they had heard in the news about the events unfolding in other lands but the man waved these away with disinterest and said that what happened across seas and mountains was of no interest to him and all that mattered was that the weathers didn’t change so that his crops could still harvest.
When they woke early the next morning the fire was cold and a thick heavy fog hung all about them in every direction, up and down the mountainside. The dogs were curled into each other in the back of the cave and the horse was stepping about nervously and down the hill the goats were bleating to each other where they were tethered in the mist, almost out of view. They gathered up their things and took the pot from the firepit where it still stood and unhitched the horse and the goats and re-hitched them to each other. The dogs sniffed about by the pit picking the scraps of food from the ground and licking the burnt rock.
They set out walking close to each other for none of them could see very far ahead of where they walked.
The Dutchman was at the front walking with the man and leading the horse by the reins and when he glanced back on more than one occasion he couldn’t see the American or the goats at the back of their party for the fog but he could hear the clattering of their hooves on the rock.
The fog remained there for some time and after an hour the man pulled up the horse and stood looking into the grey abyss. He held the bridle in one hand and his walking staff in the other and watched the nothingness.
His narrowing eyes and curled lips gave him away.
“We lost?” asked the American.
He said nothing but he did not have to.
They could see the faint white glow of the sun through the cloud and established an approximate direction and continued to walk blindly into the grey nothingness until the sun was high above them and the clouds began to thin and the visibility improved.
They were lost for the rest of that day but they kept heading west, as was their plan, and while the man didn’t recognise any of the land around him he insisted there was no problem with that and they should press on until he did. They camped again that night on the bank of a river running north to south and stripped to their underwear and washed themselves and their clothes and hung them to dry from the branch of a tree and sat at the fire almost naked. The dogs splashed around playfully with each other and fell asleep in the grass to the north. The man peeled and shared the papayas he had picked on their journey and prepared sesame tea in the pot and they cooked on the fire their one remaining fish wrapped in banana leaf and smoked the cigarettes. The American fashioned a rod from a thin strip of wood and attached to the end of it a length of thread the Dutchman had unwoven from the sack and the man tied a piece of banana to the end and sat on a rock above the river and let the line hang into the water. It was dark again when he returned to them with nothing but the rod.
“Do you know where we are yet?” asked the Dutchman.
“No. I have no map. We are going west”
The Dutchman nodded.
They woke the following morning and the man and the dogs had gone but his horse was standing in the river and the goats remained tethered to the tree stump where they had been the night before.
Up on the hill on the far side of the water the man and the dogs were crouched together on the ridge surveying the view. The dogs left his side together and headed down into the thicket of trees and he whistled to them sharply, remaining crouched.
They watched as one of the hounds skulked from the undergrowth and rounded the trees alone. The man clicked his teeth and the dog stopped again on its haunches as a sheepdog might do and crept forward along the ground this way with its ears pointing straight upwards and its eyes fixed forward. It twitched on the spot.
All was still for a moment until with a thunder of hooves from the trees and the rustling of bushes the small herd of golden deer jumped and stamped from the treeline with the other hound chasing behind them.
Birds exploded from the top of the canopy.
The second dog jumped up and joined the chase and dropped in behind the herd and they ran down the face of the hill together and at the bottom near the trees a smaller doe faltered and lost step and got separated from its herd and the front hound turned to follow it. The second one watched as the herd pulled away and was still watching them when it turned to follow the other dog. It dipped its muzzle, its ears pressed backwards on its thin head and gritted its teeth, increasing its speed to catch the other dog. The doe darted from left to right and turned sharply on the rocks and put some distance between itself and the hounds.
The man was standing now and watching the chase.
The deer turned into the trees and the dogs turned with it, disappearing from view entirely. After a few moments the man jogged down the hill with his staff in his hand and went into the treeline and the kid and the airmen watched until he emerged a few moments later with the two dogs trotting beside him, their tongues hanging low out of their mouths.
He carried only his staff.
When the man returned to them and walked back to the camp none of them made comment on the hunt and the man said nothing.
They gathered their belongings and moved out.
They walked all day until their feet blistered and the Dutchman removed his boots and hung them around his sunburned neck by the laces and walked barefoot. They passed a farm building in the gulley where an old lady was husking corn and the man spoke to her and she gave them all fruit juice to drink and gave water to the dogs and the pony and dried grains to the goats and she showed them on the map the location of her farm. She offered them somewhere to sleep but they declined as it was still noon and they had many more miles to cover that day. All four of them and the horse too would have liked to spend that afternoon sitting drinking juice and resting their leg
s, though the men didn’t admit as that was not what men did in the company of other men and the horse could not, even if it chose to. She showed them on the map the location of a monastery at the top of a hill and she told them they would be offered shelter for the night and no doubt the monks there would have food and be willing to share though she had never been that far across the valleys herself.
They took the pass further west and after a couple of hours they saw the dark spire piercing the afternoon sky on the horizon a few miles away though the walk was longer than they had thought it to be and it was dark when they arrived.
There were no lights on inside and as they neared the old stone building they saw that the place was entirely deserted and had been for some time. There was no door on the front and the stonework had crumbled away on the exterior.
Inside, the huge open hall was circled at the perimeter with tall ornately carved concrete pillars which held up the giant domed ceiling above. The stonework was once patterned and carved but it had worn away and they wondered when last the old lady had known anyone at all to occupy that place as it could not have been for many years indeed.
To one end of the great hall there still existed the remnants of an altar with stone steps leading up to it and a space atop where there had once sat an icon. There were two rooms to the back of the building, each through a doorway, and one was filled with old wooden chairs and a table and a small carved staircase that led up to the top floor where a balcony overlooked the main chamber. The monastery had once been ornate and the fragments of carvings and paintwork remained, a fractured patchwork of memories belonging to another time and all was dark there yet the place retained its air of eternal calm.
They threw down their packs and poured some whiskey and water and lit cigarettes and the man would not let them smoke inside the chamber and shouted for them to go outside as this was, regardless of its state, a holy place.
They lit a fire outside on the top of the hill creating, whether they liked it or not, a beacon to anyone in the surrounding hills who cared to see. They boiled up dried noodles in the pot and ate them without accompaniment and then finished the last of the papaya and a durian the kid had carried up the hill and which smelled awful and tasted great.
When the sun was long down and they were each quiet from the whiskey, a clattering of falling stone came from inside the building and they stood quickly to face it.
The man held his staff out in front of him and one dog barked into the open doorway as the other stood staring with its ears and its tail bolt upright. It pressed its front feet into the ground and hung backwards on its straight legs leaning its head towards the doorway.
The man called into the dark.
There was another sound inside made by more than one set of feet and they heard what they thought to be a man laughing and the men looked at each other and moved slowly towards the door. The American pulled a length of wood from the fire and held the flame into the dark. Its round glow lit the space ahead of them but could not reach the far side of the hall and they couldn’t see anyone inside and the sound stopped.
He picked up a broken piece of stone cladding that had once fallen from the roof and tossed it into the open monastery. It clattered down on the floor and smashed apart and there was again the sound of feet running in the dark.
The front dog saw something in the blackness and shot into the chamber, barking. The other followed it closely and the man shouted for the hounds to stop but they didn’t listen and disappeared inside the building. The American stepped further inside holding out the torchlight and saw across the dark at the far end of the chamber both Pariah hounds at full speed across the floor with their noses six inches from the rearend of a fleeing macaque. It squealed loudly as the dog nipped at its backside but it managed to clamber up one of the pillars to the overhang above.
The dogs circled below it, barking and jumping.
Other monkeys had gathered on the balcony, holding on to each other and peering over the side at the baying dogs.
The man whistled for them again but they didn’t come and he had to go inside with the rope and tie it around the necks of both dogs, one at each end, and haul them back out of the building where he tied them to the horse until they had calmed themselves.
On their fifth day they came off the hills and arrived on the east bank of the Thanlyin river.
A farmer was standing his cattle in the shallows at the river’s edge and spoke to the man while the horse and dogs drank and the kid took off his boots and stepped into the cold water with them. The farmer told him that the bridge their party intended to use and which the man had used on previous journeys was down due to the earthquake a week prior. He said that many of the ruby mines for which the town of Mong Hsu was known had also collapsed and many villagers had lost their lives. The man asked of his brother and his father but the farmer didn’t know them by name and couldn’t tell him but said that other than those in the mines and some working on the mountain, most in the town had escaped harm.
They followed the bank of the river for a short while until they reached a point they deemed narrow enough to cross on foot. The man tied the two dogs together at the neck and tied them both to the pony and led it into the water at a point where the water was moving slower. The kid took hold of the rope which was linked through the neck buckles of the six goats and led them too into the river, although it wasn’t easy to do as the goats wouldn’t put their feet in the water and pulled back on the tether. He stood up to his knees in the river, braced against the current with his pack across the top of his shoulders and the rope at full length, heaving the first goat forward until eventually it gave in and tottered nervously into the water, pulling the second one in the chain with it. They stamped about in the two inches of water as though it burned their hooves.
“Can goats swim?” shouted the American, still on the bank.
The man was now in the centre of the river where the current was stronger and he was holding the side of the horse’s rein with the two dogs swimming next to him, their rope at full length downriver as they fought to swim against the current.
The kid shrugged.
“I guess so. If they have to” the kid shouted back.
The American looked at the goats.
“Well, they have to”
He nudged the back two goats into the water with his boot and they huddled together tight legged with their necks braced against the pulling rope.
The Dutchman also had his pack across his shoulders and was wading into the river. He took hold of the rope at the back end of the herd and pulled the goats sideways into the water until all six were wide eyed and kicking to keep afloat.
“Go” he called to the kid.
The two of them pushed forward through the current, pulling the goats behind them as they swam sideways, bleating loudly. Their scrawny legs were sufficient to keep them afloat but not at propelling them forward at any speed and the two men used all their strength to keep the six kicking animals from drifting away downriver. The man had got his horse and dogs to the other side and the dogs were shaking themselves dry and rolling in the grass and the horse stamped about where it stood with its neck straight as it shook water from its ears. He waded back into the current to meet with the kid and the Dutchman and helped them pull the goats across the river onto the bank where they huddled together, petrified and pouring with water. They didn’t know how to shake themselves like the dogs did for they had not ever been that wet and the kid had to brace himself against them one at a time as the man ran his hands across their faces to wipe the water from their eyes.
The goats spent the remainder of their journey from that point huddled together and travelling as one, traumatised by their experience. The man did not care for they were across the river and while they may not milk for some time they were, all six of them, still alive.
The man was greeted as he led the pony and the wet goats into the dusty town square of Mong Hsu. The airmen and the kid walked behi
nd him with their packs, without shirts and all sunburned and bruised and blistered. The dogs had run away from them when they arrived into the town to find food from one of the many scents they had detected and the man had barely looked up as they went for he knew they would be back.
A younger man in a faded black shirt and woven hat limped out from the cover of a doorway and embraced the man and he called over some boys who took the horse from him and led it away and staked it and gave it water and grain to eat. The man told the airmen and the kid that the younger man was his brother and the man waved and shook their hands with both of his own. The father emerged too from the home and the man embraced him and introduced him and the father smiled to them all through thick wrinkled eyes. He motioned to the goats who were huddled on their rope and the man responded and pointed back the way they had come with a smile.
He turned to the group.
“My father asked what has been done to scare the goats”
They laughed amongst themselves and the man thanked them all and wished them good luck and sent the goats away with a farmhand and gave them directions across the town to a small office wherefrom a mining operation was run, and he told them to ask for his friend there and he would see that they got safe passage west by road and they said their goodbyes and their good lucks and they went their ways.
The little office was dark and hot and the tiny wall fan did little to help. The place smelled of soil and alcohol and cigarette smoke and the girl who led them inside nodded to them and left them standing in the low space amongst the chairs and the pictures of men holding stones and the lines of paper files and boxes. A few moments later a squat man arrived in the doorway, his white shirt wet with sweat and sticking to his chest.
Where Men Once Walked Page 7