Island

by Alistair Macleod

  When the horses arrived home they were covered with froth, the muscles of their shoulders and flanks trembled and twitched and their eyes were glassy and wild. The people of the house came out then and with lanterns and flashlights began to retrace the journey of the wagon, seeking to find him in the roadside ditch or over the cliffs edge on the boulders touched by the sea, or even perhaps lying sprawled in the middle of the road. But they did not find him all that night and in the morning someone brought the official, final news. They noticed then that the reins had been cut, and wondered why they had not noticed it before.

  But that is ahead of my story. For at that meeting on the narrow road and in the presence of the bull, we did not know what future was in store for any of us. Our present seemed too real.

  In memory, now, he moved with tremendous speed, although he did not seem to hurry and the illusion was probably due to the length of his legs and the amount of ground he covered in a single step. Without breaking stride, he bent down and his right hand scooped up a large rock which lay by the roadside. It seemed almost the size of a bowling ball yet he carried it easily and lightly in his gigantic hand. As he approached the rearing, lunging bull, he extended his left hand up and forward until it grasped one of the mountain sheep horns and then in one fluid arc of motion and follow-through, he brought the rocky boulder down between the bull’s concentrated, widespread eyes. The thud of the rock on skull was like the sound on the butchering days and the bull toppled sideways and to his knees. His eyes, drained of their passion, rolled glassily upwards in their sockets, and two thin streams of saliva, now green from regurgitated grass, trickled from his nostrils and back into his sagging mouth. His penis, still dripping fluid, collapsed limply within its sheath. His day’s breeding or attempted breeding was over.

  “Did he get it in?” he said, wiping his hand on his overalls and then reaching for one of the rum bottles.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I couldn’t see.”

  “If he got it in,” he said, “you never can be sure. What are you doing here anyway, apart from trying to get yourself killed?”

  Briefly and disjointedly I stammered out the nature of my mission.

  “Well,” he said, “you may as well keep going. I’ll go with you partway if you want. Here, you jump on the horse.”

  Easily and with the same arm he had used for the rock, he lifted me up to the back of the horse and then passed me the reins. He took Morag’s rope in his hand and almost automatically she began to move in step with him while I followed behind on the horse. I looked back once at the bull and he was still kneeling and partially lying by the roadside where he had been struck down. His head seemed to loll to one side.

  After we had negotiated the remainder of the hairpin turns and had travelled perhaps a mile, he stopped and passed Morag’s rope towards me. I dismounted from the horse, exchanging the reins for the proffered rope.

  “You should be all right now,” he said. “Perhaps you should go back by the other road.”

  Taking a deep pull from one of his rum bottles, he mounted the black horse and turned him in the direction of his original homeward journey.

  Morag and I continued on our way more quietly and more slowly than when we had set out. When we entered the laneway to the MacDougall yard, the sun was almost setting and I could see that they were hurrying to get their last load of hay into the barn before darkness. Mr. MacDougall was on top of the hay wagon, organizing the pitches tossed up by the others, and he was not awfully glad to see us.

  “Jesus H. Christ, another goddamn cow,” he said, driving his fork deep into the hay before him. I was reminded of my father’s earlier remarks.

  Nevertheless, he climbed down from the wagon and his place was taken by one of his sons. On the way to the barn, I told him what had happened.

  “Did he get it in?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “I couldn’t see.”

  “He probably didn’t,” he said, “if it happened as fast as you say. Perhaps he didn’t reach her. Sometimes it takes them a while to get set. Anyway, we’ll just have to see.”

  I stood in the dusky yard, clutching Morag’s rope and waiting for the cherry-red and white bull with all the proper characteristics to come moaning forth, guided by a long wooden staff snapped into the ring of his nose. The breeding was almost leisurely and seemed thorough.

  “Well, this one is sure as hell in,” said MacDougall appreciatively. “No doubt about that. It should be all right.”

  After the bull was returned to his barn, I paid MacDougall the fee and he went into his house and then returned with a scribbler from which he tore a page. On it he wrote the date, and Morag’s ownership, and the fact that the breeding had occurred. He squinted his eyes in the dusky gloom and his hands were heavy and thick and unaccustomed to holding the stubby, yellow pencil. The funky odour of the bull’s perspiration and semen still hung about his hands and about the man himself.

  On the return we took a more travelled route and I was afraid as the darkness descended that we might be hit by a passing car or truck, but there was little traffic and we walked steadily and briskly. Although the route was longer, the return journey seemed much shorter than the outgoing one, the way return journeys often do. It was totally dark when we entered our own yard and my father was in the barn, where he seemed to be waiting.

  “How did you get along?” he asked.

  Again, I stated my story.

  “Do you think he got it in?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I was so exhausted I could hardly stand. My father took Morag’s rope from me and led her into the barn. I went into the house and to bed without eating any supper. The mark from Morag’s rope still burned and circled redly about my hand and wrist.

  During the weeks that followed I played and replayed the events of the day within the privacy of my mind. I half hoped she had not conceived so that we could perhaps start over again; but I knew that if she had not, valuable time would already be lost and a September mating would at best produce a summer calf instead of a spring one; and that would perhaps be too late for the calf club’s organization. When the September dates came, I watched Morag anxiously but there were no signs. She grazed contentedly and lay in the sun by the sea and walked home placidly to be milked. She seemed at ease with everything.

  We went into September seriously then with a new round of activities: grain crops had to be harvested, and preparations began for the digging of potatoes. School reopened and I was in the eighth grade. There were various fall fairs and exhibitions, and our agricultural representative was everywhere. The first truckload of lambs was hauled away, bleating in the autumn sun, and the vines and tendrils of the vegetable gardens turned to russet and then to darker brown.

  In October Morag was still quiet and calm when the serious butchering and selling began, and by Hallowe’en, when the first snow fell, she and the other animals entered the stables for their winter confinement.

  All winter I watched her anxiously and nervously, almost as if I were the young expectant father. When she began to grow heavier I moved her to a special stall so she might have more room, and sometimes I would place my hands and arms around her expanded girth, hoping I might feel life. When first I felt it, we were already out of the coldest depth of winter and into the erratic, gale-filled month of March. The calf became even more real then, as I led her through my mind in various elegant postures and positions.

  Spring came early that year and although the nights remained cold, during the days the sun shone warmly down upon our backs as we went about repairing fences and replacing sluices and generally rectifying the ravages of winter. By May first the cattle were out during the day busily seeking the first adventurous blades of grass. During the first week the older, more mature, animals still sought the relative warmth of the stable at night while the younger ones seemed quite willing to give up warmth for the advantages of freedom. I was torn between Morag’s giving bir
th outside where there would be less chance of infection but possible dangers from the cold, or keeping her inside where her surroundings would be warmer but more constricted and less sanitary. She was now so heavy that she seemed almost to fall when she lay down and she had great difficulty in getting up.

  In the late afternoon of the tenth of May when I went down to the shore for the cows I could not see Morag among them and I knew then that her time had come, apart from any decision that might be mine. I searched for half an hour, knowing that she would not give birth near the sea, which was still dotted with the winter’s ice floes and the source of chilling winds, so I began to criss-cross the wooded hollows and the inland sheltered gatherings of spruce. Finally I found her heavy tracks deep in the wet spring earth. They were already nearly filled with water, indicating that she had passed a considerable time before. I followed them across a small stream which trickled from a marsh and then around the edge of the marsh itself and then up a steep incline and finally to the edge of a considerable grove of spruce and fir.

  The trees of the grove were closely crowded together. Parting the branches and still following the heavy tracks in the brown needled floor, I came suddenly into a small clearing which was almost like a room. The edges of it were bordered by wild brambles which had not yet begun to bud, and there were also several older heavier trees which had been uprooted and toppled by the winter winds and now lay like heavy barriers along the wooded perimeter. There seemed no way out of it except through the entranceway that we had used. Morag was lying on her side when I entered. She was already greatly dilated and the mucus discharge had begun. She struggled to her feet when I entered and swung her horns towards me and for a moment I was afraid that she might charge even as the unborn calf began to protrude. But then she became calmer, and after pacing several preparatory circles she flopped heavily down upon her side once more.

  As in all births, it seemed surprisingly fast once it actually began. After all the months of our waiting, it seemed to take no time at all.

  His shoulders were heavy and thick and his chest was large. He was mostly white but his head and neck were a brindled grey that shaded at times almost into blue. No formal heritage was visible in the way he looked and there was nothing like him in any book entitled Standard Breeds of Cattle. Morag rose and turned to lick the mucus from his nostrils and nudged him with her nose. Almost immediately he tried to struggle to his feet, clothed in the shimmering curtains of placenta which hung transparently from about his newborn frame.

  He tottered and fell and tottered and fell but then seemed to gain control of his wobbly legs even as his mother’s nose pushed him firmly but gently towards his first nursing. They seemed very glad to see each other, and if disappointment was mine it obviously was not shared by them.

  The calf club wish ended there in the tiny groved room on the tenth of May, when the eighth grade was not yet completed.

  I do not think I had to work as hard that summer. Perhaps it was just that the weather was better. Or that I was older. Or that my parents were doing more than I realized. Perhaps all of them together. Anyway, there seemed to be more free time, and that was the summer I flung myself into baseball with a passionate enthusiasm.

  We played some evenings and on Sunday afternoons and we travelled considerable distances. I found that I could hit the ball naturally and easily but it was the fielding that I loved most of all. I played third base and the shortstop and I divided up our territory and responsibilities.

  I would wait then for the bouncers and the line drives and the ground balls with delicious intensity. I would hope that each ball would be hit to me, and I do not recall any of them getting by. I would lunge and leap and bend and fall and pivot and turn and then hope that the next one might once again be mine. In my small area of the earth it seemed that everything was under my control.

  WINTER DOG

  (1981)

  I am writing this in December. In the period close to Christmas, and three days after the first snowfall in this region of southwestern Ontario. The snow came quietly in the night or in the early morning. When we went to bed near midnight, there was none at all. Then early in the morning we heard the children singing Christmas songs from their rooms across the hall. It was very dark and I rolled over to check the time. It was 4:30 A.M. One of them must have awakened and looked out the window to find the snow and then eagerly awakened the others. They are half crazed by the promise of Christmas, and the discovery of the snow is an unexpected giddy surprise. There was no snow promised for this area, not even yesterday.

  “What are you doing?” I call, although it is obvious.

  “Singing Christmas songs,” they shout back with equal obviousness, “because it snowed.”

  “Try to be quiet,” I say, “or you’ll wake the baby.”

  “She’s already awake,” they say. “She’s listening to our singing. She likes it. Can we go out and make a snowman?”

  I roll from my bed and go to the window. The neighbouring houses are muffled in snow and silence and there are as yet no lights in any of them. The snow has stopped falling and its whitened quietness reflects the shadows of the night.

  “This snow is no good for snowmen,” I say. “It is too dry.”

  “How can snow be dry?” asks a young voice. Then an older one says, “Well, then can we go out and make the first tracks?”

  They take my silence for consent and there are great sounds of rustling and giggling as they go downstairs to touch the light switches and rummage and jostle for coats and boots.

  “What on earth is happening?” asks my wife from her bed. “What are they doing?”

  “They are going outside to make the first tracks in the snow,” I say. “It snowed quite heavily last night.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Shortly after 4:30.”

  “Oh.”

  We ourselves have been nervous and restless for the past weeks. We have been troubled by illness and uncertainty in those we love far away on Canada’s east coast. We have already considered and rejected driving the fifteen hundred miles. Too far, too uncertain, too expensive, fickle weather, the complications of transporting Santa Claus.

  Instead, we sleep uncertainly and toss in unbidden dreams. We jump when the phone rings after 10:00 p.m. and are then reassured by the distant voices.

  “First of all, there is nothing wrong,” they say. “Things are just the same.”

  Sometimes we make calls ourselves, even to the hospital in Halifax, and are surprised at the voices which answer.

  “I just got here this afternoon from Newfoundland. I’m going to try to stay a week. He seems better today. He’s sleeping now.”

  At other times we receive calls from farther west, from Edmonton and Calgary and Vancouver. People hoping to find objectivity in the most subjective of situations. Strung out in uncertainty across the time zones from British Columbia to Newfoundland.

  Within our present city, people move and consider possibilities:

  If he dies tonight we’ll leave right away. Can you come?

  We will have to drive as we’ll never get air reservations at this time.

  I’m not sure if my car is good enough. I’m always afraid of the mountains near Cabano.

  If we were stranded in Rivière-du-Loup we would be worse off than being here. It would be too far for anyone to come and get us.

  My car will go but I’m not so sure I can drive it all the way. My eyes are not so good any more, especially at night in drifting snow.

  Perhaps there’ll be no drifting snow.

  There’s always drifting snow.

  We’ll take my car if you’ll drive it. We’ll have to drive straight through.

  John phoned and said he’ll give us his car if we want it or he’ll drive – either his own car or someone else’s.

  He drinks too heavily, especially for long-distance driving, and at this time of year. He’s been drinking ever since this news began.

  He drinks bec
ause he cares. It’s just the way he is.

  Not everybody drinks.

  Not everybody cares, and if he gives you his word, he’ll never drink until he gets there. We all know that.

  But so far nothing has happened. Things seem to remain the same.

  Through the window and out on the white plane of the snow, the silent, laughing children now appear. They move in their muffled clothes like mummers on the whitest of stages. They dance and gesture noiselessly, flopping their arms in parodies of heavy, happy, earthbound birds. They have been warned by the eldest to be aware of the sleeping neighbours so they cavort only in pantomime, sometimes raising mittened hands to their mouths to suppress their joyous laughter. They dance and prance in the moonlight, tossing snow in one another’s direction, tracing out various shapes and initials, forming lines which snake across the previously unmarked whiteness. All of it in silence, unknown to and unseen and unheard by the neighbouring world. They seem unreal even to me, their father, standing at his darkened window. It is almost as if they have danced out of the world of folklore like happy elves who cavort and mimic and caper through the private hours of this whitened dark, only to vanish with the coming of the morning’s light and leaving only the signs of their activities behind. I am tempted to check the recently vacated beds to confirm what perhaps I think I know.

  Then out of the corner of my eye I see him. The golden collie-like dog. He appears almost as if from the wings of the stage or as a figure newly noticed in the lower corner of a winter painting. He sits quietly and watches the playful scene before him and then, as if responding to a silent invitation, bounds into its midst. The children chase him in frantic circles, falling and rolling as he doubles back and darts and dodges between their legs and through their outstretched arms. He seizes a mitt loosened from its owner’s hand, and tosses it happily in the air and then snatches it back into his jaws an instant before it reaches the ground and seconds before the tumbling bodies fall on the emptiness of its expected destination. He races to the edge of the scene and lies facing them, holding the mitt tantalizingly between his paws, and then as they dash towards him, he leaps forward again, tossing and catching it before him and zigzagging through them as the Sunday football player might return the much sought-after ball. After he has gone through and eluded them all, he looks back over his shoulder and again, like an elated athlete, tosses the mitt high in what seems like an imaginary end zone. Then he seizes it once more and lopes in a wide circle around his pursuers, eventually coming closer and closer to them until once more their stretching hands are able to actually touch his shoulders and back and haunches, although he continues always to wriggle free. He is touched but never captured, which is the nature of the game. Then he is gone. As suddenly as he came. I strain my eyes in the direction of the adjoining street, toward the house where I have often seen him, always within a yard enclosed by woven links of chain. I see the flash of his silhouette, outlined perhaps against the snow or the light cast by the street lamps or the moon. It arcs upward and seems to hang for an instant high above the top of the fence and then it descends on the other side. He lands on his shoulder in a fluff of snow and with a half roll regains his feet and vanishes within the shadow of his owner’s house.