Blue Dog

by Louis de Bernières

  ‘Why does he always have an umbrella?’ asked Mick.

  ‘’Cause he hates the sun so much. Hats aren’t good enough.’

  ‘Why’s he here if he hates the sun so much? Can’t he go somewhere else?’

  ‘Doesn’t know anywhere else,’ said Granpa. ‘He’s a Chinaman.’

  ‘Where’s Lamington?’ asked Mick, suddenly worried about what might have happened to the cat.

  ‘Under the bed. Doesn’t like cyclones. When we’ve had enough we’ll give him what’s left of the fish. I’ve got VoVos and Anzac bickies for afters.’

  Mick was disconcerted by the green bones, but the fish was delicious. Afterwards Granpa taught him how to play poker, having to shout the instructions, and then went and found the ludo and snakes-and-ladders board, left over from his son’s childhood. Granpa took sips of Bundy, and let Mick have sniffs of it. They sang a few songs, and Mick asked what a waltzing matilda was, and Granpa said it was supposed to be a swag, but perhaps it was a woman called Matilda, and the swagman was telling her that she was going to come a-waltzing, ‘’cause what’s the point of waltzing with a swag unless you were full as a goog and pretty damn desperate?’

  ‘When we came here, we were squatters,’ said Granpa. ‘I’m a squatocrat. And now I’ve got a thoroughbred. Even if he’s mad as a mother-in-law’s cat. I’ve never given a swagman a hard time, though, and there’s no trooper for miles.’

  ‘I hope Willy’s all right,’ said Mick.

  ‘We’ll find out tomorrow,’ said Granpa.

  They became so used to the slamming and screaming of the cyclone that eventually they stopped paying attention to it, and fell asleep under the table. They were still asleep, propped against each other, when Lamington, finally certain that the cyclone was over, crept out from under the bed, jumped lightly on to the table, and polished their plates to a shine.

  THE GIFT

  WHEN MICK CAME out in the morning, Granpa and the blackfellas were already clearing up the mess. ‘G’day, Micko,’ called Taylor Pete, and ‘G’day’ replied the boy.

  It was a good day, too, with the sun shining brightly, and an unfamiliar humidity in the air. The paddock was a lake of water as far as the eye could see. It would have been beautiful, were it not for the wreckage of trees, the strewn planks, the gaps in the roofs of the sheds where the corrugated iron had been ripped off and hurled away, and the body of a Brahman cow wrapped up in the shattered timbers of the paddock fence. Jimmy Umbrella was re-erecting his outdoor cooking shack, one-handed, his umbrella firmly clutched in his left hand.

  Mick went indoors and came back out with a brush. He needed to be doing something useful like everyone else, and his bike needed cleaning up. It had rivulets of sand drying on it, and he knew that the air filter would be full of water. He could even see water under the glass of the speedometer, and when he removed the cover of the magneto, he found that that was full of water too. Taylor Pete came over, told him exactly what he had to do, and then left him to it. ‘I’d lend a hand,’ he said, ‘but there’s too much yakka on.’

  Stemple came over and said exactly the same thing. It was the first really big cyclone he had ever been in, and he had genuinely questioned himself as to whether he had chosen a good place to live. He imagined that even being at war could not be more worrying than all that clattering, shrieking, howling and banging.

  Granpa organised parties of men to go and find out what had happened to the mobs in the different paddocks. A lot of them would be bogged down, without a doubt. Granpa said they must have had a good eighteen inches of rain, and God knows what it must be like down near the creek. Mick wanted to go with them, but Granpa told him to get the bike working and then go out with a sack and try to find the chooks, otherwise there’d be no cackleberries till God knows when. ‘And if you find Willy, let me know. I’ll be out on the north paddock. He’ll probably find his own way back, but I’m worried.’

  It took two hours of dismantling, wiping, blowing and reassembling to get the old bike functioning again, but finally Mick put all his weight for a crisp thrust on the kick-start, and the engine came to life. He revved the engine for a while to make sure that it would not immediately pack up again, and went to fetch a sack from one of the sheds. It was then that he realised that the outdoor dunny had been blown away, apart from the pedestal, which sat there in solitary glory on its concrete plinth, its cracked porcelain glinting in the sunlight, with no sign of the wooden seat.

  Mick soon found that there were not many places he could go where the bike would not sink in the new mud, and he realised that the best thing to do would be to head for the high ground so that he could have a good view. He returned and looked in the house for binoculars, but soon concluded that his grandfather must have taken them already.

  He drove up the ridge that separated the farm from the creek, and was amazed to see that it had turned into an ocean. He felt like Cortez staring at the Pacific from a peak in Darien, and suddenly understood the wisdom of having constructed the homestead where it was, instead of closer to the water. He left the bike on the ridge, and scrambled down to the water’s edge, walking along it in wonderment, having forgotten completely about the horse and the chooks. He thought there might be fish in it, and that it might be worth fetching a rod and reel.

  He had gone half a mile along this new shoreline when he came to a stretch where there were a great many leafless and unidentifiable shrubs half submerged. He looked out across the sheet of water, and became curious about one that seemed to have a lump in it. He shaded his eyes with his hands, and peered hard, but it was too painfully bright.

  He thought he saw the lump move, and shook his head. He looked again, and was certain that it was moving. There must be an animal trapped out there.

  Mick was a compassionate boy, and didn’t like the thought of an animal dying out there, trapped in a shrub and getting steamed to death in the heat. On the other hand, he was intelligent enough to know that beneath the water there was a layer of new mud.

  It was when he heard a whimpering sound that he decided to risk it.

  Luckily he was near the edge, and it turned out that the mud was only six inches deep. Even so, it was scary enough, and with every cautious step he worried that he was going to die there. It was hard to extract one foot from the glutinous clinging mire, before putting down another. When he leaned forward to take the weight off his back foot, he could feel the remorseless suction that was trying to keep him immobile. His heart thumped in his chest, and the sweat prickled at his brow.

  It turned out well. Mick carefully disentangled the puppy from the twigs that had enmeshed it. It was clearly very weak and exhausted, and was covered in thick blue slime. He had no idea what breed it might be, if it were any breed at all. He held it under the belly with one hand, and lowered it to the water so that he could give it a rinse and get the worst of the mud off, and then he tucked it under his arm and climbed back up the ridge to his bike. The puppy whined, but was too exhausted to struggle.

  Mick put the dog in the sack, and drove home with it hanging from his right hand, so that he was unable to use the front brake properly. He stayed in low gear and made his way carefully.

  When he arrived half an hour later, he carried the dog to the shower and cleaned it off thoroughly which was a difficult task, as the shower seemed to have only two settings, ‘off’ or ‘ferocious’. It had no settings for subtle and gentle. In the end Mick took his clothes off and had a shower with the dog in his arms, as this seemed the only way out. Afterwards he rubbed it down with the sack, and sat on the veranda with the dog on his lap.

  The puppy was male, and Mick judged that it was already weaned, because it accepted his gifts of small lumps of Lamington’s rations, and then fell fast asleep.

  That was how Granpa found them when he came home, and he didn’t seem greatly surprised. ‘That’s a red cloud kelpie,’ he said. ‘What are you going to call it?’

  ‘I don’t know, Granpa.’

&nbs
p; ‘You’re not to call it Kevin.’

  ‘No, Granpa.’

  ‘Or Keith.’

  ‘No, Granpa.’

  Granpa took the dog from Mick’s arms and held it up to look it in the eye. ‘Bloody hell,’ said Granpa. ‘It’s let one rip. Blimey. What a stinker.’ He handed it back to his grandson. ‘Here, you have it. If it’s going to do that, it can be when someone else’s holding it. And the dog’s called “Blue”. I always know what a dog wants to be called. It’s hereditary. Gets passed down from your second uncle on your mother’s side.’

  ‘But he’s red!’

  ‘That’s why he’s called Blue. If you’re short, you’re called Lofty; if you’re black, you’re called Chalkie; if you’re bald, you’re called Curly; if you’re fat, you’re called Slim; if you’re red, you’re called Blue. Everybody knows that, son. By the way, we don’t have dogs sleeping in the house. Our dogs are yard dogs. It’s the rule, OK?’

  ‘OK, Granpa.’

  ‘What’s the matter, son? You’ve got a face on you like half a mile of bad road.’

  ‘Granpa, it’s too cold out here at night. He’s supposed to be snuggled up with his brothers and sisters, all in a heap.’

  ‘It’s the rule.’

  ‘What if there’s a dingo?’

  ‘The other dogs’ll see it off. Look, we’ll find him a nice big box with a rug in it.’

  That night Granpa looked in on Mick last thing, as he always did, to check that he was sleeping. It was the one time when he could just sit on the edge of the bed and look at his grandson’s face, and stroke his hair, and think back to when his own small son slept in this very bed, and he would come in at night to check up on him. It was a world away, and Granpa could hardly believe that so much time had passed without his having noticed. He never let it show, but he was feeling more tired than he used to. Round here you had to stay young till the day you died, and there was nothing he was going to give up, not even entering the Roebourne Races on his one-eyed horse that had boomers loose in the top paddock, and always came in fourth or fifth in the wake of the blackfellas. He’d never won yet, but he wasn’t going to stop trying now, aching hips or not.

  On this night, Granpa frowned, and prised the puppy out of Mick’s arms. There was a house rule, and it had to be stuck to. Only Lamington was allowed to sleep indoors at night, and the dogs stayed out. Granpa took the little dog outside and put it back in the box. The puppy wagged its tail so hard that it looked as though he was going to wag his backside off. Granpa looked into those small bright eyes, and said, ‘Sorry, mate.’

  The next morning he told Mick off, and said, ‘My oath, you’ve got more front than bloody Myer’s, you have. I told you that dogs sleep outdoors, and that’s where they sleep, right? If you disobey me again, you’ll be feeling the back of my hand. Understand?’

  That night, Granpa came in to check up on Mick, and he wasn’t there. There was no bedding either. Granpa went out onto the terrace, and found Mick curled up in his bedclothes with the puppy clutched to his chest. It was a very cold night. The two sleepers looked blissful.

  Granpa prised the puppy out of his grasp, and restored it to its box. Then he picked up Mick and his bedding all in one armful, and carried him back to his bed without his even waking for a moment.

  Granpa turned in, and had trouble sleeping. Amid the sound of the grasshoppers and nightbirds outdoors, he could hear the puppy whining. He thought about Mick. The boy had no friends of the same age. He had no mother or father to cuddle with. He had no brothers and sisters. In fact, the poor little sod didn’t even have so much as a teddy bear. He was giving all his love to a motorbike.

  Granpa knew exactly what it was like to be as alone as that. In the end he couldn’t bear it any more, and he got up and went outside to fetch the dog. It yipped and squirmed in his arms, and tried to lick his face. Granpa put the dog back into Mick’s arms, and wondered how he was going to announce the rule change in the morning. It would take some careful phrasing, so that it wouldn’t look like a climbdown. He’d tell Mick that he’d thought about it, and decided that the nights were too cold after all, and he’d seen that perentie creeping about again.

  In the morning, Mick said, ‘Granpa, now that everything’s wrecked, and everything’s got to be mended, why don’t we redo Granma’s garden at the same time?’

  ‘You know how to?’

  ‘No. You can tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.’

  ‘We’ll do it together,’ said Granpa, ‘but we’d better get everything else fixed first.’

  BLIND WILLY

  THERE WERE NO longer many horses on the station because they had been replaced by motorcycles, and the few that remained were not much more than pets. None of them were particularly large, because the days when huge draught horses were needed to pull the carts had long gone. Nowadays you did not need to breed horses for a particular purpose, and so the general size had averaged out. Granpa delegated Taylor Pete to educate Mick.

  First of all, Taylor Pete made Mick shut Blue away in the shed, and then showed him how to gain the confidence of a horse.

  ‘Right, Micko,’ he said, ‘you come here and watch what I do.’

  He walked softly up to Blind Willy and touched noses with it. He sniffed the horse’s breath, and the horse sniffed his. He patted the horse’s neck, and the animal bared its teeth and took a friendly nip at the cloth of his shirt.

  ‘Now you do it,’ said Taylor Pete.

  Mick let the horse sniff his breath, and then inhaled the breath of the horse. It smelled beautiful, like warm grass. It filled him with a kind of sensuous delight. The horse brushed his face with his lips, and they were very velvety and whiskery.

  ‘Put your arms round his neck and lay your face against it,’ said Taylor Pete, ‘but nice and smoothly. No sudden moves.’ Mick did as he was told, and after a while, Taylor Pete said, ‘He likes you.’

  ‘He’s standing on my foot,’ said Mick.

  ‘Just you wait till he puts some weight on it,’ said Taylor Pete. ‘Now, if you always let a horse get to know you by exchanging breath, you can tame just about any old brumby pretty damn quick.’

  ‘Is this all Aborigine stuff?’ asked Mick.

  ‘It’s magic ancestral knowledge,’ said Taylor Pete portentously, ‘from the Dreamtime and beyond. It’s all to do with smoke and dances and spells and magic bones, and then your ancestors plant the special knowledge in your brain without you having to learn it, and you wake up one morning full of horseness. I’ll show you sometime.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No, just kidding. I worked it out for myself. If you think about it, there weren’t any horses here till the whitefellas brought ’em. Nothing to do with Dreamtime. Nightmare time, more like. It’s like when you meet a cat; always let it sniff your fingers before you touch it. And I’ll tell you something else. Did you know that horses are really a kind of rabbit?’

  Mick shook his head.

  ‘Well, rabbits and horses are both vegetarians and have peepers on the sides of their loaf, right? That means they can see behind them as well as in front, but they can’t focus too well on anything very close. That’s the main reason they can’t read. Unless it’s in big print quite a long way off. And rabbits and horses both kick with their back legs when they’re in a blue.’

  ‘Horses don’t hop,’ said Mick.

  ‘Only ’cause they don’t see the point,’ replied Taylor Pete. ‘And rabbits only hop ’cause they’re jealous of boomers being so much bigger, and they want to be roos themselves, and they’re hoping no one’ll guess they’re really rabbits.’

  Every day for three months Mick went out to Blind Willy’s paddock and exchanged breaths with him, because he had a plan. Gradually, Willy stopped kicking and rearing, and whinnying and caracoling, and peacefully took handfuls of lush grass from Granma’s garden from Mick’s outstretched palm. Then the day came when the horse let Mick lie across his back on his stomach.

  Stemple had also b
ecome a keen rider, because he was relatively new to it, so he and Mick took to going out for a hack first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening, because it wasn’t fair making horses work hard in the extreme heat of the day. Stemple’s horse was small and tough, and Mick’s was even smaller.

  Stemple liked to talk about his plans. He was a guitar player, and one day he was going to study it properly, and become a truly good musician, even though at present he mainly played ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, and ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’, and ‘Waltzing Matilda’.

  Mick told Stemple that he wanted to be an armed policeman like his dad, and Stemple said it wasn’t always easy having to fit into an organisation, the way that policemen and teachers had to. You were never your own man.

  Blue always went with them, sniffing about, going off on tangents, often getting lost, but always arriving back home in the end. As far as Blue’s nose was concerned, the station was an everlastingly interesting piece of paradise. There was nothing whatsoever whose whiff didn’t tell a story. While Mick and Stemple talked about life, Blue had adventures alongside them that they could not possibly have imagined, in a world populated by wallabies, lizards, dingos and lady dogs.

  Mick did not have enough money to buy presents, and in any case there wasn’t a shop for miles, but at last there came a special day, and Mick had come up with something truly wondrous.

  When Granpa was standing in the yard, Mick rode in with a grin on his face as wide as Cleaverville Beach. Granpa could not believe his eyes when he saw Mick on the thoroughbred. What he said is probably better left unrecorded, because it involved some ripe expletives, but he was undeniably amazed, thrilled and proud.