The Dog Runner

by Bren MacDibble

  Emery checks over his shoulder again and again, and we go further and further along, not just down to the creek where he said we were going, and it seems he don’t trust the old farmers.

  ‘They seem real nice,’ I say to him.

  ‘Yeah. Seem,’ he says.

  ‘I think they were nice. I’d have liked a real bed, and a big breakfast.’

  ‘For all you know they were fattening you up.’

  I elbow Emery in the stomach. I don’t want to hear stupid jokes about me getting eaten no more.

  The sun gets lower and lower, and finally Emery points to a flat bit of sand tucked into a bank behind a few scrubby bushes, stopping the dogs.

  ‘No one will see us there,’ he says. He stumbles across the creek rocks and stomps about while I wait with the dogs, hanging onto the brake of the cart.

  ‘It’s sandy over here,’ he calls, ‘this will be soft to sleep on.’

  There’s a rustle in the bushes beside him and a small kangaroo breaks cover, leaps out, crosses the creek, stumbles, and bounds away in front of the dogs. Not only is it small, it’s skinny. So skinny.

  I yell, ‘Woah!’ just as Maroochy leaps after it.

  Wolf and Bear yelp and follow. They’re too hungry, there’s no stopping them. The cart lurches forwards, all the dogs now, their mushing job forgotten, all trying to be the ones to bring down that roo.

  I’m clinging to the cart as it bounces, dragged, coz I got the brake on. I can’t steer it and brake, but I can reach the tag for the emergency release. I can set the dogs free of the cart. My fingers close around the red tag just as the cart tips, and me and the tent and the backpack full of fruit hit the dirt. Dirt in my face, scraping my elbow, the cart slamming into the side of my head, but I yank hard on that tag and the cart grinds to a stop. Yelping dogs take off without me, all still tied to the gang line.

  ‘Ella!’ Emery slides to a stop as I sit up, spitting out dirt, then twist my arm to see my bloody elbow. He grabs my shoulder.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I say.

  He gives my shoulder a squeeze, grabs the knife in its leather holder from the pouch at the top of the cart and chases after the tangle of yelping, growling dogs.

  There’s a squeal as the roo goes down, then a growling scuffle breaks out, dust and teeth snapping as the dogs all want a piece and Emery yells, ‘Drop it!’ and wades into that mess, hauling Oyster and Maroochy apart by the neck fur, and all the dogs quit growling, except for Oyster, who really wants her piece of roo, right now. And that poor roo, it’s not dead. It’s still squealing. I cover my ears.

  ‘Sit!’ Emery yells again, his boot on the weak struggling roo, and four bums hit the dirt, and finally Oyster’s goes down too.

  Emery cuts the roo’s throat. Quick and strong, like he knows how. I stand up, smack at the dust all over me, and limp over there. I’m glad it’s not hurting or hungry anymore, poor roo.

  As the roo bleeds to death, Emery releases each dog from the gang rope and moves each one to sit further apart, and away from each other.

  He cuts the roo into lots of pieces. A whole thigh for Maroochy first coz she’s the boss, then a forearm each for Wolf and Bear, and a lower leg each for Oyster and Squid to keep them still and chewing. He slices the other thigh into bits, hunks of roo with not much meat under the fur at all, and delivers a piece each to the four waiting dogs, then he guts the roo, it all spilling out onto the dirt, cuts the head off, chucks it outside the circle, the heart in one direction, the liver in another, the carcass apart from the spilled guts.

  ‘There,’ he says. ‘They should be able to sort out who gets what, without fighting.’ He collects up the gang rope and we go back and right the cart, repack all the stuff and carry it across the creek to behind the bushes on the sand.

  We sit down and eat the cheese right away. Soft and creamy and salty, it gums up the roof of my mouth. Maybe heaven tastes like this. My stomach crawls up my throat to get to it, even if my mouth wants to go on tasting it forever. Cheese. I’ve forgotten what it tasted like and I never had goat cheese before, but I’m pretty sure cheese never tasted this good.

  ‘Can’t let it go off,’ Emery says, and scoops two fingerfuls more out of the plastic pot and wipes them on his tongue. Shoves the pot at me.

  I swallow finally and scoop the rest into my mouth and hold it there.

  Emery takes the container back and licks it out, just like Maroochy.

  ‘You go down to the creek and wash your elbow and face,’ he says. ‘I’ll set up the tent.’

  The creek water stings the graze on my elbow but I ignore it. There’s no point whingeing when there’s no one around with a bandaid or anything to help anyway. I fill the water bottles, and then go and sort the fruit into piles. The stuff that bruised when the cart tipped over has to be eaten, before the bruises taste bad, but that only leaves one apple and two plums for tomorrow, which I put back in the pack.

  Emery and I crawl into the tent, door flap open, sit on the sleeping bags and eat the bruised fruit and the potatoes Ted and his wife gave us. The dogs find us, one by one, slinking back to sit near the tent and gnaw on bones. They stare at the other dogs, and get up and move, bones in their mouths, when another dog comes close. Oyster shows her fangs at the other dogs. Squid, Wolf and Bear just slink away like they don’t want any arguments.

  ‘They’re all so hungry,’ I say.

  ‘I think we should just rest here tomorrow. The dogs are too thin to run day after day. We’re too tired. And it seems like it’s a safe place. If we can catch some eels or another roo, it’ll be good for us all.’

  Maroochy comes back to the camp last. She hasn’t brought her bone. Maybe she’s buried it somewhere.

  ‘I’m gonna go for a quick look around,’ Emery says.

  ‘I’ll come,’ I say.

  Emery piggybacks me across the creek so my boots don’t get wet again, and we climb to the top of a small hill nearby. It’s so dark now I’m tripping on lumps in the dirt I can’t see. There’s just a bit of light left above in the sky. The five dogs trot after us and point their noses high and into the breeze. The farmhouse of the old people sits in the distance and there’s light showing in one of the windows.

  ‘They’re so stupid,’ Emery mutters. ‘They stick out like a lighthouse.’

  ‘Maybe they know no one can see them from a main road?’ I say.

  ‘Were those three bikers travelling on a main road?’ Emery asks.

  ‘Ted has a gun.’

  ‘Maybe those people in the old cars had three guns. You remember what Dad said?’

  ‘When the world turns upside down, the ones that survive are the first ones who learn to walk on their heads,’ I say.

  ‘Yep. Those people are still walking on their feet, thinking the world will flip right way up any day.’

  ‘Maybe it will.’

  ‘If someone makes a grass that can grow, how long before they make enough seeds to send to Australia? We’re on the bottom of the world here, Ella. There’s millions of starving people in Asia and America and Europe who are gonna be getting those seeds first, then how long before cows and sheep get brought back? There’s no end to this anytime soon if we’re waiting for help. They said the outback grasses are okay, so there’s still healthy roos and emus out there.’

  ‘What if everyone in the cities starts heading outback?’

  Emery laughs. ‘Most people will be too scared to do that. Most people will be clinging to their houses and their old lives.’

  ‘Scared to try walking on their heads?’ I ask.

  ‘Yep,’ he says. ‘Ba harvested lots of seeds from the land and has been growing the old grasses. Our people been managing those grasslands and keeping the kangaroos near and healthy for thousands of generations. With that and Mum’s mushrooms, we’ll be eating fine once we get there, and maybe we’ll have enough grass to share with the farms around us and then the rest of the state and then the whole country.’

  I don’t know much, but I know
this whole country is too huge for Emery’s grandad to save it all.

  We sleep in the next day, right through till midday. We’re safe here, tucked away. The dogs are fed, and we’ve been fed, and I guess we were all real tired. Emery sharpens sticks with his knife and we lie around the creek trying to stab eels, but they turn out to be sneakier than us, and we go to bed with just water in our bellies. The dogs have their bones to chew, so they spend the evening trying to chew those to a pulp.

  ‘I’ll get up early and go hunting,’ Emery says. ‘And if that don’t work, maybe we can ask Ted for more potatoes?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, glad we have a plan for food tomorrow.

  We’re fast asleep, me, Emery, five warm hairy dogs around us, pinning my feet down. I’m dreaming of soft white cheese dripping down my T-shirt, and no matter how many times I slurp it back up, it just keeps dripping. Then Maroochy jumps up, stepping on my legs and growling. Emery is awake in a second, lunging for her, hanging on, saying, ‘Shh!’

  Maroochy keeps up her growling and over her noise there’s far-off shouts and a loud ‘Crack!’ splits the night. I sit up too then. It’s too dark to see, but Emery hauls up the zipper on the tent anyway, and there is something to see. Over the rise, back towards the farmhouse, there’s a red glow. Like there’s a fire over the hill. More shouting.

  ‘We have to help them!’ I say, thinking their house has caught fire.

  ‘Shh!’ Emery says, and he slaps Maroochy’s head. It makes her jump. She stops growling. She’s not used to being slapped.

  We’re all listening now. Men shouting, more than one.

  ‘We have to help them!’ I whisper.

  ‘Nothing we can do,’ Emery whispers back. ‘We’re two kids and a pile of dogs.’

  ‘You’ve got a knife,’ I say.

  ‘To kill roos for food. To wave at someone if they try to hurt us. Not to go fight a one-man war.’

  He’s right. I know he’s right. I don’t want him to go out there really.

  ‘I’m going to see what’s going on, you keep the dogs quiet,’ he says.

  ‘No!’ I say ‘I’ll come too.’

  ‘If we both go, the dogs will howl. You stay here!’ He slides out of the tent and zips it closed behind him with Maroochy snorting and scratching at the zipper where he left.

  ‘No, Rooch,’ I say and pull her back. ‘Wait.’

  She yowls and complains in a grumble.

  Emery is in his bare feet, silent across the sand, then splashing through the creek, then no sound. No sound except shouting in the distance.

  It’s hard to hear with five heavy-panting dogs. I dunno what they’re shouting about, but the hair on my head stands up, like on the dogs’ necks. Maybe I don’t want to know.

  Emery is gone too long. Any time for me alone is too long, but this feels like half the night goes by. Then Rooch starts whining and snorting at the zipper again. Water splashes in the creek. I don’t know how she knows.

  ‘It’s me!’ Emery whispers, and then he’s unzipping and crawling back through the tent flap with five dogs trying to lick his face.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I whisper.

  ‘It’s too late,’ he says. ‘The house is gone. I dunno what happened to them. We’ll wait till the sun’s up and go look.’

  I lie back down, dragging one of the dogs with me. Hard to know which one in the dark. The dogs seem calmer now that Emery has checked the noise out, they lie down and soon they’re snoring, but I’m lying there listening to Emery’s breath not regular like a sleeping person, and car doors slamming way back at the farmhouse, and vehicles driving off into the night.

  Then it’s light, and the zipper goes up and dogs bound off into the morning sun through the tent flap. I sit up and rub my eyes. Emery’s outside pulling on his boots.

  ‘Wait for me!’ I say.

  We stand on top of the rise, the burnt-out shell of the house in the distance smoking, just a couple of tin sheds next to it left standing.

  ‘I can go over by myself,’ Emery says, looking like he really don’t wanna go near the place.

  ‘I’m going too,’ I say. ‘I can handle it. You don’t have to keep trying to protect me.’

  Emery looks at me like he don’t really believe that, but he nods, and we head on down there together, five dogs trotting along beside us.

  Nothing’s left of the house. It’s gone to ground, black and smouldering mounds of things that I can’t figure out what they used to be. I think I can pick out a toaster, definitely a stove, a fridge, but there’s bits of stuff I have no clue what they once were.

  Emery goes to check out the fridge, stomping over the hot charcoal, hauling at the door, but the seals are gone and it’s full of black. There’s nothing in there for us that’s edible. ‘I think they took all the cheese,’ he says.

  I walk around the front of the building and I see a body in a chequered shirt slumped on the driveway. It’s Ted. He’s got his back to me, one arm flopped out behind him. I take a few steps towards the body. I’m thinking I need to see if Ted is still alive, but I can’t make my feet move that way. So here I am, maybe twenty steps from Ted and I can’t make my feet take those twenty steps. I can’t help him. I lean forwards so I have to step, and that gets me three or four steps closer.

  Bear bounds past me, running at the body lying there, and even he stops before he gets there and sticks his nose out carefully, sniffing at Ted. He shakes his head and turns back, runs away sneezing like something got in his nostrils he didn’t like.

  ‘Ella!’ Emery calls, then he’s there beside me, grabbing me like he’s stopping me from going any closer. ‘We don’t need to see dead people, Bells,’ he whispers, and pulls me away.

  ‘We should bury him or something,’ I say.

  ‘No, leave him to the foxes. If those people come back for the rest of the potatoes and fruit, they gotta see the place just like they left it. Come pick some fruit. Ted would want us to have it.’

  I nod. Even though I’m swallowing down vomit crawling up my throat, I go back to the little orchard beside the burnt-down house, find a few plums and apples and apricots that are ready for eating, polish the smoke off them on my trousers. I can’t get many, coz my arms are heavy like planks of wood, but I keep going and fill Ted’s blue bucket halfway. We head back down past the potato crop and stop so Emery and Rooch can dig up a few potatoes for us and top up the bucket. I just stand and watch. It’s like my arms have died now. They’re just floppy like Ted’s are, flopped and useless on the ground.

  Back at the tent, I feel real tired suddenly, body tired, dead tired, and crawl onto the sleeping bag.

  ‘We should get moving. Away from here,’ I say.

  Emery shakes his head. ‘There’s fruit and potatoes for us, and we can hunt for the dogs. We should rest here a couple of days, let the people who did that move on to a different area. Then we’ll go.’

  I don’t say anything. I just close my eyes and think of our little flat, pretend I can hear Dad in the kitchen cooking up a batch of bickies.

  ‘I’m gonna go along the creek, see if I can find the dogs some food,’ Emery says.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, and I sniff in the smell of Dad’s bickies. How long since we had flour for bickies, butter for bickies? A year, two years? I miss Dad so much. Seeing Ted lying there on the driveway to his house, like he was trying to protect it, makes me think of Dad. Where is he? What if he’s lying dead somewhere too, his skinny arms flopped and useless? I can’t say that to Emery though. I don’t want him to think about Dad like that.

  ‘You okay here alone? Want me to leave a dog? I won’t go far,’ Emery says.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I say, but I think I’m broken.

  Emery goes off with the dogs. The sun warms my back, and I wrap up in my sleeping bag real tight and sleep.

  The dogs come back panting and sweaty, feet and faces wet from the creek, blood around their muzzles and stinking of meat. They flop down all around me, and Emery comes in a little
while later.

  He has the knife in its leather pouch strapped to his thigh and there’s blood up his arms that he’s missed washing off in the creek and a wild look in his eyes. The world has turned upside down and Emery is already walking on his head.

  He kicks his boots off and sits on the sleeping bag. ‘Got another skin-and-bones roo and found an already dead possum,’ he says, then yawns and lies back, hands behind his head. Soon him and the dogs are sleeping the hot afternoon away.

  I feel silly that I see a dead person and I’m shaken to bits. I’m not walking on my head. But then I remember that’s normal. That’s what normal people do. Ted was nice to us. He was a nice person who thought other people were nice, like us, just passing by, and happy to take a plastic tub of cheese and go. I said Dad wouldn’t want us to be worse people, but really, I’m thinking Dad just wants us to be safe and alive, even if we have to run away when good people need help.

  I tell myself they would’ve taken Mrs Ted to look after the goats, so she is safe somewhere, and after this is over she’ll come back to her farm with her goats and make cheese again and live in a brand new little cottage.

  When we go back up to the farmhouse ruins later in the day, I can’t go closer than the potato patch, so Emery picks fruit and I dig up potatoes, then we light a fire, and cook up all the potatoes we have in the pot, scrubbing them in the creek, throwing them in and pulling them out until we have a huge collection of potatoes cooked in their skins sitting on the backpack. Then we put the fire out right away.