The Sun Between Their Feet

by Doris Lessing

  Jock was, in fact, a handsome young dog. More Alsatian than anything, he was a low-standing, thick-coated animal of a warm gold colour, with a vestigial ‘ridge’ along his spine, rather wolf-like or fox-like, if one looked at him frontways, with his sharp cocked ears. And he was definitely not ‘little’. There was something dignified about him from the moment he was out of puppyhood, even when he was being scolded by my mother for his visits to the compound.

  The meeting, prepared for by us all with trepidation, went off in a way which was a credit to everyone, but particularly Jock, who regained my mother’s heart at a stroke. The puppy was released from the car and carried to where Jock sat, noble and restrained as usual, waiting for us to greet him. Bill at once began weaving and yapping around the rocky space in front of the house. Then he saw Jock, bounded up to him, stepped a couple of feet away, sat down on his fat backside and yelped excitedly. Jock began a yawning, snapping movement of his head, making it go from side to side in half-snarling, half-laughing protest, while the puppy crept closer, right up, jumping at the older dog’s lifted wrinkling muzzle. Jock did not move away; he forced himself to remain still, because he could see us all watching. At last he lifted up his paw, pushed Bill over with it, pinned him down, examined him, then sniffed and licked him. He had accepted him, and Bill had found a substitute for his mother who was presumably mourning his loss. We were able to leave the child (as my mother kept calling him) in Jock’s infinitely patient care. ‘You are such a good dog, Jock,’ she said, overcome by this scene, and the other touching scenes that followed, all marked by Jock’s extraordinary forbearance for what was, and even I had to admit it, an intolerably destructive little dog.

  Training became urgent. But this was not at all easy, due, like the business of getting a new puppy, to the inner nature of the family.

  To take only one difficulty: dogs must be trained by their masters, they must owe allegiance to one person. And who was Jock to obey? And Bill: I was his master, in theory. In practice, Jock was. Was I to take over from Jock? But even to state it is to expose its absurdity: I adored the graceless puppy, and why did I need a well-trained dog? Trained for what?

  A watchdog? But all our dogs were watchdogs. ‘Natives’ – such was the article of faith, were by nature scared of dogs, yet everyone repeated stories about thieves poisoning fierce dogs or making friends with them. So apparently no one really believed that watchdogs were any use. Yet every farm had its watchdog.

  Throughout my childhood I used to lie in bed, the bush not fifty yards away all around the house, listening to the cry of the night-jar, the owls, the frogs and the crickets; to the tom-toms from the compound; to the mysterious rustling in the thatch over my head, or the long grass it had been cut from down the hill; to all the thousand noises of the night on the veld; and every one of these noises was marked also by the house dogs, who would bark and sniff and investigate and growl at all these; and also at starlight on the polished surface of a leaf, at the moon lifting itself over the mountains, at a branch cracking behind the house, at the first rim of hot red showing above the horizon – in short at anything and everything. Watchdogs, in my experience, were never asleep; but they were not so much a guard against thieves (we never had any thieves that I can remember) as a kind of instrument designed to measure or record the rustlings and movements of the African night that seemed to have an enormous life of its own, but a collective life; so that the falling of a stone, or a star shooting through the Milky Way, the grunt of a wild pig, and the wind rustling in the mealie-field were all evidences and aspects of the same truth.

  How did one ‘train’ a watchdog? Presumably to respond only to the slinking approach of a human, black or white. What use is a watchdog otherwise? But even now, the most powerful memory of my childhood is of lying awake listening to the sobbing howl of a dog at the inexplicable appearance of the yellow face of the moon; of creeping to the window to see the long muzzle of a dog pointed black against a great bowl of stars. We needed no moon calendar with those dogs, who were like traffic in London: to sleep at all, one had to learn not to hear them. And if one did not hear them, one would not hear the stiff warning growl that (presumably) would greet a marauder.

  At first Jock and Bill were locked up in the dining-room at night. But there were so many stirrings and yappings and rushings from window to window after the rising sun or moon, or the black shadows which moved across whitewashed walls from the branches of the trees in the garden, that soon we could no longer stand the lack of sleep, and they were turned out on to the veranda. With many hopeful injunctions from my mother that they were to be ‘good dogs’: which meant that they should ignore their real natures and sleep from sundown to sun-up. Even then, when Bill was just out of puppyhood, they might be missing altogether in the early mornings. They would come guiltily up the road from the lands at breakfast-time, their coats full of grass seeds, and we knew they had rushed down into the bush after an owl, or a grazing animal, and, finding themselves farther from home than they had expected in a strange nocturnal world, had begun nosing and sniffing and exploring in practice for their days of wildness soon to come.

  So they weren’t watchdogs. Hunting-dogs perhaps? My brother undertook to train them, and we went through a long absurd period of ‘down, Jock’, ‘to heel, Bill’, while sticks of barley-sugar balanced on noses, and paws were offered to be shaken by human hands, etc., etc. Through all this Jock suffered, bravely, but saying so clearly with every part of him that he would do anything to please my mother – he would send her glances half proud and half apologetic all the time my brother drilled him, that after an hour of training my brother would retreat, muttering that it was too hot, and Jock bounded off to lay his head on my mother’s lap. As for Bill he never achieved anything. Never did he sit still with the golden lumps on his nose, he ate them at once. Never did he stay to heel. Never did he remember what he was supposed to do with his paw when one of us offered him a hand. The truth was, I understood then, watching the training sessions, that Bill was stupid. I pretended of course that he despised being trained, he found it humiliating; and that Jock’s readiness to go through with the silly business showed his lack of spirit. But, alas, there was no getting around it, Bill simply wasn’t very bright.

  Meanwhile he had ceased to be a fat charmer; he had become a lean young dog, good-looking, with his dark brindled coat, and his big head that had a touch of Newfoundland. He had a look of puppy about him still. For just as Jock seemed born elderly, had respectable white hairs on his chin from the start; so Bill kept something young in him; he was a young dog until he died.

  The training sessions did not last long. Now my brother said the dogs would be trained on the job: this to pacify my father, who kept saying that they were a disgrace and ‘not worth their salt’.

  There began a new régime, my brother, myself, and the two dogs. We set forth each morning, first, my brother, earnest with responsibility, his rifle swinging in his hand, at his heels the two dogs. Behind this time-honoured unit, myself, the girl, with no useful part to play in the serious masculine business, but necessary to provide admiration. This was a very old role for me indeed: to walk away on one side of the scene, a small fierce girl, hungry to be part of it, but knowing she never would be, above all because the heart that had been put to pump away all her life under her ribs was not only critical and intransigent, but one which longed so bitterly to melt into loving acceptance. An uncomfortable combination, as she knew even then – yet I could not remove the sulky smile from my face. And it was absurd: there was my brother, so intent and serious, with Jock the good dog, just behind him, and there was Bill the bad dog, intermittently behind him, but more often than not sneaking off to enjoy some side-path. And there was myself, unwillingly following, my weight shifting from hip to hip, bored and showing it.

  I knew the route too well. Before we reached the sullen thickets of the bush where game birds were to be found, there was a long walk up the back of the kopje through a lux
uriant pawpaw grove, then through sweet potato vines that tangled our ankles, and tripped us, then past a rubbish heap whose sweet rotten smell was expressed in a heave of glittering black flies, then the bush itself. Here it was all dull green stunted trees, miles and miles of the smallish, flattish, msasa trees in their second growth: they had all been cut for mine furnaces at some time. And over the flat ugly bush a large over-bearing blue sky.

  We were on our way to get food. So we kept saying. Whatever we shot would be eaten by ‘the house’, or by the house’s servants, or by ‘the compound’. But we were hunting according to a newer law than the need for food, and we knew it, and that was why we were always a bit apologetic about these expeditions, and why we so often chose to return empty-handed. We were hunting because my brother had been given a new and efficient rifle that would bring down (infallibly, if my brother shot) birds, large and small; and small animals; and very often large game like koodoo and sable. We were hunting because we owned a gun. And because we owned a gun, we should have hunting-dogs, it made the business less ugly for some reason.

  We were on our way to the Great Vlei, as distinct from the Big Vlei, which was five miles in the other direction. The Big Vlei was burnt-out and eroded, and the water-holes usually dried up early. We did not like going there. But to reach the Great Vlei, which was beautiful, we had to go through the ugly bush ‘at the back of the kopje’. These ritual names for parts of the farm seemed rather to be names for regions in our minds. ‘Going to the Great Vlei’ had a fairytale quality about it, because of having to pass through the region of sour ugly frightening bush first. For it did frighten us, always, and without reason: we felt it was hostile to us and we walked through it quickly, knowing that we were earning by this danger the water-running peace of the Great Vlei. It was only partly on our farm; the boundary between it and the next farm ran invisibly down its centre, drawn by the eye from this outcrop to that big tree to that pothole to that ant-heap. It was a grassy valley with trees standing tall and spreading on either side of the water-course which was a half-mile width of intense greenness broken by sky-reflecting brown pools. This was old bush, these trees had never been cut: the Great Vlei had the inevitable look of natural bush -that no branch, no shrub, no patch of thorn, no outcrop, could have been in any other place or stood at any other angle.

  The potholes here were always full. The water was stained clear brown, and the mud bottom had a small movement of creatures, while over the brown ripples skimmed blue jays and humming-birds and all kinds of vivid flashing birds we did not know the names of. Along the lush verges lolled pink and white water-lilies on their water-gemmed leaves.

  This paradise was where the dogs were to be trained.

  During the first holidays, long ones of six weeks, my brother was indefatigable, and we set off every morning after breakfast. In the Great Vlei I sat on a pool’s edge under a thorn tree, and day-dreamed to the tune of the ripples my swinging feet set moving across the water, while my brother, armed with the rifle, various sizes of stick, and lumps of sugar and biltong, put the two dogs through their paces. Sometimes, roused perhaps because the sun that fell through the green lace of the thorn was burning my shoulders, I turned to watch the three creatures, hard at work a hundred yards off on an empty patch of sand. Jock, more often than not, would be a dead dog, or his nose would be on his paws while his attentive eyes were on my brother’s face. Or he would be sitting up, a dog statue, a golden dog, admirably obedient. Bill, on the other hand, was probably balancing on his spine, all four paws in the air, his throat back so that he was flat from nose to tail-tip, receiving the hot sun equally over his brindled fur. I would hear, through my own lazy thoughts: ‘Good dog, Jock, yes, good dog. Idiot, Bill, fool dog, why don’t you work like Jock?’ And my brother, his face reddened and sweaty, would come over to flop beside me, saying: ‘It’s all Bill’s fault, he’s a bad example. And of course Jock doesn’t see why he should work hard when Bill just plays all the time.’ Well, it probably was my fault that the training failed. If my earnest and undivided attention had been given, as I knew quite well was being demanded of me, to this business of the boy and the two dogs, perhaps we would have ended up with a brace of efficient and obedient animals, ever-ready to die, to go to heel, and to fetch it. Perhaps.

  By next holidays, moral disintegration had set in. My father complained the dogs obeyed nobody. He demanded training, serious and unremitting. My brother and I watched our mother petting Jock and scolding Bill, and came to an unspoken agreement. We set off for the Great Vlei but once there we loafed up and down the water-holes, while the dogs did as they liked, learning the joys of freedom.

  The uses of water, for instance. Jock, cautious as usual, would test a pool with his paw, before moving in to stand chest deep, his muzzle just above the ripples, licking at them with small yaps of greeting or excitement. Then he walked gently in and swam up and down and around the brown pool in the green shade of the thorn trees. Meanwhile, Bill would have found a shallow pool and be at his favourite game. Starting twenty yards from the rim of a pool, he would hurl himself, barking shrilly, across the grass, then across the pool, not so much swimming across it as bouncing across it. Out on the other side, up the side of the vlei, around in a big loop, then back, and around again … and again and again and again. Great sheets of brown water went up into the sky above him, crashing back into the pool while he barked his exultation.

  That was one game. Or they chased each other up and down the four-miles-long valley like enemies, and when one caught the other there was a growling and a snarling and a fighting that sounded genuine enough. Sometimes we went to separate them, an interference they suffered; and the moment we let them go one or another would be off, his hind-quarters pistoning, with the other in pursuit, fierce and silent. They might race a mile, two miles, before one leaped at the other’s throat and brought him down. This game, too, over and over again, so that when they did go wild, we knew how they killed the wild pig and the buck they lived on.

  On frivolous mornings they chased butterflies, while my brother and I dangled our feet in a pool and watched. Once, very solemnly, as it were in parody of the ridiculous business (now over, thank goodness) of ‘fetch it’ and ‘to heel’, Jock brought us in his jaws a big orange and black butterfly, the delicate wings all broken, and the orange bloom smearing his furry lips. He laid it in front of us, held the still fluttering creature flat with a paw, then lay down, his nose pointing at it. His brown eyes rolled up, wickedly hypocritical, as if to say: ‘Look, a butterfly, I’m a good dog.’ Meanwhile, Bill leaped and barked, a small brown dog hurling himself up into the great blue sky after floating coloured wings. He had taken no notice at all of Jock’s captive. But we both felt that Bill was much more likely than Jock to make such a seditious comment, and in fact my brother said: ‘Bill’s corrupted Jock. I’m sure Jock would never go wild like this unless Bill was showing him. It’s the blood coming out.’ But, alas, we had no idea yet of what ‘going wild’ could mean. For a couple of years yet it still meant small indisciplines, and mostly Bill’s.

  For instance, there was the time Bill forced himself through a loose plank in the door of the store hut, and there ate and ate, eggs, cake, bread, a joint of beef, a ripening guinea-fowl, half a ham. Then he couldn’t get out. In the morning he was a swollen dog, rolling on the floor and whining with the agony of his over-indulgence. ‘Stupid dog, Bill, Jock would never do a thing like that, he’d be too intelligent not to know he’d swell up if he ate so much.’

  Then he ate eggs out of the nest, a crime for which on a farm a dog gets shot. Very close was Bill to this fate. He had actually been seen sneaking out of the chicken-run, feathers on his nose, egg-smear on his muzzle. And there was a mess of oozing yellow and white slime over the straw of the nests. The fowls cackled and raised their feathers whenever Bill came near. First, he was beaten, by the cook, until his howls shook the farm. Then my mother blew eggs and filled them with a solution of mustard and left them in t
he nests. Sure enough, next morning, a yell of wild howls and shrieks: the beatings had taught him nothing. We went out to see a brown dog running and racing in agonized circles with his tongue hanging out while the sun came up red over black mountains – a splendid backdrop to a disgraceful scene. My mother took the poor inflamed jaws and washed them in warm water and said: ‘Well now, Bill, you’d better learn, or it’s the firing squad for you.’

  He learned, but not easily. More than once my brother and I, having arisen early for the hunt, stood in front of the house in the dawn hush, the sky a high far grey above us, the edge of the mountains just reddening, the great spaces of silent bush full of the dark of the night. We sniffed at the small sharpness of the dew, and the heavy somnolent night-smell off the bush, felt the cold heavy air on our cheeks. We stood, whistling very low, so that the dogs would come from wherever they had chosen to sleep. Soon Jock would appear, yawning and sweeping his tail back and forth. No Bill – then we saw him, sitting on his haunches just outside the chicken-run, his nose resting in a loop of wire, his eyes closed in yearning for the warm delicious ooze of fresh egg. And we would clap our hands over our mouths and double up with heartless laughter that had to be muffled so as not to disturb our parents. On the mornings when we went hunting, and took the dogs, we knew that before we’d gone half a mile either Jock or Bill would dash off barking into the bush; the one left would look up from his own nosing and sniffing and rush away too. We would hear the wild double barking fade away with the crash and the rush of the two bodies, and often enough, the subsidiary rushings-away of other animals who had been asleep or resting and just waiting until we had gone away. Now we could look for something to shoot which probably we would never have seen at all had the dogs been there. We could settle down for long patient stalks, circling around a grazing koodoo, or a couple of duiker. Often enough we would lie watching them for hours, afraid only that Jock and Bill would come back, putting an end to this particular pleasure. I remember once we caught a glimpse of a duiker grazing on the edge of a farmland that was still half dark. We got on to our stomachs and wriggled through the long grass, not able to see if the duiker was still there. Slowly the field opened up in front of us, a heaving mass of big black clods. We carefully raised our heads, and there, at the edge of the clod-sea a couple of arm’s-lengths away, were three little duiker, their heads turned away from us to where the sun was about to rise. They were three black, quite motionless silhouettes. Away over the other side of the field, big clods became tinged with reddish gold. The earth turned so fast towards the sun the light came running from the tip of one clod to the next across the field like flames leaping along the tops of long grasses in front of a strong wind. The light reached the duikers and outlined them with warm gold. They were three glittering little beasts on the edge of an imminent sunlight. They began to butt each other, lifting their hind-quarters and bringing down their hind-feet in clicking leaps like dancers. They tossed their sharp little horns and made short half-angry rushes at each other. The sun was up. Three little buck danced on the edge of the deep green bush where we lay hidden, and there was a weak sunlight warming their gold hides. The sun separated itself from the line of the hills, and became calm and big and yellow; a warm yellow colour filled the world; the little buck stopped dancing, and walked slowly off, frisking their white tails and tossing their pretty heads, into the bush.