be found.
In the days that followed he could only hunt in the cleared
area. The rough terrain made it difficult to find anything.
Tracking prey was impossible. The buzzard could strike from
the air but the dog had to make his way on the ground
through brambles of brush and muddy tractor ruts.
Hunger made him clumsy and overexcited. He found a
couple of mouse nests with litters of young. Once the ache
in his belly let up he started listening for squeaks from the
nests instead of the rustling of adult animals scurrying under
the brush. He never caught enough to fill him up and make
him sleepy. The constant hunger in his belly drove him on
through lacerated terrain where the smell of diesel overpowered
the scent trails he tried to follow.
The sun burned down on the cleared area during the day.
He tried to find shade by the piles of brush. At first there had
been water in the tractor ruts but it had dried up. Thirst
drove him out into the heat. At midday the only sound was
the monotonous buzzing of the horseflies, a dull song from
no apparent source in the scorching air. The buzzard didn't
appear at midday and the dog could roam without its
screeching surveillance.
One night he walked a long way in the dim light, driven
by thirst. Nose to the ground, he searched for moist patches
but found only dryness and debris. Often he felt apprehensive,
as if something were after him.
There was no wind to pick up a scent. He walked in
loops, frequently twisting round to detect a pursuer. Hunger
and thirst made his muscles tire easily. Sometimes he wanted
to curl up by a boulder and let weariness overpower him, but
the nagging sensation of having something on his trail drove
him on.
When the darkness over the cleared area lifted at dawn and
the piles of grey brush shifted to red again, he heard running
water. He started off at a trot but remained on guard. Water
in a brook rippled among stones. The air was different. Dawn
had brought the sound of birds.
He reached the murmuring water, running across stones
and the trunks of small, felled spruces, but he didn't dare
stand in the open and drink. Pushing on to a place where
the brook ran in a crevice between some rocks, he found a
sheltered spot where he could lap the cold, sparkling water
until the burning in his throat subsided. Then he listened.
The wind had awakened, bringing bird calls and the fragrance
of pine needles. The forest was close by. But the one
whose presence he sensed was not discernible and there was
no rustling.
He crept along the brook to find better protection before
drinking his fill. He was now going upstream towards the
smell of forest. Then the wind changed, bringing back his
early-morning apprehension. It blew from the opposite
direction through the brushwood by the brook and there
was a loud crackling in the leaves. The dog caught the scent
of predator. It stung in his nose.
He never saw her. She was resting on the boulder where
he'd first stopped to drink. Eyes wide, she watched him
crashing forward. The tufts in her ears quivered. Then she
glided down and crossed the brook in the opposite direction.
Her large cat pads left their marks in the damp sand of the
brook.
When he got to the forest it didn't engulf him, just forced
him on. He took the first hill in leaps and bounds. Large
stands of blue sowthistle snapped. He heard birds flying up,
shrieking. For a long time he ran along a ridge, hearing only
the surge of blood in his ears.
Now the wind picked up, singing high above in the
spruces. Surging wind, surging blood. No quiet. He was
frantic. Forgetting was remote and the memory of the unfamiliar
scent was near. It was the scent of a creature that
attacked; his body knew that instinctively. Now he was running,
but he wasn't following a trail. He ran to escape the
memory, to forget.
The loon called out from above a distant lake. Up here the
waters were cold. The loon's cry lingered in the air, a quivering
ribbon of sound.
He sometimes returned there, to the steep, straight banks,
but the intervals in between were long. He'd become a rambler,
a rover.
There were no abandoned pastures this far up, no dense
coverings of grass where voles rustled. Hunger drove him
on. He covered long stretches each day. At first he had nothing
to eat. He was dizzy and often had to rest.
Day by day he adapted to this new life, always on the
move. He started finding wood grouse hens and their
broods. He herded the frightened, peeping chicks, running
rapidly in a wide circle where he'd heard the cackling and
the hen taking flight. He grabbed each chick by the neck
and chomped. The fluttering wings and twitching body
excited him. His jaws clamped down again. His teeth ripped
through feathers and down, reaching warm flesh.
He rarely caught game birds, surviving mainly on rodents.
At the foot of the spruces he sniffed out mouse nests and
tore out the young, but up here he never found very much
in any one place. He loped on, a muscular grey body, almost
invisible in the sheets of fog across the marsh at dawn.
Sometimes he crossed his own tracks, returning to places
they'd disappeared, where only the scent of an old marking
clung to a stump. This wasn't enough to make the place
seem familiar. Only where the loons were: there he often
stopped, lying on the steep northern banks above the tarn
and listening. He rarely saw the loons, just their streaks in the
water, but he heard their cries from far away as he roamed
the ridges; that made him want to turn back.
He covered more ground than hunger compelled. When he
was running long distances he had an economical, slightly
uneven lope that didn't tire him out. It took him deep into
a different area, into belts of forest in the mountains. Under
high stands of blooming sowthistle he listened for lemmings.
They were easy to catch: prey that went limp when he bit
them across the back, revolting little bags of patchy skin. If
he was hungry he swallowed them, otherwise he let them
be. Some of them didn't run away; instead they sat on their
haunches, chattering furiously. At first this bewildered,
almost frightened him.
He ate cloudberries that had ripened in the sun. At dawn
he sneaked up on game birds out on the marshes but he
never caught anything in such open terrain. When he'd
frightened them off he did as they did, gobbled wet cloudberries
until his belly felt heavy. He knew the foxes came
here to eat. When he got farther up the mountainside he
caught another scent that he avoided, of something heavy
that made enormous, deep tracks in the marshy soil. This
scent made him veer and get as far away as he could.
The marshes were narrow, running between the ridges
and the islands of birch forest where the ground was dry. Up
here the wind had more bite. Black-beard lichen fluttered in
the birches and the lady fern and sowthistle rustled. There
was rarely a period of calm between the gusts, and the wind
from the mountains carried a whiff of snow.
One day he crossed the last of the marshes, coming up to
a treeless slope. The ground was hard, covered with brush
and heather. The wind pressed his ears back, making him
uneasy. He could hear nothing but the whining in the air.
When he scared up a grouse he was startled. It seemed to
come out of nowhere, tearing at the air with its flapping
wings. He started noticing rocks and thickets of dwarf birch
and willow. He kept a lookout by them, crouched and listening,
but the grouse always came from unexpected
directions and he could never catch them. Frustration made
him more and more restless and irritable as he ran.
He came to a large field of snow that was trampled down
by hooves and speckled with droppings. The snow was
coarse, porous and sunken. He sniffed at reindeer hairs and
ate some snow but was afraid to walk on the expanse of
white. Disturbed by the roaring wind in his ears, which
deafened him and made his surroundings unreliable, he
turned and began loping downward.
That night he slept under one of the first large spruces became
to once he was back in the forest. The days had grown
shorter and no insects tormented him, but he was stiff when
he awakened in the morning and the bump on his hind hock
hurt. Below him the marsh lay under a layer of frost. Each
blade of grass was pristine and powdery when he started
nosing for the sickly-sweet smell of overripe cloudberries.
He was heading down, running long stretches each day. The
mountain wind at his back carried his own scent ahead,
making it impossible to pick up whatever was moving or
hiding in front of him, but he paid no attention since he
wasn't hunting. He loped along unevenly and purposefully.
His paws got used to the gravel of the logging roads. His
pads became hard and slick, his claws dull and worn down.
He'd turned back just before the first night of frost when
he encountered a sharp wind on the mountainside. Since
then he'd only hunted at dawn. Even if he didn't catch anything
he started running after a while. What drove him was
a stronger incentive than hunger.
After drinking from a brook he would doze for a while
under a spruce, but never for long. Soon he was on his way
again. He didn't know where he was heading, but an inner
sense told him he should run towards something more compelling
than the cry of the loon above a distant mountain
tarn.
Not all the days were strong, bold days for running.
Confusion seized him sometimes, making him run aimlessly,
not knowing if he was hunting or just following something
distant he'd caught on the wind. When the rain washed the
logging road clean from gravel and dug furrows in the sand
he stayed off it.
Long, cold rains blew in off the ocean beyond the mountains.
Clouds shrouded the jagged ridges in grey mist, not
dissolving until they had emptied all their water over the
forests and marshes. But the one caught in the downpour
didn't know where it had come from or where it was going.
He was in a chamber of swirling water, trapped and miserable.
His coat was drenched nearly down to the skin, a
thick, unpleasant wetness that made him so cold he shivered
all night no matter how tightly he curled up around himself.
His hock ached.
When it wasn't raining too hard he would run anyway, at
a measured, steady pace, a dark grey body with worn paws
and a tight belly. He was running from the pain and his
hunger and confusion, which pursued him like persistent,
raw fog.
By day, the one who swooped down was in the spruce
tree, dozing. The one who hunted voles was by the edge of
the marsh. The little ones who cheeped and fluttered busied
themselves in the trees. Each was where it belonged. They
circled, roamed and fluttered, each in its own domain, and
they always returned. But he was the one who kept running.
One
night he slept near the logging road in a jumble of
roots and stones. There were raspberry seeds between his
teeth. He was engulfed in a freezing fog that muffled all
sounds. He slept curled up, stiff from the cold.
At dawn the wind lifted the fog, carrying with it a complex
fabric of smells that penetrated his sleep. His paws
twitched and he started whimpering like a pup.
When he woke up he stood facing the wind, taking in the
scents. It was all his. It was far more compelling than the cry
of the loon. He took off running before he had even peed,
before he had even found a stream to drink from.
He reached the marsh up above the pasture before the last
clouds of mist had risen from the sedgegrass. The higher
ground was orange after the frost, and the pit holes were
black and saturated with rain. He sniffed. Everything was
familiar. His paws knew every bump in the ground and
nothing frightened him. His markings were still there in the
wood of the barn. He peed on it again. It was all his, but he
needed to mark it once more.
Although he was hungry he didn't feel like hunting. The
scent of a hare hung in the wet grass. It was quite fresh but
he didn't follow it. He needed to ring in the whole area first.
Nose to the ground, he ran in circles. Lots of others had
been through this grass. The enormous grey creatures had
left huge prints. They'd broken the stalks of meadowgrass
and ploughed through the dark green blanket of leaves covering
the wetlands, now starting to turn brown.
Everything that happens is inside him. It has already happened.
Everything that happens is vivid within. He knows.
It flares up, flashes like a wing in the dark night, settles again.
It encompasses a lite that has been lived.
Remembering and forgetting are the same murky depths.