When the sun was low and streaming down that long corridor of diamond mesh., you could see her stretched out on her side, her coat burnished by the last rays in a blaze that seemed to light the furthest corner. Other kennels stood ajar, awaiting the return of their occupants, straining against the slip chains, tails flailing, snuffling and sneezing at the enticing, dusty aroma of their brimming bowls.
She would greet their return with a few token pats of her own thick, golden rudder on the concrete, polished by a thousand pacing paws and redolent with Jeyes Fluid. Amid the sounds of harnesses, leads and chains being clipped to the mesh and the departure of Wellingtons and trainers, she would cock an ear for some sign that she was not forgotten, and then, without further movement, accept that today was the same as yesterday.
She was at ease in the sanctuary of her kennel where all sounds were familiar and non-threatening, the routine comforting and reassuring. Whether the others were boisterous by nature or quiet and placid, their conditioning made them ignore sudden clatters, slams and bangs – something she’d never again be able to do.
The training and exercises and the simulated blindness of her handlers had heightened her natural, protective instincts, and she had padded soft-footed and gently through changing mazes of harmless obstacles, time and again, bringing her sacred charge safely through it all. Only the big black had been able to match her, albeit with a more confident swagger in his pigeon-toed gait and his endless, coral-pink grin preceding each triumphant march.
But for one reason or another, the black and the others were not there the day the gas bottle exploded in the training school kitchen, sending most of its own stout steel shell, a window frame and a rain of other debris bouncing and somersaulting thunderously across the galvanized roofing of the kennels to buckle the wire netting front of her own enclosure and litter her run with smaller, smoking fragments. That one instant decided the rest of her life.
It took her trainer almost an hour to coax her out of her sleeping box, hold her tightly until her convulsive trembling passed, and get her to leave the shelter of the kennel block. Out on the green square, she pulled anxiously against her lead and crouched at every slight sound, so that they looked at each other and shook their heads or looked away.
Long after the others had left, her trainer sat against the fence with her legs outstretched, stroking the golden head on her thighs, pulling at the velvet ears and making the sounds that only the two of them knew. But like all things human, there had to be an end to it and for the last time, the kennel gate was unlatched and the choke chain slipped off so that she was released to her own devices. That had been almost two weeks ago.
The adoption family recommended by Friends of the Blind did their best to get there at the appointed time, and when they did, it was with an air of great excitement that they pulled into the brick-paved carpark in their modest family car with the mud-spattered CA registration plates.
The child with them skipped ahead of her parents and the facility manager, pointing into each occupied kennel and shrilling “Is this him?” and “And this?” and “This is him - I know” with such infectious enthusiasm that they smiled at each other and the manager relaxed a little. The trainer had absented herself for this inevitable moment and he was left to cut the ties and issue advice and cautions on the care of an intelligent, sensitive animal.
The child was in raptures and insisted on holding the lead as they walked the dog back up the corridor to the office to take care of the paperwork as the manager described the adoption agreement and indemnity. Finally, they were in the car, the dog lying quietly on the back seat as she had been taught and good naturedly enduring the fussing of the child. Fifteen minutes later they were back on the freeway and heading home as evening drew in.
The trip had been through hot and endless Karoo landscapes, but despite her tiredness, excitement sustained the child for some time before she fell asleep, toppling slowly sideways against her seat belt to where the quiet panting of the dog stirred the curtain of dark hair that had fallen forward to cover the child’s sleeping face.. Eventually the square, golden head sank to rest on crossed forepaws and against desultory conversation in the front seats and muted music on the car radio, the dog relaxed her defenses and slept.
When common sense dictated a stop for coffee and a stretch, the driver swung the car off the highway, down an unremarkable side road for two hundred meters and into L J Pinto’s at Mossiefontein The child woke, confused, but registering, in the same moment, the flashing neon inducements, vocalising her wants and fighting her way out of her restricting seat harness.
The first slowing and change of engine note had woken the dog and she raised her head without changing body position, to take in the paved forecourt, the smeared windows and the Rexine upholstery of the booths where she knew she was not permitted.
Still, her own bodily needs were pressing and she looked forward to the command to leave the car and attend to them. The handbrake was being applied when she stood and whined softly and the alpha male chuckled and rubbed her head. “Sure, you have to go, you have to go. Us too. Off you go, girl!” And opened the back door.
With a last glance to make sure she had understood, the dog left the car. Anxious at first, the alpha female protested that she would run away and called her. She stopped her sniffing to look back before crouching to empty her bladder on a small patch of weeds she had found at the outer edge of the circle of moth-swirling fluorescent light. Relieved, the family called together, clapped hands and slapped their thighs to attract her back to them. The overtures were attractive and she raced back the length of the forecourt, tongue lolling and suddenly eager to be with them again.
It was at that moment that the W J Retief pantechnicon swung in from the far end of the long-paved area, headlights blazing and its bulk outlined in the green running lights of a freeway juggernaut. The driver’s mate shouted as a golden shape appeared in his left field of vision, its rocking horse canter attracting his attention. The driver hit his brakes and the klaxon button at the same time and the hissing pneumatics responded almost as noisily as the warning from the multi-horned chrome carillon on the roof of the driver’s cab.
Caught in a paralyzing blast of light and sound, the dog froze for an instant and began to crouch submissively until the sudden throttling down caused a series of backfires that rattled the sheet iron roof of the forecourt. And that was the end for her.
From a friendly, playful animal willing to accept any kind word and gesture, she became once again an adrenalin-charged fugitive with only one goal in mind - to leave this terrifying place far behind with its nerve shattering explosions of sound, blinding lights and stifling stench of dieseline and petrol.
By the time the giant, jackknifing trailer demolished a roof support, she had vanished into the darkness of the surrounding desert and was at full stretch when the first dislodged roofing sheet hit the forecourt roadway with a thunderous crash. Racing through the sparse Karoo scrub, she yelped through her labored panting and extended her stride still further.
Back at L J Pinto’s, the pandemonium eventually subsided to an exchange of curses and threats around the couple with their weeping child and after an hour or so of calling and pacing, they gave up and pulled quietly and sadly away, leaving the others to make of it what they would.
Under an overarching navy sky ablaze with stars, the dimly visible flatness stretched away in every direction as the dog mindlessly distanced herself from the terror behind. A few times, she veered off course as nightjars flurried up in her path and once, the explosive, warning hiss of a puff-adder saved her from certain death as she disturbed its nocturnal hunt for rodents. But, when even her fear had lost its stimulus and she had slowed through a shuffling trot to an exhausted walk, head down and tongue at full extent, she was twenty miles into the wasteland and still heading west.
By sunrise, she had sunk to her belly in the lee of a mound of wind driven sand that threatened to one day engulf the entire skeleton of a rickety, angle-iron structure. In the windless air, the pitted vanes atop this were as still as the surrounding desert. Daylight showed through the rust holes in the corrugated tank that crouched below the motionless windmill.
The dog remained where she was, panting stilled but tormented now by massive thirst. Accustomed to having water at any time she needed it, this was a new experience and the way her tongue stuck to the lining of her mouth added to her distress. She gave up the impossible search for enough saliva to free it and wearily rested her chin on her paws for a moment. It was some time before she was aware of the woman approaching.
Unafraid of humans and associating them with company and food and water, she jerked up her head as her tail patted the sand in a glad reflex. Then she stopped uncertainly as the strangeness of this person registered a warning. Unlike those she was used to, the human had a crablike, shuffling gait, one hand extended before it, the other clutching a chipped enamel bowl to its emaciated, ragged breast as it came slowly closer to her sheltering hummock of sand. It was speaking quietly to itself, a cracked and hissing sound that did not reassure her at all.
The dog rose silently and trotted out of reach, tail between her legs. The strange human reached the windmill and, carefully placing the bowl inside its incredibly tattered clothing, it clambered painfully, one rung at a time, up the ladder protruding from the drift-sand to the tank platform.
Despite her misery, the dog watched the bowl with great interest as the woman reached into the tank and then seemed to remove it with great care. A dribble of water splashed down the legs of the tower as the woman gulped noisily at the bowl. She repeated the movements once more to refill the bowl and began an awkward, one-handed descent to the ground below with her precious burden, placing the bowl on the ground, stepping away carefully so as not to kick sand into it.
Then she crabbed away towards a distant scattering of scrub on a slight rise, where triumphant clucking announced the presence of a nest – and at least one fresh egg.
Stealing forward to inspect the contents of the bowl, the dog found water and consumed it in a succession of gulps that emptied the bowl in seconds. Her thirst only partially satisfied, she looked hopefully in the direction in which the human had disappeared and despite her distrust, her tail swayed gently.
At the nest, old xAau had sunk to her knees to run her spatulate fingers gently across the sand to find the shallow indentation scratched to hold the eggs, the smooth outlines telling her what she needed to know. She closed her hand around the most recent addition, warm to the touch and still fractionally moist.
Birds she knew, but a bird that laid eggs and let the whole world know was still strange to her. The wild birds knew better than to betray their nests while these abandoned domestic fowl had lost all sense of self preservation even though their human protectors were long gone. No matter to xAau, whose survival instincts had led her step by determined step from the interior to these outer limits of her world. Where she had encountered the strange things left behind by another race - gods perhaps - for who else would have the need to make such towering shelters, some still faintly fragrant with the scent of the animals or the people that had been housed therein. They were replaced now by the encroaching desert that had piled itself in soft drifts in the corners and against the sills and skirtings. Fearful at first, she had started sheltering there from the night wind after each day of grubbing under the stones and in the sand for a meager sustenance that either writhed and squirmed and stung her fingers or contributed to the wear on her few remaining teeth with the clinging grit that she was unable to remove from the bulbs and roots. Connecting the calls of the domestic fowl with fresh eggs had been a turning point and from the first nest, her condition and her spirits had picked up.
It had been a search for eggs that cost her sight so long ago she could hardly remember it. Squatting over a clutch of sand-partridge eggs under a little bush, twin jets of venom had taken her full in the eyes as she looked up from making space in her forage bag. Her instinctive reaction toppled her backwards into the dry riverbed below. Without doubt, her fall saved her from the follow-up strike of the banded cobra.
The last thing she ever saw was the dull, dusty, muscular gleam of it, undulating angrily away along the edge of the bank above, and then the agony set in and she ceased to care about dying.
When her blind, feverish digging found water to lave her eyes, it was too little and too late and too full of grit to do anything but lacerate inflamed membrane, adding to her suffering. But together with the contents of her bag, it kept her alive and ten days later, when she was reduced to chewing the rawhide bag itself, she had recovered enough to follow the riverbed to wherever it might lead her.
It had been two months now since she first cautiously felt her way to investigate the strange rhythmic creak of the windmill up on the dune and now, there seemed to be no reason to leave. Food, water and shelter were all here on increasingly familiar ground.
With head on paws, the dog watched xAau following her daily circuit. There were places where she would walk confidently upright, then suddenly stop and inch her way forward, a hesitant hand extended to confirm the position of a shrubby white thorn, navigating her careful way around it and feeling with her horny feet for the broken shale underfoot that marked the beginning of a patch of tubers that she plundered sparingly. From there, it was a short distance to a collapsed shed that had held stock for many years.
The dessicated dung was still deep in places and patches of damp she had painstakingly maintained with her water bowl attracted flies and other winged scavengers that buzzed and probed and laid eggs that hatched within days into wriggling nutritious maggots or enormous, pallid larvae. xAau had learned from the first to drag a length of corrugated iron across the doorway to keep out the domestic fowls. A foraging hen that tried to flee past her from this new source of food, she had caught in her arms in the doorway and plucked and eaten raw.
The halting, hesitant progress of the woman throughout the long day had roused more than curiosity in the dog and several times, she had risen with a soft whine and a hesitantly waving tail to subside again and watch xAau’s next move. With the sun high, her half slaked thirst was tormenting her and she returned hopefully to the empty bowl. It was all the promise she could find in this harsh place and she flopped down in the square of shade cast by the tank overhead, eyes half closed and tongue at full stretch, tulip ears twitching back and forth at each distant sound from the old woman.
xAau’s return up the dune to the windmill seemed harmless enough and the dog lay where she was, her attention fixed on the empty bowl when the woman located it and picked it up with a clucked expression of annoyance, then tucked it in her rags and climbed the ladder again. In the intense heat, the surface of the water had dropped to a level just beyond the point where xAau could fill the bowl. She set it down with a metallic clink and felt for the bottom edge of the nearest wind vane.
Exerting all her frail strength, she pushed it away from her and grabbed the next one, then the next and so on until with much creaking and shuddering the ancient device was rotating in the windless air. xAau persisted for ten minutes, at which point, in a succession of echoing groans and belches, the earth relented and gave up a thin trickle of liquid. The old woman continued with the movement that her human intelligence had quickly associated with life-giving water on that first day of discovery, when a slight breeze had stirred the windmill and a miserly amount of water had been audibly added to the tepid contents of the tank.
After a half hour of hard labour, she was able to reach the surface and delve a long drink of rusty water and even allow herself the profligate luxury of tipping a second bowl over her head and shoulders. Below her, the dog was surprised and excited by the sudden shower of lukewarm droplets that cascaded between the planking, snapping and gulping at the brief and unexpected relief that hit the sand and was gone as though it never was.
Intent on scooping another bowlful, xAau missed the anxious whining beneath her feet as she backed to the ladder and made her careful, one-handed way down the corroded rungs to the ground. She stopped once during her cautious, shuffling passage down the dune to the shelter of the ruined buildings, sure she had heard something behind her. But the dog had also paused, one forepaw suspended in mid-stride, and her panting stilled, resuming her shadow-like progress only when this fascinating human continued.
Throughout that icy desert night, with a billion stars wheeling and exploding overhead, the dog maintained a shivering vigil, twenty paces from the dark doorway into which xAau had disappeared. Occasionally the golden head would jerk up, the wide brow furrowed at a sleepy, child-like whimper or cry from within as the old woman fought the demons of her eternal darkness.
For the dog, dawn was a pale peach suffusion in the eastern sky - for xAau, it was a slackening of night’s icy grip and an instinct that told her that condensation on leaves and grasses was there to be collected or be lost to the sun. She emerged from her refuge, stepping cautiously over the threshold, scratching and yawning. The dog sat up, tongue lolling and tail patting the sand until xAau started at the strange rhythmic sound and she stilled all movement as the blind woman set off on her morning circuit in search of the essentials of her humble life, this time with the dog following more closely.
It was mid morning before blind xAau next climbed the windmill for water, to drink and to fill her bowl. She had clambered her awkward one-handed way down the flaking ladder and had scarcely set down the bowl when the parched dog rushed forward. xAau stepped back hurriedly, palms instinctively outstretched to fend off this sudden, noisy presence that gulped and snuffled and panted too close to her cringing feet for any possibility of escape.
Submissively, she sank to the sand and crouched there, awaiting her fate. Non-plussed, the dog pulled back and regarded the head down, hindquarters raised posture. In canine language it was clearly a play-bow and a signal that this strange human invited friendship. Still nervous, she edged forward, nuzzling and licking at the saltiness of the proffered neck. And in her swoon, the old woman weakly extended one hand.
It was enough, so that poor xAau regained consciousness and rolled onto her back to find herself smothered by fawning attention, her protective hands nudged and nuzzled away from her cringing, blind face and the eager weight of the dog against her. Again, she reached out one hand and the dog was won. In her excitement, she barked, twice, three times, lavishing grateful licks on the trembling hand before her.
Slowly, at that long unheard, familiar sound, xAau’s fear drained away and she roused enough courage to explore the happy squirming body against her. Far bigger and more robust than the ribby, skulking creatures that had followed the nomads from camp to camp, joined in the hunts in return for scraps and given warning after dusk when lurking shadows pressed in too close to a dying fire, it was, unmistakably, a dog.
Shakily she climbed to her feet. Panting happily, the dog swung in against her left knee. tail waving and suddenly purposeful – waiting for her next move. xAau stepped forward and the dog maintained her position, carefully keeping pace with the old woman. xAau rested her left hand on the golden shoulders and continued walking. There was gentle pressure against her thigh and she gave way to the right, registering from her knowledge of the area, that she was avoiding the pile of fragmented rock that lay before her.
A short way further, the dog edged away to her left and instinctively, xAau followed, maintaining her hand contact and by-passing the collapsed remnants of an ancient barbed wire fence that had so frequently deceived her. And so it went on for the rest of that long, hot, amazing morning, as xAau grew in confidence and they learned from each other.
That night, they lay down together as though they had always been that way. It was a long time before xAau slept. When she did, it was to dream of once again having a shadow.
Pinelands Writers Circle