Where There's Smoke (25 page)

SHOOTING THE DOG

PETER GOLDSWORTHY

He was long in the tooth now, although no one in the district could put an exact figure on the years. His name offered a clue: even this far from the city it had not been possible to call a dog Nigger for at least a decade.

‘You get jailed for it these days,' Hedley Stokes liked to joke, ritually, to his daughter-in-law Meg, city born and bred and blamed for all kinds of city nonsense.

Hedley had bought the dog, fully grown and pre-named, years back.

Two droughts back, he sometimes put it – but the worst drought had been the absence of his son Ben at the time, playing football in the city and searching for Meg, or the idea of Meg, and trying to get the farm out of his blood. When Hedley's left knee finally gave way (cack-footed, he had been no mean player himself in his day) and Ben reluctantly returned to take over the place, the name-change insisted on by Meg – ‘Nugget' – would not be answered to by the dog. Dogged herself, an English teacher anxious about the influence of language on impressionable minds, she tried one more time – ‘Nipper' – but even the softening of a single consonant was stubbornly resisted by the black dog.

And even more stubbornly by Hedley and his wife, Edna, who still drove over most days from their retirement unit on the coast. Hedley gave the notion nothing more than a cursory snort; it was Edna who took the young woman aside and suggested that it might be cruel and confusing for the dog.

Largely retired from farm work, Nigger was allowed to tag along with his son, Blue, as the younger dog went about its shepherding. Blue was an athletic, wide-casting dog – the best in the district, many thought. If Ben was caught up in the crutching or drenching he would sometimes leave a gate or two open, and rely on Blue to bring up the sheep from the bottom paddocks unsupervised. Nigger was more of a loose cannon now. Slower, arthritic in the hips, he would break out about the flocks ever more lazily, much to the younger dog's frustration. The winter before, while bringing in the Angora goats that Ben had briefly diversified into, then rapidly out of (‘Another get-poor-quick scheme, son?'), Nigger had cast far too narrowly, dividing the herd and stampeding half of it through a fence. Half a day's work went down the drain, and far too much torn hide and bloodied fleece. The younger dog had taken it upon himself to admonish his sire's clumsiness, chasing the astonished Nigger back to the ute, then directing an equal amount of dog invective at an even more astonished Ben for his lack of leadership.

Hedley couldn't believe his ears when told the story over that Sunday's roast. ‘Who's running this farm?
You're
the top dog, Bennyboy. You've got to lead by example – not leave it to the dogs to sort it out.'

Edna, for good measure, ‘It's not fair on Blue, dear.'

‘But they do the work,' Meg put in, ‘maybe they should have more say.'

‘Votes for dogs!' Ben added.

Hedley allowed himself a chuckle. ‘I tell you one thing, girl. A kelpie-cross or three would do a hell of a better job of running the country than this mob.' He chewed a little more lamb before remembering his main theme. ‘You can't spoil them, Ben. Next you'll have them sleeping in the house.'

Meg's eyes slid immediately to her husband's, alarmed. He winked, reassuringly. He wasn't about to confess.

‘Woof!' he said, and grinned. ‘Woof, woof!'

After Blue's rebuke, Ben kept the sire chained in the tray of the ute while working the flocks, often with Hedley –
his
sire, it occurred to him – sitting in the front seat for company. He toyed, briefly, with the idea of moving Nigger to the coast with his parents, but Meg refused to allow it. A working dog would be bored to death inside their tiny, enclosed courtyard, she argued. In fact, she had grown attached to Nigger, and often kept him inside the farmhouse herself, spoiling him with tidbits, enjoying his company, a familiar presence in the corner of her eye.

‘Well, if it isn't the house nigger,' Hedley declared over another Sunday roast, as the dog tried to remain invisible beneath the dining-room table.

‘Hedley!' his wife warned him before Meg could bite. ‘You mustn't say things like that.'

‘Sticks and stones, Edna my love. Sticks and stones.'

It was a theme he often returned to, liking to shock his daughter-in-law with his version of straight country talk – but liking, also, her cheek in return, her willingness to give back as much as she got.

‘He's not a full-blood nigger,' he announced one morning. ‘Look here –' And he ruffled the white patch, roughly diamond-shaped, that stained the dog's black head like a horse's blaze. ‘Bentley mark. Know what a Bentley mark is, Meg?'

‘Yes, Dad. But don't let that stop you telling me again.'

He grinned, pleased. ‘Sign of the true heeler. He's got more than a bit of Queensland blue in him, this feller.'

‘I don't follow. You mean they crossed a dog with a cheese?'

Dash of blue heeler or not, Nigger was mostly kelpie. His coat's blackness took on a reddish kelpie sheen in the afternoon light, although Hedley liked to claim it was mostly dust.

Once, after Meg had spent the morning washing the old dog in a plastic washing tub, Hedley had leaned forward from his chair – a sort of cane throne on the veranda – and spat on the dog's coat as it slept in the sun at his feet.

‘A working dog should be dirty,' he said, with that glint of mischief in his eye that Meg was beginning to enjoy, and that she knew, also, was his harmless way of flirting with her.

Blue's dam had been a red kelpie from a property further down the Peninsula. The mother's redness had come through almost undiluted in the son, hence his name. He was a beautiful dog to watch at work, prick-eared, sleek as a seal, forever on the move. As a pup he had shown no interest in the sheep, and Hedley had almost given up on him. Then suddenly, at six months or so, watching his sire squeeze sheep into a pen for jetting, some sort of lightbulb had gone on the pup's head. Within minutes he'd been walking across the backs of the penned sheep, up to his hocks in their thick wool. He hadn't stopped moving among them since.

‘Gentler than his old man,' Hedley liked to boast. ‘The cattle dog hasn't come through. Which is why he's not a biter. Never even nips. Doesn't need to.'

For a time, chained in the ute, Nigger seemed to take a similar pride in watching his son at work. But after a few days the whining started, and then the frustrated straining at the chain. The last straw came with the arrival of the alpacas. Ben bought the small herd against his father's advice, or perhaps because of that advice. (‘Rooster one day, feather duster the next in that caper, son.') When the bottom fell out of an over-supplied alpaca-wool market (‘Can't say I didn't warn him, Meg. Only the breeders made any money.') Ben offloaded the herd at dog-food prices. The sight of Blue bringing these alien animals – half-goat, half–bonsai camel – in for transport drove Nigger into a frenzy. Maddened even further by Hedley's dressings down, he managed to scramble over the near-side of the ute and almost hang himself on his chain.

‘Two things, son. The length of the chain – Jesus! Second – you'll have to leave him at the house in any case.'

‘Wouldn't mind leaving both of you,' Ben muttered to himself.

In fact, he and Blue were alone in the top paddock a week later when the dog found the first of the spring lambs. Or found the crows which had already found them.

‘What you got there, feller?'

Foxes were his first thought, but the ripped-apart lambs had not been eaten. It looked more like play, or playful torture, than hunting for food. His second thought was Blue – the dog had the freedom of the farm. But Blue seemed as surprised as him at the discovery, and he had never been aggressive with the animals, apart from head-butting the nose of the odd angry ewe.

Meg, back teaching six-tenths, was still in town when he arrived home, but his father was sitting in his cane throne on the veranda and his mother was ensconced in her old kitchen, baking, and chatting to her husband through the open window. Ben stalked straight to Nigger's kennel. As he squatted on his haunches, the dog seemed pleased enough to see him, wagging its tail and innocently offering up its jaws for inspection.

His father limped across the yard. ‘Problem, son?'

‘A few lambs have been killed.'

‘Foxes?'

‘They weren't eaten.'

‘No sign of wool on Nigger,' Hedley said, peering over his shoulder. ‘How fresh was the kill?'

‘Yesterday. Maybe the day before. The crows had got stuck in.'

‘Then you're not likely to find anything today,' the old man said, and straightened up and limped back to his chair.

‘Maybe it was a wedge-tail?'

A chuckle from the older man, ‘No chance, son.'

‘What about Ted Chambers' dog? I never liked the look of it. Plug-ugly. More pig in it than dog. And always out in the road chasing cars.'

‘Big call to make, Bennyboy. You wouldn't want to say anything to Ted without hard evidence.'

Gathering evidence would not be easy, but the chief suspect was waiting for Ben and Meg in the middle of the road –
its
section of road clearly – as they drove home from church that Sunday, alerted by their dust from miles away. The dog's front feet were planted firmly in the dirt, bracing itself less against the oncoming car, perhaps, than against the backward thrust of the force of its own barking. One especially powerful bark seemed to lift the entire dog off its paws, spinning it three-sixty degrees back to its original position. Instead of speeding past, Ben pulled to the side of the road and stopped. Ted and Joan, great talkers, were still back in town on the church steps; he had time for a little sleuthing.

‘What are you doing?' Meg asked, alarmed, as he opened the door, but the dog had already stopped its barking, and padded tamely up to the driver's door with its tail wagging, a picture of innocence.

‘All bark and no bite,' Ben said, chucking its pale, pig-like ears.

In the adjacent field Ted Chambers' spring lambs were frolicking, and even as Ben inspected the dog's snout for telltale strands of wool, he knew that there was no chance of this dog travelling ten miles across stony country to kill
his
lambs. Behind them, the dust of another car was fast approaching. The Chambers, escaping the church steps earlier than usual? Edna and Hedley, more likely, arriving for the Sunday leg of lamb which Meg always left roasting in the oven before church.

‘We need to get home,' she reminded him, and he pushed the blameless dog away and tugged the car door shut.

He made sure Nigger was outside, out of sight, while they were eating, but Hedley warmed to the theme nonetheless. ‘It happens to some dogs late in life, son. They turn.'

‘Into grumpy old dogs?' Meg suggested.

For once her father-in-law ignored the tease. ‘Might be the dingo coming through, of course.'

‘He's got dingo in him?' Meg asked, surprised.

‘He's got blue heeler in him,' Ben reminded her. ‘Heelers are part dingo.'

‘Some more than others,' Hedley said. ‘Every now and then some genius decides the breed is getting too soft and crosses more dingo back into it.'

‘What's this, dear?' Edna interrupted, working with her fork at a white cyst-like pocket in a slice of meat.

‘Looks like hydatid,' Hedley pronounced. ‘Better not touch that, Mother.'

Meg laughed. ‘They're just garlic cloves, Dad.'

Hedley drowned the offending lamb in mint sauce. ‘And I thought the meat was off.'

‘It's an acquired taste,' she said, but he had already turned back to Ben.

‘There's no cure for it, son.'

‘What are you saying, Dad?'

‘You know what I'm saying. Once they start, they never stop.'

‘Then you'll have to have him with you, after all. In town. Where he can't do any damage.'

‘It's no life for a working dog in there, son.'

Silence. Meg's eyes met Ben's, pleading. He turned back to his father. ‘I'm not going to put him down without definite proof, Dad.'

‘Bennyboy – listen to reason. In no time flat you'll have no lambs left. Once a dog acquires the taste …' He turned back to his daughter-in-law. ‘Speaking of which – could I pester you for a couple more slices?'

Nigger left his breakfast untouched in its bowl the next morning. After stalking that bowl, and being unrebuked, Blue gobbled it down. Was the older dog sickening? A different explanation waited out in the fields, where three black-feathered undertakers were keeping vigil over the bodies of another two dead lambs, one of which this time had been partly eaten.

Even now, finding no wool on the old dog's jaws or blood on his coat, Ben was able to resist the obvious. Although he prudently kept Nigger chained up every night for a week.

Prudently, but sleeplessly: bursts of angry, frustrated barking kept waking both of them. Desperate for a night's shut-eye by the weekend, he left the dog unchained, and found three more lambs ripped apart in the morning. Circumstantial evidence? Only Meg still thought so.

‘We have to catch him red-handed, Ben.'

A year or two before he wouldn't have listened. The value of the lost meat and wool would have tipped the scales of justice against the dog. Now the wool mountain was a mile high, everyone wanted to eat beef, or battery chicken, and his monetary losses were negligible. He could afford to bide his time.

‘You were thinking of getting rid of the sheep anyway, Ben. Barley prices are up – why not put in a few more acres next year? Or canola – the Chambers are putting in canola …'