Man & Beast Read online

  We enjoyed the summer with Sally, the name Deborah gave the dog. She followed me everywhere I went during the day, and at night I would sneak her into our room, where she’d sleep until morning. My father worked for the local council and left the house early. Once he’d gone I let the dog out in the street. She’d go off on her own to explore before returning to the house for breakfast, which consisted of a bowl of milky tea and two slices of buttered toast. The only problem with Sally was that generally she didn’t like men, including my father. Michael was about to turn eighteen, but with his baby-faced looks and sense of innocence, Sally treated him as just another kid.

  One night during the following winter I was lying in bed when I heard a knock at the front door. Sally let out a low growl. At first I thought it was Michael. He hadn’t come home from work and I assumed he’d been locked out of the house. A few minutes later I heard voices in the next room, a loud scream and then sobbing. Thinking it was another of the many nights of fighting between my parents I put a pillow over my head, blocked my ears and fell asleep. The next morning, I woke to find my grandmother and several of my aunties and uncles in the kitchen drinking tea. Michael had been murdered the night before after he got into a fight in a laneway behind the Rainbow Hotel in Fitzroy. He was shot through the heart. It made little sense to me then, and makes less now, more than fifty years later.

  The days after Michael’s death remain a blur. But I do remember my mother found it difficult to get out of bed, and my father went to the pub and got drunk, as he usually did. Weeks after his funeral, with my sister Deborah taking me by the hand, Sally and I walked through the streets in the rain and stopped outside the laneway where Michael had been killed. I was a good Catholic in those days, an altar boy at the local church, All Saints, and a believer. I looked down at the bluestone pavers and wondered where Michael could be. Sally sniffed the air but wouldn’t enter the lane. Decades later I published one of my first poems, Michael. It ended with the following stanza:

  And sometimes we walk

  along that laneway behind

  the Rainbow Hotel

  I look down for you

  and listen for the whistle

  of a bullet.

  After Michael’s death it was up to me to pay for Sally’s keep from the money I made as a paper boy. I didn’t mind. Sally had a litter of pups after a wild night out with a stray mongrel and we would keep the runt of the litter, Rusty, for the next twelve years.

  Sally increasingly found herself in trouble on the street. When a debt collector turned up at the front door demanding money from my mother, she bit him on the calf. And when he came back a week later with a bill for the ‘invisible mending’ required for the hole in his suit pants, she bit him again. The next day a policeman came to the house riding a black bicycle. He picked up a broom and chased Sally around the yard with it. He eventually backed her into a corner, broke the broom handle across her back and proceeded to give her what my father would have termed a good kicking. Sally was a slow learner when it came to male authority. A few weeks later I was coming home from the street with her. It was getting dark, I was late and began to run. I turned the corner into our street and ran into a Salvation Army major. He’d been giving out prayer cards and collecting donations. He spooked Sally and she responded by taking a chunk of meat out of his forearm. We ran home, the major following with a bloodied arm.

  The next day the police returned, with a caged van and a net. Sally put up a good fight. It took the police fifteen minutes to net her. And she continued fighting, barking, snapping and tearing at the net with her claws until she was in the back of the van. One policeman laughed and winked at me before getting into the van and driving off. When I asked my mother where Sally was going she told me she was being sent to a holiday farm. I didn’t believe a word of what she said but I understood why she said it and didn’t hold it against her.

  Dirty Dog

  John Birmingham

  I took the dog down to the beach, as is my wont. Once or twice a year we sojourn to Byron Bay. There’s a Mexican joint there at the top of the main street that does excellent margaritas. This alone is reason enough to visit but the main purpose of driving for a couple of hours is to walk the dog.

  The local government authorities maintain a relaxed attitude on the question of hounds set loose upon their sands. Most beachside local government authorities are implacably opposed to allowing dogs anywhere near the beach, but Byron, being in the thrall of Greens and vegans and winged fairies, has set aside an entire bay where you can walk your best friend.

  Sophie, my ageing labrador, loves it, of course. A city dog, she is walked at least once a day, occasionally two or even three times. But I can understand that the regular round of pissed-upon telephone poles, car tyres and dead possums grows stale with repetition. The legacy of her breeding calls. Labradors grew from a line of sturdy water-fowling hounds and are seldom happier than when they are wet. Being wet and chewing experimentally on a captured bird is, for them, the first step on the path to nirvana.

  As a pup, Sophie approximated this by leaping upon birds drawn to our water sprinkler and enthusiastically shaking them to actual pieces. As she has aged out of the killer demographic, however, she has learned to find her pleasures elsewhere. The beach is one such place—but not only because seagulls call forth memories of blood and water.

  She is not the hunter she once was and I am not naive. I know only too well the reason our furry friend goes wild at the first whisper of crashing surf is that she is already imagining the giddy joy of befouling herself at water’s edge. For this reason I normally walk Sophie for an hour before we get to the beach. And I take her at different times of day, lest she determine a pattern to our outings and set herself the challenge of holding bowel and bladder tight until some innocent child’s carefully constructed and much-loved sandcastle presents itself as a tempting target for explosive discharge.

  No. We walk and we walk the hot dusty backstreets until she has done her dirty business and it is safe to have her off the leash near sand and water.

  Or so I thought, until yesterday. A full hour I gave her on the lead, with multiple breaks to make potty and to water the parched and yellow grass of Byron’s less travelled byways. When at last it seemed there could be nothing left, no chance of being disgraced in public, we repaired to the surf.

  A fine hot day it was, with a lovely rolling swell peeling north of the small rocky outcrop that marked the edge of the sanctioned area where dogs might play and frolic. Many children were about, watched over by their parents, and many other dogs too. All behaving and enjoying themselves.

  I let slip the hound, who bolted after a border collie and took to racing back and forth up and down the beach, a pleasing sight after recent woes and injuries. We carefully chose the breeder from whom we took our pup. Frank Meusberger, a retired copper, was a thoughtful and conservative breeding master. He had never sought to produce the highly prized and hugely expensive brown labs you sometimes see. Force breeding that particular strain brings out the genetic hip problems that can torment older labradors.

  Sophie, when young, was a small but sturdy animal, strong and fit. She maintained her fitness even as the years piled up on her, but had of late been bothered by arthritis. It was a pleasure, then, to see her move so freely and with such vigour on the sand.

  Not that I allowed my normal vigilance to slip. I kept close watch lest she suddenly begin to display the telltale signs of a dog in search of a dumping spot.

  But there was no warning. No telltale signs.

  After running about for ten minutes with no sign of needing to take a canine comfort break, she suddenly charged into a small lagoon-like area in front of several families and, panting and smiling the way dogs do, let loose an enormous and distressing explosion of semi-liquid brown spray, carrying within it lumps of more solid matter.

  It was as though time ceased to have meaning. A small bubble of suspended reality enclosed the beach. Waves no lo
nger crashed. Gulls no longer soared. Other dogs stopped their charging about.

  All was still.

  And then one child, downstream of the toxic event, screamed.

  Then all the children screamed, their parents yelled, and I roared at the dog to stop what she was doing. All of which naturally served only to reward her with the sort of attention that demanded even more panting and spraying and bounding about.

  I was moving towards the contaminated site, slowly at first, in disbelief, but accelerating as the horror of it dawned. The children scattered, some hauled out of the sea by cursing parents who could not have splashed more had they been trying to save their charges from a great white.

  Meanwhile, the dog, who seemed to have stored a week’s worth of bodily wastes for this moment, continued to leap and spray and turn in circles. I had my phone in one hand, held high above my head, a doodoo bag in the other, and the eyes of everyone upon me as I raced towards the deposits, hoping somehow to scoop them up. Also racing towards them was an unusually large set of waves. Great fantails of water arced up behind me as I accelerated. Sophie barked in joy at such a jolly caper. Parents and surfers did not.

  The waves made it there before I did, scattering and atomising everything while I traipsed forlornly back and forth making a pathetic show of launching myself at anything that looked even vaguely brown and collectible.

  How long does one stay in the water and show willing under such circumstances?

  For as long as anyone who witnessed your original disgrace remains.

  We were a long time getting out of the shallows of shame.

  Snake Dog

  Anson Cameron

  The old man called me into his office and told me we were buying a horse. Something I could learn to ride on. He’d found a mare in Stock & Land and rung the owner and arranged to go for a test ride on the thing, he said. Come on, a lunchtime excursion.

  Dad was wearing his aubergine business suit. He pulled on his RMs and we got into his HD ute and drove out past the north edge of town to the 10-acre hobby farms of Bathurst burr, car bodies and lone sheep with Christian names.

  We pulled up at a yellow brick veneer with a weed yard. The horse was right alongside the house in a treeless paddock. A lean chestnut mare. She looked sparky, alert. We whistled her up with a handful of lucerne and I fed her through the fence as Dad got the saddle from the ute. He cinched it tight and began to ride her around the paddock.

  I stood whacking the fence wires with a stick, Jimi Hendrix on a colossal five-string. I stopped when I saw the horse’s owner peeking from behind his blinds, watching Dad kick her to a canter and test her flightiness by throwing his hand in front of her eyes. A lot of people were wary of talking to lawyers, broad daylight, face-to-face. They thought it might cost them—money or dignity, they knew not which—but somehow it would cost. So I understood why the guy didn’t come outside. His horse was being ridden by a legal eagle in an aubergine suit. No need to get involved in that.

  Dad rode the chestnut mare clockwise and counter-clockwise round her small paddock, taking her through all the gaits. She moved like she was auditioning for a life of wide spaces, hills, the bush, dawn journeys. He unsaddled her and I gave her an apple and we drove away with me wiping her slobber off my palm onto my bare thigh. He was impressed with the horse, though the owner was shifty. The horse was at least two years older than advertised. ‘I could see the guy watching us from inside his house,’ I said.

  ‘Did he look shifty?’ Dad asked.

  ‘Furtive,’ I said.

  ‘Furtive.’ Dad rolled the word round his mouth. The furtive are a favourite hors d’oeuvre of lawyers.

  When we got back to his office, Dad phoned the owner and told him his horse was okay, she might do the trick, she was older than he’d said, of course, but she had a light mouth and wasn’t skittish. ‘How … like … how would you know that?’ the guy asked.

  ‘We came out just now and rode her,’ Dad said. ‘You must have been out.’ He winked at me.

  ‘Not my horse, you didn’t,’ the guy said. ‘I been with my horse all day.’

  Dad had got the wrong address and saddled up some stranger’s horse. Had ridden some citizen’s pet … put the steed of some housebound innocent through its paces.

  These years later I still see that guy peeking out from behind his blinds. What did he think we were? Joyriders? People who stole horses a quarter-hour at a time? How did he explain us to his missus? ‘A guy in a purple suit saddled up Joybelle and rode her round the paddock today.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘True. Canter, trot, gallop, like … I don’t know … maybe he’s driving past and wondering how she rides, so he pulls over and he rides her to see if his speculations is on the money. Just curious.’ ‘And you didn’t stop him?’

  ‘I told you … he was wearing a purple suit.’

  Next day we drove north again and Dad rode the advertised horse. It was thick-coated, thickset, and looked like it should be pulling a bucket, working underground. The sort of horse to make a prospective buyer umm and ahh and grimace. Given the umms and ahhs and grimaces, the woman there said she’d throw in a puppy. Her Australian terrier bitch had just had a litter of puppies. Terriers of tangled genealogy, Dad called them. Which she winced at, but he said was most Australian. He got me to choose one while he bought the horse. We gave the pup to my sister Vicki as a birthday present. She cooed over it, named it Bindi, bathed it once or twice, and then left home.

  I never had a dog of my own. Legally bound to me—naming rights and feeding duties. Bindi was an absent sister’s dog. She probably didn’t know that, but she was. And a bitch. We didn’t care for each other early on. Who, with any male dignity, with any plans to hunt mega-fauna and track Navajo, would want a puny, female dog as sidekick? She smelled my disapproval, but began to tag along on my expeditions when she learned there would be blood, speedy getaways, warm things falling from the sky.

  We lived out of town on the Goulburn River, in snake country. The first serpent she engaged was a large eastern brown on our doorstep at night. Enough poison there to kill a congregation or a Samoan. By the time I answered her squeals they were joined. I was to learn that if you could catch her in the early phase, while she was circling the serpent wailing, being drawn closer by the vortex of her bloodlust, you could snatch her up and stop the fight, save the snake … or dog. But there’s no way to unlock a snake and canine once they’re fully involved. It’s personal by then, and you’ll be bitten by either or both for interfering. Bindi soon got a lock on it behind its head and shook it lifeless. And was thereafter hooked on battle. Tiger snakes, brown snakes, black snakes … and one blue snake.

  Wolves don’t attack bears front on. Jackals don’t latch onto lions. A cougar avoids a rattler. Snakes flee from all things. Nature is circumspect. You think a leopard swaggers and hums the ‘Eroica’ on its rounds? It proceeds like Stalin’s proctologist—gently, gently, any slip death. Each wild beast throbs with the knowledge of its own fragility.

  Not a terrier. They are impervious to prudence. We have bred prudence from a terrier’s brain. The sensible were spayed. The peaceniks were neutered. We have crossed kamikazes with crazies and enticed the foolhardy to fornicate with the hotheaded. We have made a canine Scotsman. These small dogs are a type of homicidal lemming. One does not expect to see a country terrier with a trim of whitened fur around its muzzle. Geriatricism is as rare, to them, as honesty to a cat.

  She was bred to play a charging Capulet to slithering Montagues, a snarling Hatfield to hissing McCoys. No other role and no chance of peace. A snake is a peaceable creature. It doesn’t want to fight a dog. But she couldn’t not. She was a duellist. Everything on the line every time. You only ever lose one duel.

  She fought many snakes. The rebel yells calling up her courage, before the silence of battle. Each time, afterwards, Dad would scratch her neck and say, ‘You won’t make old bones.’ He was saying it for me to hear.

 
; One summer day I jumped onto the front seat of a car that had been years abandoned in the bush near our place. Alongside me was a massive tiger snake, curled, head raised, leaning back ready to punch forward. Its back was iridescent blue, sparking sun like a badass Harley. I was a skinny boy wearing footy shorts. Bindi came in through the driver’s door across my lap. No circling, no overtures; blue chrome scales and black and tan fur and screech and hiss. I was out in the dry leaves swearing when that war finished.

  She came to me and lay at my feet. Was she sedating as the adrenaline ebbed from her? Or being put out by neurotoxins? I was still on a combat high, my voice loud and my sentences full of ‘fuck’. Fuck this and fuck that and Jesus Fucking Christ a tiger big as a fucking Harley. When I came down I lay beside her and scratched her belly. She was just tired. By now I realised that the snake that got her got us, so I told her, ‘We won’t make old bones.’

  In the afterglow of adrenaline there was always a brief season of serenity. I came to expect it, to wait for it and relish it. A surprising fifteen minutes where we lay zonked in the dry leaves and stared at the sky, her tucked under my arm and the sun hot on us. Hideous Death had taken its shot and fallen short, and I felt dreamily immortal, as if all big battles would be won. Lying there I’d even feel a tinge of sorrow for the dead thing, and this sorrow was the sapphire set in the crown of survival. We pitied the fallen. There but for the grace of God … These were our closest moments. These little pools of serenity after the adrenal high of battle. We had waged soldierly campaigns and our cause was just.