Ring of Bright Water. Gavin Maxwell
his heart was not a young dog’s heart.
At the end of one despairing night sitting with him at Druimfiaclach, Morag relieved me after she had seen to her family’s wants, and I set off down the hill for Camusfeàrna, dazed and unhappy and longing desperately to get into bed and sleep. When I came to the part of the track that looks down over the house and the sea I was startled by the unmistakable boom of a harpoon gun, and woke, as it were, to find myself staring straight into the past. Below me in the calm bay was a ring-net boat from Mallaig; there was a storm of thrashing spray about her bows, and from the gun in her stem drifted a thin haze of cordite smoke. A little farther out to sea were showing the vast dorsal fins of two more sharks. I saw the white water at the boat’s bows subside as the harpooned shark sounded, and I sat and watched the whole familiar procedure as they got the winches started and hauled for half an hour before they had him back at the surface; I saw that great six-foot tail break water and lash and slam the boat’s sides while they struggled, as I had struggled so often before, to lasso the wildly lunging target; I saw it captured and made fast – yet because of my own state of exhaustion and preoccupation the whole scene was utterly without meaning to me, and I had no moment of mental participation while the small figures of the crew scurried about the deck in pursuance of a routine that had once been my daily life. Yet at other times, when I have watched through the field glasses the cruising fins of sharks far down the Sound, I have been possessed by a wild and entirely illogical unrest; the same sort of unrest, I imagine, that migratory creatures feel in captivity when the season for their movement is at hand.
Though Jonnie survived pneumonia to become seemingly as strong as before, the writing was on the wall. A few months later he developed cancer of the rectum, and while it was, I think, painless, he had always been a dog of great dignity and cleanliness, and he felt acutely the concomitant humiliation of an evil-smelling discharge over the white silk-and-wool of his coat. When I was away from Camusfeàrna he lived with Morag MacKinnon, to whom he accorded a devotion no less than to myself, but when I came back after months of absence he would go mad with joy like a puppy and lead the way down the path to Camusfeàrna as if I had never left it. But it was with Morag that he died at last, for I was too cowardly to travel north and watch my friend killed, as in all humanity he had to be.
Camusfeàrna is a very long way from a vet; the nearest, in fact, is on the Island of Skye, nearly fifty miles away by road and ferry-boat. When he visited Jonnie that winter of 1954 he said that the disease was progressing very rapidly, and that pain when it came would be sudden and acute, with a complete blockage of the rectum. He thought there was a fifty-fifty chance of Jonnie surviving what would now be a major operation, but he was insistent that action must be taken at once either to end Jonnie’s life or to prolong it.
I had no car with me that year, so I hired one for the whole journey, to wait during the operation and to bring me back at night, either alone or with what I was warned would in any event be an unconscious dog. Jonnie loved car journeys, and he was enthusiastic to start on this one; as we bumped over the precipitous road to the ferry he stuck his head out of the window and quested the breeze with all the zest of his puppyhood long ago, and I was miserable to see in some sense his trust betrayed and to know that in the evening I might come back alone and leave him dead in Skye. All I could think of then and during the long wait while he was on the operating table was of past days spent with Jonnie, many of them seeming so long ago as to span a man’s rather than a dog’s lifetime. I stayed to help to give the anaesthetic; Jonnie was trusting but puzzled by the curious preparations, hating the stinking rubber mask that I had to hold over his face, but giving only one pathetic whimper of despair before he lost consciousness. Then for more than an hour I wandered aimlessly up and down the shore below that Skye village. The day was grey and heavy with coming snow, and a bitter little wind blew in from the sea and rustled the dead seaweed on the tideline. I thought of how I had nursed Jonnie through distemper twelve years before; of teaching that strangely woolly spaniel puppy to retrieve and to quarter the ground for game; of how once in his early prime he had, after an evening duck flight, swum out forty-one times through forming ice that skinned over behind him as he swam and returned forty-one times with a wigeon in his mouth; of how often his fleecy flank had formed a pillow for me in open boats; of the many times I had come back to Camusfeàrna knowing that his welcome was awaiting me.
I have more than once tried to analyse this apparently deliberate form of self-torture that seems common to so many people in face of the extinction of a valued life, human or animal, and it springs, I think, from a negation of death, as if by summoning and arranging these subjective images one were in some way cheating the objective fact. It is, I believe, an entirely instinctive process, and the distress it brings with it is an incidental, a by-product, rather than a masochistic end.
But Jonnie did not die then. When I was allowed to go into the surgery he was conscious but too weak to move; only his blood-stained tail fluttered faintly, and all through the cruelly long and jolting journey home he lay utterly motionless, so that again and again I felt for his heart to make sure that he was still living. It was night before we reached Druimfiaclach, and the snow had begun, piling in thick before an icy north wind. Morag, whose whole heart had gone out to Jonnie from the first day he had come to Druimfiaclach, had endured a longer suspense than I, but though Jonnie was living he yet seemed very near to death. For many days there was little change; either Morag or I would sit up with him all through the night and tend his helplessness. His very cleanliness provided the worst problem of all; while he was too weak to move he would yet endure agonies rather than relieve himself indoors, so that he had to be carried outside in that bitter weather and supported to keep him upright while one or other of us screened him with a blanket from the wind and the snow.
Jonnie recovered from the operation as only a dog of his tremendous physique could do, and for six months his prime was miraculously restored, but in the autumn the cancer came back, and this time it was inoperable. Morag wrote to tell me of this, and to ask my assent to his death before the pain should start and while he was as yet happy and active. I agreed with a heavy heart, not least because I knew that to make the arrangements for his death while he felt himself sound in wind and limb would be a torture to Morag; but, weighed down at the time by a bitter human loss, I lacked the courage to go north and take an active hand in things myself. Jonnie received the vet with enthusiasm, and Morag cuddled Jonnie while he received a lethal injection. He gave no sign of feeling the needle, and she only knew that he was dead by the increasing heaviness of his head in her hand. Morag had given her heart to Jonnie as she had to no other animal in her life, and for her that moment of betrayal must have been like death itself.
I have never had another dog since Jonnie; I have not wanted one, and shall not, perhaps, until I am of an age that would not be congenial to an active dog.
Six
WHILE I WAS quite clear that I did not want to own another dog, and that Jonnie’s death had in some sense ended an overlong chapter of nostalgia in my life, it was, I think, autumn and winter’s days at Camusfeàrna that with their long hours of darkness made me crave for some animal life about the house.
Autumn begins for me with the first day on which the stags roar. Because the wind is nearly always in the west, and because the fences keep the bulk of the stags to the higher ground above Camusfeàrna, behind the low mass of the littoral hills, I hear them first on the steep slopes of Skye across the Sound, a wild, haunting primordial sound that belongs so utterly to the north that I find it difficult to realize that stags must roar, too, in European woodlands where forests are composed of trees instead of windswept mountain slopes. It is the first of the cold weather that leads in the rut, and the milder the season the later the stag breaks out, but it is usually during the last ten days of September. Often the first of the approaching fall comes with a night frost and clear, sharp, blue days, with the bracken turning red, the rowan berries already scarlet, and the ground hardening underfoot; so garish are the berries and the turning leaves in sunshine that in Glengarry a post-office-red pillar-box standing alone by the roadside merges, for a few weeks, anonymously into its background.
When the full moon comes at this season I have sat on the hillside at night and listened to the stags answering one another from hill to hill all round the horizon, a horizon of steel-grey peaks among moving silver clouds and the sea gleaming white at their feet, and high under the stars