Free The Long Dry by Cynan Jones Page A

hedge, at the edge of the field. When she woke she was spooked. Birds hopped and snipped around her. She felt watched. She was very warm from the sun and she slumbered for some time. Then she got up and moved on. She clattered on, breaking back through the thick dry growth.
    From the mud, like a broken machine, a cage of bleached white bones stood up. Many a cow had died in the bog, stuck and having to be shot where they struggled. You couldn’t tell if the cow thought of her own death when she saw the bones. She left another long green pat as she walked; and for no reason, in no particular way, went on over the fields.
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    Gareth walked down to the bog. The heat is crazy. Everything seems subdued. Walking out after lunch was like walking into a wall of heat, and he couldn’t see very much for a while, until his eyes accepted the light. He said: ‘if the vet comes, you have to get Mummy.’
    He went the way he thought the cow had gone, across the fields. He didn’t know if the cow was in the bog, but the last time a cow did this she was in the bog. She’d made a nest and bedded down and had her calf quietly there.
    From the road, above the land, he hears a dog barking, his neighbour’s vicious shouts. The anger that is in him turns on them – the anger that is really because of the cow, and the rabbit, and his hurt ankle. He tries to put it on his neighbours. They are fat vicious people who don’t know very much and don’t like anything and it shows in their dogs. They came here some time ago, to Bill’s farm, with the idea of using the land. But they did nothing, and let it ruin. He had tried to like his neighbours, but they were just not people you could like, in the end. He was sure one of their dogs had taken the cat.
    They had lost the cat last summer and had said that she must have been taken by tourists. They thought this because there was always a chance the family that took her was a good family. A lot of tourists come here every year. Most of them are from cities and they don’t understand the country – it is like a park to them. They see a cat and they think it is a stray because it isn’t very close to a house.
    So they coax it away, feeling sorry for it; worse than that, because they don’t understand the way of things, the cat gets in the car. Like a kidnap. He imagines the cat suddenly in the city and being totally afraid, but he knows the neighbours’ dogs had had it.
    Once, one of the dogs – they are Alsatians and untrained and nasty – had come down the lane and was in the yard where Emmy was. It barked at her and ran at her and she stood stock still and it barked right into her face but she didn’t cry or move. And Curly came out, old as he was even then, and tried to bark the other dog down but it just growled at him and inside Curly knew that the other dog could kill him. Then his son had come out and bravely ran at the dog which fled back up the lane, though it hesitated horrifically for a moment. They will be in the fields with the lambs one day, and Gareth will take a gun to them, and he will kill them. He will take the dead dogs back to his neighbours and if they say anything he will open all his anger on them because he is a very strong thing when he is angry.
    When the neighbours got their dogs they argued about naming them. Their first ridiculous idea was to give them Welsh names which they could not say properly. They could not agree on names and in the end named one each, defiantly. So the dogs became tools they used against each other, like everything else about them. She named the bitch, with whom she shared some features, Cher, after the pop star; he gave his dog a lordship’s name, which, in his voice which sounds like a chicken, he shouts across the fields because it’s always escaping. The dogs fight constantly, too. Dogs are always a distillation ofwhat their owners are. They learn by observing, not by being broken.
    Sometimes, when he checks the stock at night, when