Sky Wolves (4 page)

Reluctantly, Sam set off. He bought some tins of dog food at the corner shop and paid the man ten pence to put the card in the window. He was about to tuck it behind an advert for washing-machine repairs and another one for second-hand bikes, so that it could hardly be seen, when he changed his mind, left the shop and dropped all the cards into the bin outside. He used the rest of the money to buy another tin of dog food and a lollipop for himself, so when, over the next few days, no one contacted them about the advert and his mum was surprised, and a little disappointed, Sam wasn’t surprised at all.

And while Sam’s mum waited hopefully, Aunty Dot came every day and introduced Jenny, one by one, to the other dogs she walked.

Gentleman Jim was an enormous dog. His owner, Gordon, was fond of saying that his mother was a cross between an Irish wolfhound and a Great Dane but his father was a horse. And indeed Gentleman Jim was almost as tall as his owner, who was not a short man. He was very old – over sixteen – and was getting a bit stiff in his legs. In fact, getting up at all was becoming more and more of a problem. He would try various approaches, such as raising his huge head off his paws and pushing his front end to a standing position, but then if his rear end refused to shift, he could only push himself backwards across the floor. Or if he got his rear end up first, sometimes his front would follow, only to sag forward again unexpectedly. And then sometimes he would actually manage to get both ends up at once, but his middle would buckle.

It was sometimes said, by uncharitable people, that Gentleman Jim was not the prettiest sight. His hair was falling out in patches and his wrinkled skin was scabbed all over. He had the ears and eyes of a bloodhound, and a long muzzle like a horse, and terribly bad teeth, which from time to time would fall out, clattering despondently to the floor. As a result of these terrible teeth his breath was so
bad that he could kill small mammals just by breathing on them.

Despite these natural disadvantages, Gentleman Jim was cheerful enough, partly because his owner was so well trained. After years of trying to get Jimbo, as he was affectionately known, to fetch the paper or his slippers, Gordon had finally learned to fetch them himself. Similarly he would run after any ball that he threw for his dog, retrieve it and lay it at Jimbo’s feet. And Gentleman Jim would raise his expressive eyebrows until Gordon finally picked up the ball, threw it and ran after it again. In a similar manner he had trained Gordon to jump, roll over and beg. He had also trained his owner to get up when he didn’t want to, simply by climbing slowly and painfully on top of him, then squeezing all the breath out of him as he slept. On the occasions when this didn’t work and Gordon simply seemed to be lapsing into a coma, Gentleman Jim would unroll his massive tongue and drool into Gordon’s ear until he eventually awoke, spluttering, sneezing and coughing all at once, and shaking his head so vigorously that droplets of drool flew around the room.

Once his owner was thoroughly awake and had attended to all his needs, putting the fire on, cooking substantial quantities of pet mince and taking him round the corner for a constitutional, Gentleman Jim was free to go back to sleep in his favourite position in front of the fire, while Gordon banged around the house in a rather bad-tempered way, wondering what on earth he should do until the sun rose and he could set off for work.

So, on the whole, Gentleman Jim was entirely happy with his situation. His needs were few. He would sit in front
of the patio doors, doing his eyebrow exercises, twitching his nose if a fly landed on it and greeting Aunty Dot, when she came by to walk him, with a slow but enthusiastic thump of his tail on the floor that sounded like applause, and generally living in peace with his world. That is, until Gordon found a new girlfriend.

At first Gentleman Jim was untroubled by this development. He had got rid of no fewer than five of Gordon’s previous girlfriends, mainly by sitting on them.

‘Down, boy, down!’ Gordon would say, struggling to extract them, and ‘Bad dog!’ when Gentleman Jim refused to move, and Gentleman Jim would wag his tail in a good-humoured kind of way, while Gordon strained and pulled, and his girlfriends squeaked out terrible language with what little breath they had left.

‘I’m so sorry!’ Gordon would say when they finally emerged. ‘He’s just being affectionate. He thinks he’s a lap dog.’ But the girlfriends, terribly shaken by their experience, would usually leave in a hurry and never return.

This girlfriend, however, was different. She was small, but determined, and had a black belt in karate. The very first time Gentleman Jim attempted to jump on her, rather more clumsily than he used to be able to, he received a stunning blow to the nose, then found himself trapped in a kind of headlock and flipped over on to his back, where he lay for a moment, wondering what had just happened.

‘Oh, he likes you!’ Gordon said, reappearing with the coffee, to find Gentleman Jim prostrate at his girlfriend’s feet, while the girlfriend, whose name was Maureen, merely smiled as Gordon sat next to her and flexed her talons.

The worst thing about Maureen, apart from her lightning reflexes and tendency to violence, was that she seemed to want to reform Gordon. And reforming Gordon seemed mainly to involve reforming his approach to Gentleman Jim.

‘What is that terrible smell?’ she exclaimed one day as she entered the house after work.

Gentleman Jim looked at her in surprise as she ran round the house, throwing the windows and back door open. He could smell only his wonderful pet mince, a sumptuous olfactory brew of tripes and offal, the lungs, liver and mashed-up bowels of long-dead mammals, that Gentleman Jim had loved since he was a pup. It was true that Gordon wore protective clothing and a mask when he was cooking it up, and that on more than one occasion the neighbours had complained, and even raised a petition, but from the first moment that Gordon took it out of the freezer and hammered off a chunk for the pan, Gentleman Jim’s eyes would glaze over and he would start to drool. As the potent vapours filled the room he would begin barking – deep, hoarse, regular barks signifying approval and anticipation – and finally, when the whole house was enveloped in a succulent smog, he would be unable to contain his excitement any longer and would give vent to his feelings in a long, baying howl.

‘I’m not having this!’ said Maureen. Her face had gone purple and her eyes were watering freely. ‘Give me that pan!’

‘But it’s the only food he likes,’ Gordon protested, through his mask.

‘I don’t care!’ said Maureen. ‘I’m not being asphyxiated by dog food. Give me the pan now!’

Gordon, having been drilled into obedience since he was little more than a pup by Gentleman Jim, meekly handed it over. Gentleman Jim’s paean of praise turned into a blood-curdling lament as Maureen dumped the whole pan into the wheelie bin at the end of the garden. Then she marched back in and sent Gordon to the shop for some dried dog food.

‘There,’ she said, as the tiny husks clattered into his bowl. ‘Nutritious, filling and entirely smell-free!’

Gentleman Jim’s look said it all.

Next she threw out his dog bed, because it stank, and replaced it with a rubber mat that could be easily wiped clean. Gentleman Jim ignored this entirely and took up position on Gordon’s bed, where he usually only slept at night. But Maureen’s reaction to this was unfavourable in the extreme.

‘You don’t mean to say you let that
filthy hound
lie on your bed?’ she exclaimed in horror.

Now, Gentleman Jim was very fond of that bed. It was a lovely, cushiony, rickety bed, or at least it was now, after several years of him lying on it. He had marked his territory on it several times, and it was full of his own scents, and drool and hair, plus the smell of mingled anxiety and sweat from Gordon.

‘That bed,’ said Maureen, ‘has got to go.’

‘Go?’ said Gordon stupidly. ‘But where will I sleep?’

‘In a new bed, of course,’ said Maureen.

Gentleman Jim was outraged. He had never felt the need to sleep anywhere else at all, certainly not on a new bed. He barked sharply, in a deep and commanding voice at Gordon, to tell him to assert himself immediately.

‘Er, OK,’ Gordon said, provoking a snort of disgust from Gentleman Jim. ‘Do you know where from?’

Maureen not only knew where from, she got on the phone straight away to order it, checking that the firm would take the old bed with them when they delivered the new.

‘And that dog’s not sleeping on it,’ she said, putting the phone down smartly. ‘I can tell you that much.’

Gentleman Jim felt obliged to give his owner a sharp nip, in order to provoke him to speak.

‘
Ow!
’ said Gordon. ‘Well – er – where will he sleep, then?’

‘Downstairs in the kitchen,’ said Maureen promptly. ‘He’s got his mat, hasn’t he? Or even outside. There’s nothing wrong with dogs sleeping outside. That’s what kennels are for,’ she said, looking darkly at Gentleman Jim.

Gentleman Jim couldn’t believe his ears.
Outside?
he thought.
In a kennel?
He waited for his owner to put his foot down, but Gordon was gazing at Maureen with the foolish, admiring expression that dogs reserve for bones.

‘You think of everything,’ he said, cuddling up to her.

Poor Gentleman Jim! He was so disheartened he could hardly raise a growl at the delivery men, though he did bark furiously at the new mattress, which seemed to have a life of its own and was disinclined to go up the stairs.

Nothing in his old house smelled the same. Maureen had made Gordon clean it with disinfectant and she installed air fresheners in every room. There were none of the old, comforting smells of pet mince and dog basket and double bed that had marked out his territory. He was too old to adjust to all this new, clean freshness and he got terribly disorientated and confused.

One morning he awoke early as usual, in the hour before dawn. He couldn’t remember why he wasn’t sleeping in his usual place on Gordon’s bed and lumbered upstairs to find him. Everything smelled so different he could hardly remember the way, but Gordon must have left his door unlocked for once, because Gentleman Jim pushed it open easily and clambered on to the bed to begin his usual ritual of waking up his owner. He lowered his considerable weight on to the sleeping form and, when it showed signs of struggling into life, unravelled his tongue as usual into the small pink ear.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t Gordon in the bed at all, but Maureen. Once awakened by the crushing weight of what felt like a walrus descending on her, and finding her aural cavity filled with drool, she did what any sensible woman would do. Gordon came flying in from the bathroom to find his girlfriend screaming loudly and dribbling from her ear.

‘Oh, God!’ he cried, and there followed the kind of perfectly ridiculous fuss that only humans in a panic can make.

Maureen packed her bag, which pleased Gentleman Jim mightily, until he was ordered out of the house, and as the door slammed behind him he just caught the words, ‘Either that dog leaves or I do!’ before Maureen stormed away.

Eventually, of course, Gentleman Jim was allowed back into the house. But everything had changed. The life seemed to have gone out of Gordon. He didn’t wash or shave, but simply sat in front of the TV.

‘What am I going to do, Jimbo?’ he sighed, as the great dog laid his heavy head on his master’s knee. ‘I really loved her, you know.’

This was beyond Gentleman Jim’s comprehension, but he did understand that his owner was very sad, sadder than he could ever remember seeing him before. For the first time, the awful thought came to Gentleman Jim that, if faced with a choice between his girlfriend and his dog, Gordon might actually choose Maureen. And if he did, Gentleman Jim wouldn’t know what to do about it, for at bottom, despite all his firm training of Gordon, he deeply believed, as every dog does, that his master’s needs came first. But what Gentleman Jim would do then, or where he would go, he did not know. So, for the time being, the two of them sat around the house, watching TV repeats of programmes that hadn’t been very good to start with, each of them looking doleful and lost, as only a very large hound and his broken-hearted master know how to do.

And it was in this state that Aunty Dot found them when she and Sam called round to take Gentleman Jim for a walk with Jenny.

‘Well, you two look like a wet weekend in Whitby,’ she said. ‘I was wondering if Gentleman Jim might want a walk.’

Usually this suggestion was greeted with as much rapture as Gentleman Jim was capable of at his advanced age, but today his tail managed only a single, feeble thump.

‘Dear, oh dear,’ said Aunty Dot. ‘This won’t do at all. Come on, Jimbo. There’s someone I want you to meet.’

She produced a doggie treat from her pocket and Gentleman Jim struggled to rise. But it seemed as though his joints were as disheartened as the rest of him, for as soon as his front end struggled upwards, his rear end collapsed, and vice versa. Eventually Aunty Dot pulled his
collar at the front and Gordon shoved him from behind, and hurried to open doors and move furniture out of his way, because once he was up and lumbering in a particular course, there wasn’t much he could do about it.

He stopped abruptly, however, his rear end falling over his front, when he saw Jenny. Aunty Dot had attached her lead to a hook by the back doorway, and she stood there patiently, glimmering softly in the evening light.

Both Gentleman Jim’s ears flew up and his whiskers twitched as Jenny raised her muzzle to his. And, as with Pico, as soon as she sniffed his scent, she felt compelled to speak.

‘Dear friend,’
she said,
‘I can see you are a born hunter. The blood of your ancestors runs in you from the dawn of time and your instincts are keen. You will hunt fiercely and swiftly again before your days are done.’

Jenny didn’t know where these words came from, but as she spoke Gentleman Jim seemed to remember it all, the stirring of old instincts, intimate and powerful, the blood surging through his muscles and joints, which was like the surge of life itself. He remembered white woods and earth and moonlight, and the thrill of battle, which was like an ecstasy, a forgetfulness of self, trumpeting through him like an old war cry. And he raised his muzzle and sounded the cry from the depths of his being, frightening Aunty Dot and Gordon almost to death.