father and I heard that he quieted down a lot once he settled into the hospital to the south of Glasgow and no longer made his escape attempts, but looking back he was probably just trying - successfully, it would seem - to lull his keepers into a false sense of security.
And now he was making his way back to see us.
I swept my binoculars slowly across the land in front and beneath me, from north to south, from haze to haze, across the town and the roads and the railway and the fields and the sands, and I wondered if under my gaze at any point came the place where Eric was now, if he had got this far already. I felt he was close. I didn’t have any good reason, but he had had the time, the call of last night sounded clearer than the others he had made, and . . . I just felt it. He might be here now, lying up waiting for night before he moved, or skulking through the woods or through the whin bushes or within the hollows of the dunes, heading for the house or looking for dogs.
I walked along the ridge of hills, then came down a few miles south of the town, down through the ranks of conifers where distant buzz-saws sounded and the dark masses of the trees were shady and quiet. I went across the railway line and over a few fields of swaying barley, across the road and over the rough sheep-pasture to the sands.
My feet were sore and my legs ached slightly as I walked along the line of hard sand on the beach. A slight wind had come up off the sea, and I was glad of it, because the clouds had all gone and the sun, though sinking gradually, was still powerful. I came to a river I had already crossed once in the hills, and crossed it again near the sea, going up into the dunes a way to where I knew there was a wire bridge. Sheep scattered in front of me, some shorn, some still shaggy, bouncing away with their fractured-sounding baas, then stopping once they thought they were safe and dipping their heads or kneeling to resume cropping the flower-scattered grass.
I remember I used to despise sheep for being so profoundly stupid. I’d seen them eat and eat and eat, I’d watched dogs outsmart whole flocks of them, I’d chased them and laughed at the way they ran, watched them get themselves into all sorts of stupid, tangled situations, and I’d thought they quite deserved to end up as mutton, and that being used as wool-making machines was too good for them. It was years, and a long slow process, before I eventually realised just what sheep really represented: not their own stupidity, but our power, our avarice and egotism.
After I’d come to understand evolution and know a little about history and farming, I saw that the thick white animals I laughed at for following each other around and getting caught in bushes were the product of generations of farmers as much as generations of sheep; we made them, we moulded them from the wild, smart survivors that were their ancestors so that they would become docile, frightened, stupid, tasty wool-producers. We didn’t want them to be smart, and to some extent their aggression and their intelligence went together. Of course, the rams are brighter, but even they are demeaned by the idiotic females they have to associate with and inseminate.
The same principle applies to chickens and cows and almost anything we’ve been able to get our greedy, hungry hands on for long enough. It occasionally occurs to me that something the same might have happened to women but, attractive though the theory might be, I suspect I’m wrong.
Home in time for dinner, I wolfed down my eggs, steak, chips and beans, and spent the rest of the evening watching television and picking bits of dead cow out of my mouth with a match.
10
Running Dog
It always annoyed me that Eric went crazy. Although it wasn’t an on-off thing, sane one minute, mad the next, I don’t think there is much doubt that the incident with the smiling child triggered something in Eric that led, almost inevitably, to his fall. Something in him could not accept what had happened, could not fit in what he had seen with the way he thought things ought to be. Maybe some deep part