White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,67

shadows of the bank, followed by their hulking broad backs.

Will asked Alice, “Are you glad you came?”

“God, yes.”

“Do you think we accomplished anything?”

“I don’t know. People can surprise you.” Ian watched her. When she wasn’t saying everything she felt, he noticed she pushed her tongue into her right cheek, which created an almost imperceptible bulge, like a bubble of tiny words straining to get out.

“Arthur’s not the only bloke in the Ministry of Agriculture.”

“But he was the one who came, unfortunately.”

“You know,” said Will, “someday, after millions of animals have piled up against fences, someone’s going to say the fences didn’t do any good, and they’ll come down. The bloody ignorance, it staggers one. You wonder how the human race got this far.”

A sudden hissing expulsion of air from the river surprised him. Crocodiles. No one else seemed to have heard it. Ian felt sadness sweep over him, partly at Will’s words, partly at what felt suddenly like the waste of his own life. Somehow, things had become fractured. He looked at Alice, thought of the freshness of her laughter, her anger, her grief, how they seemed to pour straight out of some living cauldron in her.

He stood up, holding half a bottle of beer, and left the circle, muttering something about needing to go have a piss. He felt her eyes on him, felt them burrow into the curve of his lower back, almost as though she’d laid a hand there.

He needed to get away from her. A point of no return would soon be reached. He wasn’t far from it now. You’re on a river. You hear the sound of a waterfall in your ears. You haven’t navigated this particular river before, but you’ve navigated others like it. You’re paddling along at the same rate as the river, hardly noticing how fast the trees are whizzing by, when the earth suddenly drops away and the water rushes down into boiling mayhem, leaving no time for regrets, second thoughts, resolutions.

There was something ancient about her large, generous face. Her eyes looked right at you. They weren’t drifty like the eyes of most people, looking vaguely in your direction, glancing off. They saw you; it was like looking into the sea on a cloudy day: gray, blue, green. They were wide-set, her mouth also wide, easy with its shy smile. Her face had a calmness in it, the kind you see in wild animals who have no predators. Her hair was almost always a mess. He liked this. And he liked that it was already almost entirely gray, as though some older wisdom had outpaced her age. It was curly with a kind of wild abandon, and he often had to stop his hand, wanting to tuck it behind an ear, out of her eyes. In the heat of the day, she pinned it up, but not successfully. It often fell down.

He was too old for her. Down the road, it would be miserable for her to be saddled with an old codger shuffling about in bedroom slippers needing his tea, when she was still in the prime of life. Fifteen years is almost a generation. And age aside, he wasn’t exactly the catch of a lifetime. He’d pretty much lost whatever looks he had. His grant awards were hit or miss. When necessity called, he taught. When he didn’t have to, he wandered about in the hills, discovering what he could. He’d be hard pressed to say where home was, or even that it mattered. That had been a problem with any woman who’d ever wanted him in her life. It would be a problem again.

He felt protective of her. She was a bit of a mug. He needed to get the hell out. Crack of dawn tomorrow. Give her a wide berth tonight. Say a quick good-bye when they reached Nata: it’s been dandy, see you someday. Get over whatever hit him, get back to work. Head for the hills. Literally. He hadn’t been with a woman in a while. That was part of the problem. A man needs a woman. But Alice didn’t need him making a shambles of her life.

As he circled around the side of the lodge, he heard the eerie call of a Pel’s fishing owl, the song rising and falling, falling some more. He stood still, not breathing. It reminded him of departing souls. And then he thought, not wanting the thought, of the thousands of animals hung up on fences, perishing for