I hold his muzzle in my hands as I speak to him. “Go. Find. Gus.”
When I let go of him this time, I feel the rope go taut in my hand and he pulls me forward with a lurch. I stumble to keep up and I train my torch beam on to Jock’s back so I can follow him. I’m surrounded by darkness except for his blurry black and white form that moves ahead of me through the void.
The rye grass is long and damp from evening dew and I feel wetness seeping through above the top of my riding boots as I half walk, half jog to keep up with him.
I can feel the anxiety creeping up on me, making my pulse race. I hope the braids in Gus’s mane have held. I can’t do anything about them now, but there are other rituals I can do. I could stop again and arrange the contents of my backpack to squash the anxiety back down. But I push through the fear and keep going, even though my mind is racing with thoughts like What if we get lost? Then we’ll never find our way back and Moxy will end up trapped in the tent alone and she’ll be stuck in there forever and she’ll starve and die …
… and just as I’m running all the worst-case scenarios through my head and I’m about to lose it, Jock stops running. He freezes in front of me and the hackles on his neck stiffen straight up and he starts barking his head off. But when I shine the torchlight ahead of us, there’s nothing there!
What is he going on about?
“Gus?” I call out.
“Gus!”
I shift my torch to the left and there in the clean, white beam of light he stands facing us. His white face is dappled like the moon, dark eyes reflecting and unblinking.
If I had hackles like Jock, they would rise on the back of my neck too. Because the eyes captured in my torchlight are not the ones I expected. The fur is grey like Gus, but the face is broader and coarse, and gleaming above his temples there are two sleek, hard horns, lethal and as highly polished as sabres, curving and sharpening to a brutal point on either side.
Jock growls and the creature returns my dog’s warning with a threat of his own – a deep, indignant snort expelling streams of mucus from his nostrils.
This is not my horse. Not Pegasus at all, but the Minotaur. I am staring at the face of a great, white bull.
The white bull stares back at me, his eyes boring down my torch beam. For a moment, we hold each other’s gaze. And then I run!
Almost immediately I know it’s the very worst thing I could possibly have done. Idiot! I curse myself for turning my back on him. But the fear is so deep and so primal, I’m not thinking, I’m just falling and getting up again and scrambling for my life, running through the deep grass and then tumbling forward, down on my hands and knees, panting and sobbing, as I try to escape.
I can hear Jock behind me and he’s barking his head off! He didn’t run after me. The herding dog blood is so strong in him, he’s instinctively turned to face the bull. I’ve seen him do it before. Once he dominated a whole stampeding dairy herd and turned them round by holding his ground. But a white Charolais is not the same as a Friesian cow, and even a working dog with Jock’s awesome skills can’t back him off for long. I hear my dog’s valiant woofs and in reply come the angered snorts of the bull. There’s silence, a stand-off of sorts, and then the ground shakes and I think aftershock. But it’s not an earthquake this time. It’s the lumbering gait of the bull.
I turn with my torch and see Jock, unbowed and unafraid, facing him down and barking like mad.
The bull stops for a moment, and I think maybe Jock has him. But then he lets out this bellow, and the noise is so strong and low and terrifying, it’s like a lion’s roar. And then there’s the thunder of hooves once more and with my wobbly torch trained on the bull I don’t entirely see, but I know that he’s got Jock!
I can hear him yelping!
“Jock!”
He keeps howling and I know he’s been hurt and without thinking I find myself running back to him. My heart is pounding, and all I care about now is Jock and reaching him before the bull can get him again.
I run through the dark, stumbling and falling and getting up again until at last I reach Jock’s side. I stand over him and spin round in a full circle looking for the bull, making myself dizzy following the torch beam, hyperventilating with fear. Where is he? Where did he go?
Then my torch casts a shadow and I catch a flicker of something white in the furthest reaches of the beam. It’s the bull! He’s about ten metres to the right of us, and he’s moving in our direction.
At my feet Jock gives a whimper as if he’s trying to say, “You run!”
I can’t run, though. Not without him. So I throw my torch to the ground and yank my sweatshirt over my head and for a second everything is black and I’m panting and blind, and then with a tug my sight returns and I snatch up the torch in my left hand, and with the sweatshirt in my right, I focus back on the bull.
The sweatshirt is blue, which I know is the wrong colour. It should be red, right? Like a matador’s cape. But I am hoping that waving it around will have the same effect.
“Hoi!” I call out to the Charolais. “Hey, Bully Bull!”
I hold my sweatshirt out as far away as I can from my body and I wiggle it.
The bull pulls up to a halt, he stamps a hoof. He’s looking at me.
“No!” I say. “Not me. See the sweatshirt? Look at the pretty sweatshirt!”
The bull prepares to charge. As he angles his massive forehead towards the ground, the horns rise up and I see their gleaming, bony tips and I realise far too late how ridiculous I am with my matador cape. The bull is ten times my size and the sweatshirt is like a postage stamp to him.
I fling the sweatshirt hopelessly in his direction and I throw myself to the ground on top of Jock. And as the hooves thunder I know that any moment I will feel the impact. I’ve seen bulls attack cattle dogs. I once saw one on the farm get gored by a horn and he had to be put down. And that’s what I’m thinking this bull will do to me, and I can feel Jock squashed beneath me and I think at least he will be safe because the bull will get me first.
And at that moment I am Theseus, facing the Minotaur.
***
I’m back in the hospital for my second session with Willard Fox. I’m telling him about the Ancient Greek day we had at school.
“I went as the goddess Athena,” I say.
We had to dress as gods so I wore an old bed sheet knotted at the shoulder, and when I got on the bus George the bus driver gave me a look and said, “Your mum forget to wash your clothes?”
Half the kids on the bus weren’t even in costume.
“Moana was just in shorts and a T-shirt!” I tell Willard Fox. I was grumpy
