when they came crashing behind me, I fell back and waited. I knew you would outwit them – you always outwitted them, dozens of times. You would double back and leave them panting, and then you would disappear, and later, when it was safe, I would find you. I ran through the thicket. I hacked brambles apart. I knew where your den was; I would meet you there and see that no harm came to you. I said the words in my head and I know you heard me. I would get there before them. But even the ground could not hold you. Even earth vomited you out. Like some prophet of old, there was no place for you, or for me that day; we were driven out, dispossessed, disinherited, and I knelt, or rather my knees did, when I saw they had found you before me; I watched as they hit the ground with pipes and with spades; as at one end of your home dogs began to bark. The dogs wagged their tails – they were such stupid creatures! They yapped and they whined; foolish noises for such large animals to make. If you made a noise it would mean something, I knew; it would make sense. I had heard you at night and you sounded like a demon. There was thunder now and rain like tarpaulin, banging in sheets, or maybe the banging was in my head, and I watched as they clamoured for you, unashamed in their lust. I should have shouted. I should have screamed and run at them. Could a child have done that? A girl of twelve? Perhaps. Why didn’t I, then? Why didn’t I stand up and save – I see now – both you and myself?
The first time I saw you, you were trotting along the top of the cornfield. The sun was rising, and when it caught your fur you looked as though you were cloaked in blood. I had never seen anything so beautiful and at once so familiar; I had the strangest feeling that I had, for the first time, seen me. After that I always looked out for you. I knew there was only one. You were the one the grown-ups spoke of. And they too spoke as if you were one, not many; not really animal and not really human. Not spirit either. What, then? An exile, a devil, the whipping boy of centuries. An ancient carrier of wrongs. You were the massacre, I learned. You were the terrorist. You were the alien. You and me both. And though they hated and killed you, they wrote stories about you and sang songs. You were a trophy. They eviscerated you and stuffed you, over and over, as if to reassure themselves there was no way you could come back to life. They put you in glass cases above fireplaces, or painted you on signs above doors where you swung in the breeze at the end of chains – as your brothers and sisters swung at the end of ropes, and, now, unable to move, I realised you would too this day, before they were done.
You were a legend and didn’t even know it. You were immortal. And that afternoon I understood: they must kill you for you to live on.
So they dug down. They sank steel rods into the ground and pushed you out. A difficult birth; you did not want to be born. Who would into such a world? They sent in forceps: a mastiff. He came out dragging you, but before he could kill you they took you away and let you hang, and I began to see that my worst fears were not dark enough: these men had a plan, but death was only a fraction of it; time made up one half and pleasure the other. They took you down and gave you to the jaws of the dog. He received their offering ungraciously, tugging clumsily in his hunger. Your skin was pulled back from your skull. You looked absurd, surprised, as if you were smiling. Absurd was the first thing you would look. There would be others.
The dog was excited, then confused. He could not pull any harder, but they made sure that he did: one pulled you, another his hind legs. Short sharp pulls. Your head came away bloody, dishevelled, fur in your eyes. You looked concussed, stunned. Stunned was the second thing you became. There would be more.
Your eyes were so bright at that moment. They were enormous. I was not sure if I was kneeling or standing or lying down; my own body seemed to have evaporated. We were both merely eyes, mine weeping, yours steely; looking on at the world’s fun; playthings both; whirligigs; spinning, elevated, enthralled; borne high on a rhapsody of pain. They held you by the fur so that your mouth panted, showed small teeth. You looked like you were grinning. You looked mad now. Mad was the third thing you became.
‘Look at this creature!’ they said. And you certainly were a spectacle. They laughed and spat now, having removed their king and vanquished their leader – for you are their leader: you led them, not the other way around. The hounds bayed and jostled, in frantic anticipation. Their saliva descended in strings. The men held you aloft by the scruff, and you hung like a dead thing. You knew you must use only awkward effort each moment called for. You knew already, as I did not quite yet, that it was too late, yet still you played the game; you were a magnificent player – the best; you played your part so beautifully, down to the puny snap at the pole with which they touched the side of your jaw; down to the way your mouth clapped shut as they dropped you – careful to keep their hands out of harm’s way – into a sack. And there you hung for an instant; a man on his way to the gallows. Though there would be no more trial now, that chapter was over; or if there were to be one, I sensed even now, it had barely begun.
The company were overly loud as they rode back through the wood. They were washing their hands with their laughter; without laughter they would honour you even as you were destroyed. I followed, breath rasping, stumbling over bare furrows, blinded by rain and by tears. I, your witness, your watcher, your other. Betrayer. Self.
Did you know me? Even now, in this hour I disowned you? When I stood silent by? I knew you. It was I who watched you from the beginning. You are the one who came out of the woods at the end of the day. You came out of the woods where the thorn trees grew thickly, out of the woods and into my life. They said not to encourage you, but I couldn’t help it. A person can’t look truth in the face and go back again. And you were truer than anything I had ever seen and more alive. So I watched and I courted you. At night when you played with your children, or fought, or made love. Early in the morning and late in the dusk, I saw you saunter leisurely with a bird or rabbit slack-necked in your mouth. Left you scraps from the table when their backs were turned, though I also knew that you slaughtered far more than you could carry away; hens, ducks, geese; night after night. I smelt your stink, heard your rustle, found the hole in the ground where you came and went that looked like an empty socket in a head. I thought you saw me too, because once or twice you stopped and looked back or looked up, and our eyes met, and when they did it was as if we had spoken, though not in any language I knew of. Once we stopped feet apart, surprising each other in the lane. Your expression changed but a whisker. You barely lifted your head, simply slipped sideways into the hedge. Afterwards I thought there must be some residue, evidence, but I came away empty-handed as if waking from a dream, and, as if bereaved, found I could not remember your face.
So here we are. At the end of all things, it seems. They have taken you to the long field, and when I reach it I fall to the ground winded, and though it lurches beneath me like a wave, strangely, I am almost at peace now, in the midst of utter loss; because the loss is utter, because I am in the midst of it. Perhaps I would not be if I were further from the centre, if the loss were one degree less.
They whirl you once in the air and then let you go. And even now, for a moment, my heart leaps in hope and I think they are setting you free, it is over, they were simply teaching you a lesson! It was just a trick, a nightmare – they have caught you and now they will throw you back! I clamber to my knees then stagger forwards, weeping, cheering, ridiculous, as I watch you scarper. But a sound makes me turn. Dogs, pouring over the field after you. There is no reprieve. It is simply round two. They have not forgiven you at all, they hate you more than I knew. And I stand as if halved, split asunder, and watch you. A small thing, moving slowly.
In dreams I have seen you since that time, wearing a diadem of thorns. I have seen you at the foot of a tree, a wolf with a red hide, a man in sheep’s clothing, with a snout and hairs on the backs of his hands, a creature who bids me speak. I, your cowardly apostle, your doubting disciple, your false friend, was silent when it mattered; was with you and was not; went with you to the end of the earth, was there when the field came alive and leaped like a wave. I was there when you ran your last race.
The rain was too heavy to see. I saw. The wind blew sound this way
