This short story is a tribute to Fennec, the lurcher whose every line is a drawing, from his brindle markings to his body muscles, from his maori face down to the scars testifying of a difficult start in life. Every line telling a tale, every tale building the story of an exceptional dog.
The matt, dull orange light particles scattered around by the scanty street lamps of the Limerick suburbs would have dropped lifeless on the cold and shiny asphalt, if the mist hadn’t helped them to remain suspended half way, between a black sky swollen with the October rain and the waste ground where the travellers had gathered up. Instead, they seemed to attempt an awkward, ungraceful dance to the tunes of the moist autumn wind, a wary fiddler who had obviously grown indifferent to their charm.
So the mist and the light were one and everywhere, lingering around the solitary posts, alighting on the roofs of the caravans, coating the garments, sheets and rags that invariably hung across the camp as if they ever had any chance to escape their shroud of fog or rain. An escape that, however, was hardly a commodity for anyone at the camp, from the humans in the caravans to the piebald tinker horses enclosed by and within them, to the restless and confused lurcher bitch that had been seized by the frenzy of an unnoticed, unimportant and unassisted motherhood.
So she’d lay there, underneath a caravan, in what must have been a cardboard box that had first served as suitcase and then as laundry basket, to be finally cursed and kicked out of the way by a drunken home comer in order to accidentally land under the reveller’s dwelling, and partially spread open behind one of its wheels. The lurcher bitch shivered, sat, stood, turned around, wined and voiced her restlessness, until it all began. One by one, at intervals, she grabbed them and licked them, turning around to severe the cord, after dropping the one she had been eagerly nursing before. She was infallible in picking the last born, in spite of the darkness, the cold and the moisture, the hunger and the loneliness.
The pups were all but taken aback by the circumstances. Blind and deaf as they were, in their ignorance of betting against all odds, they were determined to live. They applied themselves to suck with method and perseverance, voracious and selfish, as if they had learned beforehand a lesson that only centuries of precariousness could instil within a few instants in a newly born.
The pups were taken for granted, just like the rain and the wind. The bitch, however, had earned some credit among the few travellers who still exerted their right to a night out lamping. Hence the few morsels of brown bread, scanty and sticky spoonfuls of cold, lean and sometimes fermented porridge and the accidental bone that were carelessly thrown under the caravan by some passers-by, with quick, indifferent gestures as if to hide some kind of unmanly weakness in throwing a glance at and sparing a thought for the litter of voracious and restless lurchers.
The days went by, November came and the strongest, boldest pups were still there, with their swollen hungry bellies, attempting some hide-and-seek games among the scattered cardboard boxes, the torn and abandoned wellingtons, the mouldy, semi-unfolded hay bales and rusty tools that were lying underneath the caravan. Together with November and its first persistently chilly nights, when the long dark hours and the drizzle make human and beast seek shelter, the first mice came, looking for unlikely winter provisions that were not there for anyone. Attracted by the warmth of the jeep’s engine and by a few hay-seeds dropped by the horse feeder, they would leave the bushes growing beside the near end of the campsite to wander about, at first hesitantly, then more determined, until they began to gain some confidence, so much so that a young fellow would at times dare to patrol the surrounding area until underneath the caravan. And so it did, on one chilly miserable incipient morning, confident to remain unseen or to be confused with the low shadows cast to the ground by the fading street lamp. So it did, as light as a mouse, until it woke the even lighter sleep of the hungriest puppy, a beautiful fellow made to look bold by its blue brindle maori tattoo pattern on a fawn greyhound head, which, however, already betrayed the wide, strong and unrelenting jaw of some ancestor that at some stage must have emigrated from Staffordshire. A face made even bolder by the hopeless perspectives which were already marked and foretold by his beautiful maori drawing. The puppy looked, spotted the mouse and stared at it, tickled in his nostrils by the smell of human and animal urine which the mouse had picked on its way from its bush to underneath the jeep and further to the caravan, the very same smell which it thus entrusted the omnipresent wind with spreading in the direction of the sleeping pups. The maori lurcher looked again, while getting up, and performing a series of actions he never knew being capable of nor ever gave a second thought about. He got up, curled, focused, enjoyed the excitement and the shivers, and felt the ancient, violent rush arise and reach every single muscle of its still tender body. So he strained and sprang in the semi-darkness, blinded by desire and drive, oblivious of hunger and cold, so determined and yet so unaware of the significance of its actions. He leaped, reached and set its teeth on the terrified, spasmodically convulsive, squeaking mouse’s tail, then lifted a paw, held the tail down to the cold, wet and tarred ground, opened and closed its jaws nearly at the same time, with an imperceptible movement of the neck by which he felt the mouse’s fur under its deciduous canines. Then he nipped and squeezed, and he did it again, until he could first clutch, then fully serrate his disproportionally strong jaws, and feel the fur rip and fill his mouth, the bones creek, the flesh tear, the warm blood fill his palate, dripping down the sides of his muzzle and his throat at the same time, and there and then, on the most dejected November morning, when misery and dismay seem to be the only possible salute to one's beginning life, there - with a life coming to an end - the maori pup felt the sheer joy, the quintessential happiness and the ecstasy of the kill.
A hunter was born.
