When I Came Home

Late afternoon sun beamed gloriously over Welsh fields like torchlight through amber. The air was cold and heavy with manure, which – rank but fresh – electrified the sinuses.

We were on the valley floor. Hills encircled us, nearby but hazy, serene and restful like alcohol-dazed, kindly old relatives at a birthday party. The grass was long.

One Labrador, one Jack Russell. One black, one white. One big, one small. One girl, one boy. It was March, 2017.

I had been away for a very long time. I had thought about them often whilst in that strange corner of the world. They were where they had always been – home - with my family. I had wondered, on my way back, if they would recognise me. Had my smell changed?

I need not have worried.

My girlfriend was there that day, too. A city-girl, having overcome the trauma of seeing a spider tumble bleary-eyed from within one of them, she wore my sister’s pink wellies. I stopped her from killing it. The dogs, who had been thrashing about their leads excitedly, paused to watch, heads cocked, as the spider scuttled away, seemingly embarrassed, like a well-to-do novice practitioner of the occult sighted through a window by the postman.

The dogs resumed their ritualised frenzy. In trying to subdue them, my girlfriend looked up at me, laughing, and her eyes were chartreuse and wide and very beautiful. We snapped the dogs into their harnesses. Pink for the girl; blue for the boy.

Back in the fields. A short walk from my home, they stood empty but in the sunlight they had about them the trace beginnings of Springtime whimsy, as if they knew it was a matter of time until they would be flush with corn once again.

The four of us reached a turnstile. I opened it for the Labrador, at that point entirely feral, and the Jack Russell scooted underneath. Situated in the center of that final field, a tree, crooked and sturdy and dark brown and dark green, observed all, schoolteacherly.

I could see even at that time that the Labrador was getting old. I worried about life without her. She yo-yoed on her lead, tongue lolling with a leaf glued to a dangling globule of frothy saliva. I looked into her eyes. Those sepia eyes which were both wild and perhaps blank but also – was it there? – alive and reverberating with an ancient blood, immortal and omnipotent; gatelamps in negative to a realm of older gods from whence came and perhaps lingers yet the wolf, shadowed and infinite and immediate.

Though less of a wolf, the Jack Russell, too, had something of the arcane about him that day. Ignoring, if you would, the irreverent nugget of poo that bounced at the end of an undigested blade of grass hanging from his bottom, he exuded the morbid gravitas of an Old Testament prophet that penned his scripture in the blood of innocents with sham reluctance by flickering candlelight at the boundary of which loomed the specters of hooded, chanting acolytes. Either that or some mountainside shaman, eyes watery from long consultation with a celestial furnace; an artificer of simple religions and perverse astrolabes, loved and loathed by his followers in equal measure. I caught him and used a handful of leaves to remove the poo while he wagged his little sausage tail.

We watched them go free. Happy, wild, simple creatures. I wondered about what they truly saw in us.

And it was then that the weather changed. The suddenness of it was astounding. What was a world of sunlight became, in seconds, dark. Grey clouds textured like wizards’ beards muscled in. And then it started snowing.

Initially the snow drifted down like something from a dream. A minute later, it came in a fury, crashing from the heavens. It piled around us and was everything; all was white.

We laughed incredulously at first but as the world became bleached we stood entirely still, awestruck. We were in a snowstorm and it felt wrong, as if some ancestral prayer had been answered at the wrong time and in the wrong format. It was bizarre but unspeakably beautiful and as layers of snow swiftly built upon one another we sensed somehow that we were witnesses to some terrible omen or to the end of the ordinary way of things.

But in reality this was no omen. The dogs know it for exactly what it was – nature. Not even worth looking up for. Because dogs are still resident in this world; whereas each of us is forever doomed to inhabit our own.

I watched them. Black and white shapes, with the snow’s powder wheeling about them as they twisted and turned and leapt in the snow like phantoms, and the silence was so complete that we felt ourselves to be in another world entire.