The Retaking of Animal Farm

“Look, look there’s some”

He says in a hushed tone, squatting on the sun-bleached slope and pointing into the shadows ahead. The dog at his side, clad in a Kevlar chest plate and neck brace, strains at her leash and whines slightly, panting heavily. She is a sleek, Doberman-Alsatian cross, a natural born hunter with teeth and wits as sharp as the forest thorns. Her leash is nothing but a  piece of rope, looped through the Kevlar collar with both ends held together only by the man’s hands, more like a launch system of a weapon than a leash for an afternoon walk. Squatting down beside them my eyes can adjust to view beyond the wall of murk at the edge of the mango grove and squinting against the fierce afternoon sun I see the 4 or 5 pigs rooting through the detritus.

“Are you ready?”

The question breaks my distraction and I nod, feeling for the handle of the hunter’s knife strapped to my hip.  We move forward down the short, steep slope of loose, sandy gravel but the dog is faster and pulls the man so that he slides down the gravel. The sound startles the pigs and the dog gives a yelp of excitement pulling even harder than before.

“Go Serena!” the man shouts loosing one end of the leash.

The dog rockets off through the murk, the man sprinting behind her. I hesitate, everything happening much faster than I had ever imagined anything to happen. “Son of bitch” I mutter and sprint after the pair some 10 metres in front of me already. 

The pig group breaks, each individual running in an individual direction, screaming as they flee. Some double back, thundering past me no more than a few feet away, paying no heed to my own heavy foot falls.  

“This way!” The man shouts from the undergrowth ahead and I follow the barking, squealing shouting and snapping undergrowth.  We plunge through a bank of thorns, tear through an open gate and suddenly we’re on the road. Not pausing to check for any tourist cars or busses, just making the sharp turn onto the smooth tarmac hand on the hilt of the knife to stop it slapping my leg.

“Down here, she’s got it!” The man shouts from the road embankment, pointing down into a patch of forest emanating blood curdling shrieks and growls. He pauses just long enough to make sure I see where to go, then darts off in the direction of the noise.

I run after him, diving off the road and through a thicket only slowing as I reach the source of the commotion.  The dog has the screaming, kicking pig by the scruff of the neck, snarling savagely as she holds it, not intending to share it with the two late arrivals of the pack. I pause at the edge of the clearing. Lost in the chaos and held back by the wall of terror that surrounds the scene.

SSSSSSHHRRRIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKKKKKK “TAKE THIS!”SSSSSHHHHRRRIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEKKKK

I look down and he’s holding the back legs out towards me and I take them calmly, almost as if in a dream

SSSSSSHHHRRRRIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEKKK“LIFT THEM UP, GET ‘IM OFF HIS FEET!!”SHHHRRRRRIIIIEEEEEK

SSSHHRRRIIIEEEEKKK “THAT’S IT”SSSSHHRIIEEEEK “SHUT UP YA F*CKER” SSSSHHHRRRRiiIIEEEEEEEK

He stands on the throat of the pig exposing its chest. There is a blur of an arm and a flash of silver.

Suddenly, as if from a spring, there is a jet of ruby, vivid against the faded sun-bleached brown of the forest. No amount of film or video game violence can prepare you for the smell of fresh blood. The blood continues to pour as if it is a prisoner grateful for their release and the pig’s screams as an enraged warden after the escapee.  SSSSHHHHRRRRIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKK

His arm blurs 3 or 4 more times and in the whirlpool of terror that surrounds the scene I dumbly realise that there is nothing I can do. The animal is petrified. No kind word, no miracle of modern medicine, no action at all can ward off the death that I can feel hovering over, waiting like impatient customer at a diner.

No action is exactly what I take.

I just stand there dumbly while the animal screams murder and coughs and splutters, holding its still running legs, running to its own oblivion, watching the blood gleefully escaping and feeling as though I have let a guilty man walk free.

The pig lapses into silence.

The only sound now is the snarling of the dog, the pig convulsing in my hands as she tries to wrench it from my grasp.

“Serena, OFF, Serena, that a girl” the man sooths as he draws what appears to be a cuttlefish bone knife and inserts it between the dogs snarling jaws and prising them from the pigs neck, dragging the still lunging dog back from the pig.

 The pig falls still.

“Leave it here for the moment, we’ll get another one” he says hauling the dog off through the undergrowth. I stare blankly at the new corpse the shrieks still ringing in my ears and nod, turning to follow them back to the road.

“I’m sorry about that. That was a hell of a screamer.” The dog is trotting and panting happily by his side, remounted on her launching mechanism and immensely pleased with herself.

“Is it always like that?”

“No. That was a difficult one.” He says shaking his head.

We pause as we return to the bank of thorns, and this time make our way more carefully through them back into the mango grove.

“There, there, there!”

*Morons* I think. Why would they come back.

“You good?”

I nod again.

Again the dog flies from his side, whining in excitement.

Again the pigs break in all directions.

Again we crash through the slashing undergrowth.

There is the sound of splintering branches, a yelp, snarling with renewed savagery, but this time there is a new sound, a defiant growl from the pig. I duck under a low branch and step into a clearing barely big enough for the two struggling creatures before me. The man pauses beside me.

“Fuck”

The pig, a full grown boar, turns to face us; the only thing obscuring his malicious face from vision is the dog, desperately clinging to his ears. Both snarl and shake each other viciously. The man waits for a momentary lapse in their whirling dance and snatches the pigs legs.

“Steve!” he says holding them out to me. “She’s slipping!” He nods at the dog, holding on to the very tip of the boars ears.

I hesitate a second longer, but realising that to back down would mean serious injury for all but the pig I take the offered legs.

I haul them upwards flipping the boar off his feet and the man managed to pin his neck with a foot.

“That’s it! Got ‘im!”

Again his steal tipped arm flashes releasing another grateful stream of prisoners.

The boar doesn’t scream. He growls deeper and struggles harder.

“Fuck he’s Hard!” says the man, having to pound the knife through the animal’s toughened breast plate.

 The Boar makes one last bid for freedom, but he too realises there is no action to take and lapses into silence.

The dog tugs against me, trying to move the pig into the undergrowth for herself and the man can barely get the cuttlefish into her mouth to pry her off. “Bring her this way.” Without a thought the shear amount of adrenalin that must have been in my body I comply, hauling the pig and tugging dog a full 3 feet in one movement. (When moving the pig for butchering, long after the adrenalin subsided, it would take both the man and myself working at full strength to move the animal a similar distance.)

“Good girl” the man says as the dog is coaxed away panting and obviously pleased with her endeavours.

“We’ll have a break and come back” says the man.

As we return to the to the sun-drenched slope on which we started the man turns to the dog.

“Fuck”

“The fucker got her.”

I turn to the happily trotting god and see the blood trickling strongly from both a large gash on the dog’s leg and under the dog’s chin, her left pupil is also clouded out by blood.

“Fuck” I agree.

The man bends and scoops her up. She makes no complaint.

We walk hurriedly back to the shelter where we left our bags and water, the man gently crooning over the dog. We get back to the hut and he puts the dog down and tenderly removing her Kevlar. Again, she doesn’t object and settles on a cool concrete floor. The man goes to his bag and pulls out a dog first aid kit and the manual of dog first aid.

The next two hours are a blur of following instruction, pinning the dog so her wounds can be cleaned and stapled, of worried calls to the vet and anxious inspection of the clouding eye. As the motion swirls around her the dog remains calm, struggling against the most irritating of the disinfectants, only to be soothed and restrained again. Ice is fetched from the nearest shop and help against her eye rolling the clouds of blood back. Eventually she is released; sore and indignant but standing at the trailhead to recovery, looking accusingly at the anxious humans fumbling around her.

Post script:

The dog is well on her way to recovery. She wore a “Cone of shame” for three weeks and was cooped up indoors while her wounds healed. She is a sweet dog, but by no means over sociable. She greets almost no visitors to her house, regarding them with a passive eye from a distance once they are determined to be friendly. However, on the first visit I made to her after the incident described above she laboriously stood from her bed and padded over to me and stood a foot in front of me. She made eye contact and allowed me one stroke. She then padded over to another person who had helped in her treatment and repeated the gesture. She then returned to her bed, entirely ignoring the remaining 3 people in our party.