SHOOTING THE DOG

PETER GOLDSWORTHY

For Lisa

‘Each time the gravel slid off the shovel it sounded like something trying to hang on by its nails.’

—PHILIP HODGINS, ‘Shooting the Dogs’

He was long in the tooth now, although no one in the district could put an exact figure on the years. His name offered a clue: even this far from the city it had not been possible to call a dog Nigger for at least a decade.

‘You get jailed for it these days,’ Hedley Stokes liked to joke, ritually, to his daughter-in-law Meg, city born and bred and blamed for all kinds of city nonsense.

Hedley had bought the dog, fully grown and pre-named, years back.

Two droughts back, he sometimes put it – but the worst drought had been the absence of his son Ben at the time, playing football in the city and searching for Meg, or the idea of Meg, and trying to get the farm out of his blood. When Hedley’s left knee finally gave way (cack-footed, he had been no mean player himself in his day) and Ben reluctantly returned to take over the place, the name-change insisted on by Meg – ‘Nugget’ – would not be answered to by the dog. Dogged herself, an English teacher anxious about the influence of language on impressionable minds, she tried one more time – ‘Nipper’ – but even the softening of a single consonant was stubbornly resisted by the black dog.

And even more stubbornly by Hedley and his wife, Edna, who still drove over most days from their retirement unit on the coast. Hedley gave the notion nothing more than a cursory snort; it was Edna who took the young woman aside and suggested that it might be cruel and confusing for the dog.

Largely retired from farm work, Nigger was allowed to tag along with his son, Blue, as the younger dog went about its shepherding. Blue was an athletic, wide-casting dog – the best in the district, many thought. If Ben was caught up in the crutching or drenching he would sometimes leave a gate or two open, and rely on Blue to bring up the sheep from the bottom paddocks unsupervised. Nigger was more of a loose cannon now. Slower, arthritic in the hips, he would break out about the flocks ever more lazily, much to the younger dog’s frustration. The winter before, while bringing in the Angora goats that Ben had briefly diversified into, then rapidly out of (‘Another get-poor-quick scheme, son?’), Nigger had cast far too narrowly, dividing the herd and stampeding half of it through a fence. Half a day’s work went down the drain, and far too much torn hide and bloodied fleece. The younger dog had taken it upon himself to admonish his sire’s clumsiness, chasing the astonished Nigger back to the ute, then directing an equal amount of dog invective at an even more astonished Ben for his lack of leadership.

Hedley couldn’t believe his ears when told the story over that Sunday’s roast. ‘Who’s running this farm? You’re the top dog, Bennyboy. You’ve got to lead by example – not leave it to the dogs to sort it out.’

Edna, for good measure, ‘It’s not fair on Blue, dear.’

‘But they do the work,’ Meg put in, ‘maybe they should have more say.’

‘Votes for dogs!’ Ben added.

Hedley allowed himself a chuckle. ‘I tell you one thing, girl. A kelpie-cross or three would do a hell of a better job of running the country than this mob.’ He chewed a little more lamb before remembering his main theme. ‘You can’t spoil them, Ben. Next you’ll have them sleeping in the house.’

Meg’s eyes slid immediately to her husband’s, alarmed. He winked, reassuringly. He wasn’t about to confess.

‘Woof!’ he said, and grinned. ‘Woof, woof!’

After Blue’s rebuke, Ben kept the sire chained in the tray of the ute while working the flocks, often with Hedley – his sire, it occurred to him – sitting in the front seat for company. He toyed, briefly, with the idea of moving Nigger to the coast with his parents, but Meg refused to allow it. A working dog would be bored to death inside their tiny, enclosed courtyard, she argued. In fact, she had grown attached to Nigger, and often kept him inside the farmhouse herself, spoiling him with tidbits, enjoying his company, a familiar presence in the corner of her eye.

‘Well, if it isn’t the house nigger,’ Hedley declared over another Sunday roast, as the dog tried to remain invisible beneath the dining-room table.

‘Hedley!’ his wife warned him before Meg could bite. ‘You mustn’t say things like that.’

‘Sticks and stones, Edna my love. Sticks and stones.’

It was a theme he often returned to, liking to shock his daughter-in-law with his version of straight country talk – but liking, also, her cheek in return, her willingness to give back as much as she got.

‘He’s not a full-blood nigger,’ he announced one morning. ‘Look here –’ And he ruffled the white patch, roughly diamond-shaped, that stained the dog’s black head like a horse’s blaze. ‘Bentley mark. Know what a Bentley mark is, Meg?’

‘Yes, Dad. But don’t let that stop you telling me again.’

He grinned, pleased. ‘Sign of the true heeler. He’s got more than a bit of Queensland blue in him, this feller.’

‘I don’t follow. You mean they crossed a dog with a cheese?’

Dash of blue heeler or not, Nigger was mostly kelpie. His coat’s blackness took on a reddish kelpie sheen in the afternoon light, although Hedley liked to claim it was mostly dust.

Once, after Meg had spent the morning washing the old dog in a plastic washing tub, Hedley had leaned forward from his chair – a sort of cane throne on the veranda – and spat on the dog’s coat as it slept in the sun at his feet.

‘A working dog should be dirty,’ he said, with that glint of mischief in his eye that Meg was beginning to enjoy, and that she knew, also, was his harmless way of flirting with her.

Blue’s dam had been a red kelpie from a property further down the Peninsula. The mother’s redness had come through almost undiluted in the son, hence his name. He was a beautiful dog to watch at work, prick-eared, sleek as a seal, forever on the move. As a pup he had shown no interest in the sheep, and Hedley had almost given up on him. Then suddenly, at six months or so, watching his sire squeeze sheep into a pen for jetting, some sort of lightbulb had gone on the pup’s head. Within minutes he’d been walking across the backs of the penned sheep, up to his hocks in their thick wool. He hadn’t stopped moving among them since.

‘Gentler than his old man,’ Hedley liked to boast. ‘The cattle dog hasn’t come through. Which is why he’s not a biter. Never even nips. Doesn’t need to.’

For a time, chained in the ute, Nigger seemed to take a similar pride in watching his son at work. But after a few days the whining started, and then the frustrated straining at the chain. The last straw came with the arrival of the alpacas. Ben bought the small herd against his father’s advice, or perhaps because of that advice. (‘Rooster one day, feather duster the next in that caper, son.’) When the bottom fell out of an over-supplied alpaca-wool market (‘Can’t say I didn’t warn him, Meg. Only the breeders made any money.’) Ben offloaded the herd at dog-food prices. The sight of Blue bringing these alien animals – half-goat, half–bonsai camel – in for transport drove Nigger into a frenzy. Maddened even further by Hedley’s dressings down, he managed to scramble over the near-side of the ute and almost hang himself on his chain.

‘Two things, son. The length of the chain – Jesus! Second – you’ll have to leave him at the house in any case.’

‘Wouldn’t mind leaving both of you,’ Ben muttered to himself.

In fact, he and Blue were alone in the top paddock a week later when the dog found the first of the spring lambs. Or found the crows which had already found them.

‘What you got there, feller?’

Foxes were his first thought, but the ripped-apart lambs had not been eaten. It looked more like play, or playful torture, than hunting for food. His second thought was Blue – the dog had the freedom of the farm. But Blue seemed as surprised as him at the discovery, and he had never been aggressive with the animals, apart from head-butting the nose of the odd angry ewe.

Meg, back teaching six-tenths, was still in town when he arrived home, but his father was sitting in his cane throne on the veranda and his mother was ensconced in her old kitchen, baking, and chatting to her husband through the open window. Ben stalked straight to Nigger’s kennel. As he squatted on his haunches, the dog seemed pleased enough to see him, wagging its tail and innocently offering up its jaws for inspection.

His father limped across the yard. ‘Problem, son?’

‘A few lambs have been killed.’

‘Foxes?’

‘They weren’t eaten.’

‘No sign of wool on Nigger,’ Hedley said, peering over his shoulder. ‘How fresh was the kill?’

‘Yesterday. Maybe the day before. The crows had got stuck in.’

‘Then you’re not likely to find anything today,’ the old man said, and straightened up and limped back to his chair.

‘Maybe it was a wedge-tail?’

A chuckle from the older man, ‘No chance, son.’

‘What about Ted Chambers’ dog? I never liked the look of it. Plug-ugly. More pig in it than dog. And always out in the road chasing cars.’

‘Big call to make, Bennyboy. You wouldn’t want to say anything to Ted without hard evidence.’

Gathering evidence would not be easy, but the chief suspect was waiting for Ben and Meg in the middle of the road – its section of road clearly – as they drove home from church that Sunday, alerted by their dust from miles away. The dog’s front feet were planted firmly in the dirt, bracing itself less against the oncoming car, perhaps, than against the backward thrust of the force of its own barking. One especially powerful bark seemed to lift the entire dog off its paws, spinning it three-sixty degrees back to its original position. Instead of speeding past, Ben pulled to the side of the road and stopped. Ted and Joan, great talkers, were still back in town on the church steps; he had time for a little sleuthing.

‘What are you doing?’ Meg asked, alarmed, as he opened the door, but the dog had already stopped its barking, and padded tamely up to the driver’s door with its tail wagging, a picture of innocence.

‘All bark and no bite,’ Ben said, chucking its pale, pig-like ears.

In the adjacent field Ted Chambers’ spring lambs were frolicking, and even as Ben inspected the dog’s snout for telltale strands of wool, he knew that there was no chance of this dog travelling ten miles across stony country to kill his lambs. Behind them, the dust of another car was fast approaching. The Chambers, escaping the church steps earlier than usual? Edna and Hedley, more likely, arriving for the Sunday leg of lamb which Meg always left roasting in the oven before church.

‘We need to get home,’ she reminded him, and he pushed the blameless dog away and tugged the car door shut.

He made sure Nigger was outside, out of sight, while they were eating, but Hedley warmed to the theme nonetheless. ‘It happens to some dogs late in life, son. They turn.’

‘Into grumpy old dogs?’ Meg suggested.

For once her father-in-law ignored the tease. ‘Might be the dingo coming through, of course.’

‘He’s got dingo in him?’ Meg asked, surprised.

‘He’s got blue heeler in him,’ Ben reminded her. ‘Heelers are part dingo.’

‘Some more than others,’ Hedley said. ‘Every now and then some genius decides the breed is getting too soft and crosses more dingo back into it.’

‘What’s this, dear?’ Edna interrupted, working with her fork at a white cyst-like pocket in a slice of meat.

‘Looks like hydatid,’ Hedley pronounced. ‘Better not touch that, Mother.’

Meg laughed. ‘They’re just garlic cloves, Dad.’

Hedley drowned the offending lamb in mint sauce. ‘And I thought the meat was off.’

‘It’s an acquired taste,’ she said, but he had already turned back to Ben.

‘There’s no cure for it, son.’

‘What are you saying, Dad?’

‘You know what I’m saying. Once they start, they never stop.’

‘Then you’ll have to have him with you, after all. In town. Where he can’t do any damage.’

‘It’s no life for a working dog in there, son.’

Silence. Meg’s eyes met Ben’s, pleading. He turned back to his father. ‘I’m not going to put him down without definite proof, Dad.’

‘Bennyboy – listen to reason. In no time flat you’ll have no lambs left. Once a dog acquires the taste …’ He turned back to his daughter-in-law. ‘Speaking of which – could I pester you for a couple more slices?’

Nigger left his breakfast untouched in its bowl the next morning. After stalking that bowl, and being unrebuked, Blue gobbled it down. Was the older dog sickening? A different explanation waited out in the fields, where three black-feathered undertakers were keeping vigil over the bodies of another two dead lambs, one of which this time had been partly eaten.

Even now, finding no wool on the old dog’s jaws or blood on his coat, Ben was able to resist the obvious. Although he prudently kept Nigger chained up every night for a week.

Prudently, but sleeplessly: bursts of angry, frustrated barking kept waking both of them. Desperate for a night’s shut-eye by the weekend, he left the dog unchained, and found three more lambs ripped apart in the morning. Circumstantial evidence? Only Meg still thought so.

‘We have to catch him red-handed, Ben.’

A year or two before he wouldn’t have listened. The value of the lost meat and wool would have tipped the scales of justice against the dog. Now the wool mountain was a mile high, everyone wanted to eat beef, or battery chicken, and his monetary losses were negligible. He could afford to bide his time.

‘You were thinking of getting rid of the sheep anyway, Ben. Barley prices are up – why not put in a few more acres next year? Or canola – the Chambers are putting in canola …’

‘If it’s not our lambs, it’ll be the neighbours’.’

‘I’ll keep him in the house then. Or we can put up a higher fence.’

‘I can’t even afford to fence the back paddock.’

He didn’t tell his father about the latest attack. Hedley’s trick knee needed replacement, he had enough on his plate. But when the older man next rode around the farm with Ben he saw immediately that the lamb numbers were down.

‘That cold snap,’ Ben lied, and Hedley seemed satisfied enough, or too preoccupied with his own health to care.

Meg kept Nigger inside for the rest of the week, and when Ben found the fourth batch of savaged lambs it seemed at first that the dog might be in the clear. But a day later Meg found a leg bone in the dog’s basket. She told Ben as soon as he came in that afternoon.

‘You let him out last night?’

‘He might be able to get out. But I can’t see how he could get back in.’

‘He must have,’ Ben said, and walked to the kitchen door. The flyscreen door was open an inch; he pushed it open, watched it fail to close completely.

‘The spring’s gone. He could shove his nose in there.’

‘No wonder the mozzies were biting,’ Meg said, but mosquitos were the last thing on Ben’s mind as he stalked outside and chained the dog to the tank-stand.

‘Why is Nigger chained up?’ Edna wanted to know over the roast that Sunday.

‘Just a precaution, Mum.’

‘You missing a few more lambs?’ Hedley put in.

Ben said nothing; his eyes sought refuge in Meg’s, avoiding his father’s. But he couldn’t turn his ears away.

‘You’ve only yourselves to blame, Bennyboy. Both of you. You can’t get close to a dog.’

‘A few pats can hardly make a difference,’ Meg said.

‘A few pats? He has the run of the house. You feed him scraps from the table …’

‘Sometimes.’

‘He thinks he’s human, girlie. He thinks he’s a member of the family.’

‘He is a member of the family. And he feels things – just like us.’

Hedley spluttered, amused. ‘Like you maybe.’

‘Like all of us. He feels anger. Jealousy. Love …’

‘Maybe you’d better get one of these social workers from the city out to talk to him.’

‘Hedley,’ his wife warned.

‘Just trying to help, Edna. The kids have made a rod for their own backs. All I’m doing is offering advice. You have to put the dog down, son. Before you lose any more lambs.’

‘We’ll think about it, Dad.’

‘Well don’t think too long. It might be your farm now, but I can’t sit by and watch it go down the gurgler.’

Ben, through gritted teeth, ‘I said, we’ll think about it, Dad.’

‘And I said, you’re running out of time.’

Ben dropped his knife and fork with a clatter. ‘Maybe I don’t want the fucking farm, Dad. Maybe I never wanted it …’

‘There must be someone who would take him as a pet,’ Meg interrupted before anything more damaging could be said.

‘You could put an ad in the paper,’ Edna suggested.

Her son picked up his cutlery again. ‘We’ll think about that too, Mum.’

The young couple lay awake half the night thinking – and talking. Meg’s sleep, when it came, was eased by a sense that nothing had yet been decided. Ben left the house before she woke the next morning, needing an early start. Restringing wires in the top paddock, he waited until he saw her drive away to school before climbing into the ute and heading back to the house. He dragged a stool into the bedroom next to the wardrobe, and climbed up. Three guns had once been stored on top, out of his child’s reach, until the Anzac Day when Hedley arrived back early from the Club, pulled down his old army .303, carried it out to the woodpile, set it on the block, and took to it with a sledgehammer. He had offered no reasons, then or later, and Ben had never seen him in such a state, before or since. Edna deflected her troubled son’s questions by talking vaguely of ‘a disagreement at the Club’, of someone calling him ‘a name that he didn’t like’.

Two guns remained. The single-shot .22 Ben had used himself as a boy, spotlighting rabbits and kangaroos and even shooting the odd fox under supervision. The shotgun – a Winchester Type 12 – he had never been allowed to touch. He had been too small the winter his father had bought it. A pair of ducks had settled on the dam, but after breaking a tooth on a pellet while biting into a drumstick, Hedley had gone off duck meat forever. The Winchester had not been used since, except secretly, in play. In his teens, Ben would often take the gun down when his parents were out, and familiarise himself with its workings. He was standing on the stool now, checking the pump action, when his father appeared in the doorway below him.

Startled, he nearly unbalanced. The old man might have been a genie conjured up by rubbing the blue gun metal.

‘Jesus, Dad – where did you come from?’

‘You can’t use a twelve-gauge, son. You’d take his whole head off.’

Hedley turned and limped out of sight as abruptly as he had appeared. Ben placed the Winchester back on the wardrobe and took down the .22, an ancient single-shot Browning, plus a box of shells, and the squeeze can of gun oil. He spread newspaper over the kitchen table, and carefully wiped down the open sights, broke open the breech, and blew out the cobwebs. He oiled the hammer, checked its action, then opened the box of ammo and dropped a single shell into his breast pocket.

He was about to replace the box on the wardrobe when he stopped, and took out a second shell. Just in case.

Outside, Hedley was back on his throne. ‘Nigger,’ he called, and as always the dog ran instantly to him. ‘Sit, boy,’ he ordered, and as he leaned forward Ben thought he might be about to pat the dog for the first time ever. ‘You’ve been a good worker, boy,’ he said. A pause. ‘Well done,’ he added, then leaned back again, and turned to his son and nodded. To Ben, unsettled, it felt weirdly like a prison warden’s nod to an executioner.

‘You coming, Dad?’

‘You got to do these things by yourself, son.’

Bullshit, Ben thought. You just don’t want to see it. But a lump clogged his throat; his father’s terse farewell to the dog had touched him somehow. He averted his face, and whistled Nigger up into the back of the ute. Blue tried to follow; twice Ben had to order the usually obedient dog to stay. The younger dog whimpered, and paced around the yard, agitated. When Ben tossed a spade into the tray, Blue barked frantically up at his sire, as if in warning.

Ben knelt and held the young dog’s head for a moment, looking him straight in the eyes. ‘It can’t be helped, Blue. It’s got to be done.’

The condemned dog, its own mind-reading powers apparently diminished by age, showed no qualms at accepting a ride in a ute with a man with a rifle and a spade. The south paddock was three gates away. Each time Ben stopped and climbed out he avoided eye contact with the dog, but Nigger seemed oblivious to this body language, running eagerly from side to side of the tray, tongue lolling, happy just to be out and about. When they reached the stand of uncleared mulga that bordered the south fence, the dog jumped joyfully down, and headed straight into the bleached summer grass. He had killed a brown snake here years before; the patch of scrub was clearly a technicolour mix of nose memories and fresh scents, which was why Ben had chosen it.

Ben took the spade and rifle out of the tray and stood for a time with one implement in each hand, as if balancing them, or weighing something. Should he dig the grave first? Or afterwards? Nosing about in the dry grass the dog still seemed impervious to his fate. Dig first, and work a little agitation out of the system? And if it delayed the inevitable a little longer, so be it.

The work was hard; the stony ground had never been tilled, and no rain had fallen since August. He should have brought a pick, or mattock. He dug slowly and methodically, wanting to take his time, needing to take his time, all the time in the world. He took an unnecessary break, and sat with his legs dangling from the back of the ute, sipping tea from the cap of his thermos. The dog ran to him, expecting a treat, but he was saving the one treat in his pocket till later, and the dog immediately turned and ran back to his explorations, able to read the man’s intentions in this respect at least. Ben savoured a second capful of the tea, black and sugary, then returned to his digging. The hole was Nigger-sized in length and breadth, but no more than two feet deep when he decided that enough was enough. The phrase ‘a shallow bush grave’ came to him, poignantly, from somewhere, another murder story in that morning paper perhaps. He rolled himself a cigarette from a long-abandoned pack in the glove box. Having smoked it to the last few millimetres, stale tobacco or not, he could delay no longer. How small the .22 shell he fossicked from his breast pocket seemed, not much more lethal than an air-gun slug. He broke open the old rifle, loaded the chamber, snapped the breech shut. He took the scrap of dried liver from his pocket, a treat his father had never approved of for working dogs, and dropped it into the hole.

‘Here, boy.’

The dog came to him, looked down into the hole, looked up into his eyes, looked down again, then once more up, quizzically.

‘It’s OK, boy,’ he said, and as the dog stepped down into the hole for its last, small meal, he lifted the rifle to his shoulder in one quick movement, aimed it into the black crown of the dog’s head, and fired, and the dog collapsed on its own legs without a sound.

As fast as the shooting had been, the tears that sprang to Ben’s eyes were even faster.

‘Sorry, boy,’ he said, and knelt and examined the dog through the film of those tears. ‘Sorry, old feller.’

There were no tears in the dog’s motionless eyes, or even any kind of death shiver in its legs. He rose and took up the spade and began to fill the grave, working rapidly this time. When he had finished, he found the sight of the small mound – exactly the length and width and volume of the dog – too disturbing, and he began to remove dirt from it, and spread it around. He couldn’t bring himself to tread down the remaining heap, not wanting to further damage the dog, or in any way to squash it.

He drove off immediately to his fencing chores, and buried himself all day in the physicality of star-dropping, and stringing and tightening wires. Hard enough work for two, near impossible for one – but he had no distractions. He had drunk most of his tea while stalling for time at the shooting, and had left home early without packing lunch. His father’s car had gone when he returned to the house late in the afternoon; he washed down a meat and pickle sandwich with a bottle of beer then slumped into the cane throne on the veranda, exhausted.

‘Ben?’

‘Hmmm.’

A kiss on his forehead. ‘You’re sleeping in the sun, darling. Come inside.’

Meg made no mention of Nigger, then or later, over dinner, but she brought Blue into the house, and fed him a choice scrap of meat from the table, whether for her comfort or the dog’s or to make some kind of obscure point to Ben he couldn’t tell.

He had dreaded facing her, but she seemed especially kind to him also.

His mother rang after dinner. ‘You OK, Benny?’

‘Fine, Mum.’

‘And Meg?’

‘She’s managing.’

‘I know she was fond of old Nigger. But your father was right. It had to be done.’

‘I know, Mum. Thanks for the call.’

‘Give my love to Meg.’

‘Of course. She’s right here. You want to talk to her?’

‘I’m sure she has more important things to do. Just give a hug.’

Blue nosed his way in through the flyscreen door the next night as they were eating. It was clearly lonely out in the yard, and after the three of them had cleaned the two dinner plates between them, Ben brought the dog’s basket inside.

It was Blue tugging at the quilt that woke him in the small hours the following night. He had seen the dog agitated before – the morning of Nigger’s execution for one – but he had never seen such a silent, purposeful agitation. Something was afoot. An intruder? The hairs were bristling along the dog’s back, but still it made no noise, insisting only with its body language that Ben follow, immediately. Meg, exhausted, slept on as he slipped from the bed. It wasn’t until he reached the hall that he heard the scratching at the kitchen door. Blue was already waiting at that door, staring at it, ears pricked, hairs erect, one forefoot raised. Ben pulled his old cricket bat from the hall stand, turned on the porch light, and jerked open the door.

A dog was lying with its head on the doormat, scratching at the flyscreen; it took a moment for Ben to realise, shocked, that it was Nigger. His heart was thumping as he knelt and examined the dog. The entry wound on its crown had congealed into a dark, hard scab. There was no sign of an exit; the slug must still be in there somewhere. Blue was whimpering now, finding his voice, and after some sniffing, and licking of the older dog’s nose, began to lick methodically at its wound.

‘Nigger,’ Ben whispered. ‘It’s OK, boy.’

The dog had lost the power of dog speech, apparently; it made no noise at all, not even a whimper. It dragged itself an inch or so closer, but skewing sideways, crabwise. Ben saw that it – he, he reminded himself – was able to move his right-side legs only, as if cut down by a stroke rather than a bullet. His coat was encrusted with dust and clay; he had clearly been unable to shake off the grave dirt. Ben looked out, across the dust of home yard; within the fall of the porch light he could make out the trail of the dog, a dragging, snake-like spoor. A black joke from childhood came back to him, made poignant now; what do you do with a dog with no legs? Take it for a drag.

But what do you do? His immediate reaction, through the fog of disbelief, was to take the dog straight back out into the bush and shoot it again, before Meg woke. To put Nigger out of his misery, certainly – but even more, to spare her. Except the rifle was in the bedroom; he couldn’t get his hands on it without waking her. The cricket bat was still tucked under his arm; he became aware of its weight again. Could he club the dog to death? He baulked at the thought, but the bat seemed to be getting heavier all the time, as if by a sudden surge in gravity. Did he have the heart for it? No – he had the heart not to do it. Did he have the stomach for it? He was saved, for the moment, by the padding of bare footsteps along the hall floorboards behind him. He shifted on his haunches to hide the maimed dog, but Meg was already leaning over him, her ‘What’s the matter, darling?’ swallowed by a horrified gasp, ‘Oh, my God!’

She covered her mouth with both her hands and in the same movement sank to her knees. ‘Oh, my poor boy. My poor Nigger.’ She took the dog’s head gently in her lap, and its long tongue slid out and licked weakly, lopsidedly, at her hand.

She looked up at her husband, distraught, through wet eyes. ‘What can we do, Ben? What can we do? And what are you doing with that bat?’

He had no answer. His eyes met hers for a long moment, then he stepped back inside the house, and kept walking through to the bedroom. He climbed the stool, and took down the shotgun. He slid three plump, red cartridges into the magazine, and loaded one in the chamber. The gun could hold more, but four already seemed like overkill. He pocketed another three cartridges all the same. To be found wanting once was once too many.

‘What are you doing?’ Meg demanded when he reappeared.

He couldn’t meet here eyes.

‘You’re going to shoot him again?’

‘Look at him, Meg. What choice is there? He must be in misery. Dragged himself two miles back to the house. What else can I do?’

‘Can’t we give him the night at least? Something to eat? Maybe he’ll recover.’

This time he looked at her, if still unable to speak.

‘It’s not right, Ben. You put him through this. You and your father. And isn’t there some kind of law? If you survive the execution you can’t be convicted again …’ How had this nonsense popped into her head? She abandoned it as soon as it popped out of her mouth. ‘If you’d done it properly the first time …’

‘You think I don’t know that?’

The dog was shivering. She took off her towelling robe and tucked it over and around him.

‘Get some water, Ben.’

He leaned the shotgun against the wall inside the door, and filled a saucer in the kitchen. The dog ignored it, or was unable to control its head enough to sip.

‘I’ll warm some milk,’ Meg said. ‘You bring him inside. Put him on the spare bed.’

At least the dog seemed in no pain. Paralysed down one side perhaps, and unable to speak any dog words, unable even to whimper, but uncomplaining as he was wrapped more tightly in the swaddling of bathrobe, and lifted into Ben’s arms. The burden was surprisingly light – dehydration? blood loss? – and by bending his knees Ben was able to grab the shotgun also. Meg had vanished, naked, into the kitchen. For a moment he paused in the doorway, half inside the house and half out. Nigger looked up at him, and licked his hand. Blue was out in the yard, facing them; as Ben stepped down off the veranda the younger dog ran between him and the utility, and turned, crouching, and turned and crouched again, as if trying to herd him back into the house.

‘Stand down, boy.’

He laid the bundled dog gently in the tray, then took the shotgun into the cabin with him, placing it carefully across the backrest. He had started the engine and turned towards the grid when Meg walked out in front of the ute. He hadn’t seen her emerge from the house; she had pulled on boots and jeans and a thick pullover. Instead of the promised saucer of milk she was carrying the garden spade, cradling it across her chest like a weapon. Was she, also, refusing to allow him to pass? Over my dead body, Ben? Instead she walked around and climbed into the passenger seat, nursing the spade between her knees, perhaps – the thought came to him – to keep it out of sight of the dog. She reached over and squeezed his hand, briefly, but without looking at him. Sensing that she couldn’t bring herself to speak, he kept silent himself as the ute rumbled across the grid and into the home paddock. She climbed out to open the first gate and climbed back in after he had driven through, still without speaking. After the second gate, she climbed back onto the tray instead, and sat nursing the dog’s head in her lap.

He opened and closed the third gate himself.

He parked facing the same stand of scrub, leaving the headlights blazing. The shallow grave had imploded; he dug it out quickly while Meg remained up in the tray, murmuring soothing sounds at the dog. He worked hard and fast, digging out another entire hole’s worth of dirt, wanting to be certain this time, before tossing the spade aside.

‘I’m ready,’ he finally said.

‘You’ll need to lift him out,’ Meg said.

He took the towelling bundle from her and carried it around into the headlights, keeping the dog’s head towards the ute, not wanting him to see the stand of gums, or the gaping hole – although Nigger surely knew exactly where he was.

He set the dog on the ground and, as Meg knelt and fondled his ears again, walked back to the cabin of the ute for the loaded gun. He checked the breech as Meg tugged a corner of the robe over the condemned dog’s eyes. Nigger licked her hand once, but as she stood back, the right side of his body, the working side, began trembling, violently.

‘He’s scared,’ she whispered, hoarsely. ‘He knows. Do it quickly, Ben.’

Not too quickly, he reminded himself as he aimed the gun with more deliberate care at the masked head. He squeezed the trigger slowly, and with such forced concentration that he barely noticed the hard, bruising kickback of the stock against his shoulder, or the explosion of the shot itself.

Meg’s gasp of horror was barely audible to his deafened ears; she had already turned away to lean against the bonnet of the ute as he lowered the gun. He could look no longer than a second himself. He leaned the gun against the wheel of the ute and dragged the dead dog by the hind legs to the edge of the hole, keeping his face averted.

Then he took the spade and cleaned up the fragments of shattered bone and brains, still trying only to look out of the corner of his eye. He had scraped two small mounds of dirt and remains into the hole when nausea overcame him.

‘Here,’ Meg was saying somewhere, far off, although apparently close enough to take the spade from his hands. He squatted on his heels, with his head between his knees till he stopped feeling faint. He could hear her working somewhere, and by the time he felt safe to rise to his feet again she was banging down the earth on top of the grave.

‘You OK, Ben?’

‘Getting there. And you?’

A long silence. ‘Do you think we’re cut out for this?’

‘I think you are,’ he said, and she offered up the glimmer of a smile.

They drove back to the house as they had driven out, in silence. Blue was waiting at the grid, prick-eared, pacing relentlessly about. As they climbed out, he was already looking past them from the tray to the cabin and back again. Ben left the shotgun in the cabin, but tossed the spade into the toolshed and closed the door; he would hose it down later. Blue followed Meg up the steps onto the veranda, searching her face for a sign, looking back at Ben’s face, looking past them out into the night, looking and searching everywhere.

At the door Meg turned, and spoke to him. ‘No, Blue. Stay.’

She held the door for her husband to step through, then closed it in the dog’s face, slowly but firmly.