He dreamed of home. His mother spilling tubers out of her bag; his father grinning as he held a fine spear against the sky. He held on to the dream even as he woke up, hoping desperately that he’d find himself on the leafy branches of a sleeping platform, the chatter of family around him.
He opened his eyes. The rock was growing chilly against his skin. The sun had sunk to the horizon. The rocks were shadowy, with vague rustlings that he didn’t understand.
Back home he knew the sound of every animal. It was like he’d been dropped by an eagle far from where he should be — home, the sounds of the clan, the mutters of grandmothers, the cries of babies — to here, with just the sounds of wind and sea and strangeness.
Where was the rubbish dog? There was no sign of her — and still no smoke or canoe or people. He forced himself to lurch down to the pool again, drank, then made his way under a rocky overhang near the water. At least he’d be out of the wind down here.
He sat with his back to the rock, feeling the last of its warmth fade with the daylight. He shivered, from hunger and loneliness as much as cold.
Something warm touched his hand. For a moment he thought it was the rubbish dog’s nose.
It was a bird. A dead bird, with strange red and green feathers. The dog sat next to it, looking at him.
The bird was a present for him. He picked it up. It was freshly killed, the marks of teeth where it had been choked to death.
The rubbish dog had a few feathers around her muzzle too, either from this bird or another she had eaten.
He’d eaten raw meat before, when he had been too hungry to wait for it to cook after a hunt. This wouldn’t be good, but it would feed him, and not hurt him either.
He looked at it, and then at the dog. He would have died of thirst tomorrow, or died from lack of food the day after, or the day after that. The rubbish dog had given him his life.
Why?
Suddenly he began to cry. He cried like a baby, on and on, letting the tears flow and the sobs well out of him. He screamed up into the sky and felt the scream echo back. At last the sobs came quietly.
Something warm pressed against him. It was the dog. She sat next to him, her front legs poking out by his. It was almost as if they were old men sitting together.
We are, in a way, he thought. He and the dog had been through as much in the last two days as many old men had experienced in their whole lives.
The dog knew it too.
He pulled the feathers off the bird, then chewed its still faintly warm flesh. He couldn’t face the guts, so the dog ate them from his fingers, licking them clean.
Then they sat together as the blanket of the night covered them, and the fruit bats made long sweeps against the sky.