Free Range - Epitaph for a dog

Epitaph for a dog by Ro Cambridge
It’s an ordinary morning in Mapua. The traffic flows by at an amiable village-by-the-seaside pace. At the café, locals and visitors relax with coffees in the early autumn sunshine. There’s a bit more of a bustle than usual at the local hall, where the inaugural Mapua Literary Festival is happening today. Magaret Margaret Mahy is special guest.

I’m on door -duty, extracting $2 from adults, waving children in for free. The money goes into a plastic container which once held hokey pokey ice-cream. The smell of fresh muffins wafts from the hall kitchen. One child arrives dressed as a very un-ferocious tiger. Another ais a wood nymph in with a circlet of flowers. How lovely the day is.

Then I watch as a young dog, tongue flying, launches herself off the pavement and into the path of an oncoming car. Suspended in mid-leap she embodies all that so delights us about dogs: an aliveness to every fresh-minted, fresh-scented moment, unencumbered by fear of the future, or regret for the past. I can’t bear to witness the extinction of that unselfconscious joy and flee into the hall. I hear the thud of something hard colliding with something tender and soft but no squeal of brakes, agonised yelping, or human cry. A boy stares from the hall into the street. His faces shows only mild curiosity and I begin to think I have been mistaken, too ready to read disaster into the trajectory of car and leaping dog.

But the dog is dead. Her body’s been laid down, off the road and out of sight. There’s blood congealing in a pool on the bitumen. A woman flings water on the road and scrubs at the blood with a broom. She is trying to wash the it away before the dog’s young owner sees it. Jacob, she tells me, was given the dog for his 14th birthday two weeks ago. He said she was the best present he’d ever had. Two women arrive and lift something heavy and inert in a blanket and lay it, very gently, onto the back of a ute, very gently.

For the rest of the morning I try to talk myself out of feeling so heartsick. It was a dog, I tell myself, how much worse if it had been a child. It happened quickly. The dog wouldn’t have felt a thing. The boy only had a fortnight to fall in love with the dog. Maybe this will mean the death will hurt him less. And anyway, all kinds of animals get bowled over every day. As if to prove it, a pukeko dashes recklessly in front of my car as I drive homeward, passing the flattened corpse of a possum on the road.

When I get home my own dog greets me with a shimmy of delight and I search out a dimly-remembered poem about a dog dying. It’s by Bruce Weigl about having his sick, beloved dog put down. Here I find a dog’s death given its proper gravitas – “there was no cry or growl/only the weight of her in my arms/and then on the world.”