The Dogs by John Hughes

Author:John Hughes [Hughes, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Books Pty. Ltd.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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It was bitterly cold in the wood when she woke, and the fog obliterated everything. She had been told that near the mouth of the river, in the delta, were vast enclosures of brackish water, a kind of impenetrable swampland separated by dykes in which they would be able to take refuge if ever the Germans discovered their camp. She had been with the partisans half a year now and her daughter was two months old. She had fashioned a sling from a flour sack and carried the baby on her back. No one seemed to mind her presence. In the newness of life was a kind of hope. There were many superstitious men among them. The baby was like a talisman.

In winter, one of the men who knew the valley well told her the swamps were invaded by migrant duck and wild geese, and the locals, who were mad for shooting, would wait, shivering, for their flights at dawn and dusk, or else stalk them, using punts. There were also great clouds of eels, which in November would travel westwards on the first stage of their journey to the Sargasso Sea, where, in the depths of the Atlantic, they would beget their young, a journey from which only the newborn eels returned. No one knew what happened to those that made the journey. He spoke about the other fish that inhabited the river: carp, pike, and the big sturgeon that sometimes came. He showed her how the large net worked, the source of most of what they ate.

They were a motley group of men but they shared a love of the river, and when she had arrived with Giovanni they had taken her in as if they had known her all their lives. There was a quiet rhythm to their days – interrupted by nights of frantic sabotage, or the tense searching out of German positions – cleaning the guns and fishing in the river (the whole camp smelled of fish) and sitting while they smoked and talked of their lives before, and most animatedly, after, the war, to which she adapted with a kind of family ease she’d never really experienced with her mother. She would never have thought it, but the quietness allowed her to heal. They were gentle with her, though she had proved herself countless times already and her battle scars showed she did not need to be carried. They loved her daughter almost more than she did; she was never out of someone’s arms for long. One of the older men, Salvatore, told her it was the first time he’d handled a baby – he’d never held any of his own six children. He would turn away from her because he did not want her to see his tears. Perhaps he was thinking of his own children. There was much time for such thoughts.

To begin with, before the birth of her daughter, they would send her to a small hideout they had made near the station, no more than a bark cover at the edge of the forest and invisible from the tracks.

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