The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog. Doris Lessing
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the doorway of the shack stood a woman, and she had a knife in her hand. ‘No, no,’ shouted Dann. ‘Help, we need help.’ He was using Mahondi, but what need to say anything? She stood her ground, as Dann arrived beside her, panting, weeping, and opened his jacket and showed her the soaking bundle. She stood aside, put the knife down on an earth ledge on an inside wall, and took the beast from him. It was heavy and she staggered to a bed or couch, covered with blankets and hides. He saw how nimbly she stripped off the soaking clothes, which she let fall to the earth floor. She wrapped the beast in dry blankets.
Dann watched. She was frantic, like him, knowing how close the animal was to death. He was looking around the interior of the shack, a rough enough place, though Dann’s experienced eye saw it had all the basics, a jug of water, bread, a great reed candle, a reed table, reed chairs.
Then she spoke, in Thores, ‘Stay with it. I’ll get some milk.’ She was a Thores: a short, stocky, vigorous woman, with rough black hair.
He said in Thores, ‘It’s all right.’ Apparently not noticing he spoke her language, she went out. Dann felt the animal’s heart. It did beat, just, a faint, I want to live, I want to live. It was not so cold now.
The woman returned with some milk in a cup and a spoon, and said, ‘Hold its head up.’ Dann did as he was told. The woman poured a few drops into the mouth between those sharp little teeth, and waited. There was no swallow. She poured a little more. It choked. But it began a desperate sucking with its wet muddy mouth. And so the two sat there, on either side of the animal, which might or might not be dying, and for a long time dripped milk into its mouth and hoped that would be enough to give it life. Surely it should shiver soon? The woman took off the blanket, now soaked, and replaced it with another. The animal was coughing and sneezing.
As Dann had done, she lifted it by its back legs, still wrapped in the blanket, and held it to see if water would run out. A mix of water and milk came out. Quite a lot of liquid. ‘It must be full of water,’ she whispered. They were speaking in low voices, yet they were alone and there were no other huts or shacks nearby.
Both thought the animal would die, it was so limp, so chilly, despite the blanket. Each knew the other was giving up hope, but they kept at it. And both were crying as they laboured.
‘Have you lost a child?’ he asked.
‘Yes, yes, that’s it. I lost my child, he died of the marsh sickness.’
He understood she had been going out of the room to express her milk to feed the beast. He wondered why she did not put the animal to her breast now, but saw the sharp teeth, and remembered how they had hurt him when the animal sucked at his shoulder.
Such was their closeness by now that he put his hand on her strong full breast, and thought that if Mara had had her child, she too would have breasts like this. It was hard to imagine.
He said, ‘It must hurt, having that milk.’
‘Yes,’ and she began to cry harder, because of his understanding.
And so they laboured on through the day and then it was evening. During that time they saw only the beast and its struggle for life, yet they did manage to exchange information.
Her name was Kass and she had a husband who had gone off into the towns of Tundra to look for work. He was a Tundra citizen but had made trouble for himself in a knife fight and had to look out for the police. They had been living from hand to mouth on fish from the marsh and sometimes traders came past with grains and vegetables. Dann heard from Kass a tale of the kind he knew so well. She had been in the army, a soldier, with the Thores troops, and had run away, just like him and Mara, when the Agre Southern Army had invaded Shari. The chaos was such that she imagined she had got away with it, but now the Hennes Army was short of personnel and was searching for its runaway soldiers. ‘That war,’ she said, ‘it was so dreadful.’
‘I know,’ said Dann, ‘I was there.’
‘You can’t imagine how bad it was, how bad.’
‘Yes, I can. I was there.’ And so he told his tale, but censored because he wasn’t going to tell her he had been General Dann, Tisitch Dann, of the Agre Army, who had invaded Shari and from whom she had run.
‘It was horrible. My mother was killed and my brothers. And it was all for nothing.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘And now Hennes recruiting officers are out everywhere, to enlist anyone they can talk into going back with them. And they are looking for people like me. But the marshes are a protection. Everyone is afraid of the marshes.’
And all that time of their talk the animal breathed in shallow gasps and did not open its eyes.
The shack filled with dark. She lit the great reed floor candle. The light wavered over the reed ceiling, the reed walls. The chilly damp of the marshes crept into the room. She shut the door and bolted it.
‘Some of those poor wretches running from the wars try and break in here but I give as good as I get.’
He could believe it: she was a strong muscled woman – and she had been a soldier.
She lit a small fire of wood. There was nothing generous about that fire, and Dann could see why: probably this rise with its little wood was the only source of fuel for a long way walking in every direction around. She gave Dann some soup made of marsh fish. The animal was lying very still, while its sides went up and down.
And now it began to cry. It whimpered and cried, while its muzzle searched for the absent teats of its mother, drowned in the marsh.
‘It wants its mother,’ said Kass, and lifted it and cradled it, though it was too big to be a baby for her. Dann watched and wondered why he could not stop crying. Kass actually handed him a cloth for his eyes and remarked, ‘And so who have you lost?’
‘My sister,’ he said, ‘my sister,’ but did not say she had married and that was why he had lost her: it sounded babyish and he knew it.
He finished his soup and said, ‘Perhaps it would like some soup?’
‘I’ll give him some soup tomorrow.’ That meant Kass believed the creature would live.
The cub kept dropping off to sleep, and then waking and crying.
Kass lay on the bed holding the beast, and Dann lay down too, the animal between them. He slept and woke to see it sucking her fingers. She was dipping them in her milk. Dann shut his eyes, so as not to embarrass her. When he woke next, both woman and animal were asleep.
In the morning she gave it more milk and it seemed better, though it was very weak and ill.
The day was like yesterday, they were on the bed with the beast, feeding it mouthfuls of milk, then of soup.
By now she had told him that because of the ice mountains melting over Yerrup, there was a southwards migration of all kinds of animals and that these animals, called snow dogs, were the most often seen.
How was it possible that animals were living among all that ice?
No one knew. ‘Some say the animals come from a long way east and they use a route through Yerrup, to avoid the wars that are always going on along this coast, east of here.’
‘Some say, some say,’ said Dann. ‘Why can’t we know?’
‘We know they are here, don’t we?’ The animals Dann had seen when sleeping out on the side of the cliff were snow dogs. This was a young snow dog, a pup. Hard to match this dirty little beast with the great beasts he had seen, and their fleecy white shags of hair. He was far from white. His hair was now a dirty mat, with bits of marsh weed and mud in it.
Kass wrung out a cloth in warm water and tried to clean the pup, but he hated it and cried.
The helpless crying was driving Dann wild with … well, what? Pain of some kind. He could not bear it, and sat with his head in his hands. Kass tried to shush the animal when it started off again.
And