to call the dogs

it’s as if I’m driving through a Rorschach test. Melted street signs, their plastic fonts blistered, hang like metal aprons from blackened signposts, while equidistant along the edges of the winding road, misshapen reflectors – burnt out or cracked – pass time as if it’s meaningless. Between the scabs of trees, scrub lands of ink etchings. Thousands upon thousands of hectares, tin coloured, sepia-toned and grey.

Stumps, gold-yellow and black, whizzed-apart by men with chainsaws, form a half-hacked coronation – a firebreak leading into the valley, into town. A single road takes me from the east towards the Hume, and past the pub. It’s the only structure of note in the village besides the community hall and public bathrooms, so I’ve made a habit of stopping here for a breather and a beer while the locals drink and wrestle out words. Laughter, strangely jarring against the blackened land. There’s a trail ride next Sunday: a camp out and piss-up, a fundraiser for the local RFS – a town-hall friendly with slabs of beer and pots of stew.

‘After all,’ the publican says within earshot, ‘they saved our arses.’

This is the sort of place where the licensee is an authority on everything. And yet, he’s damn humble, especially for a man who just shepherded a village through two natural disasters. The first, Black Summer: on Christmas eve, when fires boxed in both ends of town. Trapped, the locals funnelled between the pub and church-turned-community hall, depending on the direction of the wind. A sheer miracle that everyone survived. Then, just a few weeks after, unprecedented floods gutted the waterways, suffocating aquatic life with all that ash. This, after decades of drought.

After a quick beer, I exit the bar, having only spoken to the bartender. The locals nod, say nothing to me. I’m an outsider, but they aren’t cruel about it. Anyway, it’s time to get back on the road, to start my move. I’ve seen enough.

Leaving, I spot a pug chained to one of the picnic tables under the verandah. His tongue hangs from his mouth like a pink rope and his huge eyes look up at me. I oblige him, bend down for a pat. His face lights up as I dig my fingers in behind his ears. He reminds me of my own dogs, Poppy and Kendrick, who are temporarily staying with my aunt – an hour’s drive away, the house where I waited out Black Summer – while I

sort out a new place to live.

Thinking of Poppy and Kendrick reminds me of the drive into town when I saw groups of wildlife workers by the sides of the roads, tending to injured animals. Likely from WIRES though I didn’t stop to check, in fear of what I might see. A burnt koala in a washing basket is already a meme.

It will be years before I learn that this place right here, right now – the south-east coast of NSW – is the most ecologically devastated region in Australia’s recorded history. It will be years before I hear stories from locals that during the worst of the fires, day turned to night and asphyxiated birds dropped dead out of the sky. It will be years before a wildlife worker at a macropod sanctuary will begin to cry as she tells me about the burnt feet of wallabies. Years before I will hear and read stories of blackened hooves, blackened snouts, blackened rib cages and bones, blackened shapes – families returning home to fields covered in blackened bodies. It will be years before a woman who owns a local wildlife sanctuary tells me about one of the worst days of her life, the afternoon she returned to her property to find that her house had made it, that many of the enclosures where she rehabilitated local fauna had made it, but that the animals she had let free in the hope they might survive – the animals, many of which she had hand-reared, bandaged, collected from the sides of roads, pulled from the remains of their mothers, and in some cases taken care of for decades – were found littered all over her property, either burnt alive, husks frozen in spot, or so badly wounded that the only humane option was to shoot them. Years, before I will hear that she couldn’t even shoot them, because only registered shooters were allowed to – and considering the scale of the fires, professional shooters were in short supply.

Over three billion dead animals, I will hear time and time again, and I will think of Poppy and Kendrick: the dogs that were shipped from house to house during one of the most devastating and confronting periods of my life. The dogs that always love me unconditionally. The dogs that always wait for their dad to return home.

image captured in kangaroo valley during black summer 2019.

It wasn’t until I saw their faces in the sliding glass door, coming and going like ghosts in the liminal space between this world and the next, that I realised just how close the fires were. All day we had watched the news, the apps, like hawks, debating whether we should leave – the radio constantly humming in the background. But my aunty was adamant: she wouldn’t go without her cats, Mr Ginger and Theodore. And Theodore had jumped the fence that morning and disappeared, after Kendrick cornered him. From then, my dogs had been relegated to the backyard.

‘They’re a nuisance,’ my aunt declared, closing the glass doors on them. 

That day, we had searched rural suburbia, knocking on the doors of neighbours who planned to stay and defend, triple-checking drainage pipes or the few trees left at the end of the cul-de-sac, while yet another waterbomber droned overhead.

In the days prior, I had begun to time the rotations of these water bombers. Ten, twenty, sometimes thirty-minute cycles, their incessant rotors an industrial lullaby. The helicopters with their tear-drop packages, chukka-chukking like the sprinklers set up on our neighbour’s roof. Perhaps it was their swooping, bird-like demeanour that brought me comfort as they scooped up hundreds of litres of water from the river near the town pool, before returning to us with their payload. There were no longer any other birds in the sky. It had been days since I saw the confused flock of yellow-tailed black cockatoos making their way towards the coast. They are known for their small family groups, but there were over one hundred cockatoos in that flock. I knew immediately what was driving them out.

Just over a kilometre away, columns of grey smoke rose from clusters of trees. The planes released kaleidoscopic sheets of water, causing steam to rush skyward and the planes to shimmer. For most of the week the fires had been just far enough away for us to think we were safe. But not always. New Year’s Eve was bad. And now things were beginning to look worse.

That afternoon, while we searched for my aunt’s cat, an unusually warm easterly had come in, so hot that we thought, at first, it was from the west; from the remnants of a disappearing town. Never before had we experienced a hot easterly, and the climatic shift was disorientating. As smoke began to roll through the suburbs, blanketing the streets and making our neighbours’ houses mirage-like, my aunty, who couldn’t stop coughing, decided we should abandon the search. My mum, however, refused to give up. Call it guilt for gate-crashing my aunt’s house, or her melancholy from missing her dog, Coco, who post-Christmas stayed at the family home – a place we were forbidden to go. Mum seemed tireless, even as the streets turned milky and it became harder and harder to orientate oneself. Repeatedly, I heard her yelling out, Theodore! Theodore! Theodore! with no idea where her voice was coming from. 

There’s an anthropological theory that humans first made noises – the precursors to language – in order to call out to dogs; that the origins of our oral skills are found in our earliest interactions with animals. This speaks to a symbiotic relationship with animals and the world, one that understands that animals (the other – the non-human) and humans are essentially connected, even intellectually. That animals are the before.

On the day Theodore went missing, my aunt closed all the windows, cranked the AC, and turned on repeats of ABC’s The Cook and the Chef. Her eyes flicked to me, then the dogs, and back to the TV. I could tell she wanted to tell me and the dogs to get out. She loved my mum. As the smoke rolled in, she said nothing.

When mum finally returned from the search, she did what she always does when she’s anxious: she cleaned. First, she wiped down the fake plants. Then, the floors, which she vacuumed and swept several times, before mopping the tiles, refusing to accept how futile it was. Ash was everywhere.

Mum and I had come to my aunt’s house a week earlier, after a Christmas Eve fist fight had sent irrevocable fractures through my family. Late at night, over the remains of a roast, my father told my eldest brother that if he didn’t waste all his money on international holidays he might be able to afford a house – a clear gibe not just at him but at me, just returned from a post-break-up trip to Bali. my brother, having suffered through years of my dad’s physical and psychological abuse, finally snapped and punched my dad repeatedly in the head.

My mum used this event as an excuse to evacuate herself from a dangerous marriage. For months – years really – my father’s violence had been escalating. Not a week before Christmas, he had threatened her with a kitchen knife. I was convinced he was going to kill her. I would do anything to support her get-away And so, just after midnight on Christmas Day, we arrived at my aunt’s place. My aunt welcomed us in with beers and cigarettes, and we sat around in her living room and drank until we couldn’t feel. Two hours in, my aunt went to bed. Mum and I stayed up, talking about what we were going to do. My dogs were at my parents’ house, having stayed there while I was in Bali. We had to get them out.

On Christmas morning, we drove to the family home. I snuck around the side gate, and Mum waited in the car. Kendrick was so excited when I loaded him into the back that he ran in circles, flipping himself off the seat and landing on his head. As I closed the door on Poppy, she scrapped at the window, her eyes desperate. I knew that she thought I was going to leave them again. This was the second time she had been moved in less than a month.

In 2018, I had moved to the south-east coast of NSW with my girlfriend. She was a fashion designer with a small retail company, while I, naively, dreamed of being a writer. In a clunky 80s brick house that backed onto a river, we were going to follow our dreams. 

Seven years earlier, my father had gotten into breeding French bulldogs, one of his many Homer-Simpson-style money-making-schemes that throughout my childhood had kept us balancing precariously between skid row and oil money.

My girlfriend, who loved dogs, was elated when my father offered to give us two. It was a rare act of generosity – one that made me feel trapped. I couldn’t handle the idea of the rest of my life – of settling down with three kids and two dogs – nor the idea of owing my father anything. So, while my girlfriend adopted the role of doting mother, I kept my distance. I never played. Never took them for walks. Never gave them treats. The most involved thing I did was pick up their shit.  

In early 2019, this changed. My girlfriend and I split up. She moved back to Sydney, and I stayed on in the riverside house. She couldn’t take the dogs with her, so I promised to look after them. Each night, they formed a yin-yang. I was convinced that I’d have to give them up, have to separate them. How could a single man look after two dogs? Who would take two at once?

The conversations happened gradually. Instructions first, of course. Then remarks at dinner time. Casual musings. Little jokes I didn’t have anyone else to tell. Secrets whispered in their tent-like ears. Truths unravelling during hour-long cuddles. Murmurs leaking from dreams. The dogs refused to be ignored. They refused to let me ignore how loud the silence had become. I felt tarnished by my father. Intimacy was terror: it wasn’t just fear of committing to my now-ex; it was the feeling that I was committing to being a dad. In time, I told them everything. It was impossible for me to conceive of a world where I would do a good job, so I just hadn’t tried.

The conversations we have with the animals we love most in the most devastating times of our lives often reveal more about ourselves, our worlds, our futures, than those we have with each other. Animals aren’t just our mirrors, our equals, they are prisms that refract our myriad and most intimate selves, revealing to us new dimensions of sorrow, joy and sometimes even shame. Perhaps this is why when the devastations of the fires became so apparent, we turned to the stories of animals – those that were so harrowing and heartbreaking – not for solace, but to understand the carnage humans have inflicted on this world.

In that clunky riverside house post-break-up, my visions of isolation, of writing, were challenged by two animals who needed me as much I needed them. The bed I had shared with a woman I thought I loved only weeks earlier became an empty space devoid of meaning. And on the first cold night alone, I let Poppy and Kendrick inside to sleep on my bedroom floor. I woke up halfway through the night with Poppy perched on my chest, licking my chin. While I would have hated it a month earlier, I realised in that moment not only how much I needed her, but also how badly I had treated her mum, my ex. I was emotionally absent. I was moody. I was difficult to deal with. And all my ex had wanted was someone who loved her as much as she loved them. All of us are just striving towards some love that keeps us alive. I pulled Poppy into my arms, and we fell asleep spooning. Since then, I’ve spent almost every night with them.

“Animals aren’t just our mirrors, our equals, they are prisms that refract our myriad and most intimate selves, revealing to us new dimensions of sorrow, joy and sometimes even shame.”

The night the fires brushed by – like so many nights where we filled the bathtubs with water, put buckets by the doors, watched the news, read URGENT texts that told us to leave if we were between X and Y – I set the alarms on my phone at intervals, then waited for my aunt and mum to go to sleep. Later, I snuck to the back door and slipped it open. Kendrick, who always barrels Poppy out of the way, was the first to stick his head in, but I could faintly see Poppy’s gleaming underbite hovering in the smoke. Looking across the backyard, the neighbour’s house was a magician’s trick – the only thing visible, the yellow smudge of an exterior light.

Earlier that night, my aunt was again adamant: the dogs weren’t allowed inside, period. But my heart was racing, and I needed Poppy’s gentle beat against mine. I needed Kendrick at the end of the bed, watching like a soft gargoyle, his eyes slipping closed as he began to snore. 

I picked Kendrick up like a baby – aware Mr Ginger was asleep in the front room – and carried him to the spare bedroom. Poppy bounced along behind us. In bed, they sandwiched me as I closed my eyes, searching for sleep. There was only one future that was true: us together.  But behind my eyelids, I saw burnt leaves rain from the sky. I saw the columns of smoke.

I awoke the next morning to one of the many alarms I had set to monitor the fires. I got up quickly so I could sneak the dogs back outside. When I went through the living room, Mr Ginger was pawing the front door. I walked past my aunt’s room – she was still asleep. We were all so exhausted. I opened the front door. A dark shape through the flyscreen. When I pushed it open, there was Theodore, fast asleep on the welcome mat. He’d returned to the home where a day earlier fear had dictated everything.

Now I’m on the way back to my aunt’s house, post-Melbourne, post-finding a place. I turn to look at the pub, hoping to spot the pug again. Surprisingly, the pub is shut – not a car out front – though in a paddock not far off, I spot a lone kangaroo raising her head, staring at me with a hypervigilance that makes me acutely aware of my body. I am human. I am a part of the problem. Why shouldn’t she be scared of me? The only animals I’ve seen out here in weeks are dead ones – carcasses, often burnt, rotting by the sides of the road.

Is this place apocalyptic? No, not really. A few new leaves on the limbs of trees that I thought were dead two weeks ago. Where the fields were alight only months back, there are even new tufts of grass; the intense floods at least brought some nutrients. Now, there is a noticeable moisture to the earth, as if everything has been turned with a spade.

Perhaps the country will never recover, and what we have done to the beings that came before us can never be forgiven. Perhaps we have already lost to the politicians’ piggybanks and the oil barons hell-bent on watching the world burn. But within hours, I will be holding Poppy and Kendrick, I will be helping them into this van, and I will be driving them some ten hours to Melbourne where we will begin a new life together. In this life, we will no longer deal with untenable housing situations; no longer contend with my father’s violence; no longer fear that love might consume us, might suffocate us; and I hope, no longer live through days of smoke, fire and flood. None of this I can promise, and none of it is true, but I will promise it all the same, the way a parent might promise their child.