Missing, Presumed Dead

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 713, 13 March 1953, Page 20

Missing, Presumed Dead

by

SUNDOWNER

FEBRUARY 9

N earnest note came today from a Riccarton reader begging me not to shoot Mac but to ask a veterinary surgeon to give him an injection. I am not sure that it is kinder to have a dog put to sleep by a stranger than to send a bullet into his brain when he is asleep in his own environ-

ment; but it is a decision I have no longer to make.

Mac disappeared five weeks ago, and must now be presumed to be dead, How he died, and where, no one will tell me.. It is, of course, possible that no One’ knows. He may have wandered away, and on and on, and died in @ thicket or a gully. There is.a theory that dogs sometimes do this when the end approaches, and are not seen again. It is, I suspect, the dying elephant theory, or mystery, with about the same basis in fact, Left to themselves: dogs would die as, in the end, men usually do, without warning, preparation, or clear awareness. But they are notoften left. to themselves. On farms they are usually removed beforé nature’ has quite finished with them, and we therefore do not know

what the last move would be. All I know myself ¢is thy the two dogs I have allowed ‘to continue to the end died as near to.me as, they-could get-one on the doorstep and one under the floor. A simpler explanation is that Mac wandered out on to the roadway, and being deaf and half blind, was run over by a car. But this does not satisfy me either. Even if the driver stopped to investigate he would not be likely, however guilty he felt, to carry the body away or bury it. In this case he would have had no responsibility at all, but even if ‘he. did not know that he would either drive on without stopping or stop just long enough to throw the body into a ditch or under a hedge. Long before five weeks had passed it would have announ¢ed its hiding place. If: Mac is dead and buried there is someone not far away who knows where he is and how he got there; but I don’t expect him to tell me. I am not myself tolerant of. wandering dogs,. and I_ don’t expect my neighbours .to be tolerant either,. however "harmless "they must have known Mac ‘to be with ‘his slow trot and toothless jaws. If one of them

shot him I hope he had a good rifle and a straight eye. But I can think of another explanation that implicates no one. It is possible that Mac, blind, deaf, and toothless though he was, heard a siren call and followed her to his death. One passed this way the day before he disappeared, and it is very likely, I think,

that he became aware of her presence and followed. If he did, the rest can be imagined-the steadily increasing following, the queue, the fights, and Mac, who knew neither fear nor discretion; worried to death in life’s last madness.

FEBRUARY 11

= ba CORRESPONDENT who remembers that I "scoffed some months ago at rook parliaments" suggests that I "read the evidence" ‘in the latest issue of The Countryman. I had read it before this advice reached me, and today, to make sure that I had missed nothing, I have read it again. But I would not

call it evidence. It is a series of eyewitness descrip-

tions of incidents that the reporters are all as sure they saw as Luther was sure that he saw the Devil. I don’t doubt that Luther saw the Devil-the brooding, agitated, mystical Luther whose mind projected the image on the wall. Nor do I doubt that The Countryman’s correspondents saw what they thought and said they saw. They saw a circle of rooks, probably excited and noisy, surrounding one or more other rooks. which (in every case but one) they pecked to death. They did not see a court or parliament of rooks or rooks bringing other rooks to trial and. sentence. They may have seen a colony of rooks killing intruders from

another colony. They may have seen a colony killing sick or dying members of their own community. They may have seen a multitude of rooks joining, as birds and animals so often will, in a quarrel between two individuals, and killing the loser. They may have seen examples of community behaviour that have not yet been fully reported or scientifically explained. They did not see rooks displaying a knowledge of right and wrong, a sense of justice or injustice, a rational plan for bringing offenders to trial and conviction and investigating charges against the innocent. Those who say they saw such things deceive themselves, and are not very difficult to deceive. They are the lads who blister their hands waterdivining, swear to Loch Ness monsters and flying saucers, and know someone who talked to someone who chased a live moa. * * *

FEBRUARY 14

| WAS ashamed and almost nauseated today when I made a false cut trimming a tam’s foot and received a jet of blood in the face. It is easy to do, difficult not to do, but it is the kind of surgery only clumsiness and ignorance can justify. It is, however, disgracefully common. I have followed a flock of

sheep on a metal road that left splashes of blood

every yard or two, and it is not nvany weeks since I saw a flock of stud ewes trimmed to the quick on the shearing board. After the trimming they were moved through a foot bath of bluestone, and then hobbled out into a dusty pen to lie down and burn. It was a far cry from those Southern ewes to the Arab. associates of T. E. Lawrence, but their cut and bleeding feet recalled an incident in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom that some readers of these notes may remember. There the sufferer was not a sheep but a shepherd, a Circassian herdsman whose bad luck it was to get in the way of a raiding party. What followed must be told by Lawrence himself: If we left him he would give the alarm, and send the horsemen of his village out against us. If we tied him up in this remote lace he would die of hunger or thirst; and, Fig we had not rope to spare. To kill him seemed unimaginative: not worthy of a hundred men. At last, the Sherari boy said if we gave him scope he would settle his account and leave him living. . . He his wrist to the saddle and trotted him off with us for the first hour, till he was dragging breathlessly. We were still near the railway, but four or five miles from Zerga. There he was stripped of presentable clothes, which fell, by point of honour to his owner. The Sherari threw him on his face, picked up his feet, drew a dagger, and chopped him with-it deeply across the soles. . . Odd as was the performance, it seemed effective, and more merciful than death. The cuts would make him travel to the railway on hands and knees, a journey of an hour; and his nakedness would keep him in the shadow of the rocks till the sun was low. (To be continued)