The wonder of a journey to the wild

The DogBy Kerstin Ekman, Translated by Linda Schenck and Rochelle Wright Sphere, 133pp, £12.99

A PUPPY WAKES up to hunger and silence. He had been sleeping under a spruce tree. More snow had fallen overnight. The exhausted puppy has no memory of how he got there. All he is aware of is the hunger.

The facts are unfortunate; his master had gone fishing and although he had not called her, the puppy’s mother had followed him, as had the puppy. The man notices his dog, always ready for a hunting trip. He brings her back home. But the pup had fallen behind and was lost. His humans realise a puppy is missing and decide he has died in the snow.

Published in Sweden in 1986 The Dog was well received for two reasons; Kerstin Ekman is a major literary figure in her native country and her story is unsentimental, impressively dignified and centres on a hero who is innocent and brave.

This first English language translation presents The Dog to a wider stage. It is a thoughtful, considered work written in highly visual descriptive prose which also succeeds in being understated and deliberate.

The reader feels privy to a shocking adventure. By setting it in the harsh winter landscape, an ordeal of chance becomes a life and death struggle for the pup. If he wants to survive, he will have to abandon play and concentrate on searching for food, often by hunting it down. Most of all he has to identify his enemies, those animals that can kill him. But food makes everyone a rival.

There is nothing to eat, but the puppy’s sense of smell saves him by helping him find rotting meat buried beneath the snow. It is the carcass of a moose. A flock of crows challenge his right to the feast and the puppy responds: “he growled, his body all muscle and determination now, arched over the big frozen mound of food in the snow.”

Ekman establishes a tone of detached realism which she sustains throughout the narrative. “. . . and he wouldn’t have made it through a single day more if he hadn’t found the moose carcass in the marsh. No one can live long on hare droppings.”

Protecting his food source settles into a battle of wits; there are the birds, screeching and swooping and also the fox. But there is something else as well: “Sometimes at night he heard howling. He raised his head and shivers of anticipation ran through his body. He was riveted, but as the tension receded a dull sense of discomfort was left in its wake. Only sleep could make that go away.”

By evoking the landscape in vivid detail Ekman creates the world into which this young animal is thrust. If surrounded by possible enemies he is also alone, the narrative conveys the absolute solitude.

“Day followed day and between them cold fragments of nights penetrated his sleep with the hooting of an owl or the snapping of a frozen branch. But he didn’t connect the days in a series. His life and his memory were images upon images, fading in and out, scraps of days with bright skies, sharp scents to follow, disconnected cries wafting one by one through the woods until they attached to an image deep inside him.”

Without presuming to become the dog, Ekman carefully studies the sensations and reactions that stimulate his intelligence. Of vital significance to the story is the fact that the pup was born a domestic animal and survival has forced him to adjust to living wild. This comes full circle with the arrival into his life of man, the moose hunters.

The slow building of a bond between one of them and the dog, surprisingly, occasions the least interesting writing in the book as Ekman changes tone, the language flattens and it is like reading a report. The complexity of memory causes the dog to never quite forget the caution he had had to acquire.

The Dog is a fascinating book and can be read on many levels; it has wonder and sophistication. Ekman has shaped a piece of art; she has also celebrated not only the bond between man and dog, but has with dignity and restraint given honour to one of the most remarkable creatures on the planet. Yet far more remarkable is Joseph Smith’s The Wolf (Cape) which was published last year. An outstanding, though deplorably ignored, debut by a young English writer, The Wolf shares the sophistication and dignified restraint of Ekman’s book.

However whereas Ekman places her subject, a young puppy who becomes lost, in an alien wilderness, Smith is looking at a most maligned character, the obvious anti-hero of most fairy tales and fables, at home in his natural environment. It is a breathtaking narrative in which a hungry wolf, also at the mercy of the winter, gambles on survival, and summons a natural wit which is very different from that of the starving puppy.

Several dramatic set pieces confer an epic grandeur on the narrative which is blessed by Smith’s sinewy prose and which has all the power of an Anglo Saxon poem.

These are rare tales; The Dog is a celebration of courage finding a reward. The Wolf, admittedly being read in the language it was originally written in, is bold, dramatic and Miltonic. Either will engage. Ekman’s book is beautiful yet it is The Wolf with its harrowing lyric grace which ignites the imagination in the way a Beethoven piano concerto does.

• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times