‘Fury‘ (continued)
I laid in my bag trying to read a few chapters of “Maigret”. Even he failed to hold me. I was worried about Fury’s breathing: his flanks rose and fell like bellows in short sharp gasps and he seemed desperately short of air – I presumed he was suffering “oxygen lack” from the loss of blood. As the hoar frost melted inside the tent, I used a towel to dry the groundsheet and Fury’s fur as best I could – at least there was no further blood flowing. Later still, I prepared a meal and again tried spoon feeding him, but Fury just wasn’t interested. I could barely recognise the dog of yesterday and the pup of a few months before.
Fury had stood out among his brothers initially for his size, later for pure spirit.
His curiosity had led him continuously into trouble. He never learnt that it was unwise to lick metal in very cold weather and on several occasions piercing screams had brought me running out to find him with his tongue stuck hard to a piece of iron. Fury it was who had egged his five brothers out to the far edge of the sea ice when it was breaking up in the early spring; they had had to be rescued from an ice-floe, each of them sitting quietly curious about his predicament. Fury had learnt the facts of life early when, at five months old, a mature dog had thrashed him for paying attention to a bitch he considered his own. Wounded, both physically and in his pride, Fury had sloped off and maintained a low profile while he recovered his courage.
I must have dozed off. Shaking my head and fixing my surroundings I realised that it was Fury’s breathing that had woken me. I pumped the lamp and Frank sat up, rubbing his eyes. We looked down to see that Fury was fighting for breath. Rolling him over I saw the cause of the problem: a small hole exposing his lung which puckered and puffed as the dog fought for breath. Somehow the hole had not shown up earlier, probably blocked by frozen or clotted blood. We knelt, horribly fascinated, by the sight of this invasion of air into Fury’s chest. Then I shook myself: I had to do something. I reached for the medical kit and rolled a plug of gauze. I had no experience of this and thought only to stitch the hole. It was almost impossible to stop some fur slipping past the plug into the chest cavity – the suction was acting like a vacuum cleaner. Eventually I had finished all I was capable of doing. There was no dramatic recovery. We hardly expected any now. The dog’s condition seemed to deteriorate as we watched. Like a typical husky, he still fought with all his power, appearing to use every muscle in his body to breathe. But at five past four in the morning he died.
For a long time I sat on my air-bed, half relieved, totally sick with my own incompetence. Eventually I opened the tent door to look out; it was calm but snow was falling heavily, almost obscuring the light from my torch. I dressed and eased Fury’s body out through the door, crawling after him. The snow shovel was standing near the door. I dug a shallow trench and laid him in it. The falling snow quickly made a shroud that covered him quietly, completely. Later that day we travelled. One space in the team a constant reminder.
Gordon McCallum – GA, Wordie – 1960, Adelaide – 1961