Distant Light Read Free

dog in front of me, sitting in the middle of the path, still, motionless, waiting for me.
    I stopped at once.
    The dog gazed at me in silence, still blocking the way. It must have heard my footsteps a long way off and stayed there like that, waiting for me.
    I too gazed at it in silence, without moving, without breathing, all the more so because I realized this great beast was one of those breeds of dog they train for fighting, a Rottweiler.
    I couldn’t continue on as the dog was blocking my path, still watching me in silence. I couldn’t chase it away with my stick as I didn’t know how it might react to such a violent gesture.
    So I turned round and began to go back the way I’d come. Without speeding up too much, so as not to give the idea I was running away and thus arousing its fury. But without moving too slowly either, since I was far from home, alone, at the mercy of that dog.
    I took the first few steps without turning round. I couldn’t hear anything behind me. Perhaps the dog had stayed there, motionless, sitting in the middle of the path where it had blocked my way, andwas watching me as I walked off, with its black eyes in the middle of its great fierce head.
    But after a while, as I was turning a bend thinking I had left it behind, I began to hear a light regular sound behind me.
    I turned my head slightly.
    The dog was following.
    It was walking slowly, in perfect silence. I heard its heavy breathing behind me.
    I carried on walking, increasing my pace but without seeming to do so. The dog was still behind me, I could hear it from its breathing, I could see it when I turned my head. My house was at least half an hour away, and I continued walking with that large fighting dog following me in silence, in that enormous green solitude that stretched as far as the eye could see.
    “Who knows why it was there in the middle of the path, waiting for me?” I asked myself. “Who knows why it’s now following me? Who knows why it doesn’t make some small sound, why it doesn’t bark, and just follows me in perfect silence with that heavy relentless step? What can be going on in that great, fierce, inscrutable head?”
    All the more since I knew how these dogs behaved. I had read about them in the past, in newspapers, in reports about attacks on men, women and children who had been killed or disfigured by their bites. They don’t bark, they give no sign of agitation, it’s impossible to know what they’re thinking. Then, with no warning, they jump atyou and sink their teeth into your hands, arms, throat, face, they chew your flesh, your bones. They don’t stop until they’ve torn you to pieces, or somebody else comes along to beat them off, shooting them in the head.
    But here there was nobody.
    I walked on in silence, with that great fierce dog behind me. I turned round slightly every so often. The dog was always there, at the same distance. It continued to follow me with its relentless step, swaying slightly.
    At one point, on a tight bend, turning back rather longer, I could get a better look. Not just its enormous silent head but also its massive muscular body, its whole figure, from the side.
    Its legs were crooked, very crooked. Something more than crooked, I thought …
    I caught my breath.
    “It’s had all four legs smashed!” I suddenly realized. “Perhaps it has come from one of the inhabited villages lower down, from someone who keeps their dogs wild so that nobody dares approach their house. Someone must have smashed its legs with a shovel, perhaps after it had attacked a man, a woman, a child. It must have dragged itself up here where there’s nobody, on its broken legs, so that it couldn’t be found.”
    Now that I had turned my head a little longer, I thought that I could actually see, on one of its hind legs, a jagged bone protruding a littlefrom the skin when it bent its leg to take a step. Nothing jutted from the other three, though, as if the bones had now healed enough to somehow