Dave Cryer: Cave Drying in Days of Old

11:08:56 o'clock BST

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Think about your worst encounter with a dog. Did it scare the hell out of you? Or did it scare hell into you? Did it unseat your nerves so badly that a Chihuahua at fifty paces can sniff out your remembered fear? Because dogs do that, don’t they? Seek out the people who fear them most. Big dogs can frighten you. Vicious dogs can hurt you. Big, vicious dogs in the middle of nowhere with no owner in sight can do whatever the hell they want with you.

           

It is Christmas in rural France. Sam and I are in Perigord, goose-liver country, long, blank lanes away from the sleepy town of Riberac, in the tiny village of Celles, in a secluded cottage. One bar, one shop, log fire. We haven’t been in Debenhams on Christmas Eve fighting for final presents, but in that village bar, writing postcards, while the toothless Madame Epicerie and her male friends, all in wellies, watch and guffaw at a racy French film playing on the telly. They serve themselves from the bar and we serve ourselves from the bliss, the tranquillity, the sheer escape.

 

That night our friends Steve and Jane arrive. We find a map in the living room, with a circular walk marked on it. At the furthest, remotest point on the circle is a chateau. A French rural chateau. We’d like to see that.

 

And now it is Christmas Day. Warm, white sunshine as we press up a track past the goose farm. Not a soul stirring. Sparkle-ponds for eyes as we soak in the crisp greens, browns and yellows. The village roofs slip from view behind us. We pass a severed hamlet, foot and tractor access only. Woods, then a narrow tarmac lane. We parade, we twirl, we fizz, our chests so full of air that we could flutter like robins.

 

“What’s that?” Jane is pointing.

 

I look up. Map check. “A chapel. We’re near the chateau.” Chateau de Montardy, our own private viewing. I’ve only ever seen them on wine labels. A right turn. Tarmac turns to gravel, turns to grass track. Then a wall, a gateway, outhouses.

“This must be it.”

 

“Wow.”

 

“Let’s go through. Looks pretty deserted.”

 

“Better not.”

 

We walk on, skirting the mossy perimeter wall, until it culminates in a magnificent open archway through which a Disneyland splendour of windows and turrets is partially revealed.

 

A photo is required. Reverentially I step from the track into the shadow of the arch, gentle crunch on gravel. Jane and camera follow me and a lush ocean of green is our welcome, topped by the chateau.

 

We frame, we click and as the click fades in the ear, new clicks register in the eye. Six clicks as one, far corner of the lawn, foot of the chateau. Six ears pricking, three heads cocking, an upraising of muscular sharp-boned shoulders: bounding, racing, raging, three hounds of the Baskervilles are galloping towards us.

 

“Run!”

 

We turn, we run, barks like cannon-fire booming louder every millisecond. Bowels liquefy to a chilled cauldron as nitrogen smoke mushrooms into thighs. I catch Sam and instinctively slow to Olympic walking pace, inside hands soldered together in a raised molten clasp, outside hands fistedup to cover jugulars, elbows clamped over vulnerable belly-flesh. If only our coats were on – more material to bite through.

 

Where are our friends? I turn. Steve is on a wall. In the same crash position as us, Jane is dolly-stepping through a lion-brown whirlpool of snapping teeth, the threebeasts baying at her ankles. She is Joan of Arc, serenity in a pyre.

 

We walk and walk, away, away. What else can you do? Fight them off? Onward, onward. We fork right past a long barn, stop, turn. Jane and Steve are coming, still alive. Behind them, at the fork in the track, a dog is still visible, Cerberus guarding the gate of Hell, his Howitzer bark rattling his jaws and mad-flagging his ears. Like a bomber-jacketed bouncer, the sculpted pillars of his forelegs and the granite lintel of his jaw proclaim: Thou Shalt Not Return.

 

Well we don’t want to, thanks. We still have arms and legs, thank you very much. Soon we are down an incline, out of sight, safe.

 

“Which way now?”

 

I consult the map. This way. Down, away. But the track leads to a field, the grass is now mud, the mud a ploughed-up quagmire that shows us no continuation of our escape path. Must be the way. A few more desperate steps and our feet are being sucked under. The field is justa field, fenced in.

 

“It must be over that fence.There must be a stile. There must be a way through.”

 

We huddle round the map. We turn it sideways to match the landscape. We have taken the wrong path. Before the long barn we should have veered left at the fork in the path, skirting the chateau still. We need to go back to the exact point where we last saw Fido, to where he and Rover and Fluffy had kindly escorted us with their first-offence mercy.

 

We are phoneless. Even if we had a mobile, would there be a signal? And who would you phone on Christmas Day in rural France? What would you say? And where’s the Frenchman that owns those devil dogs? Why has he left them loose? So they can defend the chateau, of course. We lookat the map. If we climb over that fence, throughthose woods, cross ten fields and ten fences, we can get to that road. Which, of course, is a ridiculous choice to consider. But that’s fear for you.

 

We don’t climb the fence. We start to retrace our steps. Towards the chateau.

 

You think we escaped, don’t you?

 

At the fork in the path, there are no dogs. The gate of the chateau is hidden from view. We take the correct fork, heading right. Through trees you can see the chateau from the side again. I will have my photo. I step through the trees to a barbed wire fence. I snap. In that photo you can see the lead dog racing downhill, having leapt over the chateau wall. You can’t hear him barking in that photo. You can’t see his two henchmen bolting after him, all three set on killing the intruders they tried to warn.

 

Briskly, we walk down the track. We do not look back until we reach the road. We have escaped, haven’t we?

 

No. You see, the thing is: you never escape from fear like that.

 

On Christmas Day, Frenchmen go out shooting. Every distant rifle crack begins to jolt us. Then…

 

“What’s that?” Jane, bubbling with terror.

 

I look. A dog-sized blur is charging towards us.

 

“It’s a wolf!” shouts Steve in the resigned cadence of a man lying down to be shot.

 

I see a wolf. Sam sees a wolf. It is a bambi, a baby deer running for its life from gunshots and, when it sees us, it does a hand-brake turn, petrified at pace, and shoots off to our left. Fear has begun to play on our collective mind. It has turned a bambi into a wolf.

 

And soon after that it turns chickens into wild dogs waiting to ambush us. There they are in a farmstead we have to pass to get home. We study them for ages from a distance. Eventually, but tentatively, we decide that they are indeed chickens. But we’re not sure. As we approach, we eyeball them all the way. One of them might be a dog. They are to our right. We hug the embankment and hedge to our left.

 

Boom-bark like Big Bertha, the lowest, loudest ro-ro woof you have ever had the displeasure to hear. We leap away from the hedge. A Rottweiler the size of a horse is going ape. It’s definitely a Rottweiler, you can tell by his monstrous outline. He could break down that hedge with one shadowy tooth. We turn and scuttle back the way we came.

 

The canine telegraph is abuzz. Every dog for miles around has been alerted to the scaredy English. There are barks on all horizons. Don’t let them pass, they chant.

 

But we did not die. You know that. I wouldn’t write with such abandon about death. We did not even getbitten. We all survived unscathed. Physically. We got back to the cottage. Eventually. We laughed about it all.

 

But that night a thousand nightmares plagued me about what could have happened. And every dog I see today, every walk I take, or don’t take, every sharp sound that might be a dog…

 

 Even if a Jack Russell just looks at me the wrong way.

 

Fear is bad enough in the moment, but it’s in your reflective mind that it really gets to work. It’s the reliving, the reworking, the what-ifs.

 

I did not escape those dogs. I will never escape those dogs.

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