He was four days shy of turning fifty and Jack was running so hard he thought his heart would burst. The panting growl grew closer behind him even though he was running as fast as he ever had in his life. The huge German Shepard had burst through the brush and interrupted Jack’s evening jog before Jack snapped a dead branch from a tree for a weapon. When the wood snapped though, a splinter shot right into Jack’s eye and he was now running so fast that blood was trickling into his greying sideburns.
As Jack ran by the Thomas’s abandoned shack he veered off the road and made for the gap between the letterbox and the gate. The dog could easily vault the fence but Jack hoped to buy enough time to find a slat or board from the junk pile, something he could defend himself with. Jack misjudged the gap though, and his hip caught the jagged edge of the letterbox post. Pain jolted down his leg as he flew awkwardly through the air, landing hard on the packed dirt.
The dog was at the gate a second later, still growling viciously while assessing the best way to gain entry. It reared back, haunches coiled to vault the fence, when the Kelpie came from nowhere, bristling and black like it had been dripped straight from the night. It didn’t bark or growl at the German Shepard so much as it roared like a lion, sending the Shepard backward. Another roar and the Shepard ran back into the bush, and Jack wondered if the Kelpie only did that so it could kill him instead.
Jack pulled himself to his feet and the Kelpie turned to meet his eye. Jack knew nobody in the area had a dog other than that homicidal Shepard, and he stared in curiosity and relief as the Kelpie’s ears twitched expectantly and its tail wagged. Jack nodded thanks and then hobbled toward home, stopping intermittently to turn and try to convince the animal to return to its own, wherever that may be. Several painful kilometres later, Jack paused at his front door and turned to see that tail still wagging, those ears still expectant. He let himself in, but then held the door open and waited.
Less than an hour later, Jack’s only son would come through the door, footy shoes slung over his shoulders. He’d look curiously between Jack’s bleeding eye and his father’s hand scratching between a pair of expectant ears while a tail thumped happily on the floor. Jack would need a ride to Emergency but not before he’d smile at his son, gesture at the happy creature and say, “We have company.”
Jack would have Company for the next fifteen years before the night of his 65th birthday when Company would curl up near the tattered running shoes by the door and that tail would thump happily a final time.