Chapter 32: First Moon

Jago didn't say anything.

He looked down at his own hand on my stomach as if he'd never seen it before.

Then he looked up at me, and his eyes went gold so fast.

"Say it again."

"I'm having your pup. The old Luna smelled it first. Then a test in Yorkshire. Two lines."

"In Yorkshire."

"At the services. Where I bought the egg sandwich."

He made a sound that wasn't a word.

Then he picked me up the way he had on the beach, boots off the ground.

He turned round and round with me in the middle of the quay.

The trestle table exploded.

His aunt dropped the fish slice in the fryer, and the cooper knocked his cider into the gravy.

The lorry driver stood up on the bench and cheered.

Ninety wolves howled at a perfectly ordinary Friday evening sky.

Jago put me down very carefully.

"Don't," I said. "Don't start that. I'll be lifting casks till November."

"You'll be lifting nothing."

"Watch me."

His nephew was tugging at his sleeve.

"Uncle Jago. Uncle Jago. Is it a boy or a girl?"

"We don't know yet, little man."

The boy thought about it.

"Can I do the label anyway?"

She came at the end of November, in the middle of a gale, in the bedroom under the sloping ceiling.

She was a girl, with dark curls already, like her father's, and grey-green eyes like mine.

The pack doctor came over the hill in the storm, and Jago's aunt boiled every kettle in the cottage.

Jago sat on the floor by the bed and held my hand, and breathed with me through every one.

He never once let go.

Christmas Eve was a full moon.

In the Trevail Pack a pup's first full moon is a big night. The whole cove comes out to show her the sea.

We laid the tables in the cellars that year, under the new roof.

Two long trestles ran end to end between the racks, from the copper still to the arched doors.

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