The Captain's Dog | Part-1)

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Short Story by Ayi Jufridar
The whole village almost died because of the a dog’s death. The dog passed away—it was forbidden for the villagers to say had dead—in a mudfilled gutter in far east end of a rice paddy. His body lay in the gutter with stab wounds on his whole body, but especially on his stomach that caused his intestines to tumble out of it. Blood flowed from this last wound and mixes with the water in the gutter so that it looked like a slaughtering had taken place there. If you looked at the amount of blood, you would probably think that 100 dogs had been slaughtered by sharp weapon. Maybe a knife, a bayonet, or rencong, nobody knew for sure what kind of weapon had been used.

That was why all the villagers had been gathered together now. Men and women, young and old, all of them gathered in front of the police station on the main road of the village. Behind the station were several houses, one of them was the house of the richest and stingiest man the village. He owned a large piece of land and many heads of livestock. If one of the youths come to his house to ask for a donation for the village football team, the man would never give them anything. It used different if he was visited by member of the armed forces or policeman when the village was still in conflict. He would even give his daughter to be married with of the army if she was pregnant by him.

There was a special going to get to the rich man's house on the left of the police station. Behind the rich man's house was a large empty lot. At the end of a lot was where the body of the dog was found—the police would probably be angry if you called a carcass. An agent had finally found it after searching since noon until early morning the day. Nobody really knew why the police officer at the station hadn’t the dog’s yelps and barks when it was being slaughtered. Maybe its mouth had been pushed under the mud in the gutter so that even the most heart-reading yelp couldn’t be heard.

There had never been a time when the villagers had felt so frightened by the death of a dog. In the morning, before the villagers started with their daily routine, policeman with long-barreled shotguns accompanied the villagers head when called on the house. They pounded on all the doors and demanded that all its occupants go to the police station. The women, that were unable to leave their small children at home, took their babies arms. The policeman wouldn’t have cared even if the woman found it in their hearts to leave their babies in the rocker. It wasn’t their business to care even though a house burned down because its occupant forgot to turn off his stove after being yelled at by the policeman go to the station. Only the demented old people and the dying were allowed to stay at home; also the children that could only cry when asked question—especially by policeman with hate-filled eyes and threat-ening shotguns—were allowed to stay at home.

You didn’t even have to be able to speak to be called to the police station. Even the mute where called in—as long as they were still alive. There not many people left in the village. Armed conflict had caused many people to seek refuge else-where. They wanted to save their live. It was the only treasure they had left. But even before the armed conflict started, it was a small sparsely populated village.

Most of the villagers were farmers; the rest gathered rattan in the forest. When the conflict erupted, the forest became the palace the kingdom of insurgents and the villagers were forbidden to go there for food or gather forest products. Its wasn’t the guerrillas that banned the forest for villagers. They were happy to have the villagers come into the forest because they can ask the villagers to bring food for them. It was the police and the army that forbade the villagers to there: to break the food chain. They hoped that the insurgents would knuckle under from hunger. But that did not happen. The exact opposite happened. The villagers became famished because they could not gather food from the forest.

After the conflict subsided and the guerrillas come out of the forest to become executive and legislative leaders through pilkada —intimidating regional election—the village didn’t immediately become a teeming city. Hope didn’t in the village. The rice-paddies were plentiful and large but no water from irrigation. The villagers relied on the rain to irrigate their rice paddies. The road to the village was severaly damaged; it was dusty in the dry season and in the rainy season, it was similar to a mud pool for buffaloes. When he was campaigning, a former leader of insurgents, who was now a Bupati—district head—promised to cover the road with gold if he was elected. But it was fours year now that he was wielding power at the pendopo—the district’s head office—, there was still no sign of gold-covered roads; not even asphalt covered ones. That Bupati (lokal leader) whose false teeth were made of gold spent more time swinging a golf stick than teaching farmers how swing a hoe.

It was just five years since people lived in an area free from the sounds of guns, but it was coming back. It didn’t come from the guns of insurgents attacking police or military headquarters as in the old days. Now it came from the guns of people called terrorists. The villagers didn’t know these terrorists; they didn’t whether a terrorists was hiding in their own village or doing military exercises in forests where they usually gathered rattan and jernang (dargon's blood). What they did know was that almost more than a week ago, their village became crowded with police vans and ambulances going back and forth, transporting the wounded and dead—police officers (demised) and terrorists (dead).

Ambulance sirens wailed. Cars filled with reporters came but they were only allowed to enter the village roads. They were forbidden to go into the woods because there were still terrorists hiding there. “There are tens of them and even more guns. They are the ones that killed villagers while attacking the police,” said a police officer.

“Have they been identified, Sir?” the reporter asked.

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