The Plague Dogs: A Novel Page 13

  “Are we to go upstream towards the farm now?”

  “Na!” The tod, pressed to the ground under a rock, appeared actually to have extended itself flat like a leech and changed its colour to grey. “Heed doon!”

  “What?”

  “Bide there noo!”

  Snitter understood that they were to remain completely still and vigilant in cover. Upstream, in the Tarnbeck, he could hear the Tongue House Farm ducks quacking and blittering somewhere below the wooden footbridge leading across to the meadow below Thrang. He felt acutely conscious of his black-and-white colouring, as conspicuous as a pillar-box at the end of a street. There was a patch of bracken to one side of him and he crawled silently beneath the brown, over-arching fronds.

  After a few moments he turned his head towards the crag where the tod had been lying. It was no longer there. Looking cautiously around, he caught sight of it ahead of him, inching forward, chin and belly pressed into the bed of the runlet that trickled down the meadow to drain into the Tarnbeck. Suddenly it stopped, and for a long time lay motionless in the cold water oozing round and under its body. The quacking sounded closer and a moment later Snitter’s ears caught the paddling and splashing of the ducks as they drifted and steered in the swiftly flowing beck, thirty yards away at the bottom of the field. He realized that he was trembling. The tod was now closer to the beck by about three lengths of its own body, yet Snitter had not seen it move. He returned his gaze once more towards the tumbling patch of water visible between the alder bushes, where the runlet entered the beck.

  Suddenly, floating down from upstream, a duck came into view, turned, steadied itself against the current and dived, the white wedge of its tail wagging from side to side as it searched below the surface. Snitter looked quickly at the place where the tod had been. It was gone. What ought he himself to be doing? He left the cover of the fronds and began to crawl forward as another duck appeared, followed by a brown drake, blue-wing-feathered like a mallard.

  The drake and the duck began quarrelling over some fragment which the duck had found and, as they grabbed and quacked, floated three yards further downstream into shallow water. It was here that the tod came down upon them, silent as smoke. It did not seem to be moving particularly fast, but rather like some natural force borne upon the wind or the stream. Snitter dashed forward, but before-long before, it seemed to him—he could reach the beck, the tod had glided into the shallows, grabbed the drake by the neck and dragged it, struggling and clatter-winged, up the bank into the field. Behind rose a crescendo of splashing and the panic-stricken cries of the flock as they fled upstream.

  Snitter, two yards up the bank, came face to face with the tod, its mask grotesquely obscured by the thrashing wings and feet of the drake clutched between its teeth. Without relaxing its grip it coughed a shower of small, downy feathers into Snitter’s face.

  “What—what shall I do? D’you want me to—” Snitter, absurdly, was holding himself poised to rush into the now empty water. The tod lifted the corner of a lip and spoke indistinctly out of one side of its mouth.

  “Haddaway hyem noo!”

  Without waiting to see whether Snitter had understood, it trotted briskly—but still, as it seemed, without undue haste—downstream, quickly reaching the cover of a bank topped with ash and alder, along the further side of which they began to slink towards the open fell beyond. Once only it stopped, laid down for a moment the now-still quarry, and grinned at Snitter.

  “Ye’ll soon be waalkin’ light as a linnet, lad. Th’ next torn’ll be yours. Mebbe ye’ll get yersel’ dosed wi’ lead an’ aall.”

  Snitter grinned back.

  “Ye divven’t say?”

  The tod looked down at the carcase. “Can ye pull the feathers off a duck? There’s a gey lot o’ them. Ah‘ll hev t’ larn ye.”

  Thursday the 21st October

  Rowf lay crouched out of the wind, under a rock two hundred yards from the summit of Dow Crag. The moon was clouded and there was little light—barely enough by which to discern the mouth of the precipitous gully leading up from below. Snitter fidgeted impatiently. The tod was stretched at length, head on front paws.

  “You say there’s no need to come to grips?” asked Rowf.

  “Ne need, hinny. Th’ sharper it’s runnin’, th’ sharper it’ll go ower. Mind, ye’ll be close behind, so ye’ll hev te watch it. Tek care o’ yersel’ ye divven’t go doon wi’d.” The tod paused and glanced at Snitter. “If th’ wee fella there’s sharp off his mark, there’ll be ne bother.”

  Rowf looked down once more into the pitch-black depths below, then turned to Snitter.

  “Now, look, it’ll be coming up the fell as fast as the tod and I can drive it. It’s got to be headed and forced down into the gully. It mustn’t get past you, or turn back down the fell, d’you understand?”

  “It won’t,” replied Snitter tensely.

  “Assa, ye’ll manage canny,” said the tod, and thereupon set off with Rowf down the hillside.

  Snitter took the place under the rock still warm from Rowf’s body, and waited. The wind moaned in the funnel of the sheer gully below and blew a scatter of cold rain across his face, smelling of salt and sodden leaves. He stood up, listening intently, and began padding up and down across the gully’s head. There were still no sounds of hunting to be heard from the western slope on his other side. He might have been the only living creature between Dow Crag and Seathwaite Tarn.

  After a while he became agitated. Peering into the darkness and from time to time uttering low whines, he ran a little way towards the summit. Out beyond the foot of the precipice, far below, he could just glimpse the dull glimmering of Goat’s Water—one more of the many tanks with which men had dotted this evil, unnatural country. Sniffing along the path, he came across a cigarette end and jumped back with a start as the image of the tobacco man leapt before his mind’s nose. Confused, he lay down where he was and for the thousandth time raised one paw to scrabble at the canvas and plaster fixed to his head. His claws found a hold—some wrinkle that had not been there before—and as he tugged there came a sudden sliding movement, a giving way, followed at once by a sensation of cold and exposure across the top of his skull. Drawing back his paw, he found the entire plaster, sodden, black and torn, stuck across the pads. After a few moments he realized what it was and, capering with delight, gripped it in his teeth, chewed it, threw it into the air and caught it, threw it up again and was about to chase after it when suddenly a furious barking broke out on the fell below.

  Snitter, jumping round at the noise, realized that he was uncertain of his way back to the mouth of the gully. As he hesitated in the dark, he heard the approaching sound of small hooves clattering over stones, and dashed along the ridge in the direction from which it came. Scarcely had he reached the rock where the tod had left him than the yow came racing uphill, with Rowf snapping at its hind-quarters. Simultaneously, without a sound, the tod appeared from nowhere and lay with bared teeth, watching the yow as it turned towards Snitter, hesitated and stopped. Snitter leapt at it and all in a moment the yow plunged headlong into the blackness of the gully. Rowf, hard on its heels, disappeared also. There followed a rattling and falling of stones and gravel and then a single, terrified bleat which, even as it diminished, was cut suddenly short. Rowf, the whites of his eyes showing in the faint light, reappeared and flung himself down, panting, not a yard from the edge.

  “I saw it fall. Liver and lights, I couldn’t stop! I nearly went over myself. Well done, Snitter! You stopped it turning. Why—” He raised his head, staring at Snitter incredulously. “What on earth’s happened to you?”

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  But Rowf, sniffing and licking at the great, stitched trench running clear across Snitter’s skull, said nothing more. Snitter, too, lay instinctively silent, while Rowf, treating him as though he were a stranger, gradually brought himself to terms with this grim change in his friend’s appearance. At last he said, “You say the tobac
co man set it on fire?”

  “I don’t know—I was asleep when it happened. It often feels like that. And once I fell in, you know. If it wasn’t for the chicken-wire—” Snitter got hesitantly to his feet. “It’s not all that strange—not really. Holes—after all—I’ve seen holes in roofs. And cars—they sometimes open them, too. And there are pipes, did you know, running along under the roads? Outside our gate, men came once and dug down—you could see them. Of course, that was before the lorry came.”

  “Time w’ wuh gettin’ doon belaa! Ne doot ye’ll be hunger’d like me.” The tod ran a few yards, then turned and looked back at the two dogs lying on the stones.

  “Which way?” asked Rowf. “How far down? That yow seemed to be falling for ever. I never even heard it hit. Is it a long way round to the bottom?”

  “Nay, nay. Roond to the side an’ doon. A canny bit of a way.”

  Yet even after they had gone down to the foot of Dow by way of Goat’s Hause, it was nearly an hour before they found the body of the yow, which was lying on a narrow shelf near the foot of Great Gully.

  Saturday the 23rd October

  “Go on, kidda, bash it doon, then!”

  Snitter hurled his compact weight again and again at the wire netting of the chicken run. When at last it gave way the tod was through in a streak and, before Snitter had picked himself up, had crept upwards into the closed henhouse through a crack between two floorboards which Snitter would not have thought wide enough for a rat. At once a squawking racket broke out within and a moment later a dog began barking inside the nearby barn. Lights came on in the farmhouse and an upstairs window was flung open. As Snitter, straining every nerve not to run, tried to cower out of sight behind one of the brick piers supporting the henhouse, the twitching bodies of two hens fell one after the other to the ground beside him. The tod, eel-like, followed instantly and Snitter leapt to his feet.

  “Haddaway hyem?”

  “Why ay! Go on, lad, divven’t hang aboot!”

  The bare, yellow legs were so hot that Snitter could hardly hold them in his mouth. From above, the beam of a powerful torch was darting here and there about the yard, and as they crept through the hedge into the lonnin a shot-gun went off behind them. The tod, putting down its hen to take a better grip, sniggered.

  “ ‘Nother cat gone?”

  Sunday the 24th October to Monday the 25th October

  In the grey twilight before dawn, Rowf sprang out of the moss and confronted the two returning raiders as they rounded the upper end of Seathwaite Tarn. From head to tail he was daubed with fresh blood. His bloody tracks had marked the stones. The body of the Swaledale sheep, ripped from throat to belly, lay beside the beck a little distance off.

  “I knew I could do it,” said Rowf, “as soon as I’d had a few days’ rest. Nothing to it—I just ran it backwards and forwards over the beck a few times and then pulled it down with less trouble than the other. Well, come on if you want—”

  He broke off short, for the tod, its eyes half-closed against the east wind, was staring at him with a look of mingled incredulity and shocked contempt. At length it began to speak in a kind of wail.

  Swirral and Carrs

  “Ye got ne brains i’ yer heed! Ye greet nowt! Ne sooner’s me back turned than ye bloody up our ain place as red as a cock’s comb wi’ yer daft muckin’! Ye greet, fond nanny-hammer! Could ye not go canny till Ah teilt ye? Ye born, noddy-heeded boogger! Ah’m not bidin’ wi’ ye lot! Me, Ah’m away—”

  “Wait!” cried Snitter. “Wait, tod!” For the tod, as it spoke, had turned and was making off in the direction of the dam. “What’s the matter?”

  “First ye kill on th’ fell—reet o’ th’ shepherd’s track, muckin’ th’ place up wi’ blood like a knacker’s yard. An’ noo ye kill ootside our ain place! Yon farmer’s nay blind! He’ll be on it, sharp as a linnet. Ye’re fer th’ Dark, ne doot, hinny. Yer arse’ll be inside oot b’ th’ morn.”

  “But, tod, where are you going?”

  “Aarrgh! Haddaway doon te knock o’ th’ farmer’s door! Mebbies Ah’ll just shove me heed agin’ his gun,” replied the tod bitterly. “Save aall th’ bother, that will.”

  Indeed, as the full light of day came into the sky from beyond the heights of Great Carrs and Swirral to the east, the cause of the tod’s dismay became only too clear. The body of the dead yow lay on Tarn Head Moss like freedom’s banner torn yet flying, a beacon, as it seemed, to every buzzard, crow and bluebottle in the Lakes. As the morning wore on Snitter, from the cave-mouth barely five hundred yards away, lay gloomily watching the pecking, squabbling, ripping and fluttering, which grew no less as rain began to drift up from Dunnerdale, blotting out the curve of the dam and the further end of the reservoir beyond. The tod had only with difficulty been persuaded to remain, and soon after mid-day had gone out to the western shoulder of Blake Rigg, whence it could see the trod leading up to the tarn from Tongue House Farm below.

  By sunset, however, when the smaller becks were already coloured and chattering in spate, the reservoir valley remained unvisited by man or dog and the tod, pelt sodden and brush trailing, returned to the cave, muttering something about “a canny rain for them as desarved warse.” There was no hunting expedition that night, enough being left of the sheep to satisfy all three.

  Late the following morning, as Snitter was dozing in his snug, body-shaped concavity in the shale floor, he was roused by the tod who, without a word and with extreme caution, led him to the cave mouth. Down on the moss a man, smoking a cigarette and accompanied by two black-and-white Welsh collies, was prodding with his stick at the stripped backbone and bare rib-cage of the sheep.

  Tuesday the 26th October

  “—soom bluidy beeäst or oother livin’ oop theer,” said Dennis Williamson. “Theer is that.” He walked round his van and kicked the off-side rear tyre.

  “Git awaay!” replied Robert Lindsay. “D’ye think so?”

  Dennis leant against the whitewashed wall of the Hall Dunnerdale farmhouse and lit a cigarette.

  “Ah’m bluidy sure of it,” he said. “Two sheep inside eight or nine days, and no snaw, tha knaws, Bob, an’ the both lyin’ in open places, like, nowt to fall off or break legs an’ that.”

  “Wheer didst tha find them at?” asked Robert. “Wheer were they lyin’ and how didst tha coom on them, like?”

  “First woon were oop oonder Levers Hause, almost at top, tha knaws, joost this side, wheer it’s real steep. It were lyin’ joost this side of bit of a track—”

  “That’d be old yow, then, Dennis. Ay, it would that.”

  “Nay, that’s joost it, it were not. It were three-year-old, Bob, were that. I saw it bluidy teeth an’ all.”

  “Oh, ‘ell!”

  Robert gnawed the top of his stick without further comment. An extremely shrewd man and older than Dennis, he had been the previous tenant farmer of Tongue House and knew—or had hitherto thought that he knew—everything that could possibly happen to sheep between the Grey Friar and Dow Crag. He never gave an opinion lightly or unless he was prepared to defend it; and if someone asked his advice he was accustomed to shoulder the problem and consider it as though it were his own.

  Dennis was upset. Tenacious and energetic to the point of intensity, he had, a few years before and with virtually nothing behind him, taken the farming tenancy of Tongue House (or Tongue ‘Us, as it is locally called), in the determination to live an independent life and make good on his own. It had been a hard grind at the outset—so hard that he might perhaps have given up altogether without the moral support and encouragement of his neighbour Bill Routledge, the ribald, tough old tenant-farmer of Long ‘Us, the neighbouring farm across the fields. There had been weeks when the children had had no sweets, Dennis had had no cigarettes and meals had been what could be managed. Now, thanks partly to his own strength of character and partly to that of his courageous, competent wife, Gwen, their heads were well above water. The farm was prosperous, several consumer durabl
es had been bought and installed and the girls were getting on well. If Dennis had an obsession, it was that he was damned if anyone was going to do him down financially or worst him in a bargain. The present nasty situation—which would have worried any hill farmer—reached him where he lived, as the Americans say. It raised the spectre of old, bad times and had about it also an unpleasant suggestion that something—some creature—up beyond the tarn was getting the better of him.

  “Ay, an’ t’oother, Bob, tha knaws,” he went on, “that were ont’ Moss, like, before tha cooms to Rough Grund, an joost a bit oop from top of tarn. They were both on ‘em the bluidy saame—pulled to shreds an’ pieces spread all o’er. An’ I’ll tell thee—theer were bones clean gone—bones an’ quarters an’ all—hafe bluidy sheep torn an’ gone, one on ‘em.”

  “That’ll be dog then,” said Robert emphatically, looking Dennis squarely in the eye.

  “Ay, that’s what Ah were thinkin’. But Bill’s had no dogs awaay—had, he’d a’ told me—”

  “Dog could coom from anywheers, Dennis—could be out of Coniston or Langd’l. But that’s what it is, old boöy, an’ nowt else. So tha’d best joost get out thee gun an’ have a run round int’ early mornin’—”

  “Bluidy ‘ell!” said Dennis, treading out his cigarette on the road. “As if there wayn’t enough to be doin’—”

  “Ay, weel, tha canst joost fill boogger wi’ lead first, an’ then read it collar affter, if it’s got one,” said Robert.

  “Has and Ah’ll hev th’ basstard in court,” said Dennis. “Ah tell thee, Bob, Ah will that. There’s been ducks an’ hens gone too. Smashed henhouse wire reet in—no fox could a’ doon it. Ah’ll have soom boogger in court.”