The Plague Dogs: A Novel Page 14

  “Ay, so yer should,” returned Robert, “so yer should.” After a suitable pause he said, “Ah yer goin’ in t’Oolverston?”

  “Nay, joost as far as Broughton—pickin’ oop coople of spare tyres, tha knaws. Is there owt tha wants?”

  “Not joost now, old lad.”

  Dennis, still musing on his dead sheep, drove down the valley towards Ulpha.

  “And the monkey’s done ten days plus,” concluded Mr. Powell. “I think that’s the lot.”

  “The cylinder’s being regularly cleaned out?” asked Dr. Boycott.

  “Yes, it is. Oh, but what about the guinea-pigs, chief?” said Mr. Powell, returning his note-pad to the ready.

  “The ones receiving tobacco tar condensates, you mean?” said Dr. Boycott. “What about them? I thought that was one thing that was proceeding quite straightforwardly?”

  “Well, I mean, how long do we go on using the same guinea-pigs?”

  “Use them up, of course,” answered Dr. Boycott rather shortly. “They cost money, you know. Apart from that, it’s only humane. The Littlewood Committee report had an entire chapter on wastage. We don’t use two animals where one will do.”

  “Well, this lot have all had tar doses on both ears now, and the ears removed in just about every case—every case where there’s a cancerous growth, that’s to say.”

  “Well, you can go on and use their limbs for the same thing, you know.”

  “Oh, should we, chief? Righty-o. Only I haven’t been in on one of these before. Do we ever use anaesthetics?”

  “Good God, no,” said Dr. Boycott. “D’you know what they cost?”

  “Oh, I know—only Dr. Walters was saying—”

  “I’m in charge of the tar condensates work, not Walters,” said Dr. Boycott. Before Mr. Powell could get in even the most hurried of assents, he went on, “Did you ever hear any more about those two dogs—seven-three-two and eight-one-five?”

  “Not a thing,” said Mr. Powell. “I doubt we will now, you know. They’ve been gone—let’s see—eleven days I make it. They could have been shot, or adopted, or just have run from here to Wales. But I shouldn’t think we’ll ever know.”

  “Touch wood,” said Dr. Boycott with a faint smile.

  Mr. Powell facetiously tapped his own head. Granted the faintest prescience of what the future held, he might well have broken his nails to claw the varnish off the top of Dr. Boycott’s desk—for, unlike his own, it was wood and not plastic.

  FIT 4

  Wednesday the 27th October to Thursday the 28th October

  T

  he tod had said never a word all day, even during the afternoon, when Rowf, surly at the anxiety of the other two and obstinately determined to eat the last of his kill, had gone down to the tarn in broad daylight, gnawed the remains in the open for half an hour and as darkness began to fall brought back the jawbone to chew and worry in the cave. At last it crept silently over the shale and picked up a fragment, remarking only, “Give us a bite noo, kidder. There’ll be ne bait for us i’ th’ Dark, ye knaw.”

  “What in thunder d’you mean?” snarled Rowf, the reek of the tod seeming to tingle through his very entrails.

  “Oh, let him have it, Rowf!” said Snitter quickly. “You know, that reminds me, I once saw a cat steal a whole fish and carry it up a tree. Oh, it grinned like a letter-box; it thought it was quite safe up there!”

  “Well, wasn’t it?” asked Rowf, curious in spite of himself.

  “Hoo, hoo, hoo!” Snitter danced on the stones at his own recollection. “My master turned the garden hose on it. But even then the fish came down much faster than the cat.” He became suddenly grave. “Rowf—the farmers, the whitecoats. Tod’s right—we can’t afford to be found. If they once discover we’re here, they’ll come and hose us out with our own blood.”

  “Eh, th’ Dark’ll pull ye doon soon eneuf,” cried the tod suddenly, as though Snitter’s words had driven it beyond further endurance, “an’ weary ye’ll be an’ aall, but Ah’m not hangin’ aboot. Ah’m away. Yon yow ye felled ootside’ll be yer last, ne doot aboot yon.”

  All in a moment it had crept to the further side of the tunnel and, having thus put the breadth of the place between Rowf and itself, trotted quickly along the wall and out into the darkness.

  Snitter ran after it, yapping, “Tod! Tod! Wait!” but when he reached the mouth of the cave there was nothing to be seen in the twilight. Only the rising wind, gathering itself high up in Calf Cove, moaned down the funnel of the valley and tugged at the bog myrtle and tufts of grass in the dreary, empty moss. There was a singing in his head, rapid and shrill, like a wren in a bush. Looking up at the last light in the pale sky, he perceived that the wind—and this, he now recalled, he had, indeed, always known—was in reality a gaunt giant, thin-faced, thin-lipped and tall, carrying a long knife and wearing a belt from which were dangling the bodies of dying animals—a cat whose protruding entrails dripped blood, a blinded monkey groping in the air with its paws, a guinea-pig lacking ears and limbs, its stumps tar-smeared; two rats grotesquely swollen, their stomachs about to burst. Striding over the moss, the giant returned Snitter’s frightened gaze piercingly, without recognition. Snitter knew that he had become an object upon which the giant’s thought was playing like the beam of a torch, the subject of the song—if song it were—now rising and falling either through his own split head, or perhaps—might it rather be?—through the solitude of this waste valley between the hills. Silently the giant threw his song like a stick across the bog; and obediently Snitter retrieved and brought it back to him, carried in his own mouth.

  “Across the darkness of the fell

  My head, enclosed with chicken wire.

  Seeks the far place where masters dwell,

  A stolen town removed entire.

  The lorry, churning through the mire,

  Foreknew and watched all ways I ran.

  With cloven headpiece all afire,

  A lost dog seeks a vanished man.”

  Snitter whined and pressed himself to the ground at the wind’s feet. The wind, taking the song from him, nodded unsmilingly and strode away down the length of the tarn, the jumbled, struggling bodies swinging at its back. Snitter understood that the seizure had passed; until next time he was free—to lie in the darkness and wonder what would become of Rowf and himself without the tod.

  “What are you doing?” asked Rowf, looming blackly out of the scrub. His anger had gone and he lay down beside Snitter uneasy and subdued.

  “Dancing like a piece of ice,” said Snitter, “and singing like a bone. The mice do—it makes the sky blue. Where there were three there’s only two.”

  “You look crazier than ever,” said Rowf, “with that great hole in your head. I’m sorry, Snitter. Let’s not quarrel—we can’t afford to, you and I. Come in and go to sleep.”

  Once more Snitter woke to the smell of the tod and the sound of Rowf moving in the dark. Listening, uncertain what might have happened, he realized that it was now Rowf who was making towards the opening of the cave, while the tod was standing in his way. Just as he was about to ask what they were doing, Rowf said, “I can kill you. Get out of the way.”

  “Noo, take it easy, lad. Divven’t be se huffy,” replied the tod.

  “Rowf,” said Snitter, “where are you going?”

  “Poor sowl, he’s gone loose i’ th’ heed,” answered the tod, in its sharp, fawning voice, “blatherin’ like a bubbly-jock. Here’s me comin’ back te tell ye te lowp off sharp. Th’ farmer’s oot o’ th’ rampage—dergs an’ gun; an’ noo yer pal says he’s off to gi’ hissel’ back to yon whitecoat fellers. Wad ye credit it?”

  “Rowf, what does he mean?”

  “I’m going to find the whitecoats and give myself up. Don’t try to stop me, Snitter.”

  “It’s you that’s crazy, Rowf, not me. Whatever for?”

  “Because I’ve come to see that all I’ve done is to run away from my duty, that’s why. Dogs were meant to ser
ve men—d’you think I don’t know? I knew all the time, but I was too much of a coward to admit it. I should never have listened to you, Snitter. If they need me to drown for them—”

  “Of course dogs were meant for men, Rowf, but not for that—not for the tank and the whitecoats.”

  “Who are we to judge—how do we know? I’m a good dog. I’m not the brute they all thought I was. The men know best—”

  “Yes, masters, Rowf, but not whitecoats. They don’t care what sort of dog you are.”

  “Yer nay a derg noo, yer a sheep-killer,” whispered the tod. “They’ll blow yer arse oot, hinny. Howway let’s be off, or ye’ll both be deed an’ done inside haaf an hoor, ne bother.”

  “What end can there be to this?” said Rowf to Snitter. “To run about loose until they find us—how long?”

  “You said we’d become wild animals. That’s what they do—live till they die.”

  “Why ay. Run on till th’ Dark comes doon. Are we goin’ noo or div Ah go mesel’? Ah warr’nd ye’d best be sharp.”

  Suddenly Rowf, with a heavy, plunging rush, blundered past the tod and out through the cave-mouth. They could hear him howling as he leapt over the further edge of the grassy platform outside and down to the marsh. Snitter turned quickly to the tod.

  “I’m going after him. Are you coming?” In the faint glimmer of light down the shaft he caught the tod’s eye, wary and inscrutable, but it made no move. Snitter ran out alone.

  Tarn Head beck is wide in places and Rowf, in his unthinking flight, had reached the nearer bank by the edge of a pool in which the dark water, reflecting the moonlight, gave no sign of its depth. He checked and turned downstream. Snitter caught up with him in the act of springing down to a bed of stones on the further side.

  “Rowf—”

  Rowf jumped across and at once struck out southwards. Snitter, following, set off once more in pursuit, from time to time drawing breath to yelp. Rowf took no notice but held on his way, up and across the western slope of Dow Crag fell. Snitter saw him halt and pause, looking about him as though intending to go down to the reservoir road, which showed clear and white in the moonlight nine hundred feet below. Making a great effort, he ran on as fast as he could and once more came up with Rowf before he realized that he was there.

  “Rowf, listen—”

  Rowf turned sharply away without answering. At that moment the fern parted and the tod put out its head and shoulders, breath steaming in the cold air, tongue thrusting between small, sharp teeth. Rowf started and pulled up.

  “How did you get here?”

  “Roondaboot.”

  “I said I could kill you.”

  “Killin’? Ye daft boogger, it’s ye that varnigh got killed. There’s none luckier than ye. Ye saved yersel’ an’ me an’ yon bit fella an’ aall.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Snitter quickly.

  “Lukka doon there by yon gate,” said the tod, itself neither moving nor turning its head.

  Snitter looked down towards the high gate in the dry stone wall through which the reservoir road passed in descending to the lower fields and Long House Farm.

  “Noo lukka bit back there.”

  “What d’you mean? I don’t—” All of a sudden Snitter caught his breath and jumped quickly into the bracken. About a quarter of a mile above the gate, where the trod leading up from Tongue ‘Us joins the reservoir road, a man, carrying a gun, was making towards the tarn. At his heels followed two black-and-white dogs.

  “Yon’s yer farmer, hinny,” whispered the tod to Rowf. “What ye bidin’ for, then? He’ll shoot ye sharp eneuf if ye fancy it.”

  Rowf, motionless and in full view on the open hillside, stood watching as the man and his dogs, half a mile away, tramped steadily up the road towards the dam.

  “There aren’t any men you can go back to, Rowf,” said Snitter at length. “The tod’s right—they’d only kill us now. We’re wild animals.”

  “By, mind, lucky ye moved se sharp. Ye just got oot in time.”

  “Do you think the man knows we were living in the cave?” asked Snitter.

  “Mebbies. Ne tellin’ what th’ booggers knaws—but Ah’m keepin’ aheed o’ them. Ah saw him lowpin’ up from doon belaa, so Ah comes back to tell ye. Yon fyeul” (it looked quickly at Rowf) “wez yammerin’ on a gey lot o’ daft taalk afore ye come oot o’ yer bit sleep. Mebbies noo he’ll do it ne mair.” It turned to Rowf. “Ye best stick te killin’ yows wi’ me, hinny. Thoo’s a grand chep for yon, an’ Ah’ll bide wi’ ye an’ aall. But howway wivvus noo, an’ us hangin’ aboot here, plain as yon moon i’ th’ sky!”

  Rowf followed the tod in a mazed silence, like a creature barely recovered from a trance. Snitter, for his part, was plunged in that strange state of mind which from time to time visits all creatures (but perhaps more frequently in childhood or puppyhood) when our immediate suroundings take on the aspect of a distant fantasy, we wonder who we are, the very sounds about us seem unreal and for a time, until the fit passes, it appears strange and arbitrary to find ourselves in this physical body, in this particular place, under this singular sky. The black peat, the heather, the crags, the glittering droplets, each a minute moon, bending the grasses through which Rowf was shouldering his way—these seemed, as he followed the tod, to be unfamiliar things he had never hitherto smelt—things which might even, perhaps, dissolve and vanish in an instant. Mournful they seemed, scentless; and the white moonlight, draining from them the colours of the day, made of them a residue, an empty world, where nothing could be certain and upon whose smells and other properties no more reliance could be placed than upon the figments of his own castaway, wounded brain.

  Dow Crag

  It was during this night that Snitter came to be possessed even more deeply by the delusion that the world where they now wandered—or at least the light in which it appeared to him—was both a product and the equivalent of his own mutilated mind.

  He was recalled to some sort of reality by stumbling over a piece of sharp-edged slate. Piles of dark slate were lying all about them and beneath his pads he could feel the tilting, sliding and pricking of the flat splinters.

  “Where are we?”

  “Walna Scar,” replied the tod briefly.

  “Is this the Scar?” asked Snitter, thinking how odd it would be to find himself walking across his own head.

  “Why nair—th’ Scar’s up ahight, on th’ top there. These ower here’s slate quarries—but they’ve been idle mony a year noo. Ne men come nigh, ‘cept only th’ time o’ th’ shepherds’ meet.”

  “Where are we going?” asked Rowf, looking up, as they left the slate quarries and came out once more upon the open hillside, at the steep bluff of Torver High Common above them.

  The tod dropped its head quickly, snapped up a great stag-beetle under a clump of heather, and padded on, spitting out the fragments of the carapace.

  “There’s mair than one place, ye knaw.”

  “Well?”

  “Nearby an’ a canny bit scramble.”

  “Oh, he knows where he’s going all right,” said Snitter, anxious as always for the precarious relationship between Rowf and the tod. “He won’t tell you where—he’s too sharp for that—but if you go on asking he’ll only think you don’t trust him.”

  “I trust him just as long as he goes on feeling I can fill his belly,” said Rowf. “But if I broke my leg in a chicken-run—”

  “We’re wild animals,” answered Snitter. “What could he do for you then—die with you? You tell him what sense there’d be in that.”

  For some time they had been trotting up a long, gradual slope, crossing one narrow rill after another and here and there startling a sheep under a crag. Suddenly, without another word, the tod lay down on a patch of smooth grass so unobtrusively that the two dogs had already gone a dozen yards before becoming aware that it was no longer with them. When they turned back it was watching Rowf expressionlessly, head on front paws and eyes unblinking.

&
nbsp; “Yer doin’ canny, hinny.” There was a hint of derision, barely masked. “Ah warr’nd ye’ll be hunger’d b’ now?”

  Snitter realized that the tod was covertly manipulating Rowf. If Rowf admitted that he was hungry, as he must be, the tod would then be able to seem to accede to a wish expressed by Rowf that they should stop, hunt and kill. Rowf would apparently have initiated the idea, and if anything went wrong with it the blame would lie with him and not with the tod. He forestalled Rowf’s reply.

  “We’re not particularly hungry,” he answered. “If you are, why don’t you say so?”

  “Mind, yon’s bonny yows. D’ye see th’ mark o’ them?”

  You can’t win, thought Snitter wearily. Anyway, why bother? Let’s get on with it.

  “What mark?”

  “Sheep mark—shepherd’s mark, hinny. Yon’s hoo they tell th’ yin from t’other. Did ye not knaw? Yon mark’s nowt like t’other shepherd’s yonder doon be Blake Rigg. D’ye twig on?”

  “He means we can kill more safely here because we haven’t killed here before,” said Snitter. “I don’t know why he can’t say so and be done with it.”

  “By, yer a grrand bit feller,” said the tod. “So Ah’ll tell ye what Ah’ll do. Ah’ll just go halfers wi’ ye ower th’ fellin’ of yonder yow.”

  The kill took them over half an hour, the chosen Herdwick proving strong, cunning and finally courageous. When they had run it to a standstill it turned at bay under a crag, and the end proved a bitter business of flying hooves and snapping teeth. Snitter, first kicked in the shoulder and then painfully crushed when the sheep rolled on him, was glad enough to lie panting in the shallow bed of a nearby beck, lapping copiously and ripping at the woolly haunch which Rowf severed and brought to him. It was excellent meat, the best they had yet killed, tender, bloody and well flavoured. It restored his spirits and confidence. Later he slept; and woke to see a red, windy dawn in the sky, the tod beside him and Rowf drinking downstream.