The Plague Dogs: A Novel Read online

  We’ve used them now, like Boycott. They’ve

  Fulfilled their part. The story gave

  Amusement. Now, as best I can,

  I’ll round it off, but cannot save

  The lost dogs for the vanished man.

  THE READER: Yet ours is not that monstrous world

  Where Boycott ruled their destinies!

  Let not poor Snitter’s bones be hurled

  Beyond the stormy Hebrides!

  Look homeward now! Good author, please

  Dredge those dark waters Stygian

  And then, on some miraculous breeze,

  Bring lost dogs home to vanished man!

  THE AUTHOR: Reader, one spell there is may serve,

  One fantasy I had forgot,

  One saviour that all beasts deserve—

  The wise and generous Peter Scott.

  We’ll bring him here—by boat or yacht!

  He only might—he only can

  Convert the Plague Dogs’ desperate lot

  And reconcile bird, beast and man.

  SCOTT, Sir Peter, Companion of the British Empire: Distinguished Service Cross.

  Chairman of the World Wildlife Fund. Director of the Wildfowl Trust. Wildlife Painter. Ornithologist, naturalist and international wildlife preservationist.

  Born 1909, son of Captain Robert Falcon Scott [of the Antarctic]. Exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy, London, since 1933. Specialist in painting birds and wildlife. Many lectures and nature programmes on British television since World War 2.

  Winner of the international 14-foot Dinghy Championship, 1937, 1938, 1946. Bronze medal, single-handed sailing, Olympic Games, 1936.

  Royal Navy, Second World War. Awarded M.B.E., D.S.C. and bar. Three times mentioned in despatches while serving in destroyers in the Battle of the Atlantic.

  President of the Society of Wildlife Artists.

  President of the International Yacht-Racing Union, 1955–69.

  President of the Inland Waterways Association.

  President of the Camping Club of Great Britain.

  Chairman of the Survival Service Commission.

  Chairman of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.

  Chairman of the Fauna Preservation Society.

  Chairman of the Olympic Games at Melbourne, 1956; at Rome, 1960; and in Japan, 1964.

  Member of the Council of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust.

  Explored the unmapped Perry River area of the Canadian Arctic, 1949. Leader of expeditions to Australasia, the Galápagos Islands, the Seychelles Islands and the Antarctic.

  Gliding: International Gold Badge, 1958. International Diamond Badge, 1963. British Gliding Champion, 1963. Chairman of the British Gliding Association, 1968–70.

  Royal Geographical Society Medal, 1967.

  Albert Medal, Royal Society of Arts, 1970.

  Bernard Tucker Medal, B.O.U. 1970.

  Arthur Allen Medal of Cornell University, 1971.

  Icelandic Order of the Falcon, 1969.

  Publications include: Morning Flight, Wild Chorus, The Battle of the Narrow Seas, Key to the Wildfowl of the World, Wild Geese and Eskimos, A Thousand Geese, Wildfowl of the British Isles, Animals in Africa, The Swans and The Fishwatcher’s Guide to West Atlantic Coral Reefs.

  Has illustrated (inter alia): Adventures Among Birds and The Handbook of British Birds.

  ENVOY

  Sir Peter Scott, despite his well-known ability as a sailor, did not very often put to sea in winter. There was always a great deal to do at Slimbridge, to say nothing of his passion for painting and the heavy load of correspondence, all over the world, with wildlife conservation groups and the like. The happy arrival, however, on a visit from New Zealand, of his old friend and fellow-naturalist Ronald Lockley had coincided with two letters asking for ornithological advice—one from Bob Haycock, warden of the Calf of Man nature reserve, and the second from none other than Major Jim Rose of the Drigg reserve at Ravenglass. The weather being mild for winter and his visitor entirely ready to fall in with the idea of a little sea adventure—the more so since, as it happened, he had never visited the Calf of Man—the distinguished pair had set out in the Orielton, a converted lifeboat which Sir Peter found extremely handy for coastal and island voyaging.

  They had enjoyed unusually fine days during three hundred miles of seafaring north to Anglesey, putting in at several islands off the Welsh coast to visit old haunts of Lockley’s and in particular staying a night each at the bird observatories on Skokholm and Bardsey, where they were welcomed with delight by the resident wardens. Once Anglesey was left behind they had a splendid following wind across the last sixty miles and finally anchored, one Wednesday evening, in the calm of Port Erin, where Alan Pickard, that best of booksellers, received them hospitably before their visit to the Calf on the following day.

  The visit—though it is always pleasant and heart-warming to see the aerial games of choughs, to help to clear a mist-net, watch a qualified bird-ringer at work and read his records of snow buntings, purple sandpipers and yellow-browed warblers—had in one respect proved disappointing. Lockley, whose knowledge of sea-birds was unsurpassed and whose forte was the study of shearwaters worldwide, still entertained the hope that one day the Manx shearwater—and with any luck the puffin too—might be restored to the Isle of Man; or at any rate to the Calf, where it had first been discovered. There were, however, formidable obstacles, chief of which was the extreme difficulty of exterminating the rats which had made survival virtually impossible for both species by infesting their underground tunnels and devouring their eggs and young. Against such attacks these burrowing birds had no remedy. Bob Haycock had not felt able to be encouraging about the prospects, and Ronald Lockley and Peter Scott, despite their recollections of the success of various sanctuary projects they had founded (such as the Wildlife Trust at Slimbridge and more lately the establishment of New Zealand’s first bird observatory on the shores of the Firth of Thames, near Auckland), were a trifle disposed, as the Orielton approached the end of the eighty miles between the Calf and Ravenglass, to give way to melancholy thoughts (or perhaps they were just plain hungry).

  Ronald sat at the helm, cutting beef for sandwiches off the bone and reflecting on the frame of things disjointed.

  “You know, ignorant sentimentality about animals and birds can be as bad as deliberate destruction,” he remarked, wiping the spray off his glasses and turning the Orielton’s nose a point to starboard. “Well-intentioned amateurs like that chap Richard Adams—fond of the country—reasonably good observer—knows next to nothing about rabbits—hopelessly sentimental—everyone starts thinking rabbits are marvellous when what they really need is keeping down if they’re not to become an absolute pest to the farmer—”

  “But you said yourself in your book that humans are so rabbit,” interrupted Peter Scott. “If that’s not anthropomorphic—”

  “Well, that’s different,” said Ronald firmly. “Anyway, humans need keeping down, too, come to that. But what is all wrong, for instance, is importing creatures like Greek tortoises, which are totally unsuited to a British climate, for sale as pets. The people who buy them usually know far too little about them; and anyway, for all practical purposes they start dying as soon as they get here. Sale of hens’ chicks as pets is illegal now, but owing to some stupid loophole sale of duckling chicks isn’t. Anyway they all die, too. I tell you, ignorant, uninstructed enthusiasm for birds and animals is worse than useless. We ought not to stir it up. Most small wild animals die if they become pets, simply through misplaced interference and disturbance.”

  “They always did, of course,” replied Scott, opening a rip-off beer and taking a pull from the can, “from Lesbia’s sparrow onwards.”

  “But it’s the scale of the thing under modern conditions,” pursued Lockley. “The demand for pets is so colossal now that it often comes close to exhausting the available supply and damn nearly brings the species on to
the danger list.”

  “It can have the opposite effect too, you know,” replied the undemonstrative and fair-minded Peter Scott (who had once, when asked by a television interviewer the reason for his defeat in a yacht race, given the refreshing reply, “The other chaps were better than we were”). “Look at budgerigars. Restricted to Australia until the early thirties. Now there are thousands all over the place, purely as a result of the demand for them as cage-birds. And they thrive, by and large.”

  “Then there are zoos,” went on Lockley, ignoring Sir Peter’s rejoinder. “I don’t mind a good zoo, but too many will try to acquire rare and delicate animals which they ought to know they can’t keep healthy and happy. Same story—in effect they start dying before or on arrival. But with a zoo, it isn’t what you see, it’s what you don’t see. Animal collectors for zoos go into jungles, rain-forests and so on, and offer the natives big money to catch animals alive. So what happens? The natives go off, savagely trapping and injuring, killing nursing females to take the young and all that sort of thing. A few animals survive the journey back; and the collector’s as happy as the public who buy his amusing book or go to his zoo and can’t read between the lines.”

  “All the same,” answered Peter Scott, “as far as goodwill and interest on the part of the public goes, zoos have played a fairly significant part. Altogether, in terms of educating people, we’ve gained a hell of a lot since the turn of the century—look at leopard-skin coats and stuffed humming-birds on ladies’ hats—but the trouble is we’ve lost more, simply on account of the human population explosion. Too many people, animals getting crowded out of their habitats—”

  “And an ignorantly sentimental attitude, as I’m saying,” insisted Ronald, leaving the helm for a moment to rummage for a banana in the deck-locker. “People like Adams represent animals acting as if they were humans, when actually it’d be nearer the mark to consider them as automata controlled by the computer they inherit in their genetical make-up. I mean—in goes the stimulus and out comes the reaction. Very often the person who knows more than anyone else about looking after an animal is the man who hunts it—you used to, as a young man, so did I—simply because he’s not sentimental. I say, Peter, is that the Ravenglass estuary over there on the starboard bow?”

  “Yes, that’s it. You’re pretty well on course, Ronald. Just a shade to the south and take her down to the mouth of the estuary, can you? We’ll have to hang around a bit for enough water to take us in. Not too long, though—I think we’ll be able to get up to the moorings in time for a jar at the Pennington Arms. Wind’s a bit fresher now, isn’t it? I reckon the tide’s only just turned.”

  A wave struck the Orielton’s bow and burst with a slock and a fountain of spray. Peter Scott turned up the collar of his anorak and reached for his binoculars.

  “I must say though,” he said, scanning the sea reflectively, “I think that for ordinary, non-specialist pepple, a certain amount of anthropomorphism’s probably useful in helping them to arrive at feeling and sympathy for animals—that’s to say, readiness to put the good of a species, or even just the welfare of an individual creature, above their own advantage or profit. We can’t all have scientific minds. I imagine your poetess friend Ruth Pitter would agree with that. John Clare, too—excellent amateur naturalist, quite without sentimentality; yet there’s a lot of anthropomorphism in his nature poetry. It expresses affection, really. But another thing—I’m sure the old notion of ‘God made man in His own image’ has a lot to answer for. And it isn’t only western civilization, of course, or ignorant urban populations. Look at your New Zealand Maoris, killing the giant moa for a thousand years until there weren’t any left. It’s time people started thinking of Man as one of a number of species inhabiting the planet; and if he’s the cleverest, that merely gives him more responsibility for seeing that the rest can lead proper, natural lives under minimum control.”

  “Certainly we’re the most destructive species, but are we the cleverest?” replied Lockley. “That’s a very debatable point, I should have thought. Consider a migrant bird. It’s as real as you or I or the Secretary of State for the Environment, and it breathes air and lives with five senses on this globe. It knows nothing whatever about Monday or Tuesday or clocks or Christmas or the Iron Curtain or all the things which govern human patterns of thinking. It has a consciousness of life on the earth which is completely different from ours—we call it instinct but it’s every bit as efficient—more, if anything—utilizing winds, temperatures, barometric pressures, navigation, thermal currents, adjusting its numbers to the food supply, its prey and predators, in a way we ignorant humans still can’t compete with.”

  “God might just as logically be a dog or an albatross,” said Peter Scott, smiling, “or a tiger. Probably is. Setting aside that we find many living creatures beautiful—and heaven knows we can’t afford to lose any beauty we’ve got left—it comes down to a matter of dignity, really, doesn’t it—real dignity, I mean—sort of a Platonic idea, don’t you think? A tiger presumably ought to have a reasonable chance of being able to approximate to an ideal of tiger and a sparrow to an ideal of sparrow; rats too, no doubt,” he added rather bitterly, “on the Isle of Man, you know. Surely our part in that lot is to do what we can to see that animals live in a world where they can fulfil their various functions, insofar as that’s consistent with our own reasonable survival and happiness?”

  “Yes,” answered Ronald, “and of course in the total, real world we and our intellects are superficial. The birds and animals are the real world, actually, tens of thousands of years of instinctive living in the past; and in the future they’ll outlive our artificial civilization. Our intellects are just the veneer, the crust over our base instincts, but just now they happen to have a good deal of power in the world to control its direction, rather like the rudder on this boat.”

  He broke off, putting up his binoculars and gazing to port.

  “Are my old eyes deceiving me, or is that something swimming over there? It’s a seal, isn’t it, Peter? Black and fairly large, anyway. I wouldn’t have thought these were seal waters—could be in passage, I s’pose.”

  “That’s no seal, Ronald,” said Peter Scott, also focusing. “Take her over that way a bit. I can see whatever it is you’re on to, but there’s something else as well—something white. Odd-looking—could be a gull sitting on the water, but somehow I don’t think it is. Better investigate.”

  Lockley opened the throttle, turned the Orielton’s bows to port and sent her bouncing and bucketing over a choppy tide-race.

  “My God!” said Peter Scott suddenly, “d’you know what it is, Ronald?”

  “What?”

  “Two dogs, swimming.”

  “What? Out here? Nonsense! You might as well say it’s your Loch Ness monster.”

  “That’s what they are, all the same—two dogs. One of them’s about all in, by the look of it. We’d better try and fish ‘em out. Poor devils! How the hell did they get out here? Speed up a bit more, Ronald, and go a shade further to port.”

  A minute or two later Sir Peter Scott, having stripped off his anorak and rolled up his sleeves, engaged a boat-hook in its collar and hauled on board the limp, deadly cold body of a black-and-white fox terrier. He laid it at Ronald Lockley’s feet in the stern.

  “I’m afraid that one’s a goner,” he said, “but the other’s still struggling away over there, look. Can you bring her round again?”

  The larger dog, which had no collar, was hauled aboard by Peter Scott with both hands and a certain amount of difficulty. As the Orielton gained way and once more headed south for the mouth of the estuary he dragged it, shivering and growling, into the deck-cabin and laid it on the floor.

  “I’m not sure this terrier is done for, you know,” said Ronald from the stern, running his hands over it. “It’s got a fearful head injury from somewhere—God knows what did that—and it’s about drowned, but I can feel its heart ticking still. If you’ll take the hel
m, Peter, I’ll try some respiration.”

  “It’s half-frozen,” said Peter Scott, running a hand over it as he settled in the stern. “We’d better try and warm it up on the engine.”

  “Well, first we must get it breathing. I can’t understand this head wound. Look, those are stitches. Ever heard of brain surgery on a dog? Anyway, how on earth did the two of them get out here, do you s’pose? Could some swine have pitched ‘em overboard?”

  Before Peter Scott could answer, the dog in the cabin began to bark as though for its life against all comers. Its furious, defiant voice rose above the sounds of engine, wind and sea as though to quail and shake the orb. Oddly articulate and distinct it sounded, each bark beginning in a low, savage growl—”R’r’r’r’r’r—” which rose to a fierce “Owf!” of desperation and rage, repeated again and again. “Rrrrrr-owf! Rrrrr-owf! Rrrrr-owf—rowf!”

  “Rowf, rowf, eh?” said Peter Scott. “Sounds like something’s spoilt his temper all right, doesn’t it? Or scared the daylights out of him; or both.”

  “This one might just possibly come out all right, I’m beginning to hope,” said Lockley, continuing to press rhythmically. “The heart’s stronger, anyway.” He addressed the limp body. “Come on now, me poor little darling—”

  Three minutes later the fox terrier opened its eyes.

  “Peter, I know it sounds damn silly,” said Ronald, “but d’you know what would come in handy now? A hot water bottle.”

  “Right, I’ll heat up some water. I dare say we can put it into this empty bottle, or just soak a towel in it, as long as it’s not too hot. Meanwhile, keep the poor little beast warm under your coat and hang on to the tiller.”

  As Sir Peter ducked his head to enter the cabin, the black dog leapt at him, barking like Cerberus at the damned; and then, still barking, cowered back under the folding table. Peter Scott, with an air of paying it no attention whatever, lit the Primus and put on the kettle (which was on gimbals) warming his hands as the water heated.