The Plague Dogs: A Novel Read online

  Snitter, raising his head, nudged Rowf’s broad, unmoving back.

  “Are you hurt, old Rowf?”

  “I was afraid—never get out—until I fell down. All right now. Tired. Sleep.”

  Snitter could smell a long, bleeding scratch along Rowf’s flank. He licked at it, tasting the iron and burnt-guinea-pig-flavoured soot of the hopper walls. Gradually Rowf’s breathing became slower and easier. Snitter felt the muscles of the haunch relaxing under his tongue. Soon he himself, full of warmth and relief, grew as drowsy as Rowf. He ceased licking, dropped his head and stretched out his paws to touch the warm side of the furnace. In a few moments he too was asleep.

  For more than three hours the two dogs lay sleeping in the fire-box, exhausted by the strain of their escape and the terror of their passage through the chute. Outside, the rain became heavier, falling steadily from a drift of clouds so low that the higher fells were blotted out beneath it. The moon was obscured and almost total darkness covered the miles of rock and bracken, heather, moss and bilberry bushes, rowan and peat bog—a fastness little changed since the days of the moss-raiders and the invading Scots—those armies which had marched to defeat and death at Flodden, at Solway Moss, at Preston, Worcester and Derby. A wild land, familiar with the passage of fugitives and the forlorn, the lost and desperate, the shelterless and outnumbered contending against hopeless odds. Yet tonight there was none to bide the pelting of the pitiless storm. From Blawith to Esthwaite Water, from Satterthwaite and Grizedale across to Coniston, not a soul was abroad, the dismal wastes were lonely as an ocean and not Thomas Rymer of Erceldoune himself, returning to earth from fair Elfland after not seven, but seven hundred years, could have discerned, from the aspect of that dark and lonely place, what century had arrived in his absence.

  At length the furnace, the bricks round the outside of which had streamed with rain half the night, cooled to the temperature of the surrounding darkness and soon afterwards the wind, veering round into the south-west and blowing up fresh rain from the Duddon estuary, began to drive keener gusts in at the stoke-hole and the control vent below. Snitter stirred in his sleep, feeling in his off-side haunch the pricking of a guinea-pig’s splintered rib-cage. A sharp point pierced his skin and he woke with a start.

  “Rowf! Come back!”

  There was no reply and Snitter nuzzled him urgently.

  “Come out of the leaves, Rowf, come out of the water! We’ve got to get on!”

  Rowf raised his head drowsily.

  “Don’t want to go. Stay here.”

  “No! No! The wide place, the rain, outside!”

  “Stay here—warm and dry.”

  “No, Rowf, no! The whitecoats, the metal water, the tobacco man! The lorry! We’ve got to get out!”

  Rowf stood up and stretched as best he could in the confined space. “There isn’t any out.”

  “Yes, there is. You can smell it.” Snitter was quivering with urgency.

  Rowf stood still, as though considering. At last he said, “There isn’t any out—isn’t any free. There’s nothing, anywhere, except-well, it’s a bad world for animals. I know that.”

  “Rowf, don’t start smelling like that. I won’t sniff it—vinegar, paraffin—worse. I’ve lived outside this place, I’ve had a master, I know you’re wrong!”

  “Makes no difference.”

  “Yes, it does. Out of that hole. You first.”

  Rowf, pushing the stoke-hole door wider, looked out into the rainy darkness.

  “You’d better go alone. The opening’s too small for me.”

  “Go on, Rowf, get on! I’ll come behind you.”

  Rowf, black as the darkness, drew back his head from the stoke-hole, crouched on the floor and then, springing up, thrust head and front paws together through the opening, blocking it entirely. His claws scraped and scrabbled on the metal outside.

  “Rowf, get on!”

  Rowf’s reply came back to Snitter grotesquely, through the control-vent, up from the grid beneath his paws.

  “Too small!”

  “Fight it, bite it!”

  Rowf struggled helplessly, breaking wind as his belly squeezed against the iron. One hind leg, thrashing wildly, caught Snitter across the face.

  “Get on, Rowf, damn you!”

  Rowf began to pant and gasp. Snitter realized with horror that his struggles were becoming weaker. His body was no longer moving at all. The truth—which Snitter could not have grasped—was that, whereas at first Rowf’s front paws had been able to push strongly against the vertical side of the furnace immediately below him, the further he forced his body through the door the less effectively he was able to thrust against the brickwork. Now, two thirds of the way through, he was helplessly and agonizingly stuck, without a purchase to drag or push himself forward. In the fire-box behind him Snitter, as his desperation mounted, felt a stabbing pain in his skull and a wolf-like ferocity that seemed to consume him, throbbing in the surrounding iron, the ashes and bones.

  “Damn the whitecoats!” cried Snitter, frothing at the mouth. “Damn Annie, damn the policeman and the white bell-car! Damn you all, damn you! You’ve killed my master!”

  His teeth closed on Rowf’s haunch. With a howl Rowf—by what means none can ever know—convulsed his body, the iron square of the opening compressing and excoriating his loins as he did so, and fell forward into the puddled mud below the stoke-hole. Almost before he had had time to draw one gasping breath and feel the pain in his ribs, Snitter was beside him, licking his face and panting while the rain ran in streams off his back.

  “Are you all right?”

  “You bit me, you damned cur.”

  Snitter’s astonishment was plainly unfeigned. “I bit you? Of course not!”

  With some difficulty Rowf stood up and sniffed at him.

  “No, I can smell, it wasn’t you. But something bit me.” He paused, then lay down in the mud. “I’m hurt.”

  “Get up and come with me,” replied the voice of Snitter, an invisible dog-smell ahead of him in the hissing darkness.

  Rowf limped forward on three legs, feeling under his pads unfamiliar textures of gravel, sticks and mud. These by their very nature were reassuring, assuaging his pain with kindlier sensations of reality. He tried to limp faster and broke into a clumsy run, overtaking Snitter at the corner of the building.

  “Which way?”

  “Any,” answered Snitter, “as long as we’re well away from here by daylight.”

  A quick run past the rabbits’ execution shed, a turn round the kittens’ quicklime pit, a moment’s hesitation beyond the monkeys’ gas-chamber—and they are gone: ay, not so long ago these canines fled away into the storm. It would be pleasant to report that that night Dr. Boycott dreamt of many a woe, and all his whitecoat-men with shade and form of witch and demon and large coffin-worm were long be-nightmared. One might even have hoped to add that Tyson the old died palsy-twitched, with meagre face deform. But in fact—as will be seen—none of these things happened. Slowly the rain ceased, the grey rack blowing away and over Windermere as first light came creeping into the sky and the remaining inmates of Lawson Park awoke to another day in the care and service of humanity.

  FIT 2

  Saturday the 16th October

  F

  reedom—that consuming goal above doubt or criticism, desired as moths desire the candle or emigrants the distant continent waiting to parch them in its deserts or drive them to madness in its bitter winters! Freedom, that land where rogues, at every corner, cozen with lies and promises the plucky sheep who judged it time to sack the Shepherd! Unfurl your banner, Freedom, and call upon me with cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer and all kinds of music to fall down and worship you, and I will do so upon the instant, for who would wish to be cast into the fiery furnace of his neighbours’ contempt? I will come to you as the male spider to the female, as the explorer to the upper reaches of the great river upon which he knows he will die before ever he wins through to the
estuary. How should I dare refuse your beckoning, queen whose discarded lovers vanish by night, princess whose unsuccessful suitors die at sunset? Would to God we had never encountered you, goddess of thrombosis, insomnia, asthma, duodenal and migraine! For we are free—free to suffer every anguish of deliberation, of decisions which must be made upon suspect information and half-knowledge, every anguish of hindsight and regret, of failure, shame and responsibility for all that we have brought upon ourselves and others: free to struggle, to starve, to demand from all one last, supreme effort to reach where we long to be and, once there, to conclude that it is not, after all, the right place. For a great price obtained I this freedom, to wish to God I had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when I sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full. The tyrant wasn’t such a bad old bugger, and even in his arbitrary rages never killed as many as died in yesterday’s glorious battle for liberty. Will you return to him, then? Ah no, sweet Freedom, I will slave for you until I have forgotten the love that once consumed my being, until I am grown old and bitter and can no longer see the wood for the starved, dirty trees. Then I will curse you and die; and will you then concede that I may be accounted your loyal follower and a true creature of this Earth? And, Freedom, was I free?

  Far away, east beyond Esthwaite Water, Sawrey and Windermere, the sun, from between low streaks of cloud, shone its first, pale rays across the woodland and bleak moor of Grizedale Forest. Already the buzzards were aloft, watching for prey, ready to tempest and tear any creature too slow or weak to escape or defend itself. Before their eyes opened, under the sunrise, the immense western prospect; the hyaline expanse of Coniston Water, five miles from School Beck to High Nibthwaite, lined along its western shore with caravans-orange, white and blue; and beyond, the little town of Coniston itself, grey against surrounding fields and autumn-leaved woods. Behind stretched the Coniston fells, over which, as the sun rose higher, the cloud shadows would flow with a pace smooth and unaltering, like that of ships upon a deep sea. More than four miles away, closing the horizon, rose the Coniston range—Caw, Torver High Common, Walna Scar, Dow Crag, Old Man, Brim Fell and Swirral; highest of all, the Old Man appeared from the east as a sharp peak tilted to the right, its eastern face streaked with the broken, white thread of a falling beck.

  Half a mile north of Lawson Park, Monk Coniston Moor rises, hillocked and undulant, above the oak woods below. An old, dry-stone hoggus (or hog-house—a “hog” being, in the Lakeland, the ovine equivalent of a bullock) stands, half-ruined, beside a stream, and a rowan lays its pliant branches and thirteen-leafleted sprays across the roof-slates. To one walking over the Forest from Hawkshead to Nibthwaite, or from Satterthwaite to How Head, one lonely knoll surmounted discloses another, all the way up to the watershed, and little moves but the falling becks, and grey sheep that start in alarm out of the fern and go bucketing away from intruders, whether human or animal: the proper landscape to lie drenched beneath a silver dawn, low clouds and an east wind in October.

  Here, among the dripping grasses and spongy, sodden mounds of moss, Rowf and Snitter lay gazing in astonishment and dismay as first light made plain the emptiness about them.

  “It can’t be the whitecoats,” said Snitter desperately. “Not a house, not. a lamp-post, not a fence—it’s not natural! Not even the whitecoats could—” He broke off and once more raised his head to the wind. “Tar—there was—yes—for a moment—but faint. And the dustbins gone—every single one—it’s not possible!”

  A cock chaffinch, slate-blue-capped and rosy-breasted, fluttered across a wall with a flash of white wing feathers. Snitter turned his head for a moment, then let it fall once more upon his outstretched front paws. “And no men anywhere—so why make it?—and all that sky, how can it ever stop raining? Rowf? Rowf, come back!”

  Rowf opened his eyes, his upper lip curling as though in anger. “What?”

  “What’s to be done?”

  “How the death should I know?”

  “They’ve taken everything away, Rowf—the houses, the roads, cars, pavements, dustbins, gutters—the lot. How on earth can they have done it? I tell you it’s not possible! And where have they all gone? Why make all this—make it and then go away—why?”

  “I told you,” said Rowf.

  “What did you tell me?”

  “The world, I said. I told you it would be the same outside the pens. There isn’t any outside. You say it’s been altered, so the whitecoats—or some men, anyway—must have altered it so that they could do something or other to some animals. That’s what animals are for, to have things done to them by men. It’s what men are for, too, come to that—to do the things, I mean.”

  “But Rowf, my master—my master never used to do anything to animals. When I was at home with my master—”

  “He must have, else he couldn’t have been a man.”

  “But how could they have taken away the streets and houses and made all this?”

  “They can do anything. Look at the sun up there. Obviously some man must once have put up his hand to light it, same as the tobacco man does in the dog-shed. But you wouldn’t believe it unless you’d actually seen the tobacco man do it, would you?”

  Snitter was silent, shivering in the wind. The whole expanse of the fell was now light, heather and grass flashing with raindrops in the fitful sunlight breaking here and there through the clouds. The long call, like human laughter, of a green woodpecker sounded from the woodland below them.

  “We’ve got to find some men,” resumed Snitter at length.

  “Why?”

  “Dogs have to have men. We need masters. Food, shelter. Come on! We can’t stay here. The whitecoats’ll be looking for us.”

  He got up and began to pad away through the bracken, downhill towards the north-west. For some little time it seemed as though Rowf, still lying in the wet heather, would let him go alone, but at length, when Snitter had passed out of sight over the curve of the slope and reached the edge of the woodland two hundred yards away, he suddenly jumped up and ran after him at full speed, overtaking him under the trees.

  “Do you think they’ve really gone, then?” asked Rowf. “I mean, suppose there aren’t any men left, anywhere—if there was none at all—”

  “There will be. Look—there are boot marks in the ground, and not more than a day old, either. No, there are men. What I can’t understand is why they’ve changed everything. It’s confused me—it’s not what I was expecting. I was expecting streets and houses, naturally.”

  They had already pushed their way between the bars of the gate into the wood and were now following the path leading down to the road beside the lake. The air was full of the scents of autumn-acorns, wet fern and newly sprouted fungi. The rowan trees were glowing with brilliant orange berries, among which, here and there, robins perched to defy one another, twittering, listening and answering across their narrow territories. Despite the strange, lonely surroundings Snitter began to take heart—from the long-forgotten sensation of damp earth between his pads, from the twinkling light, moving branches and leaves, the coloured fragments all about him in the grass—harebell and lousewort, scabious and tormentil—and the smells and rustling sounds of other, unseen creatures. A rabbit crossed the track and he dashed after it, lost it, hunted back and forth and then forgot it as he stopped to sniff at a dor-beetle under a blue-and-green-banded fungus growing between two stones. At length he ran back to Rowf, who lay gnawing on a stick.

  “There are cats here, anyway. Sort of cats. Long ears, but you can chase them.”

  The stick snapped and Rowf let the broken end fall from his mouth. “Nothing to eat.”

  “There will be. How the wind sends the leaves running across the trees! Then where do they go? Never mind, there are always more.” Snitter raced away again. Rowf, hearing him crackling through the undergrowth on the other side of the brown, turbid beck, followed more slowly.

  A mile below, they came out on the road skirting the east side of Co
niston Water. The wind had died completely and all was lonely and deserted, with never a car on the road so early. The lake itself, where they glimpsed it between the trees, lay so clear and smooth that the stones, sunken leaves and brown weed within its shallow, inshore depths appeared like objects in a deserted room seen through the windows from outside. Yet at their next glimpse these had disappeared, their place being taken, under a burst of pale sunlight, by the reflections of moving clouds and autumn-coloured branches along the shore.

  “Look, Rowf, look!” cried Snitter, running down towards the water. “Everything keeps still in there! I wouldn’t be mad if I was in there—things would keep still—covered over—my head would be cool—”

  Rowf hung back, growling. “Don’t go down there, Snitter! Keep away if you’ve got any sense. You can’t imagine what it’s like. You couldn’t get out.”

  Snitter, about to plunge, ran back up the bank but, still fascinated, went sniffing up and down along the edge, covering three times the distance of Rowf. Once the canvas dressing on his head caught in a long bramble and he wrenched himself free with a red blackberry leaf hooked into the black sticking-plaster. He ran along the shore with a shifting and rattling of loose pebbles, lapped thirstily, splashed in and out of a shallow place, shook himself and scampered back to the road, scrambling clumsily up and over the dry stone wall and dropping down into the wet grass along the verge.

  “All the same, old Rowf, it’s better out here than in the pens. I’m going to make the most of it. Only the flies in my head—they keep buzzing. And I feel like smoke. My feet are cold as a gate-latch.”

  Still surrounded on all sides by the early morning solitude, they came to the northern end of the lake, ran past the turning that leads to Hawkshead, crossed School Beck bridge and so on towards Coniston. Soon they found themselves approaching a little group of three houses, two on one side of the road and one on the other. The sun had risen clear of the clouds in the east and in the gardens, as they came to them, they could hear bees droning among the phlox and late-blooming antirrhinums. Rowf, coming upon an open gate, lifted a leg against the post, then made his way purposefully along the garden path and disappeared round the corner of the house.