The Rendezvous and Other Stories

by Patrick O'Brian

  Kirk saw the top of the ridge coming at last, and he fairly ran up the last stretch. Gerallt was already there, gazing down at the great sweep of country the other side.

  Below them stretched a tumult of rounded hills, a heaving ocean of rock frozen and set aeons ago. From high above, from this Craig Llyn Du where they stood, the roundness was strikingly apparent, although from below nothing of it could be seen. The lower hills sloped down to the shining face of Llyn Cidwm far in the distance – Llyn Cidwm he knew – and beyond the water the mountains rose dimly, merging into the general grey of a dull overcast sky, cold, with rain threatening and the worse threat of low cloud: already the bare head of Moel y Gigfran had wisps passing over it.

  Most of the other followers were on the ridge. The woman magistrate’s hair straggled somewhat, but on the whole they all looked surprisingly composed. ‘They must have hearts like steam-engines,’ reflected Kirk, privately feeling his own.

  There was no sign of the hounds. Once the distant clamour of the sheepdogs of Rhaiadr Mawr made all heads turn, and once a movement of sheep far below half deceived them: then the Master spoke briefly to Gerallt and they began to move down towards a jutting crag that would command the ground directly beneath them – a wide tract that was invisible from the ridge of Llyn Du. From here they saw a man far below, a small dark figure pointing away towards the lake with repeated emphatic jerks of his stick.

  ‘He’s gone for Moel y Gigfran,’ said Gerallt, in a voice between statement and question: the Master nodded, and they turned northward, keeping along a high broad undulating ridge with outcropping pillars of granite. Presently the followers were scattered over a furlong or two, with Gerallt and Kirk somewhat ahead, taking the higher ground. They were not going so fast now by any means, and Gerallt told Kirk about a noson lawen where he had sung penillion all last night to Maire Votty’s harp. ‘Up until three I was, and home by the light of the moon, four miles over the old mountain.’ He sang one or two of the penillion, and a stanza from Timotheus cried. Kirk had loosened up now; his second wind had come, and as he swung along over the close turf he felt a great well-being – he could go on for ever – he would be in at the kill! They went up and down, up and down, but there was nothing steep, and Gerallt was not pressing himself.

  Now there was a distinct cry of hounds before them, and every face lightened: it was clear they were in the right road. Then from a knoll Gerallt saw them and pointed them out, a line of long white dots, like sheep, but moving fast and continuously. The wind was increasing now, blowing from behind them, snatching the noise of the hounds from their ears; but when the wind slackened, or when they were under a lee, they could hear it plain – clearly the hounds were quite near their fox, pushing him along handsomely.

  At a given point the Master came to a halt, with the followers ranged at various distances from him; and they all gazed up at the massive side of the Moel y Gigfran. It seemed a terribly long way off to Kirk, and he could hardly distinguish the hounds at all by the time they ran over the ridge, over the back of the bald mountain, away from the lake. There was some talk about the line the fox would take – a flood of place-names, for every rock, pass, pool or bothie had its name – and presently Gerallt started away again, bearing left-handed: the Master and most of the others stayed in the shelter of the crag, a few more in a dell below, and Kirk hesitated, unwilling to attach himself to the huntsman too obviously – to appear to cling. A few minutes later the tall soldier, followed by the schoolmaster and the virgin, struck directly up towards the top of the mountain, while another group went away diagonally for the ridge. Gerallt was already a small active form, moving through the heather in the middle distance. The Master sat down and lighted his pipe. Kirk stood irresolutely a little longer and then dropped down from the crag in the same direction as Gerallt.

  Soon he was out of sight of all the rest, both before and behind. To his right he had the high irregular side of the mountain and to his left the valley, with the road far below and the lake: he was going along a rough, boulder-strewn plain, a great step or terrace half-way up the side of the Moel.

  Presently it seemed to him that he had been on his own a long while, with nothing but the wind and the emptiness around him – too long, and he was increasingly afraid that he would never be with the hounds again. It was a world given over to the raven: a pair of them passed high over it, communicating through three miles of air, steadily croaking one to the other. He might have been alone in it – no sign of men at all – for although he caught distant glimpses of the road it was so remote that it belonged to another planet entirely, another life. The ground, which had been reasonably plain in the distance, now proved to be full of bogs, some standing in defiance of nature on the slope, and with rocky clefts that needed care and circumspection – pitiably slow. It called for a great deal of effort too, and in time it warmed him finely in spite of the searching wind: he was wiping sweat from his face when he saw Gerallt far up on his right, much higher than he had expected and farther away than he had supposed possible. It was heartening to see him at all however, and Kirk turned directly up the main slope. The lie of the land was now such that the valley, the sweeping great valley Nant Cidwm, was shut out of his view, and only the rising hulk of the mountain with the racing drifts of cloud on it remained to show him the way.

  The stimulus of the sight of Gerallt died after he had gone another cruel hard mile, and on the top of a viewpoint that showed him nothing but a thousand acres of desolation and the dislocated skeleton of a sheep he stopped to take breath and to consider. There were so many ways they could have gone without his seeing them, and the likelihood of his being still in the right direction was very small. For the last long stretch he had been working round the side of Moel y Gigfran, climbing and turning among rocky gullies, going where he could rather than where he would, and now he was by no means sure which way round he was. The mountain seemed to rise in both directions, and he stood there in a state of tired despondency, undecided and wet-foot, with disappointment welling up.

  He stood long enough for the cold to get at him, so that he was glad to be moving again. But he went heavily now, with no spirit, and his sad mind had already returned to the prosaic road so far below and how he should reach it and the paper-work that would be waiting for him at the weary end when he came round a shoulder of the mountain and saw the hounds and the followers not two hundred yards ahead.

  They were grouped among a tumbled mass of boulders in a sloping waste of shale – the backside of the Moel – and the hounds were lying here and there upon the rocks, licking their paws or staring vacantly. Kirk’s face creased with instant joy: his heart beat double-time. He walked up, looking as unconcerned as he could manage.

  This was the Ddear Felin, an ancient fox and badger stronghold; and in the middle of the boulders he could see the bowed back of the Master, head and shoulders down a cleft between two yellow rocks. Gerallt’s head was also down the hole, his body arched over the Master’s: they were listening intently. Major Boyd sat by the earth, holding a tight mob of terriers: an empty couple showed that some of them had already been put to. One thin black-and-tan bitch barked unceasingly and every now and then all the others would join in, screaming and bawling. When they were not pulling, reared on their hind legs, they sat trembling all over, whining shrill. Boyd’s temper had improved with his walk; he told Kirk that they had run their fox in, that Bellman had marked him true for quite half an hour, and that it would be the Devil’s own job to bolt him. He suggested that Kirk should post himself on that tall rock down there to view him away, if the terriers could make him budge.

  The boulder was rough and harsh – a pleasure to creep up after all the treacherous wet slate of the other side – and from its flat top Kirk surveyed the whole of the earth, a mass of loose rock ten yards across and running twenty down the slope; some of the boulders that formed it were as big as a cart, but most were smaller; and many of these had obviously been moved before – they showe
d raw yellow underneath. Above the earth shale ran up clear for three or four hundred feet: below, the slope was less, and there was some grass and heather among the rocks. On the far side from Kirk, the way he had come, there was the shoulder of the mountain, and it broke the full force of the wind: behind him still more shale stretched away, its lower edge ending in much the same kind of grass, heather and bog, scattered with boulders fallen from the high crags of the Moel y Gigfran. Above the shale nothing but bare rock, vague in the thickening cloud.

  Other followers were posted here and there on vantage-points, and Kirk saw with satisfaction that there were not so many now as there had been. In the lee of a crag the women were mending a torn skirt with safety-pins. Clearly it was his duty to watch the broken ground below him, a gully whose nearer end was hidden from the rest, and for the first quarter of an hour he stared eagerly, rarely taking his eyes off to see what they were doing at the earth. Then his nearest neighbour began to eat his lunch – a turkey’s leg with crusty bread. The sight brought an instant, painful salivation, a grind in his stomach, and Kirk realized that he was shockingly hungry. Cautiously he dragged his sandwiches from an inner pocket, still keeping his eye on the gully; but what with the business of separating the wet conglomerate and of keeping insistent hounds from eating the pieces before he could get them to his mouth – gently insistent hounds, but tall and pervasive – his very close attention dwindled. He engulfed the food, a wretched pittance, mostly bread with cake-crumbs ground into it from his repeated falls; and by the time it was gone all the warmth he had generated on his way up had left him. Now the wind was a continual enemy; no crouching or huddling would escape it, and soon it pierced even into his protected middle parts. His eyes watered as he stared at the gully; his hands, reaching for his pipe, were too numb to do more than fumble impotently at the buttons; his neck and shoulders were rigid with shivering. He looked enviously at Gerallt and the Master, now shifting masses of rock, scarlet with exertion. They had changed terriers – the magistrate had charge of the disgraced muddy couple – but still the little dogs were not doing very much: all cry and no wool. A Jack Russell kept skipping about on the top, searching and searching for a new entry – she thought nothing of the place where the others were, four or five of them who kept up a muffled bawling and scuffling deep underground. Kirk watched her with an apathetic stare: he had never been so cold in his life.

  The present seemed always with him, and this vile wind. The man on the far side seemed to be suffering even more, cupping his frozen ears with an unconscious look of pure misery.

  The Jack Russell was screaming away, bouncing over the rocks with desperate energy, yelping at every bound: nothing of this pierced Kirk’s numbed mind for two beats of time, then everything was movement – hounds streaming down and round the far shoulder, the men all standing, bolt upright and motionless, the Master shouting to the highest of them all, incomprehensible words in the wind – and he realized that the fox had stolen away, had crept an unbelievable distance from the earth before breaking, and although he had passed close by two or three hounds only the terrier had seen him.

  One of the farmers was already racing up the crag at the corner of the shale: at the top he paused and pointed, with a shout flung back over his shoulder. A moment later the hounds swung right-handed, all giving tongue, and they came back into view. Kirk stared ahead of them, searching the heather for the fox. To his intense surprise he found himself hoping that the fox was well ahead – that it should at least have a fair run for its life. Indeed, that it should get away.

  The whole pack crossed on the flat ground three hundred yards below, and behind them the white terrier, yelling still. The whole pack in deadly earnest: there was not a hound but spoke, and the music echoed from the Moel behind and a ragged cliff in front, echoed and reverberated, though torn by the wind. Its beauty had a devilish, pitiless quality, thought Kirk; yet when the hounds checked at a bog over to the right and fell almost silent, his excitement faded; and when almost immediately afterwards they hit off the line again with a splendid crash, he felt a wild exultation.

  It looked as though the fox were making for a small earth farther along at the bottom of the shale, but they were pressing him too hard and he ran on past it, on and round. They were running so fast that they were out of sight in a few minutes; and presently they were out of hearing too, the wind being foul.

  The followers waited to see whether he would turn left-handed again into the high broken country behind the Moel, and Kirk took the chance to peer into the earth. He could see nothing but tumbled rock with here and there a brown shrivel of small fern or a handful of crude harsh red earth. It seemed quite impossible that a fox should have got away so far without having been seen.

  There were still two terriers down, and Gerallt stayed to bring them out. Major Boyd started up the shale in a sloping line for the ridge: another group went along the bottom in the direction the fox had taken. The Master watched them go, then turned back the way Kirk had come: as he left he spoke to Gerallt – a word over his shoulder, torn away by the wind. Gerallt understood it, however, and laughed.

  When they were alone Gerallt asked Kirk to hold the remaining terriers, and bent to the earth. Without looking up he said, ‘So you came along then, Doctor?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Kirk.

  The terriers were wedging one another far down under the rocks; they could be heard quarrelling, and nothing Gerallt could do would bring them up. Eventually he and Kirk and the other dogs walked away from the earth together: two minutes later the terriers came out, matted and entirely changed in colour.

  They set out after the Master, and now Kirk was glad that Gerallt was going fast; in a little while warmth flooded through him, reanimating all but his hands and ears, and he could enjoy being alive once more. They were going directly away from the obvious line, but it was clear that if the fox carried right round the top of the Moel this course would bring them out charmingly.

  Once they were round the shoulder they caught the full force of the wind, colder now by far, and the first handful of rain came driving flat along it. Kirk and Gerallt turned up their collars at almost the same moment: it was not much of a protection, to be sure, but they treasured that two inches of dry neck.

  It was a long while before they saw the Master again. He was walking rapidly up a distant slope, away from them and below, strangely foreshortened. He and they were going in almost exactly the same direction. ‘Surely,’ thought Kirk, ‘this is a good sign.’ For now to him good once more meant being with the hounds, hunting the fox and eventually killing him.

  Ever since they had come round into the wind and they had been travelling diagonally towards the Cidwm valley: hard going all the way, and Kirk had to put so much physical and spiritual energy into keeping up with the huntsman that he had little time to inspect his own attitude towards the fox, towards the fox’s fate. Once on an even slope he made an observation about ‘wanting to have his cake and eat it’; and another time, when Gerallt was untangling the terriers, he recalled the same ambivalence at a bull-fight – his pleasure when the goaded bull hurled a torero into the crowd: but no more than that.

  The mountainside stretched away behind them, and now they were looking down again into Nant Cidwm, with the lake almost behind them. They must be in the next county by now, thought Kirk, glancing at his watch. It had stopped, however; stopped hours or miles ago, some unremembered fall having sprung its works.

  The Master was sitting under the lee of a rock with his black dog, watching his hounds work along a dry ravine. The scent was poor down there, the day growing so precious cold, but they were working it out cleverly, all close together, with their noses down and their bottoms wriggling eagerly. After a while the Master said that young Lucifer was shaping well – he might be quite a good dog yet. They carried the line right across, and at the far edge of the ravine they started running again, a hound with a deep mouth speaking all the time. Still they bore away right-ha
nded, and it seemed that the fox was running a true ring, a great elliptical path with the Moel at its centre, irregular in places but always tending back to its beginning.

  They walked now on the inside of this ring, keeping the hounds in view for a good while. Since they were on the higher ground, they could see the hunting of the pack to perfection, and Kirk was so taken up with doing this and with remaining upright that by the time the hounds ran clean away he no longer had the least notion of where he was – from this high table-land he could see not a single familiar shape: north and south were buried in the clouds.

  Some time after the pack had disappeared the three men sat down on a knoll: now and then they heard the dogs, and sometimes, from the movement of sheep, they could tell where they were. Kirk could not make out why they sat there, why they did not go on after the hounds; but he was happy to sit, and what strength his mind still possessed was taken up with thoughts of food.