by Joan Smith
Undaunted by my refusal, she came calling with Emily on Tuesday (giving no mention of ever returning to her own home, I might add). The chatter was all of Edward and poetry. She did so admire Mr. Wordsworth. She never could look at a daffodil without thinking of his delightful poem. She would pay a visit to Dove Cottage one of these days, to see where Wordsworth used to live, in Grasmere. There was nothing so romantic as a poet, was there? She smiled fondly on Emily. Then she harkened back to her first marriage, to introduce the subject of young love. She was positively shameless, and perfectly successful. Before they left, Emily asked in a wan, yearning little voice if we thought Edward might return earlier than four weeks. He had said, in his note to her, that the trip was not so enjoyable as he had anticipated.
She knew more of how he was faring than we did ourselves. But I had no real concern for him. The fells are deceptive, even treacherous. They appear innocent to the tourist, who may set out in the flush of dawn telling his companions he will be back for lunch, only to disappear till evening, often having to be searched for. Edward was born and bred here. He knew their danger, would take no chances. He would have his compass and maps. So long as he was back at the end of August to sign the cheque for the mortgage, I had no fear. That there would be sufficient funds in the bank to cover the cheque was always a matter of concern, but one that had little to do with Edward.
Our fleeces had brought a good enough price, but the hot, dry season was taking its toll of our ready cash. Those plaquey tourists distressed the sheep farmers by feeding every mooching sheep who stared at them as they passed, thus encouraging them to loiter about the roadway waiting for a hand-out—and as often as not being injured by a carriage. The foxes, our old enemies, were rife, claiming more than their usual share of the herd, often choosing the ewes who were carrying a lamb and thus depriving us of two heads at one killing.
These were but incidental, occasional losses. The real destroyer was the wide variety of diseases. The blow-fly, for instance, which thrives in the bracken, can lay masses of maggots that kill a sheep in two days by eating its flesh. There are also tapeworms, ticks, liver-fluke. If the soil is not of the proper sort, they become souted, losing weight, sickening, and eventually dying. The silly creatures also become crag-bound, eat vegetation they should not and bloat up, dying if they are not pierced to let out the gas. There—I hope you are not sick to your stomach with the recital, but it gives you some idea of the precarious nature of our livelihood, and the expense of raising sheep.
The cure for some of these ailments is dipping. The blow-fly were particularly severe this hot season, so that there was an extra dipping required. This involved gathering up all our herd from the fells and pike, bringing them down to the sheep-dip for an individual dousing—a procedure abhorrent to the sheep. Many men have to be hired for these boon days, costing a great deal of money.
At Ambledown we were subject to another unforeseen expenditure. Our stone walls, built eons ago and an interesting feature of the fells, took to crumbling on us. At three-and-sixpence for ten yards (the day’s work of one man) the job promised to be ruinous. Ruin comes so easily when you are perched on the very edge of solvency. There is some damage to the walls every year due to frost, but ours suffered so much and so late in the season, well past spring, that I began to wonder whether a human hand were not tearing the stones loose, letting our herd wander into precarious perches and, worse, into precarious clover, which can cause death if it is not looked after. We had lost several by this means.
At the back of my mind there lurked the suspicion, perfectly unfounded, that Wingdale was the evil agent, devising a new tactic to get Ambledown away from us. He could hardly go on burning down barns forever, when folks were beginning to voice their suspicions. In any case, I placed implicit trust in our chief shepherd, Geoff Ulrich, who had been with my father for ten years before I was born. Certainly Wingdale had not got to him, whatever he had done about anyone else.
It was Ulrich who first suggested to me that the stone walls were being tampered with. He had seen no one tinkering with them, but from long years on the fells he knew the signs of the marauding work of raw nature and suspected that some other source was responsible for our damage. I am an inveterate roamer of the fells. It is one of life’s chief delights for me to set out in the early morning (for later it will be too warm) and walk for an hour before breakfast, admiring the lichen, which comes in all shades, the heather, even the bracken—so pale and delicate in May, darkening to emerald as August approaches, and finally turning from gold to bronze. One can almost forgive it for poisoning our sheep, for without it the fells would be half nude. As one descends from the heights, the bird-cherry and whitebeam await you in the dales, but only for a brief spring season. Even holly and rowan are encountered occasionally. It was not beauty but necessity that propelled my next visit up the slopes. I had had word from Ulrich of another wall crumbling and must go to have a look at it.
Chapter Nine
I set out for the heaf early, before eight, when the air was still fresh and cool. Heaf, incidentally, is the local name for the piece of fellside claimed by a farm for grazing. The sheep had already come down from the tops of the mountains where they sleep, and had begun grazing their way back up. By evening they would be back atop to sleep. Ulrich was particularly busy that morning, chasing off after a ewe and her lamb. I noticed something amiss, but for a full minute, what was lacking did not strike me. Then I noticed what it was. Why was Ulrich going after the ewe himself? Where was Scout, our Border collie? He usually came bounding up to meet me if he were not employed in any more vital business, his pink tongue curling a welcome. I looked around for a sight of his tawny back, his gleaming coat. Scout had a stunt of crawling on his belly like a fox, when he was going after a runaway, to sneak up on it. I looked all around in a loop of three hundred and sixty degrees, discovering that he was nowhere about.
By this time Ulrich had observed me and came loping down the fellside in that peculiar gait of the hillmen that propels them at top speed without pitching them forward on their noses. The toes are pointed out, the knees bent a little, the body forward. “I’ve come to have a look at the walls, Ulrich,” I told him.
“Catastrophe, Miss,” he said simply. Ulrich did not deal in euphemism.
“How bad is it?” I asked in alarm, though I could see from where I stood that it was bad enough to be expensive. I mentally toted up the yards, and pounds.
“Nay, I’m not talking walls, but the collie.”
“Where is Scout? I hope he is not sick.”
“Yonder,” he said, pointing off in the direction from which he had come. His voice would have told me the news, if the flocking buzzards had not. They did not hover so over a living body. I took a step towards the spot.
“Nay, you don’t want to see it, Miss. It ain’t a pleasant sight.”
“What happened?”
“ ‘Twas no accident.”
“Foxes? Foumarts?” I asked, for if hungry enough these creatures have been known to attack even a dog.
“A bullet,” he answered. “I saw him before they got at it,” he told me simply, with a wave towards the buzzards. “I’d have buried him, but I had no shovel, and the herd were wandering by then. You’ll have a shovel sent up,” he said.
“It must have been an accident,” was my first reaction. No one would be so low as to shoot a shepherd’s dog on purpose. The fox hunting done in this district could account for it. It is not done primarily for sport. It is done on foot, and with guns. Someone had been hunting reynard and had accidentally hit Scout.
“No one hunts foxes in the dead o’night,” he pointed out. “Scout was hale and hearty when I tucked in last night. This morning, I found him where you see the birds gathering, yonder. Lured far enough down the slope that I’d not hear the shot.”
“I wonder you didn’t hear it, Ulrich,” I said, though I did not mean to condemn the man. I knew him to be faithful.
“I’m a light
sleeper usually,” he told me. I discerned some traces of sheepishness about him, strong enough almost to amount to guilt.
“Did you sleep more soundly last night?” I urged.
“I’ll confess I did, Miss, for it’s bothering my conscience,” he blurted out, like a little boy owning up to pilfering the sweet jar. “Last night I had summat to drink.”
“Ulrich, that is not like you!” I charged. He likes his ale as well as anyone, but to overindulge while on the job is not at all characteristic of him.
“Nay, Miss. It happened thus. Mr. Gamble, he came walking up the hill to talk to me.” I stiffened to complete attention, but remained silent. I could think of no innocent reason why Gamble should seek so unlikely a companion. “About the herd, you see,” he added, with a sorry eye.
The Lake District has primarily two occupations, sheep raising, and mining. Carnforth’s interest was the latter. There was no logical reason for Gamble to have been talking to Ulrich about sheep. “He says the great gaffer’s mines are running out, and he’s looking to get into sheep farming. We talked for an hour and more. He knows summat about the subject,” Ulrich allowed critically. No one outside of himself is allowed to know more than “summat.” My own scarce knowledge would be described by him as “less than summat.”
“When did the drinking occur?” I asked, somewhat angrily.
“All along,” he admitted freely. “He brought a couple of bottles o’ wine with him, and we passed them back and forth, like. I told him about sheeping, and he told me tales of India. Strange tales,” he added, shaking his head, as though to determine whether his night had been a dream, or a nightmare.
“Where was Scout while all this was going forth?”
“Rounding up the strays first, then as darkness fell, he curled up in his usual spot. I’d have heard him leave if I’d been clean sober,” he admitted manfully.
“Just exactly how drunk did you allow yourself to become?”
“Not downright disguised, as ye might say, Miss. A trifle foxed maybe,” he allowed, with a judicious frown to see if he had chosen his word with precision.
“I have a good notion to give him a piece of my mind.”
“ ‘Twould be better to make your first business finding a replacement for Scout,” he suggested. A glance around at the wandering herd showed me the justice of his remark.
A true star sheepdog is worth his weight in gold, and nearly impossible to find when you need one urgently. There had been one particularly fine one at the recent Dog Show Trials that Ulrich had praised to the skies. I was fairly sure it was this one he had in mind now. He was a Border collie like Scout, and a general rounder up of sheep. Ulrich had no good opinion of “fixers,” as he called those dogs who hypnotize their sheep with an eye. They stopped the sheep well enough, but one had to go and push it to get it moving again. While I stood wondering what astronomical price would be asked for the replacement, there was a clattering of stones and boulders to announce the approach of someone up the other side of the fell.
I was hardly surprised to see the black head and brown face of Jack Gamble. I thought he might return to see how his drinking crony did this morning. I was in a mood to accuse him of having killed Scout himself, though I had no reason to believe him so stupidly cruel, and he had nothing to gain by doing so.
“Ah, Miss Barwick,” he said, striding over the rocks with an easy familiarity with the terrain that is impossible to simulate. It made his origins clear, his upbringing in the Lake District. “I hoped I might meet you. I often see you from a balcony at the Hall, cantering over the rocks. A fine day for a walk, is it not?”
“The fineness of the day is destroyed for me, Mr. Gamble,” I answered in a damping way, and with an eye cast off to that spot where ravens had joined the buzzard, honking and gabbling over the carcass of Scout.
“Lost a sheep, have you?” he asked. “Ulrich mentioned some trouble with your stone walls.”
“It is a much more precious animal we have lost. Our sheep dog has been killed.”
“Is that so? Too bad. I noticed a pair of foxes yesterday. They won’t often attack a dog. Was it foxes?”
“No, it was a bullet.”
“Shot?” he asked, in a surprised tone. “I am sorry to hear it. The hunters ought not to shoot near where the herd are grazing.”
“They don’t,” I answered curtly.
“How did it happen then? When?”
“Last night, while Ulrich was—indisposed, after your visit,” I said, throwing all the significance I could contrive into the speech. Ulrich hung his head in shame, making me feel a monster.
Gamble regarded me warily for a moment without speaking, deciding, I suppose, what reply to make to this oblique charge. “It is hardly a tragedy,” he said, with a twitching of the shoulders that relegated it to a minor mishap. “You will be in a hurry to find a replacement for Scout.”
“Just what I’ve been telling her,” Ulrich said, turning his full attention to Gamble. It is a custom of the lower born male natives to relegate mere females to onlookers when there is serious business to be done. The fact of my being in charge of Ambledown was not of sufficient importance to include me now. “Ritson, over to Stickle Tarn, has a fine breed. It’s one of them she wants.’’
“I will be happy to take you over, Miss Barwick, to make up for having caused Ulrich’s indisposition,” Gamble offered.
“That’s not necessary,” I said, brushing the offer aside.
“It’s a longer trip than she’d like to make alone, and her brother is away,” Ulrich went on, still ignoring my presence. “Tell Ritson it’s Becky we want. She showed well at the fair. She’ll cost something, but there’s no stinting on your dog. If she’s wise she’ll take the bitch, Becky, so as to breed up her own dogs. I could train them to gather for her. It’s poor economy not having a young ‘un learning. If we had one now ...” he said, his voice petering out while his hands silently finished the statement for him. He flung them out, showing the callouses that had deformed his right hand from the constant pressure of the crook. It hung now over his wrist like an umbrella.
“I don’t intend going all the way to Stickle Tarn to buy a dog, Ulrich,” I said firmly.
“It’s the cost you’re worried about,” he said, reading my mind, or perhaps the worried lines on my forehead. “Ritson will give you credit.” This offending speech at least he directed to myself.
“It’s not the cost; it is the time. I’ll go to Axels, in the village.”
“Nay, I don’t want to be stuck with a fixer,” he said, in a voice that did not invite argument.
To terminate this unpleasant subject, I said, “It is the wall I have really come to see. I’ll arrange a substitute for Scout. Now, show me where the walls are breached, if you please.”
Three discrete spots were pointed out, great holes knocked out, plenty wide and low enough to allow sheep to scramble through. Ulrich repeated his thought that the mischief had been done by human hand—at night—as he would have seen anyone about the fells by daylight.
When I turned to go home Gamble walked along beside me, hampering my progress greatly, as I could not like to dart sheep-like down the steep slopes with him beside me. I had to lift my skirts and pick my way daintily, taking longer to get home than I could spare with such a busy day ahead of me, getting some sort of a dog to replace Scout and visiting fence menders to haggle them into a bargain.
I was not very good company for Gamble. He first tried to talk, but with my mind so preoccupied I made only desultory answers, so that he soon gave up trying altogether. He offered his hand solicitously to traverse bumps I would have taken at a leap without his help. This wearying mode of getting home was more tiring than my customary scramble. By slow degrees I abandoned it entirely, without quite noticing what I was about. As I leaped down the last two-foot rock and bounded to the meadow below, I was several yards ahead of Gamble. He came puffing up behind me.
“I must be getting soft,” he said.
“It is kind of you to slow your pace down, but it would have been kinder to refrain from increasing it as we approached the end of the trail. I used to be pretty good at this, once upon a time.”
“You won’t be winning any fell races this year.”
“I did once, right here at Grasmere. You were too young to remember.’’
My knowing glance undeceived him as to my memory, or at least knowledge, of that season. “I was pretty unpopular with the local bucks, an outsider pushing in and winning the prize, but over in the west where I came from, the countryside is much wilder than these gentle slopes you have here.”
“You were wise to move then, as you can hardly manage these little inclines in your senility. Where exactly was your home?”
He took the rebuke in stiff silence, putting all his displeasure into one scathing look. “The Cumberland coast, where we have the more beautiful, wild scenery,” he answered, with what pride that is so much a part of those westerners.
“Most tourists prefer our landscape,” I retaliated.
“True, but I am surprised to hear Miss Barwick sunk to quoting tourists as a judge. Now that you are speaking to me again, pray permit me to apologize for having got Ulrich tipsy last night. I went to milk him for his knowledge, and felt I should provide something in return. Loll shrub was obviously a poor thing to have provided. I shan’t do it again.”
“Loll shrub? What on earth is that?”
“It is what we call red wine in India. I am planning to get into sheep farming and know Ulrich to be an expert.”
“I would have thought you would turn your time and attention to the copper mine.”
“So I would have done, were it not on the verge of running out. Old Carnforth insists it is good for another ten years, but the man I have had in to do surveys for me says otherwise. What bit of ore that remains is too deep and too thin a strain to be mined economically. Besides, I would rather be a farmer. My father raised sheep, so I am not totally ignorant.”