The Cry of the Wolf

by Melvin Burgess

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  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781849399708

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  This edition published in 2011 by

  Andersen Press Limited

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road

  London SW1V 2SA

  www.andersenpress.co.uk

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  First published by Andersen Press Ltd 1990

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

  The right of Melvin Burgess to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Copyright © Melvin Burgess, 1990

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

  ISBN 978 1 84939 375 1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  For Owen

  1

  BEN TILLEY LAY on the banks of the River Mole keeping very quiet. It was a still, hot day. The river moved silently below him, and around him in the grass there were tiny rustlings and scratches from insects about their business. A robin was singing nearby and the sun beat down, baking into his back, pressing him into the dry mud. Ben could quite easily have fallen asleep if he had not been so excited.

  Today was a bad and special day.

  Ben was holding a gun in his hands. It had a wooden handle with a criss-cross pattern carved into it and bolted on with a thick, dull screw. The stiff little barrel was black and it was so heavy it hurt your wrist. He had found it in his father’s garden shed and stolen it. It was not a real gun, only an air pistol, but it was still dangerous. It could shoot right through the shed door if you were close enough, and Ben thought you could kill someone with it if you got them in the eye. Certainly you could kill little animals and birds with it, and that was why he was lying so quietly on the river bank. Ben was hunting water rats.

  Ben was only ten and he had a lot of trouble keeping still. His breath seemed to clamour in the air around him. The drowsy river bank was dangerous, and he was frightened and excited. When at last he spotted a little brown face he let off a long, quiet sigh – he had already scared two off – and carefully moved the gun round until it was pointing at the little animal. It sat there, wiping its whiskers in its perfect tiny paws, combing the neat fur on its face, rubbing its eyes and peeping this way and that. Ben had it right in his sights now, but before he shot he couldn’t help checking that no one was watching. He was lying there so quiet that it seemed impossible that anyone could creep up without him hearing, but even so he peered quickly over his shoulder. When he looked back, the water rat was gone.

  ‘Oh…’ he moaned quietly. The ordeal of being still again was too much when he was so excited.

  The sun had pushed its way through his thick blond hair and was burning the back of his neck. When he half closed his eyes, the gun seemed to disappear and only the heat, the river, the robin singing hidden in the willows and the tiny rustlings of little insects remained – a peaceful sunny day.

  Ben opened his eyes. A water rat was sitting on a ledge of mud opposite, a perfect target. It was cleaning its head like the first one, sitting up like a squirrel, busy and clean and neat, a little packet bursting with life. He did not make the mistake of looking round twice. This time he thought of nothing but hitting the little thing dead. The water rat sensed danger, put its front paws onto the mud – too late. Ben fired – phhhussst – plop! – water rings crossed the river towards him; the water rat was gone.

  ‘Not a very good shot, are you?’ said a man’s voice behind him.

  Ben spun round as if he had been shot himself. There was a little man standing there. He smiled slightly; his limp face made dimples. He had a neat moustache cut level and straight above his thin lip and his smooth skin and still face were damp and shiny. There was a small white dog with a lopsided face and crooked legs sitting next to his shoes. It sat crookedly, too, as if it was injured.

  ‘It’s my gun,’ lied Ben. The man looked down at him and smiled and said nothing. Ben swallowed and wondered if he could just walk away. Nothing in the man’s expression told him what was going to happen.

  The silence was worse than being told off. ‘Where did you come from?’ pleaded Ben. And that was another thing. The day had been so quiet you could hear the beetles creeping in the grass. How had the man come up to him like that?

  The man held out his hand. ‘Give me the gun.’ Ben handed it over. ‘And the pellets.’

  He loaded the weapon and looked down the sight. Then he fired it off into the bushes. ‘It shoots to the left,’ he remarked.

  At the sight of the gun in her master’s hand the little dog stood half up, and Ben saw that one of her front legs was shorter than the other.

  ‘She’s got the best nose of any dog there is,’ the stranger told him. As he spoke he peered into the bushes opposite, moving his head this way and that like a cat. ‘A hyena did that to her. She was following his scent and got so wrapped up she ran smack into the back of him. If I hadn’t been right behind her, she’d have been dead meat.’

  Ben looked up at him. ‘Are you a hunter?’ he asked.

  For an answer the man fired the pistol into the bushes again. The little dog huffed and shuffled. ‘Fetch it, Jenny,’ he commanded, and she rushed off, dashed through the water into the bushes and came back a moment later with a dead sparrow in her mouth, which she laid across his shoes.

  ‘That was a good shot!’ said Ben grudgingly. ‘And she must be a real hunting dog!’ Ben didn’t like this man, but he was very impressed. Anyway, there had been no mention of the police or his father, and he felt he ought to say something nice.

  Now he wanted to see more. ‘Do it again, get another one,’ he pleaded.

  The man reloaded and looked around him. He gestured to a clump of blackthorn bushes slightly downstream. ‘See anything there?’ he asked. Ben saw nothing. Again the man fired the pistol, again the little dog dashed crookedly off into the water and to the thicket. She returned with another little bird and laid it neatly next to the last one. The man nodded.

  Ben looked down at the bird. Its beak was open and stained with blood. The feathers were untidy on the neck where the pellet had gone in, a little mess of bloody fibres. Its breast was red too, but not with blood.

  ‘But it’s a robin,’ he said. As he spoke he realised that the birdsong bursting from the bushes nearby was now dead.

  The man shrugged. ‘Why should you feel sorry for a robin and not for a sparrow?’ he asked. Ben shrugged. ‘Because they’re prettier?’ asked the man with the hint of a sneer in his voice. ‘That makes them more worth killing.’

  ‘Did yo
u really kill a hyena?’ demanded Ben. ‘Was it in Africa? Have you hunted lions?’

  The man nodded again. ‘I’ve killed lions, elephants, hyenas, hippos…’

  ‘Rhinos?’

  ‘Rhinos … tigers …’

  ‘Tigers?’ exclaimed Ben, out of breath with admiration. ‘You’ve really killed tigers? How many?’

  ‘More than anyone else I know of,’ smiled the man.

  ‘It’s not true.’ Ben started doubting the man again. He didn’t know whether he was to be admired or hated. ‘Tigers are protected, it’s against the law to shoot them.’

  ‘So are robins,’ replied the Hunter.

  ‘Are you going to hunt animals in this country?’ demanded Ben.

  The man waved his hand carelessly. ‘There aren’t any animals left worth killing over here.’

  ‘You can’t even hunt foxes any more,’ said Ben.

  The man sneered.

  ‘You could hunt the wolves,’ exclaimed Ben, suddenly.

  The man looked at him in surprise. Everyone knew there were no wolves left in England. The last one had been chased and beaten to death five hundred years before.

  ‘Who told you there were wolves here?’ he asked.

  The boy looked guilty, but just babbled on. ‘My dad showed them to me. It’s a secret. They come past our farm. Dad leaves out scraps for them sometimes but they never touch anything … There’s lots of them …’

  ‘Show me one,’ said the man. ‘And I’ll kill it for you.’

  Ben’s face dropped. He looked shocked. The Hunter was amused. The child really did seem to believe in these wolves.

  ‘If I find any wolves, I’ll kill them. All of them,’ he said, just to make it worse.

  Ben shuffled. He looked close to tears. ‘I’ve got to go now.’ He stepped away but the man called him back.

  ‘Aren’t you going to take this?’ He held out the gun and the pellets. The little dog at his feet yawned. Ben looked at the gun and said nothing.

  ‘Shall I throw it away?’ asked the Hunter.

  There was a silence. Ben did not want to take anything from him – especially the gun.

  ‘If it’s yours,’ went on the man in an unpleasant voice, ‘I expect your parents will wonder what you’ve done with it.’

  Ben shuffled forward and took back the gun and pellets. The man handed him the weapon but didn’t let go. He raised his eyebrows expectantly. Ben could see his teeth shining dully, like the big screw in the gun handle.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  The Hunter let go of the gun. Without a word he turned and walked away, the crooked little dog at his heel, leaving the boy standing behind with the gun.

  ‘Don’t shoot any wolves with it, now!’ he called over his shoulder.

  Before he went home, Ben kicked the dead robin and sparrow into the water.

  2

  THE HUNTER WAS on his way back from a business meeting and had only stopped off for a breath of air. As he walked back down the river bank towards his car, his eyes automatically scanned the ground, looking for signs of animals. He turned his head slightly this way and that to pick up noises. It was so much a habit to track and look for clues of wildlife that he never stopped doing it, even when he had no idea of finding any game.

  When he got back to his car he wanted to buy a few groceries, so he drove up to the village shop about half a mile away. There, he mentioned the boy he had met shooting water rats by the river and the shop woman recognised his description. She swore to tell his parents. Then the Hunter told her what Ben had said about the wolves, and to his surprise, she flushed and pursed her lips, looked shocked. For an exciting moment he believed there really were wolves to kill.

  Outside in the sun again, the Hunter could not believe he had been so foolish. Wolves in southern England! And yet the way Ben had told it – and now this woman – certainly it seemed something was going on.

  He recalled that Ben had mentioned that the wolves came near his father’s farm. The shop woman had already given him the name. An enquiry from a passerby got him directions on how to get there. He decided to drive along and have a nose about. Perhaps he would unearth something interesting.

  It was only a short drive. He parked his car in a lay-by on the main road and got out with Jenny to walk along the small road – almost a track – that led to the farm where Ben lived with his parents. The hedgerows were full of wild roses and buzzing with insects. It was late afternoon now and the air was heavy with the heat of the long, hot day, and thick and fragrant with the smell of the fools’ parsley that grew in great white drifts by the roadside. Some way off he heard a dog barking regularly – one of the farm dogs, he supposed.

  When he reached the farm he peered through the trees at the house. He could see Ben sitting on his own and mooching around the steps of the house. He looked fretful. The farmer was busy in an outhouse, banging something with a hammer and the sound of his hard work floated lazily over into the still air of the yard. Inside the house the telephone began to ring. The Hunter wondered if it was the shop woman, ringing to tell on Ben.

  At a motion from her master, Jenny crept close to his heels and moved quietly and swiftly behind. Taking care not to be seen, the Hunter glided like a shadow past the farm buildings and on to where the little road became a dirt bridleway beyond. Once past, he relaxed and sauntered along the track, hands in his pockets, his eyes scanning the ground. Occasionally he paused to examine plants by the wayside, or marks in the damp edges of the track. To one side of the track was a small patch of woodland, beyond which was pasture leading up to more woodland. On the other side was a field planted with cabbages that led down to the River Mole. The sun was going down behind the hill, casting long tree shadows down to the river, and marking time across the bridleway with the thin sloping shadows of the fenceposts.

  He came to a place where the remains of a flood-stream ran along the pathway. Something here caught his eye and he bent for a closer look, moving his head to and fro as he scanned the mud. Then he got down on his haunches to examine the mark of a pad in the dried mud of a rut that had once held water. Jenny became still and watched closely as her master scanned the ground for more marks. He found a trace of mud on the greenery by the edge of the field and then waded through the thigh-deep grass and flowers to pick a few hairs from the barbed wire, where some golden-grey animal had squeezed underneath.

  The Hunter looked out across the cabbage field to the woods above. He said, ‘Wolf.’ He turned and went back to examine the pug mark in the mud again. Sensing his excitement, Jenny crouched and wagged her tail warily.

  ‘Wolf,’ he repeated. ‘Without any shadow of a doubt. Incredible.’

  All his life the Hunter had killed rare and exotic animals. It did not matter if the beast was dangerous or not, or easy or difficult to track down. He did not care about sport. It only mattered to him that his prey was rare, and the rarer it was, the more glamorous the killing became. Above all it seemed to him a glorious thing to shoot an animal that no one else had hunted.

  He remembered when he was a little boy reading a book about the last wolves in England. This book had the dates that the last wolves had died, where they had been shot and who had killed them. The Hunter thought that fame like that was the best thing in the world. To kill the very last remaining one. Someone had killed the last bear in England; someone had killed the last beaver. If you did something first, it could be done over and over again after you; but to do something last made you unique, and the Hunter wanted that more than anything.

  The Hunter examined the prints again. ‘It must have escaped from somewhere,’ he told himself. But he knew this was a real wild wolf. He had seen prints of wolves from all over the world and he knew that every kind of wolf had a slightly different print. These English wolves were different again. They were small and neat, the plump oval toes closely grouped around a distinctive clover-shaped central pad. He knew that this wolf was of a kind he had never seen before.

&
nbsp; He called Jenny over to sniff the tracks. He closely examined the vegetation on both sides of the bridleway and then jumped the barbed wire into the cabbages. Jenny ran up and down the parched earth at the edge of the field, sniffing the ground between the few thin yellow weeds that had survived the farmer’s weedkiller. Shortly, she set off haltingly in between the cabbages. The scent was old, man and dog made slow progress, frequently pausing to check the vegetation, or for the little dog to sniff up and down before she was sure of her way. The tracks were confusing, criss-crossing other tracks, doubling back and full of tricks. But they found their way across the field to the river. They splashed across and Jenny ran up and down a few times before finding the scent again. Quickly now that she was learning how the wolves ran, the little dog led the way across the pasture and off into the trees on the hilltop.

  The last wolves in England, at the time the Hunter discovered them, numbered around seventy animals, running in seven separate packs. Over the centuries their numbers rose and fell; sometimes getting as low as forty, never rising higher than two hundred. They had lived a hidden life, forever on the run, on the verge of extinction for five hundred years and for much of that time no human being had known of them. A farmer or countryman might wonder what those odd dogs he occasionally saw about were doing. Only rarely someone guessed that they were really wolves, and the knowledge would be handed down for a few generations before it faded away again. In the small village where Ben lived, only a handful of people knew of the wolves. It was the Hunter’s luck that he had met two of them on the same day.

  How had they survived?

  Their ancestors had come from the north of England, where the last English wolves lived, and had been chased with swords and pikes and scythes, with arrows, with dogs, with fire, and finally with guns. Their numbers had been picked off, one by one, family by family, until only the most cunning and careful of their race remained. Those few had been chased and hounded out of Cumbria, south into Lancashire, east to Yorkshire, and on again to the south. Every time they shook off one hunt, another would begin. This long hunt, in the end, took the last wolf pack so far south that they came to parts where no wolves had been seen or heard of for hundreds of years. The dogs had ceased to bark; they had forgotten the smell of wolf. Men had ceased to shout. Down in the countryside south of London, where the last wolves had been hounded to death centuries before, no one any longer knew what made a wolf. If anyone did see them who knew something of wolves, they soon dismissed the idea that wolves could be at large in this of all places.