Pigeon Post

by Arthur Ransome

  “Perhaps it only works with running water,” she said. “Pump a bit, somebody, so that the water’s moving.”

  John worked the handle up and down. A stream of water gushed from the spout and splashed into the trough below it.

  Nancy walked round again.

  “It doesn’t budge,” said Nancy. “Come on, John. You have a try. We’ll all try. If only one of us could do it, we could find our own wells and camp wherever we wanted.”

  “If there was water underneath,” said Dick.

  Nancy put out her tongue at the professor, and gave the twig to John. She began pumping.

  “Not too hard,” said Susan. “Mrs Tyson says there’s no water to spare, even in the well.”

  “You’ve got hold of it all wrong,” said Nancy. “Here, Titty. You pump. Get your fingers on the top, John.”

  Titty worked the squeaking pump handle gently up and down so that a trickle of water and no more dribbled out of the spout.

  John, shown by Dick and Nancy how to hold the twig, walked round the pump. The stick showed no signs of moving.

  “Come on, Susan. You next,” said Nancy.

  “What’s that jam-jar for?” asked Titty, but Roger was already slinking away with it towards the gate into the orchard. No one else had noticed him.

  Susan tried, and after her Peggy. Then Dick, though he said he didn’t really believe in it. Then Dorothea, who in spite of Dick’s unbelief, desperately hoped it would work with her. It did not.

  Roger was waiting for his turn. Three or four times he made Dick show him just how the twig had been held by the water diviner.

  “I believe it’s going to work,” he said. He skipped quickly round the pump.

  “Well?” said Nancy.

  Roger was moving sideways across the yard.

  “Where are you off to?” said Nancy.

  “It seems to tell me where to go,” said Roger, moving a little faster.

  “Don’t be a little owl, Roger,” said John.

  “Aye, aye, Sir,” said Roger, hurrying towards the gate.

  “Hi!” said Captain Nancy. “Bring it back. There’s no water there …”

  “Yes, there is,” cried Roger. “Look at it. Wagging like billy-oh.”

  The stick wagged up and down like a pump handle and wagged sideways like the tail of a dog, while Roger held it over some rank dock leaves close by the orchard gate.

  Nancy grabbed at him. He dodged her, dropped the stick, bent down and lifted a broken jam-pot full of water from under the leaves where he had hidden it.

  “Who said there was no water?” he laughed, darting out of reach.

  “I’ll shiver your timbers for you,” said Nancy, laughing in spite of her disappointment. “Oh well, if it doesn’t work it doesn’t.”

  “Titty hasn’t tried,” said Peggy.

  “Here you are,” said Nancy. “Don’t play the goat like Roger. If only it worked with one of us, everything would be all right.”

  Titty took the stick. Nancy put her hands in the right position for her. The others were already losing interest. Even Peggy, who had wanted her to try, did not wait to see what happened, but began talking to Susan about carrying water up the hill in milk-cans. “We’d want too much,” Titty heard Susan say. “Washing, and washing up, and cooking and teeth and, anyway, we wouldn’t be allowed …”

  “Go on,” said Nancy, with hope still in her voice. “Close to the pump …”

  And at that moment Titty almost stumbled … It couldn’t be the stick itself pressing against the soft flesh at the base of her thumbs. She pulled herself together. Silly to be startled like that. And anyhow nothing could have happened. Why, Dick himself had said that nothing could.

  “Half a minute,” said Captain Nancy eagerly. “Didn’t it give a sort of jerk just now?”

  Titty looked round miserably. “It can’t have,” she said.

  “There it is again,” said Nancy. “Look here. Come back a yard or two and go over that bit again.”

  Everybody was alert now, and watching.

  “What happened?” said Roger. “I didn’t see.”

  “Slowly …” said Nancy.

  Titty’s eyes were swimming. She saw the ground of the yard at her feet through a mist. Something queer was happening that she could neither help nor hinder. The stick was more than a bit of wood in her hands. It was coming alive. If only she could drop it, and be free from it. But there was Captain Nancy’s voice, talking, close to her and yet far away. “Go on, Titty. Go it, Able-seaman. Or is it just your hand shaking?” Suddenly, a yard or so from the pump, there could be doubt no longer. The ends of the stick were lifting her thumbs. She fought against them, trying as hard as she could to hold them still. But the fork of the stick was dipping, dipping. Nothing could stop it. Her hands turned in spite of her. “Titty! Titty!” They were all talking to her at once. The next moment the stick had twisted clean out of her hands. It lay on the ground, just a forked hazel twig with the green showing through the bark where Nancy’s knife had trimmed it. Titty, the dowser, startled more than she could bear, and shaking with sobs, had bolted up into the wood.

  Steps sounded behind her.

  “It’s all right, Titty,” Susan was saying. “Never mind. It’s over now, anyway.”

  “Sorry,” sobbed Titty. “Awfully sorry. I didn’t mean to …”

  “All right, Titty … All right … Steady on.”

  Somehow or other she must stop this silly trembling, she, an able-seaman, an explorer, a mining prospector. She stood still and caught hold of a branch, hardly seeing it. Suddenly she saw it was a hazel branch. She let go of it as if it had burnt her.

  “Come on, Titty.” Susan was patting her shoulder.

  “Just a minute or two,” said Titty, swallowing hard. “I’m coming back … But … Oh, Susan … Not to do it again.”

  “No, no,” said Susan. “They won’t even ask you.”

  Susan was right. After that first moment of horrified astonishment at Titty’s tears there had been eager talk. There had been more experiments with the hazel twig, but it had not stirred in any of their hands. Still, some of them, at least, were sure they had seen the thing happen. And then John, who had started to run after Titty and stopped short, thinking it better to leave her to Susan, had had a private word with Nancy.

  “Giminy, I wish it had been me it had happened with,” said Nancy.

  “We’ve got a geologist in the expedition,” Peggy was saying as Titty and Susan came down out of the wood. “And now our own dowser … At least …”

  “Shut up,” Titty heard Nancy say.

  Dick was holding the hazel twig, looking at the cut ends of the fork. “I don’t see why it should,” he was saying. “There’s nothing to make it twist. It can’t have, really. She must have just thought it did.”

  “Look here,” said Nancy, suddenly and loudly. “What about a wallow in what’s left of the river? We’ll have to buck up before it’s too dark to find the wettest bits.”

  Five minutes later Titty and Nancy were lying side by side in one of the pools of the river. The river had sunk so low that they could not get properly under water.

  “Beastly shallow,” said Nancy, splashing with hands and feet and pretending not to be aground.

  “Hardly find room for a minnow,” said Titty gratefully.

  Not one single word was said to her about what had happened when she held the hazel twig.

  CHAPTER XIV

  DESPERATION

  NOT a word was said to Titty about dowsing, but next morning, tents were still being tidied when she noticed that Nancy had disappeared.

  “Where’s Captain Nancy?” she asked.

  “Gone on,” said Peggy, and at that moment they all heard a very loud but very bad copy of an owl call from high in the wood where Nancy was already climbing.

  “I’m ready,” said Titty, “except for the provisions.”

  “So’m I,” said Dick.

  “Nancy’s forgotten her h
ammer,” said Peggy. “And she’s gone without waiting for the grub.”

  “I’ll take it,” said Titty.

  “Better start, anybody who’s ready,” said Susan. “We’ll catch you up. Go ahead, Titty. Then you won’t have to hurry later on. Roger, your toothbrush is quite dry …”

  “Well, I was just going to use it,” said Roger.

  “I must just finish my diary,” said Dorothea.

  “Come on, Dick,” said Titty.

  “Leave your flasks,” said Susan. “We can’t fill them till Mrs Tyson’s ready with the tea.”

  Dick and Titty hurried off into the wood.

  They climbed fast at first, hoping to catch up Nancy. They called to her once or twice but got no answer. Even in the shade of the trees it was very hot and they were both out of breath before they had got half-way up the winding path to the Topps. They had passed the place where the path crossed the dry bed of the beck when Titty stopped short.

  “Let’s just rest half a second,” she said. “It’s no good thinking we can catch her.”

  “We’ll have a look at the pool,” said Dick.

  They turned aside through the trees to the shrinking puddle that in other years had been a deep little pool in the stream that had come leaping down, waterfall after waterfall, from High Topps to the valley below. It was small and stagnant, but on a hot day even to look at a puddle is better than nothing and the ferns that hung over it were cool and green.

  “It’s gone down a bit even since we came,” said Titty. “Somebody’s been drinking at it. Natives, perhaps …”

  “Animals,” said Dick. “Very small ones. Look at the tracks.”

  He flung himself down and peered through his spectacles at faint muddy prints on the white stones. Some small animal had wet its feet and brought them damp and muddy from the pool, leaving its footprints on the stones. The mud had dried at once. A breath of wind would have swept the little dusty marks away for ever.

  “What is it?” said Titty. “No Timothies here.”

  “Can’t be a stoat or a weasel,” said Dick. “Toes too near together. I’ve got a book with lots of tracks in it, and the stoat’s toes spread out wide. Not like these. I wish I could see where he went. But the ground’s so dry there are no tracks to be seen …”

  “Not even Captain Nancy’s,” said Titty, and with that they left the little pool and hurried on up the track after the leader of the expedition.

  “Yes there is,” said Dick suddenly, stopping short.

  “Is what?” asked Titty.

  “Spoor,” said Dick. “You can see someone’s been this way. Cutting sticks.” He pointed at some new twigs lying on the ground.

  “She may have been laying a patteran,” said Titty. “You know, to show which way she went. But the sticks aren’t crossing.”

  “Here’s some more,” said Dick. “She’s just been chopping as she went along.”

  “Let’s trail her,” said Titty, “for practice.”

  They climbed on with their eyes on the path.

  “Hullo! Here she’s dropped a whole stick.”

  Dick picked up a twig about a foot long. Titty found another not unlike it, the end of it showing the marks of a knife.

  They went on.

  “Now she’s hacking away at another,” said Titty. Scraps of thin bark and bits of twig and chopped-off leaves littered the path.

  “Making arrows?” said Dick. “She did once, didn’t she?”

  “That was last year,” said Titty. “For sending messages. This year we’re all together. She can’t be thinking of shooting at Squashy.”

  “Listen,” said Dick.

  They were near the top of the wood. Another bend of the winding path would bring them to the place where the old charcoal-burners’ track turned off into the bushes.

  “I KNOW WHAT SHE’S DOING”

  “I can’t hear her,” said Titty.

  “Shall I shout?” said Dick.

  “Not when we’re trailing her,” said Titty. ‘We ought to creep on feet like cats’.”

  They heard cheerful shouting far away below them in the wood.

  “The others are coming,” whispered Dick.

  “She’s at Might Have Been,” said Titty. “Probably up the look-out tree.”

  They crept away through the bushes till they came to the tall ash. But no sentinel was up there above their heads. They came to the edge of the old pitstead. There was no one there. And then, suddenly, they caught a glimpse of her under the trees between the pitstead and the Great Wall. They dodged silently nearer, round the edge of the clearing. Nancy, with bent head, seemed to be walking to and fro, looking at the ground.

  “I know what she’s doing,” said Dick suddenly. “She’s …” But he did not finish his sentence. “Is anything the matter?” he asked, seeing Titty’s face.

  They could both see Nancy now.

  She was walking slowly about with a forked hazel stick in her hands. First one way and then another she walked, bending low, holding the point of the fork before her over the short tufts of green rushes.

  “But it didn’t work with her,” said Dick. “Only with you … If it did work. Did it, or was it just because …?”

  “Don’t talk about it,” said Titty desperately.

  And just then they saw Nancy, giving up all hope of dowsing, suddenly jerk herself upright and toss the forked hazel away into the bushes. She put her hands to her mouth and gave an owl call far too cheerful to be really like an owl’s. A moment later she had disappeared, and they could hear her scrambling up the Great Wall. The owl came again.

  Dick tried to answer.

  “Hullo!” Nancy’s voice came through the trees. “Where are you? Come along.”

  Other owl calls, good and bad, sounded in the wood.

  “They’re all coming,” said Dick, as he started forward.

  “Don’t say anything about what she was doing,” said Titty urgently.

  “All right,” said Dick, and they ran through the trees, along the edge of the bramble thicket, and up the gully in the rock to find Nancy, shading her eyes with her hands, looking out over the Topps.

  “Well,” said Nancy. “He isn’t there yet. Awful climb from the bottom, isn’t it?”

  They threw themselves down on the top of the rock, already hot from the sun, and a moment later Dick had forgotten dowsing, mining, and everything else in watching a small, brown lizard dodging in and out along a crack in the stone.

  Titty could not forget. She was still remembering what she had seen, when the rest of the Mining Company came out from the trees below the rock. John, Susan, Peggy, Dorothea …

  “Come along, Roger,” called Susan.

  Roger, lagging behind the others, came into sight carrying the pigeon-basket, and Titty felt worse than ever.

  “Sorry, Rogie,” she cried out. “It was my turn to bring the pigeon. I forgot all about it. I say, did you bring the right one? Sophocles is the one for today.”

  “He weighs two tons more than Homer,” said Roger.

  “Let’s have him now,” said Titty, and she ran down the gully and took the pigeon-basket. “Oh, Rogie, I am most awfully sorry.”

  “It’s quite all right,” said Roger.

  But, for Titty that day, everything was all wrong. She could not get the dowsing out of her mind. What if they failed? What if the time came to leave and they had found nothing, and instead of going off knowing that at least they had done the best that could be done, they would have to go knowing that if only she, Titty, had been a little different, the expedition might not have been chained to the Tysons’ pump? She could hardly bear to look at the others. Nobody was worrying her about it, and even that made things seem worse. She wished that nobody had ever thought of trying an experiment with a hazel twig.

  The experiment had somehow changed things for everybody. It was all right to sleep in a solemn row of tents under the orchard wall, and to be in time for meals in the farm, so long as this was the very best th
at could be done. But now, it was almost as if someone had half opened a door and shut it in their faces.

  “Is Squashy in sight?” she heard John ask.

  “No,” said Nancy. “But he may be behind a ridge or something.”

  Even Nancy’s voice had lost its cheerful ring. Her owl call had sounded cheerful enough, but owl calls are not like talking. The most cheerful person can make a melancholy owl call, and the most melancholy person can tuwhit tuwhooooooo as if everything was as right as it possibly could be.

  Scouts were sent down to Atkinson’s, but somehow even scouting was not what it had been. Prospecting went on rather half-heartedly. Near the middle of the day Squashy Hat was seen high up on Grey Screes, but nobody had seen him going there, and he might have been there all morning. Nancy’s signal calling in the scouts was not understood by Dorothea, and in the end John went back over the Topps to explain, and had to go down into Atkinson’s wood to find Peggy, who had found a good watching post by the garden wall and was still thinking that Squashy Hat was in the house.

  “He must have set out long before we posted our scouts,” said Nancy, and Titty knew that everybody was thinking that if only they had been able to camp in the old charcoal-burners’ pitstead close to the edge of the Topps such a thing need never have happened.

  Sophocles carried a dull message … “ALL WELL. LOVE” … Nancy had not even the heart to put a skull and cross-bones on it.

  Only once did anything stir the melancholy of the day, and that was when the day was nearly over.

  “He’s painted another white spot,” said Roger suddenly, just as the prospectors were starting home.

  There it was, a great splash of white on the grey rock, a little below the first.

  “Well, we can’t do anything about it tonight,” said Susan.

  “Or in the morning,” said Nancy, “not if he’s going to be there before we get up.”

  “It’s awful not being able to cook,” said Susan. “We can’t even start until Mrs Tyson lets us have breakfast.”

  They marched home almost in silence.