The key to the country seemed to be a steep cone, well to the west of Zugarramurdi and close to the line of the frontier. It was quite unlike the other hills, the base and sides covered with dark forest and the top bare so that it resembled a volcano where streams of green lava had poured down over black rock. I chose it as my first objective and made good time to the foot of the peak, since most of the way was over high pastures. In the lingering dusk I climbed up some eight hundred feet by way of a ravine where the snow water had washed away most of the dense cover of brush and bramble, leaving a stony passage through pools and over shelves of rock. When I came to a slender waterfall I camped beside it. However long I spend on this punitive expedition the half metre of Pamplona sausage will see me through. Marvellously concentrated stuff! And I need not have carried fruit. The first blackberries are ripe.
I woke just before dawn, unable to throw off a dream that I was within some vast Presence, swallowed as it might be by a giant. The mountain was surrounded by its own dawn like its own dark rock and foliage: an even ring of cloud below the pale sky. At sunrise this private cloud retired by wisps and layers into the hollows of the cone—formless shapes, but so dense that I could have made a wash portrait of them.
I continued the ascent as far as the beginning of the grass. It was a haunted but most convenient peak, for I could scramble most of the way round it in low cover, only climbing up to the open where the line of sight had to clear the tops of forest trees. To the east were the grander Pyrenees rising and falling like ocean swell and throwing up plumes of rock where tranquillity was shattered. Down a valley to the north was a glimpse of France; on the west the cone became more of a ridge, descending to a plateau broken by narrow, wooded valleys. White dots of sheep moved on the grass and lower down, in an amphitheatre of the hills, I could see cattle.
Neither house nor hamlet was visible, but a rough, paved track ran over the brow of the opposite hill leading towards the frontier. Everywhere else its course was hidden, never passing over open ground, so that it had to start from some settlement under the far edge of the plateau and out of sight. While I ate a late breakfast, stirring up imagination with a good mug of brandy and water, I was rewarded by seeing a small truck loaded with sacks bumping its way over the hill. I was then fairly sure that I had found Odolaga. The landscape and its stock suggested a single proprietor, not several.
It was essential that Uncle Izar should never be aware of what was on the way to him. Premonition would do him no good—if he possessed it and paid any attention to it—since the sending itself had as yet no plan of action. I went down the mountain by the ravine on the south side and circled round through the woods until I was below the pastures on the plateau. At last valley and stream offered thick cover and a way round to the west. After an hour of slow and very cautious progress—though the distance cannot have been more than half a mile—I saw before me a rough bridge of stone and timber where the track crossed the stream.
I crawled up the slope and put my head out of the scrub. Three hundred yards away was a splendid Basque manor house. The great gable was much longer on one side than the other, as in all the cottages I had seen. In the centre was a square postern leading to a courtyard and buildings. Windows were deep and narrow to keep out the snowstorms. Beams were massive. It was a castle, but a castle built against mountain winter. At the first attack the herds could rumble through the gate to comfortable quarters around the yard, and men from those isolated farms I had passed might later struggle in, desperate for help and waist-deep in snow, to the only relief they could reach. It’s not surprising that the Basque witches were as famous for their healing as their dealings with the devil. I wonder if Odolaga, in this remoteness and at high festivals, still puts on his horns and tail.
And then I saw him—it could be no one else—standing on the terrace before the house and looking straight over my head. He was a broad, powerful figure in the flower of his age, dressed traditionally—I recognised the old-fashioned style from advertisements in Pamplona—in black shirt and trousers with a floppy Basque beret on his head. He was literally a Man in Black except for the flame-coloured sash around his waist. His bearing reminded me of a stout west-country farmer who will obstinately do what he thinks is right regardless of the consequences. Character and physique were formidable enough without counting the proficiency which had tortured me through poor, guiltless Leyalá and now had laid the witch-doctor’s curse of apathy on Rita, employing some method which I could neither fathom by personal experiment nor the trances of tiger brother nor communion with Meg.
I waited where I was to see all I could of him, his servants and his environment. It wasn’t much. There was no sign of a wife. She may have died young or never existed. Concha Pirrone had not mentioned Aunt Anything along with Uncle Izar. A farm hand or bailiff came round to see him and they had a cordial drink together on the terrace. Then a groom led out through that broad entranceway a good, stout cob which Odolaga mounted, trotting off round the house and up through the woods behind. It seemed likely that he was bound for the plateau to run his eyes over his sheep, so I returned on my route to the head of the valley, now sure that it was safe, and stealthily made my way up the edge of the plateau, leaving my awkward pack behind me in the woods.
This plain of rich, rough grass was bare of any sort of cover and sloped gently down to a valley on the north, containing the amphitheatre where I had seen a herd of cattle. As there was no sign of Odolaga I assumed he was down among the cows. Meanwhile I was in the only possible place for observation.
After an hour or so Odolaga rode up from the north, and by his side trotted the most handsome and vigorous billy goat I have ever seen: a magnifico of goats. It was pure black with short, dainty horns above the forehead curls, and in the prime of life. Odolaga dismounted, throwing the reins on the horse’s neck and letting it loose to graze. Before doing so, it first nuzzled the goat and rested its head for a moment on the black neck.
Odolaga joined the pair, caressing both of them. He then walked off a little way and challenged the goat to butt his outstretched palms. It went for him, reducing speed just in time to slam forehead harmlessly into hands, and rose on hind legs with forelegs on his shoulders. I knew from the experience of my own familiar what the pair were expressing to each other, and I would have let myself surrender to the common joy if I had not also remembered why I was there and perceived to what precious object I must direct my sending.
As they came nearer, the low sun was full on Odolaga’s face. It was massive and round but not fat, and topped by an unmanageable mass of grey hair. The grey eyes, in that light with a touch of green, were far apart and exceptionally large. Under the circumstances, my impression of him had to be more charitable than the first distant examination inspired by hatred.
After the play he rode off, leaving the black goat among the flock with a final caress. Dusk was now falling. I returned to my pack and ate and dozed a little till the moon should rise and give me enough light in that clear air to make a circuit of the plateau. In the heavy blue-black of twilight the Presence again threatened, created perhaps by the spent energies of former Odolagas which I did not fear but, being untrained, could not dispel. The cone was an uneasy place at any time, its shape so out of keeping with the general pattern of ridge, valley and great highlands. On this side of the mountain more birds were flying to roost than I had noticed on the south. Two pairs of ravens flapped over to some ledge in undiscovered cliffs, and when it was black night a loud Hoo-Hoo, close to and on a level with my face, made me lie still until I identified the caller: an eagle owl sitting under an awning of ivy on a branch lower down the steep slope, ears erect and staring at me with faintly luminous eyes so that it appeared a child-sized, fat, horned imp disapproving the intruder.
She could go on disapproving. A half moon was up and it was time to be on the move. I started off to do the round of the plateau, crossing to the curious outcrop of rocks where t
he escarpment began to rise from the ridge. The nesting place of the ravens was there, and with it a surprise. The plateau ended abruptly at a sheer precipice so deep that the slanting moonlight could not show me the bottom. I could hear water surging down the gorge. Its far side, worn down by freshets from the mountain, was not so sheer but quite unclimbable.
After following the edge until I was satisfied that this torrent must discharge, not far below the amphitheatre, into the stream I knew, I walked along the north side of the plateau to see if I could spot any particular track which Odolaga would take when he rode up through the woods from his house. All the way the main flock of sheep were on my left, lying down and undisturbed by my gentle pace. Several times I glimpsed a shadow moving parallel to me and wondered if there were still wolves in the fastnesses of the Pyrenees. It seemed unlikely, for in that case there should be dogs on guard and perhaps a shepherd as well. But the shadow did turn out to be a shepherd; the black goat was on duty, keeping always between me and the flock. He would not come near me, and if I had turned towards the sheep he would, I think, have had them quickly on their feet and bunched.
Then I returned to my base and slept until again I could see the plateau and a short pyramid of cone above the mist.
August 23
It was the eagle owl who first put a possible plan into my head. That my objective must be the goat, I had decided when I first saw it, but the mere slaughter of the beast was insufficient. Whatever devilry Odolaga had performed on Rita would not be reversed because an unknown brute had killed his familiar and vanished; and when he realised—as I meant him to—that I, come all the way from Penminster, was the assassin, he was more likely to intensify his attack than relinquish it.
So there had to be a tiger brother fraud to convince him that I was as adept a shaman as he, dangerous and not to be offended with impunity. That was where my friend, the eagle owl, came in. I call her my friend because she had no fear of me. She reminded me of my half-wild Indian owl, presenting much the same silhouette though four times the size. She glided in from her hunting and settled on her branch. It was her daytime roost. She had been the satisfied tenant of the ivy house for years, as proved by a six-inch-deep deposit of pellets on the ground, and she didn’t give a damn if I chose to squat on my patch of earth higher up the slope.
Paddy and Uncle Izar were both able to entrance birds. Remembering how Leyalá had planed down from the pediment on to my shoulder and how for an ecstatic moment I had transmitted to him our unity, I was convinced that I too had—or well might have—inherited the gift of simple hypnosis, though none of the advanced technique of Odolaga. In case it turned out that I was to that extent a shaman, I started to prepare my bow and arrows.
I had intended to kill Odolaga if all else failed. Given the wild and broken country, the unknown and untraceable murderer would be away before the body was found, and when found it might take the forensic consultant some time to decide that an arrow was the cause of death. That arrow had to be manufactured on the spot; I was not going to leave a promising clue behind me by carrying arrows through Customs or buying them in Spain. My chief difficulty had been to invent an efficient and easily fitted head. While I was trying in my studio at home to design an improvement on the Birhor method of fastening head to shaft with fine sinews, it suddenly occurred to me that the answer was in my hand at that moment. A shaft driven home into the lower half of a ballpoint pen, the socket for the point evenly crushed by pliers and smoothed with a file, would do very well at close range even if discharged with less than Birhor force.
I longed for a Birhor bow with which I could hit a match box at forty feet, rather better than my headquarters officers could perform with a revolver. As it was I had to make do with a crude longbow. Leaving my owl to sleep off her midnight snacks, I wandered through that thick, temperate forest, searching for a branch or sapling that would serve. No difficulty with the arrows. I came across a species of mountain ash with stiff, straight twigs which only needed smoothing. Tradition has it that the rowan repels witches, but this one must have recognised me as a harmless amateur and allowed its shoots to be stroked and stripped. The bow gave me trouble, for I could not know the properties of the available woods. The ultimate choice was between hazel, an ash sapling or a stout shoot of beech growing straight up towards the light.
I chose the beech and spent the rest of the day working on my weapons. For the primitive hunter, that task takes far more time than the hunt itself. The arrows were easy enough to trim, fletch, bind and notch. The beech bow had to be whittled down to an even thickness and the ends slightly tapered. I dared not shape it correctly for fear of weakening it. When strung, it was the devil to pull and I doubted if it would have enough spring after any prolonged shooting. However, I only needed some practice shots and then one or at the most two for business; those, I could guarantee, would send the arrow slap through Odolaga or his black, comely shepherd with the point sticking out the other side.
Tiger brother did not like owls. He treated them with respect, rather than fear, and had many stories about them. An owl could drive away an ancestral and benevolent spirit just when it was needed; an angry or vengeful ghost could wail like an owl or use the owl to wail for it. I was never sure which. That was one of the many cases when mind was indistinguishable from matter and language was unclear about the difference.
At any rate this fascinating creature of the night, with its eerie call, has been considered a bird of ill omen from time immemorial. It turns up in the environment of witches, though rarely as a familiar. I suspect that the shamans of the English kept live or dead owls like skulls and stuffed reptiles to impress the customers rather than for any real use, but to Uncle Izar the long tradition of the owl could have more meaning than to me. Divination, if there is such a thing? To help in creating illusion for enemy or patient? So it seemed likely that the appearance of an owl at the scene of a disaster would be more significant to him than any other bird, and that, since my whole object was to cloak a tiger brother fraud in mystery and entice the shaman into worrying that he might be up against a rival with all his own powers and more, the owl was a valuable stage property.
Before making use of my large and alarming friend I had to know whether I could reach the far side of the gorge and escape from it unseen. So when at last the bow was ready and tested and there were still three hours before sunset, I again hid my pack and weapons and set off through the woods on my side of the plateau. I soon came to a rough path running along the lip of the gorge. The edge was not so clean as on the grassland, tree roots having split and tumbled the rocks, but there was no possible way down until I came to a clearing where the path dived into a cleft by way of ledges and steps cut through the worst of the rubble. Crossing the fast, shallow stream at the bottom I found a zig-zag path up the other side. Along the top was little cover except rocks, but I thought they would serve at night. The most satisfying discovery was that the path allowed me to cross the gorge in a matter of minutes. I could get away round the base of the peak, a route which I already knew, or along the far side of the gorge and downhill to the confluence of the streams. Whichever Odolaga chose, I could take the other.
I was back in time to watch him make his evening visit. He came up, as the day before, over the far edge of the plateau and into sight. The sheep were on my side, near the boundary of the trees. When the black goat got up to greet him, it was closely followed by the leader of the flock, a fine ewe, black-faced like many of the others, but distinguishable by a white crescent or horseshoe above the nose. The rest followed her, so that the scene was comically like a parade: the colonel and his adjutant facing the company commander and the troops behind her standing at ease in mild curiosity as to what would happen next. Nothing did. Odolaga played with and petted his familiar and then rode off. Company commander and the rest wandered off and lay down or browsed near the skyline above the gorge.
As the sun dipped behind the mountai
n, its long and gloomy shadow turned the sheep from white to grey. It was time to experiment with the eagle owl. I was sure that I could make her sit still and possibly fly to me—unless she chose to attack—but I wanted more than that: to hypnotise her as Odolaga, according to Concha Pirrone, had hypnotised Leyalá. Of his more complex technique which had nearly destroyed me, I knew nothing.
I held the owl’s eyes as she stared at me and either received or guessed something of her simple, passing thoughts. I was harmless. I was food (not to eat but to start up by my movements). I had eyes owlish rather than animal. Strangely, I was in danger myself of being hypnotised; that is to say, there was some degree of mutual trance. Tiger brother, when curing a mentally disturbed patient, called it a drawing out of the soul. The trance became ecstatic, the preliminary to the mystic vision, and I could only preserve my own individuality within the communion by an effort of will, forcing the life that was me to remember its very mundane object. The trance must have been reinforced, for I found that I had succeeded. The owl loosened her grip on the branch and fell softly on to the carpet of pellets. I tied feet and bill and propped her up against the tree.
Blue dusk had now vanished. It was a still night and the highlands sang with silence, broken only by the calling of other owls and a short spell of distant barking from the dogs at Odolaga’s manor. I fitted my pack on my shoulders and crept out along the wooded edge of the plateau as far as the gorge, then turned left along it and crouched low to be out of sight of the sheep. At intervals I crawled up the slope and lay still, trying to make out the shape of the black goat. I could not spot him until I had the light of both half-moon and brilliant Jupiter, giving a visibility of over a hundred yards. He was well away from the flock, standing on duty above the path by which his master or any other creature would arrive. It’s probable that there was seldom any movement up from the trackless forest on the other side where I had established my lair.
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