Fraser's Voices

by Jack Hastie

  Then there was the dunghill where the manure of ages was slowly breaking down into compost, alive with worms. The boys weren’t officially allowed to play there – they never could understand why – but as it was behind the lambing shed and the hen houses and out of sight of the farm house, they would sometimes go there and count how many worms they could catch. Then they would take their haul round to the duck pond to see if the ducks would eat them. But either the ducks were nervous, for they had half-grown ducklings with them, or they just didn’t like worms, for they kept their distance. So the boys would squat by the edge of the pool and drop the worms in one by one to see if they could swim.

  Here, however, they could be seen from the house and Jim’s mum seemed to know where they got the worms from; so that adventure always ended with her calling, “Right boys. In you come and get cleaned up,” in a voice that had to be obeyed.

  * * *

  Fraser was not the only newcomer to the area to discover Kilrasken.

  One-eye and Barook knew better than to come near the place, but someone else with the courage of a badger, the cunning of a fox and a hatred of man had discovered a trail that ran out of the wood, along a hedgerow and up to the farm buildings. On its first foray it discovered the barn and for several nights feasted on rats.

  But it hunted, not for food nor even for pleasure, but for revenge and so, on the fourth night, moonless and black as pitch, it pressed on, in full sight of the house, and found the lambing shed.

  There were lights in the windows of the house but the curtains were drawn and the dogs were dozing by the fire.

  The two lambs heard a soft scratching and were awake at once, scrambling onto wobbly legs. There, unseen in the darkness but its stink shaking the shed, was the demon nightmare of every small animal’s imagination. Then the rattle of claws on the floor, the pant of hot breath, the clash of teeth and it was on them.

  Perhaps Misty, the younger dog heard the brief, terrified bleat. Suddenly her ears were erect, the hair on her neck lifted and from deep in her throat came a low growl. Seconds later the ducks and hens took up the warning and the henhouse shook with a frenzied beating of wings, crowing and quacking.

  Jim’s dad threw a switch and the courtyard was flooded with light. Jim swept back the curtains and saw, leaving the lambing shed and vanishing into the shadows behind the barn, an animal like nothing he had seen before.

  “It sort of looped,” he said later, trying to recall for the benefit of his dad and the gamekeeper what he had seen only for a fraction of a second and out of the corner of his eye.

  Naturally Jim added a little to the story when he told Fraser – the animal had got bigger – “like a wolf” – and he had to stick to this version when the man from the Kilmore Gazette came to get the story.

  “Mystery killer at Kilrasken” the headline read and the paper went on to wonder what kind of monster had torn out the throats of the two young lambs.

  Readers’ letters in the following issue offered some suggestions:

  One reader thought that “a giant flesh eating lizard of the monitor type, which can grow up to six feet in length,” might have escaped from a private zoo. An elderly lady was sure it was the ghost of a witch who had been drowned in the loch three hundred years before; and a sixth former from the High School proposed that it was an alien from space connected with recent sightings of unidentified flying objects.

  Fraser found most of this impossible to translate into the language of his friends. The birds had quickly brought the news from Kilrasken, but no one had any idea who the killer could be.

  So Fraser decided to go back into the wood and find out for himself.

  THE ROOKS

  He was nearing the edge of the wood and the mist of branches was thinning out. The clouds broke and a dazzling low sun threw shafts of slanting light between the trees. Light and dark; light and dark; Fraser’s mind began to beat to a rhythm as his eyes crossed and re-crossed the lines of light and shade, up and down, up and down. He remembered the last time in the car, at Easter in France – poplars – lines of tall trees like sentries and the brightest sun he had ever seen – light and dark flashing – flick, flick, flick, flick as the car raced on – flick, flick, flick, flick like a shutter clicking in his mind – then blackness – hospital and the bird language.

  He was falling…

  “Dead boy,” remarked an old rook perched on a high branch directly above Fraser.

  “Probably just sleeping,” said another argumentatively with a clatter of his dirty beak.

  “Think so?” said the first. “Well I saw the way he fell. He’s dead all right.”

  “So what?” quarrelled the second, a younger bird who had not lived long enough to be quite sure of himself but felt he ought to appear knowledgeable. “We can’t eat him till he’s rotted a bit.”

  “Ever tried their eyes?” went on the first. “Don’t even have to be right dead, so long as they can’t move. Like picking beetles from a rose bed. And tastier! Tastiest bite I’ve had, come to think of it.”

  “You’ve picked out dead men’s eyes?” cawed the younger bird in admiration.

  “Not quite,” admitted the older rook. “Not actually men. Done it often enough with sheep on their backs; they can’t do a thing. Once with a young calf. Anyway, fancy this one? One each, eh?”

  Like most rooks this veteran liked to boast and the pleasure of showing the youngster how to do it would be worth the other eye. Besides, the old boy knew it wasn’t quite as easy as he had suggested and he wanted moral support.

  The two flapped down to a low branch and then to the ground. There they walked – rooks are too conceited to hop – backwards and forwards as if interested in anything but the boy lying a few yards in front of them. They had to work up their courage. Anyway, the older one now realised that he had made a mistake; the boy was still breathing. Not that that made a lot of difference – but you had to look sharp – might only get one eye. If he had been alone he would have abandoned the plan and flown off, but with an admiring youngster watching and a reputation to keep up… so he strutted about ceremoniously trying to gather up his courage for the final rush, stab and quick take-off.

  By now all the birds in the wood had realised what was going on. Few of them liked the rooks, who stole their eggs and chicks, and, although none of them would have taken any risks to help a human being, their sympathies were with the boy. Besides, it was now clear that the older rook was unsure of himself and that gave some of the cheekier birds the chance to make mischief.

  “Scared! Scared! Scared! Scared!” shrieked a magpie, swooping low over the path.

  “Want me to show you how?” chattered a jackdaw, who might, if the moment had been right, have been as good as his word.

  “Chicken killer,” moaned a pigeon who had lost two of her brood and suspected the rooks.

  Immediately the smaller birds took up the cry. “Chick-en kill-er, chick-en kill-er,” they chanted and flew in circles above the two rooks.

  This only made the older bird more determined – the younger had retreated a few yards to a low branch – and he stepped purposefully towards the boy, beak darting forward and back at each stride.

  In the fox’s earth, just outside the wood, One-eye was sleeping lightly after the custom of his family. He turned in his sleep, awoke and scratched himself. It was midday and no time for hunting, but some sixth sense, to which foxes often owe their lives, made him amble up to the mouth of the den instead of simply curling up again and going back to sleep. There he heard the commotion in the trees.

  “What moves?” he growled.

  A confusion of a hundred voices answered him, “Boy dead! Rooks… eyes.”

  It made no sense, but foxes are curious and there is always a little empty space inside them for an unexpected tit-bit, so One-eye decided to investigate and stepped out of the tunnel. As soon as he saw the situation he realised that this was no hunting for him. Then he saw that the unconscious boy was Barook’s
rescuer. With a couple of sharp barks that put the two rooks to flight for the moment, he turned back to the lair.

  Badgers do not wake up, let alone venture above ground by daylight, but when Barook was rooted out of a beautiful sleep by One-eye’s wet black nose and told what was happening, he remembered his promise and, rumbling his warcry, “Barook, Ya-Barook, Ya-Barook,” galloped out, blinking, into the hostile strange sunshine to honour his pledge.

  Half an hour later Bob Paterson, who lived across the road from Fraser, was walking his labrador in the woods. He too heard the commotion of the birds and the dog ran on ahead. Moments later it was back, whining, tail between its legs, and, as Bob walked on, fell, uncharacteristically, behind his heel. Bob told his story that night.

  “I saw the lad lying on the path and beside him, in broad daylight, a badger, every hair on its back bristling and every tooth bared.”

  Only when he had put his dog on the lead and gone over to look at the boy had the animal turned and vanished into the undergrowth.

  RECOVERY

  Fraser’s adventure in the wood had one good result, from his point of view. It postponed for a time the day when he would be pronounced recovered and sent back to school in Glasgow. In fact it put him into the local hospital for a week for observation. As he didn’t feel anything wrong he would have been bored out of his mind if it had not been for his conversations with the birds, and, although these were, as usual, surprised and suspicious at first, they soon got used to him and would even fly off and bring him news of what was happening beyond what he could see from the window of his ward.

  Most of this didn’t really interest him – a rook’s story of a dead hedgehog in the hospital car park – the tale told by a big black-backed gull of a delivery of fish left unattended for a minute by the kitchen staff – the warnings of smaller birds of kestrels in the hospital gardens.

  But he did hear something more interesting from a wild drake, a mallard who settled for the night in an ornamental pond in the grounds just outside the window.

  The drake was exhausted and had clearly flown some distance.

  “Decided to shift my quarters,” he quacked. “Big party of men and dogs came through the woods just before dark. We weren’t worried, my mate and I. We just got into the water. But then, from the other side, came more men with the tame lightning.” (The mallard meant guns, but, as all birds and animals fear guns and none understands them, they make up all sorts of ways of describing them.)

  “They were shooting at everything. The small animals went underground, so they shot the birds. My mate was killed; I was lucky.”

  “Why did they do that?” asked Fraser, who had never seen a shoot.

  “Don’t know. Some of the tree birds say there’s been farm animals killed. The gamekeepers set a trap and it was raided. The bait was taken but nothing caught. That’s the second reason I came away. My friends, the coots and moorhens, tell me there has been something coming out of the water by night. It attacks them in their nests. A lot of them have been killed. ‘No place for me,’ I said. ‘Dogs and guns by day; something from the water by night; my mate dead; time to go.’”

  Fraser’s other important conversation was with someone called “the consultant” the day his dad came to take him back to the cottage.

  This time the hospital people did seem to know what his trouble was. The consultant produced a flat cardboard box with “Keep out of reach of children” printed prominently on the side. He opened one end and slid out a strip of silver paper with the days of the week printed on it and below each day a large, round, brown pill stuck under cellophane.

  “You’ll remember to take one every day. You musn’t ever miss a day.”

  Fraser nodded.

  The consultant replaced the strip and handed the box to Fraser’s dad.

  “He should be all right now. He’s stable, provided he takes one every day.”

  They went back to the cottage and in a week Fraser’s parents said he was so much better that he could go to stay for a few days with Jim Douglas on the farm.

  When he arrived Jim was there to meet him and the two dogs, Misty and Tess, came bounding out, barking a welcome. On his previous visits the dogs had always been out working the sheep with Jim’s dad and this was the first time he had heard them talk.

  By now Fraser was so used to understanding all the animal chatter that went on around him that he was surprised to discover that he could make out only a little of what the dogs were saying, as if he was listening on a crackly telephone line to someone with a foreign accent.

  “That’s funny,” he thought. “Perhaps tame animals speak a different language.”

  KWARUTTA!

  In the heart of the wood lay a tiny lochan threaded like a bead on the Ballagan Burn as it tumbled and splashed from the moors down through the wood and at last pushed its way through marshes and mudflats to enter the loch.

  Once the lochan had held trout, and mallard and moorhen had nested by its edges, but it was empty now. Twenty yards from the bank, buried in ferns and brambles, sat the ruins of a cottage. The walls still stood shoulder-high, but long ago the roof and the higher parts of the gables had collapsed into a pile of stones and slates and rotten timbers, under which a hundred rats might have nested in safety. But there were none there now.

  Slowly, from a crevice between two of the fallen stones, there emerged, first the muzzle, then the silky seal-like head and finally the sleek body of a full-grown mink.

  He was not a native to these parts, having recently escaped from a farm in which he and his kind were bred and killed for their fur. His family came from Canada where he was proud to be cousin to the wolverine who could drive wolves from a kill.

  He slipped into the pool and swam across, wasting no time, for long ago the other inhabitants had been killed by this cleverest and boldest of hunters. On the far side trails led off in two directions. One led to the farms and the village where the mink had been hunting for the last few nights, but here the scent was heavy with men and dogs for they had at last tracked him as far as this.

  Tonight, therefore, he turned in the other direction and headed up towards the moor. This was a different world from the woods and farmlands. Here tracks of big blue mountain hare, of grouse, and of adders wound in the black peat among rocks and clumps of heather and fern and the droppings of sheep and red deer.

  The smells were strong and exciting, and, after pausing for a moment to drink them in, he set off up the trail. He had not gone far when he was stopped by a new sound; a wild, unearthly cry from something higher up on the moor. The mink stiffened. The creature was down wind, so he got no whiff of its scent. By its call it was a predator like himself. If it was his size or smaller he would kill it. If it was larger he would still kill it. If it was so large as to be beyond his power he would find it easy to escape in this bristly country.

  But his own strong scent rode ahead of him on the light wind and told the other hunter that a rival was intruding on his territory. The other animal took up the challenge, bounded down the trail and then froze, crouched on stiff legs, back arched, tail lashing; the mink found himself face to face with Cruach, the wild cat.

  The two killers eyed each other.

  “Get off my ground,” spat the cat.

  “Your ground? You will have to prove that. I hunt where I please.” The mink’s jaws shut like a trap on the words.

  The cat hissed, “You’re a stranger here. You’ve no right on my ground. Get off it or prepare to pay the price.” His back was arching dangerously and, as he spoke, his lips curled back to show long, needle-like fangs bared back to the pink gums.

  More dangerous still, as he raised a front paw to strike, it was suddenly armed with five curved scimitars, unblunted by the wear and tear of walking and running, for the cat alone can sheath and unsheath his claws like a forest of swords.

  The mink was not intimidated.

  “I did not choose to live in your wretched land,” he replied. “My t
ribe comes from a better country far away, a country of rivers full of fish and woods full of game. But we were trapped and killed by man,” he went on savagely. “So I was born in a cage and lived in a cage till one day I saw the wire loose in the wood, and I tore it away, remembering that I am Kwarutta, the hunter, and no pretty flower to dress a painted lady.

  “And so I came here killing as I needed, killing as I wished. But most of all I kill to take my revenge on man and his slaves, his fat farmyard hens, his grouse on the moor, his cats and his dogs.” The voice had risen to a hissing scream, “and, one day, when they are unguarded, even his young. Then will I kill and kill and kill until at last the blood debt of my tribe has been repaid.”

  This kind of talk was new to the cat. He could appreciate a slow careful stalk through thick grass, the sudden explosive charge and the satisfaction of teeth meeting in the throat of a victim, but this single-minded vendetta against the whole human race sent shivers down his spine.

  “I have no liking for men,” he replied, “but I have nothing to do with your war. Fight it in the farmyards and the gardens, but keep off my ground.”

  Neither animal now wished matters to come to a clash of teeth and claws. Like boys in a school playground who have squared up to each other and each stood his ground, they now respected each other and wanted to withdraw with honour.

  “Between two such hunters as ourselves let there be peace,” said Kwarutta. “I will hunt here no more. But when the gamekeeper has poisoned your litter and shot your mate for the sake of his grouse, join me one moonless night and together we will repay him in his henhouses.”

  He turned, and with the looping gait of his family, headed for the farms.

  THE DAWN RAID

  Jim took the greatest pleasure in telling Fraser about the mysterious killings that had led to the great shoot-out in the wood which the mallard had described: more hens; a pet rabbit in a garden hutch; young, hand-reared partridges in a gamekeeper’s yard. Whoever it was, the killer seemed to take special pleasure in boldly entering sheds and coops and hutches close to human houses and killing, but rarely eating animals that were close to people.