Fraser's Voices

by Jack Hastie

  Rona told Cathy and Cathy, after checking that such a road and caravan did exist, phoned the Department of Environmental Health at the offices of the District Council. The Department sent two men in a van as far as they could go, but, as they told Cathy later, the road had been washed away, bits of the van were smashed and scattered over the moor like a plane wreck and a flock of wild goats was browsing contentedly where Dyer had hoped to make his home. They had also taken samples of water from the Ballagan Burn and it was now free from pollution. Dyer himself went away, possibly believing that there were, after all, spirits in the Burn and the Sgurr and the clouds.

  All this information Rona passed on to Fraser, but when he started to go into a triumphal victory chant – “Serves him right! He’d no right to…“ she cut him short.

  “Fraser, there’s something you must promise me.”

  “Oh, Oh!”

  “You’ve solved the mystery?”

  “Uhuh.”

  “Then you must promise me that you’ll start taking your medicine again.”

  “All right.”

  “And you musn’t ever again stop taking it.”

  “Ever?”

  “Not ever!”

  “I suppose so. Rona?”

  “What is it?”

  “Where’s Sandy?”

  The big labrador bounded up and the girl who loved animals listened in envy and sadness as Fraser had his last conversation with a four-footed creature.

  THE MADNESS

  OF THE WOLVES

  THE DEAD TIME

  After it was all over Fraser realised that it had started with the strange white ship; a tall ship with three masts like pine trees and a tangle of ropes and spars and sails. It had anchored in the loch late one evening and in the morning had been gone; like a ghost ship, Fraser had thought.

  Jim Douglas, who had been out fishing with his dad that night, said the men on board “talked funny”, but then Jim thought that folk from Glasgow talked funny.

  Fraser did not see the ship; from his bedroom window the view to that part of the loch was blocked by the tall trees of the wood and now that his illness had come back so seriously, he was not allowed to leave the house – ever. Klamath the heron brought him the news of what was happening in the animal world around him, and it was Klamath who told him that an animal of some kind – Klamath thought it might have been a small dog – had been thrown overboard.

  It was October, the coldest and driest anyone could remember. There was little wind and most of the leaves hung on the trees instead of falling to the ground to rot, and they burned gold and yellow and chestnut brown like the rich cloaks of kings in a book Fraser had been looking at. A few days later the first flotilla of wild geese arrived on the wetlands below the wood, exhausted after their long flight from their summer grounds in Iceland.

  The geese were an unusual lot. They actually wanted to spend the winter at Dunadd.

  Most birds and animals definitely did not. They called winter the Dead Time and those who could, avoided having to live through it. The swifts and swallows had gone long ago, following the summer south into Africa where there would be plenty of delicious insects to take on the wing.

  Those who could not fly away got ready for the Dead Time in other ways. Hobdax the hedgehog had been preparing for weeks. He had put on a lot of weight and now dug deep into a bank of fallen leaves, rolled himself into a ball and settled down comfortably to sleep the winter away. The squirrels did the same; they had eaten as much as they could when food was plentiful early in the autumn and had hidden as much again away in secret stores; now they settled down in trees to drowse through the worst of the hard times ahead.

  The hares and the stoats and, up on the high moors, the ptarmigan turned white as if expecting that the whole of the Dead Time would be spent wrapped in a blanket of snow.

  THE WOLVES’ PROMISE

  It was one of the stoats who first realised that there was something far wrong in the wood.

  “The weasels have gone mad,” he told One-eye as they followed different scents one bitterly cold night.

  At first the old fox thought nothing of the matter for it is well known in the woods that stoats and weasels dislike each other. Perhaps it has something to do with the weasels’ envy of the stoats’ winter coat; and of course those who wear a white fur which stands out, as an old weasel joke puts it “like a seagull in a rookery”, do not like to be laughed at.

  But after a while One-eye began to notice for himself; firstly there were the bodies of dead weasels lying along the trails with jaws agape and glazed eyes open; then there were the shrill sounds of bitter fighting among the living weasels; and occasionally One-eye would see one of them running in circles furiously, squealing in rage and fear.

  Then the fox, oldest of all the hunters of the wood, remembered something his father had told him, something which had been passed down by his father in turn; something from so long ago that no living fox or badger or wild cat had ever met it and not even Eye of the Wind, the eagle who lives forever, knew of a case in his lifetime.

  “It’s the Madness of the Wolves,” One-eye confided to Fraser. The boy and the fox had struck up a friendship since Fraser’s illness had returned and he had had to come back to the cottage, an invalid unable to leave his room.

  Fraser regularly threw tit-bits saved from meal times out of his window at night and One-eye, older and stiffer as each season passed, was glad to share with him, especially in the Dead Time, although, as a young fox, he would have been far too proud to scavenge for man’s leftovers. Fraser, in turn, was glad of the company and the news of all that was happening in places he could no longer visit himself.

  So now One-eye, gratefully snapping up some crusts and a chunk of corned beef, explained to Fraser: “It is an old story; older than any of us now living. At the beginning of things when the Father of Kelpies was preparing the lochs and the woods and the moors he put all the birds and the animals and the fish in their places and told them how to hunt or graze and find food for themselves and their young.

  But one of the animals, the Father of Wolves, said, ‘I will not hunt as you have told me. I will kill as I wish. I will kill man’s tame animals. I will kill man himself if I can. I will do as I please.’

  The Father of Kelpies was angry at this and he turned to the Father of Wolves, ‘For what you have said I will curse you. Your people will become many and strong and will be able to kill man’s beasts and even man himself. Men will be afraid of you as they will fear no other animal. But they will hunt you and trap you and poison you. And one day, at last they will tame the lightning and hunt you with it so that all your people will be destroyed.’

  “‘Very well,’ snarled the Father of Wolves. ‘Let man and wolf kill each other in fair fight. But if you let men tame the lightning that will not be fair. What will you give to my people to even the score?’

  The Father of Kelpies thought for a moment, pawed the turf as if he was digging for an answer and then shook his yellow mane. ‘To you I will give a weapon more terrible than the tame lightning. To you I will give a power to kill – for that is what you seem to want – beyond anything you can imagine. To you I will give the Madness.

  ‘Once in a while one of your people will go mad and will run over the moors and through the woods biting everything that comes in his way. Then he will die, but everything he has bitten will go mad in its turn, dog and fox, wild cat and badger, and they will run, spreading death through the trails and tunnels and burrows of the woods, and, this I make as a special promise to you, in their madness they will not be afraid to bite man himself; and every man bitten, even to the slightest graze, will go mad himself and will die.

  ‘I promise this power of death to your children.’

  ‘Good,’ said the Father of Wolves. ‘The odds are fair. I accept the venom of the madness for my people against the tame lightning you give to my enemy.’”

  One-eye stopped and snuffled around hungrily. Fraser threw
out some more crusts and a hunk of cheese.

  “And that is what happened.” One-eye finished the food. “The weapon was given to the wolves. From time to time one of them would go mad and run amok – afraid of nothing – biting and killing by poison like Seti the adder, and man and his dogs suffered and so did we of the woods.

  “But the Father of Kelpies remembered the other part of his promise and gave to the enemy – to your people – the tame lightning.

  “How we have all suffered from that! And his curse on the wolves also came true. The last of the wolves has been killed and the last carriers of the madness died so long ago that we thought that the old war between wolves and men was over. We were glad, for the tame lightning that men carry is terrible, but the madness is worse. Now the curse brought upon us all by the Father of Wolves has come back. It is killing the weasels and every creature a weasel bites is infected and carries the curse. Warn your people.” One-eye shook himself. That had been a long speech for an animal. “Warn your people,” he repeated and bounded off.

  JET

  Jim Douglas took up the story. He came round to see Fraser after school one day, bubbling with excitement.

  “Jet! You mind Jet, the black tomcat? Yesterday he went for dad. Jumped at him and bit his hand. Then, know what? Dad locked mum and me in the house and got the gun. Then he went and shot Jet. Then he went to see the doctor and he sent him to hospital. Lot of fuss over a scratch.”

  Jim didn’t seem particularly upset about the death of one of the farm cats, but then there were lots of cats on the farm.

  “Funny thing, though. They got Cathy the vet to come and take Jet’s body away. I’d just have dug a hole for it.”

  Fraser realised that Jim had not been told the whole story.

  “Oh, another thing. There was this weird dog. We heard this howling all night and in the morning here was this dog dead outside the front door. Cathy took it away too. Funny sort of dog.”

  “How?” asked Fraser.

  “Sort of long-legged. Funny colour – yellowish. I never saw a dog like that before.” Jim added a few stories about Misty and Tess killing rats in the barn and then went off home for his tea.

  That night Fraser threw a lot of tit-bits out of his bedroom window in the hope that One-eye would turn up and give his version of these events, but his only visitor was Nephesh the owl.

  “What moves, Nephesh?”

  “Strange times,” answered the owl. “The game are uneasy. The weasels have all gone mad and all the other folk in the burrows are disturbed. I don’t remember a time like it since I learned to fly.”

  “Do you know anything about a strange yellow dog?” asked Fraser.

  “There was one, a newcomer to our territory, howling all night not long ago. There must have been something wrong with it. I think it died.”

  Nephesh couldn’t add anything to this and had never heard the story One-eye had told the other night.

  “Madness of the wolves? What is a wolf? Your farm dogs are mad enough that run about all day in the sun. And so are the weasels just now, running about slavering and biting everything in sight. I’ve stopped eating them – though they’re easy enough to catch, the way they are.” Nephesh flapped off to hunt for something which still behaved normally.

  RABIES!

  The next week was frustrating for Fraser. Trapped behind the glass prison of his window with a view to the garden he could not walk in and the trees he could not climb, he had to wait until people or animals or birds came to him with news. And when the news they brought did not tell him what he wanted to know and he had to wait in the hope that another visitor would appear with the missing pieces of the jigsaw, he longed to be able to get up and wander at will along the wood trails until he found what he was looking for, or some bird or animal who could tell him.

  One-eye came to visit regularly these cold, cruel nights, but the more he came to rely on the boy’s leftovers, the less hunting he did and the less news he had to offer.

  Nephesh was about most nights and by day there were all the birds of the garden – blackbirds, starlings, magpies, jackdaws – and Klamath flew overhead from time to time on his way to fresh fishing grounds, but apart from Nephesh none of them knew much about what was going on in the wood.

  There were human visitors too, of course. His mum and dad were there every day, but their talk of the business of adults in Dunadd or Glasgow didn’t interest Fraser. Jim Douglas came occasionally when he had some particularly exciting information to share, but Jim was bored by being indoors – he said he had enough of it at school – and never stayed very long.

  So it was to Rona, the vet nurse, that Fraser had to turn for more news of the strange goings on in the wood and around the farms. She visited him regularly, usually bringing Sandy, and then Fraser found himself translating between dog and girl while Rona could only look on in envy of his gift of talking with animals.

  One day she came alone. “Do you know what rabies is?” she asked him.

  Fraser had never heard the word.

  “It’s a horrible disease. Animals get it and they run about biting other animals and that spreads it. Sometimes animals with rabies bite people and if the people get the disease from them they usually die.”

  “Jim’s cat!” Fraser suddenly realised what all the fuss had been about.

  “Jet. Yes, he had rabies.”

  “He bit Jim’s dad.”

  “I know. He went to hospital in Oban. They’re giving him a course of injections. They think he’ll be all right.”

  “You said people usually die.”

  “They do if they catch the disease, but you don’t always get it even after you’ve been bitten. The doctors say Mr. Douglas will probably be OK, but they won’t be really sure for a few more days. The only thing is…

  “What?”

  “It’s almost as if he’s got it already.”

  “How?”

  “He’s turned all nasty. He’s started setting gins – you know steel traps that don’t always kill the animals that get caught in them – and he goes out with his gun and shoots at everything he sees. It’s as if he wants revenge on the animals for being bitten.”

  “Maybe he has caught it then,” suggested Fraser. “So he’ll die.”

  “I don’t know. Even when people do get infected there’s supposed to be a cure; that’s why he’s getting all those injections – only it doesn’t always work. You see it’s so long since there was any rabies in this country that nobody seems to know. Anyway, an inspector from the government has been to Kilrasken and disinfected the whole place. He’s put up a notice to warn people that there’s rabies about and he’s made an ‘Infected Area Order’. That means all the other cats have to be rounded up and put in quarantine. Misty and Tess have been vaccinated and have got to be muzzled and kept on the lead – just in case. And everybody’s got to be specially careful about letting out their cats and dogs. That’s why I didn’t bring Sandy. I don’t want to let him out any more than I have to.”

  Then Fraser told Rona what he had heard from One-eye.

  “So the weasels are spreading it,” muttered Rona. “I’ll tell Cathy. Maybe there’s something that could be done. In the meantime, if you see any animals behaving strangely around the garden don’t go near them.”

  “I’m not supposed to go out at all.”

  “I know. But just in case. Don’t take any chances.”

  “OK.”

  The next morning she was on the phone to him: “Fraser! Sandy slipped his lead last night and ran away. He’s been out all night…“ her voice broke down. “If you see him don’t touch him. Don’t talk to him. Keep away.” She hung up.

  THE AVENGER

  Donald Douglas stalked the dry stubble of the autumn field, 12 bore, double barrelled shot gun under arm, like a god of vengeance.

  The red weal on his hand itched a little and the hand felt warm; the weal in his mind burned like a branding iron and his brain blazed. At the far corner of
the field, where the dry stone dyke was partly ruined and an animal trail ran across it, he had set a gin, a grim steel trap like the jaws of a bear. Today’s victim was a rook, still flapping, trapped by one leg.

  “Not worth a cartridge,” he growled and broke the bird’s neck with his heel.

  One by one he checked and re-set his traps, killing any prisoners who were still alive and scouring the field for mild-eyed rabbits or hares which he would not bring home for the pot in case they were diseased. Then he headed for the wood where he could only hope to bring down pigeons or rooks which were not affected by rabies and which, away from nesting and lambing time, could not hurt him or his beasts in any way.

  “They’re all diseased,” he muttered to himself, lighting a cigarette and kicking viciously at roots and stones and banks of dead leaves. Then he patrolled what he had made his beat for the last week since Jet had bitten him, firing off his gun at dry leaves dancing in a sudden gust of wind or bare branches groaning above his head as if all nature was possessed by rabies and he had a holy mission to cleanse and purify the countryside.

  Fortunately he made so much noise stamping furiously along the dry, rustling trails and mumbling savagely to himself that the creatures of the woods were well able to keep out of his way.

  Some of the bolder rooks knew that where there is a man with a gun there are sometimes wounded or dead animals to feast on. So a group of them followed him as they might have followed a tractor ploughing a field for the worms it turned up, or as gulls will follow a fishing boat at sea.

  “Madness of the wolves,” croaked one – the story had got about since One-eye had told Fraser and Fraser had asked Nephesh and the day birds of the gardens for news – “Do men have it too?”

  “This one looks as if he has been bitten by a pack of weasels,” said another.