The Plague Dogs

by Richard Adams

  "Rowf?"

  "Owl and rat, shrew and crow," muttered Rowf thickly. "Fiercer--older--fiercer--"

  "Are you an owl, Rowf; a rat? I can't fall so far--"

  Rowf lowered his muzzle to the ground.

  "Long ago. Fierce sire; fierce dam. Fiercer than men. Kill or be killed-" "Rowf--"

  "Wolf and crow; penned in byre sheep and lamb. Smash the pen, belly filled. Jaws grip and teeth rip--"

  He snarled, tearing at the ground with his claws. "Owls, yes but fiercer. Rats, but more cunning."

  From the grinning jaws which he turned upon Snitter foam was dripping in viscous, sharp-smelling runnels. Snitter, belly pressed to the ground in subjection, felt rising from his own being the response of a tameless force, old, long-lost but now restored, innocent of mercy to any other creature, cunning and ruthless, living only to hunger, to smell out and pursue, to kill and devour. As he plunged to meet it, slobbering and urinating in the eagerness of surrender, it flowed over and engulfed him and he too tore and bit at the ground. The mist was changed to an intoxicant fume that was indeed pouring out of his own maimed head. Yet now he knew himself also the creature of the mist, that mist created by an all-wise providence expressly to conceal the hunter from the quarry; the hill-mist below which, in lonely valleys, men--not so long ago--had hidden, in their huts and caves, from the teeth of the prowling, four-footed enemy whom they could not even see before he fell upon their homes and cattle in the black night.

  "Food, Rowf! Food, Rowf! Kill it! Kill it! Kill!"

  "We're going to kill it now," answered the great, black hound, through bared teeth. "Men? Men?"

  "Men or their beasts."

  "Which way? Which way, Rowf, which way?"

  "The way I smell."

  Running beside him, Snitter could wind at first only the emptiness of the high fell, the grass evenly wet as though a net of fine water-drops had been cast over the whole mountain. Eyes and ears alike could tell him nothing more and his nose conveyed no sense of direction. Every smell--leaves, salt, rain, bracken, heather and rock--came from all directions and from none; was, in fact, the smell of the enveloping mist itself. If there was a beck trickling below, its sound did not penetrate the mist. If there were stars overhead, their light had no business here. This obscurity was more than darkness. It was void. Rowf, he understood dimly, had invoked to their aid a power which, although their own by ancient right, was also one of overwhelming ferocity, dreaded by men and animals from the beginning of time; cruel, furtive and slouching; a power whose servants were bound, in return for a thin measure of hazardous survival, to inflict the only law in the world, the law of Kill or Be Killed. Suddenly he understood why it was that, though he and Rowf were moving silently on, the stones, the wet grass and crags remained unchanged; why he could not tell up-wind from down-wind, mist from rain, starlight from darkness. For it was time through which they were moving; to a place where dogs knew of men only that they were enemies, to beware, to outwit, to rob and kill. Sharp flashes of pain came and went in his head. The watery air seemed to be choking him and now, as he peered about him, he perceived with fear that they were no longer two but many. Round them in the mist other animals were padding--shadowy animals with prick ears, lolling tongues and bushy tails--all silent, all voracious and intent, each knowing that his share would be nothing but what he could seize, tear, defend and devour for himself.

  "Rowf," he whispered, "who are they? Where are we?"

  Without answering Rowf bounded suddenly forward, leaping between two boulders and down into the rocky, sheltered space below. Snitter heard his high-pitched growling and the plunging and kicking of a heavy body. As he himself jumped through the cleft Rowf was thrown backwards on top of him. There followed a clicking of hooves and rattling of stones as the yow vanished into the darkness. Rowf, bleeding, picked himself up and spat out a mouthful of oily wool.

  "It was too quick for me. I couldn't get it by the throat."

  "To kill it? Is this--is this--where they kill?"

  "And eat," said Rowf, "or starve. Come on."

  Again he scented, tracked and found. Again the quarry eluded him as he sprang at it, and he pursued it down the almost sheer face of the fell, so that Snitter lost him and wandered, limping and yapping until, by chance rather than by scent or hearing, he came upon Rowf lying in a stony rift, panting as he licked at one bleeding fore-paw.

  "Don't leave me, Rowf! This place frightens me. I daren't be lost here--alone--"

  "They're too quick," said Rowf again, "and very strong. They know their way about here, too."

  "Those--those dogs this afternoon," said Snitter timidly.

  "Damn them!"

  "Yes, but--wait--I'm trying to dig it up. If one dog goes alone after a sheep, the sheep runs away--more or less wherever it wants. Those two dogs went to different places--I was watching--so that they could drive the sheep down to the man. He kept calling out to them and they did what he said."

  He could not tell whether Rowf had understood him or not. He waited in the empty darkness, rubbing his muzzle against Rowf's sodden, shaggy side. At length Rowf answered, "Well?"

  "Two different places--dogs in two places--one runs while the other waits--There was a cat once," said Snitter, "in the street. I was chasing it and it ran round the corner straight into another dog."

  "Well?" Rowf, a grim stranger, scratched impatiently at the stones. Snitter became confused.

  "The cat floated down the gutter and I blew away with the leaves. The other dog was carrying his master's leg--that was before the lorry came--oh, my head!"

  When he came to himself he was still in the remote, savage place, and Rowf was licking his face.

  "Don't bite me, Rowf! Don't! I saw a sheep--a sheep like a cat. It turned the corner and you were there, waiting for it."

  "I understand. Come on then."

  They set off once more, at first climbing steeply and then, coming upon fresh sheep-dung on a narrow trod, creeping stealthily along it, one behind the other.

  "There's two of them ahead of us," said Rowf suddenly. "Not too far, either." He sniffed the air again, then moved silently off the trod to one side. "I shall be waiting behind this rock."

  There was no need for further talk. Snitter knew now what they would do and knew that Rowf knew also. Rowf had seen the cat turn the corner because they were no longer separate creatures. It was their nature, he now understood, to fuse as clouds fuse, to draw apart as the wind might impel them, to mingle again as waters mingle, obedient to the pull of the earth: to feel a single impulse, as a hundred pigeons turn together on the wing; to attack together, as common in purpose as bees driven to fury by a scent on the air; to retain nothing individual. He and Rowf were an animal--an animal that must eat, and had accordingly been given faculties to fulfil that need, including that of being in two places at once. It was this animal that he had left crouching behind the rock, this animal which was now slinking silently over the grass, climbing to get round the sheep on the trod below, creeping down beyond them, yes here was the line of the trod, turn back now in the direction from which he had come, sweet, rank smell of sheep's wet breath, bulky shapes in the mist--

  Snitter, breaking into a fierce yapping, dashed forward. The yows fled from him immediately, one bleating and plunging away down the fell. The other ran back along the trod and even as he followed it a quick warning flashed into his nose, his feet and ears, uttered by the shadowy comrades hunting round him: "The first sheep went down the fell because you dashed in too fast and panicked it. Hold back and let this one keep on along the trod."

  He stopped, uttering growls that ended in snapping barks. He heard hooves trotting, a shallow puddle stamped in, stones rattling and then, like an impact upon his own body, Rowf hurtling forward to bury his teeth in the sheep's throat. Dragging, battering, beating against the crags: kicking and plunging; and he was running after the sound in the dark. There was blood, steaming blood, sniff lick drooling on the ground, growling breath and a h
eavy body struggling, staggering forward, a clot of bloody wool, a choking, rattling noise somewhere ahead. Where? This was it, this was it, Rowf underneath, blood and shit and the smell of a sheep in agony and terror. He snapped and bit at the head, at the convulsed jaws and staring eyes, then found the edge of an open wound in the throat and ripped and tore. Suddenly, as he tugged, a great spurt of hot blood poured over his face. The wool and flesh gave way in his teeth and he fell backwards, recovered himself and leapt in again, this time to feel first an inert throbbing and then stillness. Rowf, a black, hairy bulk soaked in blood, was dragging himself out from under. Snitter, beginning to lick, could taste dog's blood mingled with sheep's. There was a jagged scratch along Rowf's left side and one of his fore-paws was oozing blood.

  Rowf's weight thrust him aside, gasping with excitement.

  "Tear it, tear it!"

  When the stomach was ripped open they dragged the steaming entrails among the rocks, gnawed at the rib cage, fought over the liver, chewed the wet heart in pieces. Rowf tore at a haunch until he had it severed, sinew, ball-joint and skin, and lay crunching the red bone in his teeth. Warmth flowed through them, and confidence--in the dark night where others were afraid, and the cold retarding the alertness of their prey. Snitter pissed over one rock after another--"That'll show them who owns the place!"

  Rowf, curled upon the bloody stones as though in a basket, opened one eye. "Show whom?"

  "If those sheep-dogs came back here now, Rowf, we'd tear them, wouldn't we? Tear them--they'd break up like biscuit! 'What's this, what's this? Dear me, a piece of a dog, who can have been so careless?' I'm careless, Rowf, not a care, very fair, very far, ha ha!"

  Incrimination and heady elation, cutting capers in the misty vapours, havoc and ravage hurrah for the savage life precarious, life so various, life nefarious and temerarious, pulling faces, fierce grimaces, leaving traces in rocky places, pieces and faeces all over the fleece is that a yow's shoulder they've left there to moulder stuck up on a boulder? Much to learn, Rowf, in the fern, of great concern, for this is the point of no return. Those who kill sheep should mind where they sleep, when there's nothing to hear the shot-gun is near, the curse of the farmer is likely to harm yer, a scent in the morning is sent for a warning, at a cloud on the sun a wise dog will run, it's the sharp and alert who avoid being hurt and a dog that's gone feral is living in peril. Those with blood on their paws and wool in their jaws should heed these old saws.

  Rowf, as yet far from adept but uneasily aware that a great change had indeed come upon them, got up and began padding up and down, nosing about, listening and throwing up his head to smell the air.

  Mist in the Lakeland can fall as swiftly as rooks fill the sky on a fine evening, almost faster than the fell-walker's hastily unlocked compass-needle can swing north to give a bearing: may swirl around the lost in icy folds until the very cairns themselves seem loosed and moving, weaving, deceiving, drifting landmarks in a muffled no-place where mountain gullies lead down into pits of air. And again, once fallen, the mist may break up as suddenly, opening as fast as a hastily ripped envelope full of bad news.

  First Snitter saw the stars--bright Deneb in the zenith, Arcturus twinkling grim and very far. Thorough the fog they came and then, all on the instant as it seemed, the opaque, sound-muffling blanket vanished before a wind smelling of sea-weed and salt-drenched sand. Startled by the swiftness of the change, Rowf instinctively crept under a crag, as though knowing himself dangerously revealed beside their kill in the sudden clarity of moonlight.

  It was a little below the high ridge of Levers Hause that they found themselves exposed--a watershed steep on both sides, so high and steep that yows seldom cross from one valley to the other--those that do being a mere handful, a half-dozen or so to be recognized at getherin by their marks and exchanged at shepherds' meet on Walna Scar. They had crossed the ridge to the Dunnerdale side. To the south hung the grim, eastern face of Dow Crag, that gully-riven precipice that has killed too many climbers, including a veteran of Kashmir. North-westward rose the flat top of Grey Friar and directly below lay the hanging valley known to Seathwaite shepherds as Rough Grund--the land above and draining into Seathwaite Tarn. A light wind was ruffling the surface of the tarn with a broken, maculate gleam, from the shallow, marshy infall down to the deep water round the convex curve of the dam. Thus seen from a mile away, the place looked, at this moment, peaceful even to Rowf--Charybdis asleep, as it were, or the clashing rocks of legend stilled in their noonday trance. In all the mile-wide valley they could see no movement save that of the becks and yet, watching from this high, bare shelf among the strewn remains of their kill, both dogs, hearkening unknowingly to the whispered warnings of that cunning, bloody power whose service they had entered, felt exposed, strayed beyond safety, out of shelter, dangerously in the open.

  Snitter's high spirits flickered and died like a spent match. He sat clawing at his plastered head and looking down at the marshy floor below.

  "We're birds on a lawn, Rowf, flies on a pane. The moon will come and run us over."

  Rowf considered. "A man may come--we don't know. Those other sheep this afternoon belonged to a man; so this one must have too. He might have a gun, as those dogs said."

  "The same man?"

  "Or a different man. It doesn't matter. We must get away." "But where?"

  "I don't know. They've put tanks everywhere, you see--there's another one down there."

  "But, Rowf, you know the whitecoats never come at night. We've got time to find somewhere to hide, somewhere to run before the sun, before the gun."

  Rowf blew out warm, steaming breath. "Hide? They might be watching us now."

  "How could they be?"

  "Well, they might have something that makes things look close when they're far off. They might be watching from right away over there."

  "Oh, that's silly, Rowf. I know they can disappear and breathe fire and create light and all sorts of things, but they couldn't possibly do that. You're letting your imagination run away with you."

  Rowf yawned wide and licked his chops. Snitter could see fragments of sheep's flesh and sinew hanging between his teeth. "Anyway, we may as well go down into that valley as anywhere. If I can."

  "If you can?"

  "I'm bruised to pieces. I had to hang on by my teeth while that brute battered me against everything it could find. You can try it next time. I'll have to go slowly."

  They set off down the hillside, Rowf scrambling and limping in and out of the rocks on three legs. Snitter, who could have gone twice as fast, kept running nervously from side to side, pushing his nose under stones and again turning to look out across the empty valley. The noise of the far becks came up with a wavering sound, receding and returning, and the outline of the distant, long shoulder of the Friar, too, seemed oscillating minutely to and fro, as though, poised yet not absolutely stable, it was sharing the movement of the air--or perhaps, thought Snitter, as though he himself had become a little giddy with gazing across the moonlit distance. As they came down on the wet moss the illusion left him. His paws were sinking in soft ground, boggy, full of watery rifts, and he was coaxing Rowf forward to no destination that he knew of. They could no longer see as far as the tarn and the outlines of the surrounding heights were altered, humped shapes against the night sky. Rowf stopped to drink, lapping noisily, and then lay down in a patch of rushes.

  "You'd better go on, Snitter--wherever you're going. I've had enough--until tomorrow anyway."

  "But if you sleep there, Rowf, in the open--"

  "Might as well lie here as anywhere. Where were we going, anyway? I've got to rest, Snitter. My leg hurts."

  "Caught stealing up on the table--"

  "Snitter, let me alone!"

  He bared his teeth. Snitter, catching the smell of his pain and exhaustion, went pattering quickly away, in and out of the bents and rushes. Suddenly it seemed, at this moment, a small matter to leave Rowf. He could not help him. Not his energy, but his resource
s were at an end. His ignorance lay all about him like a marsh, his madness within him like stagnant water. In this artificial, man-made wilderness he had no idea what might disclose itself, what might be lying just out of sight in any direction; nor, if granted the power to see, would he have been any wiser about what he ought to do. Once, there had been a master and a home: then, after the lorry--afterwards--the canine block, the tobacco man and the knives of the whitecoats. The escape from the whitecoats--all the cunning, courage and endurance--had proved useless because there was nowhere he and Rowf could go, no life which they could live. He remembered what Rowf had said in the pen--"There might be something worse through the door." True, there was no enemy present now, but since their escape they had not met with a single friend, animal or human, and though nothing had happened when they killed the sheep, he knew intuitively that they had committed a crime which was bound to come to light, a crime the perpetrators of which would not be forgiven. "He'll fill thee wi' lead, joost." Might it not be better to put an end now to the anxiety and fear, to accept that they had no alternative but to suffer as the whitecoats required of them? Rowf had said so from the outset; had joined him, against his own conviction that they had no chance, only because he could not face the metal tank again. Where could they go, what could they do, what plan could they make in such a place as this? They would simply wander about until a farmer shot them or took them back to the whitecoats.

  Put an end, then. But how? Which way back to Animal Research? Please, sir, could you direct me to the nearest whitecoat? Do you happen to have seen a street lying about anywhere--a shop, a house, a dustbin? You see, I'm lost. My head was cut open and I fell in when I wasn't looking and now I seem to have kicked my brains to pieces trying to get out. There are leaves floating in black milk--I'm just looking for the way--no, not the way home, thought Snitter. I won't call it that.

  The stream in the middle of the Moss was wide--a good five feet at the place where he came to it, and deep on the nearer side. As he stopped, peering down from the bank into the dark water, he suddenly saw, reflected over his shoulder, the figure of a man--grey-haired, dressed in an old brown overcoat and yellow scarf, carrying a walking stick, his lips pursed to whistle. As the man nodded and bent to pat him, Snitter leapt round and jumped up at his knees, barking for joy. There was no one there, and he fell forward on the squelching peat.