The Plague Dogs

by Richard Adams

  Hey-up, yon tod wez jumpin'!"

  Snitter yapped happily and after a few moments the tod launched into the final spasm.

  "Th' light's gan oot i' th' farmhoose.

  It's gey an' quiet it seems.

  The aald chep's flat-oot snotterin'

  An' dreamin' bonny dreams.

  An' when yon sun comes up agin,

  There's hank o' feathers clagged to th' whin,

  But nowt to show where tod got in!

  By, mind, th' gaffer's jumpin'!

  "There's mist o' th' tops te hide ye.

  There's bracken thick o' th' fell.

  Streams where th' hoonds won't track ye.

  Ye've lugs, me tod, an' smell.

  There's shiny neets ye'll lowp and lark

  And randy run te th' vixen's bark.

  Ca' canny, else yer fer th' Dark

  Yon fettles aall yer jumpin'!"

  "What became of your mother, tod?" asked Snitter.

  "Hoonds," replied the tod indifferently, and began licking one paw.

  As night shut down the rain slackened, though the salty wind persisted, carrying their scent away eastward. From far out at sea, beyond Eskdale, the west yet glimmered with some streaks of day. Nothing could now be seen in the deep cleft below, but from the sharp-eared and keen-scented three the blackness concealed no movement of the Bootterilket Herdwicks among the rustling bracken below. Two yows together were moving slowly down into the bottom, while a third lagged further and further behind. At a final glance from the tod the hunting pack spread out and, with practised smoothness, began their encircling descent.

  "--playin' bluidy 'ell," said Robert Lindsay firmly, while carefully keeping his voice below the level of the conversation in the bar. "They are that--and theer's not a doubt they're dogs, 'Arry--cann't be nowt else. Livin' systematically off o' sheep."

  "Oh, ay?" Old Tyson drew on his pipe and looked down, swilling the remaining third of his pint round and round the pot.

  In response to all hints and leads he had so far remained uncommunicative. Robert, with reluctance, decided that, much as he disliked asking direct questions, there was evidently going to be no alternative to taking the bull by the horns.

  "Weel, 'Arry, it were joost as bank chap i' Broughton were sayin' as tha'd told Gerald Gray at Manor soomthing about dogs gettin' out o' research place, like."

  "Oh, ay?"

  "Well, it's serious matter, 'Arry, tha knaws, is sheep-killing, an' a bluidy lot o' woorry for thim as has sheep ont' fell. It is that. Happen Gerald were wrong--"

  Tyson re-lit his pipe, took a pull at his pint and again gazed reflectively into the almost empty pot. Robert, whose sympathetic imagination knew intuitively just how far to push his man, waited in silence, eyes fixed on the tiled floor. Among his many gifts was that of sitting still and saying nothing without seeming in the least put out or causing any embarrassment.

  "Theer's plenty Ah could saay gin Ah were stoock int' box," said Tyson at last. "Ah'm noan dodgin' owt, Bob, tha knaws. But Director oop at Lawson says to saay nowt, an' Ah divven't want to lose job, tha knaws. It's reet enoof job, is that, an' suits me joost now."

  "Ay, it's reet good job, 'Arry; it is that. Ye'd not be wanting any trooble."

  There was another pause.

  "Theer's organized hunt tomorrow, tha knaws," said Robert. "Got oop by tailor chap in Kendal, for advertisement like. Ah'll be gooin' along, joost for a bit o' sport."

  "Oh, ay?" said Tyson.

  Silence returned. Robert finished his light ale.

  "Well, this wayn't do, bidin' sooppin' ale, Ah'll joost have to be gettin' along now," he said, rising briskly to his feet with a clatter of nailed boots on the tiles. "Ah've still a bit to do milkin' cows, owd lad. 'Appen if tha had lost dog out o' yon plaace, tha'd knaw it'd not be woon to be chasin' sheep; so no bother, like."

  He nodded and made to move towards the door, from beyond which sounded an intermittent popping and banging as the young of Coniston celebrated the debacle of Guy Fawkes. At the last moment Tyson touched his sleeve.

  "Woon on 'em were fair devil of a beeast," he murmured into his beer, and immediately, without putting on his glasses, began studying the evening paper upside down.

  Saturday the 6th November

  "It's too much for me," said Snitter. "Haddaway hyem, tod. And you, Rowf. I'll have to follow you back later."

  It was perhaps an hour before first light. The night's hunt along the steep, western slopes of Hard Knott had proved the longest and most exhausting they had yet undertaken. Without the tod's uncanny ability to tell which way the quarry was likely to have fled, they would certainly have lost it in the dark and been obliged to begin the whole hard task once more. Rowf, kicked and battered yet again before the death, had broken up the kill ferociously, his own blood mingling with the sheep's as he gnawed hoof, gristle, bone and sinew in his ravenous hunger. The splinters of broken bone, pricking Snitter's belly as he lay down to sleep, recalled to him the guinea-pigs' tiny remains in the ashes of the furnace-chamber.

  Waking in the night with a vague sense of menace and danger, he had found himself so chilled, stiff and lame that he began to doubt whether he would be able to manage the return to Brown Haw with the others. He felt strange. His head was full of a far-off ringing sound that seemed to come between his hearing and the wind and he had, looking about him, a renewed sense of detachment and unreality-symptoms which he had come to know all too well. For a time he limped up and down while the others slept on, then lay down again and dreamed of an enormous, explosive crash, of disintegration and terror and of falling endlessly between the sheer walls of a putrescent cleft smelling of disinfectant and tobacco. Starting up, he felt his ear nipped between pointed teeth and found the tod beside him. "Yer weel woke up oot of that, kidder."

  "Oh--a dream! You didn't hear--no, of course not." Snitter struggled up. "Was I making a noise?"

  "Ne kiddin'. Ye wor rollin' aboot an' shootin' yer heed off. Fit te be heard a mile, hinny."

  "I'm sorry. I'll have to get some feathers for my head, won't I? It's ringing like a white bell-car; no wonder it feels noisy." Confused, he hopped a few yards on three legs, peed against a stunted rowan and came back. The tod lay watching him with an air of detached appraisal.

  "Hoo ye goin' on? Ye heven't tuk bad?" Before Snitter could reply it added, "Ah'll caall up th' big feller noo. We'll hev te be goin'."

  "Already?"

  "Ay, time w' wor away hyem."

  "Which way?"

  "Up ower th' top of th' clough there."

  "I hope I can do it."

  "Ye'll hev te tek it canny, lad. Yer far ower tired fer runnin' aboot, so th' sharper we're off, th' forther we can get afore th' leet comes."

  The rain had ceased. Rowf, still half-asleep, dragged the sheep's fore-leg out of the sticky welter and carried it as they set off, climbing steeply up the bed of the gill and so out on to Harter Fell's north shoulder. It was here that Snitter began to fall behind and finally lay down. The others came back to him.

  "It's too much for me," gasped Snitter. "I'll have to follow you home later. I feel so strange, Rowf. My feet are cold."

  Rowf put down the fore-leg and sniffed him over. "You're all right--it's only in your head, you know."

  "I know that--it's looking out of it that's so difficult. I'm not at all sure it's me inside, either." Snitter kicked gingerly, testing one back leg. "Is it--is it--glass or what?" He stood up and immediately fell down again. "My leg's over on the other side of--of the--"

  Rowf sniffed again. "Your leg's all right--"

  "I know it is, but it's over there."

  "That's the sheep's leg, you fool."

  "That's not what I mean," said Snitter miserably. "I can't--what is it? Talk-to my leg."

  "Let's away, an' give ower yammerin'! If wor still on th' fell when th' sun's up, wor knacked. Them farmers--if they clap their eyes on us--"

  Harter Fell

  "Oh, do leave me and get on!"
cried Snitter desperately. "Let me alone! I'll be back before mid-day. No one's going to see me--"

  "See ye a haff-mile off in a mist, hinny--ye an' yer magpie's jacket--"

  Enveloped in the mist pouring from his own head, clung to by impalpable flies, enclosed within a jolting, invisible helmet of chicken-wire, Snitter floated away, watching the tod's mask recede and fade upstream through brown peat-water flowing insensibly, yet plain to be seen, across his flank.

  When he awoke, the sun, from a clear sky, was shining warm into his head. A ladybird was clambering laboriously among the bents close against his muzzle, and he watched it without moving. Suddenly, beyond and between the grass stalks, a buzzard sailed into sight, low against the blue, and hung, wings fluttering. Snitter leapt up and the buzzard slid away.

  He looked about him. The slope was empty. The others had gone. At least--He ran a few yards uphill, until he could look round the base of a nearby crag and, in the same moment that he knew himself to be alone, realised also that his faculties had returned and that he could both see clearly and use his legs. His head was still ringing, but at least he could now lift and carry it.

  He must be off. The voice of the Bootterilket sheep's blood was crying from the ground not half a mile off. He thought of the long run back to Brown Haw and of the farms to be avoided on the way. It would be tricky going in the broad, morning daylight. Should he perhaps wait until nightfall? But then, where could he lie up? Not here. He remembered the tod's warning. This was too close to the scene of the kill. Elsewhere, then; and if he had to look for a refuge, he might as well seek it along the way home as anywhere else.

  Which way might the tod have guided Rowf? Not the way they had come, that was as good as certain. Snitter, muttering "Roondaboot, roondaboot," cast back to where he had been lying and without difficulty picked up the tod's scent in the heather. To his surprise it led down the fell well to the north of their last night's route across the Duddon. Scattering innumerable spiders and a drowsy bumblebee or two, he shushed his way downward through the wet bracken and all in a moment found himself out upon the Hard Knott pass road where it wound back and forth in steep hairpin bends up the hillside. He nosed quickly across the narrow, grey roughness of tar and petrol exhaust and picked up the tod's line again on the opposite side. Down once more and so, at length, round towards Duddon and the Cockley Beck farmhouse standing among its trees on the further side of the bridge.

  As he splashed his way across the river some little distance above the bridge and climbed back up the bank to the road, he was suddenly aware of a car standing on the verge near the signpost, about fifty yards away. Against it a man was leaning--a man with very clean boots, new, heather-coloured knee-breeches, a green twill coat and round, brimmed hat to match. Even at this distance the smell of his clean clothes was plain. His face was turned towards Snitter, but his eyes were obscured by some object which he was holding in front of them--something resembling two small bottles--two dark, glassy circles, fastened together. Beside him, propped against the wing of the car, stood a double-barrelled shot-gun.

  The dog hunt, just as Mr. Ephraim had envisaged, had begun in good time and fine weather on Saturday morning, the various farmers assembling at the Traveller's Rest at Ulpha and being fortified with coffee and sandwiches by the landlord, Mr. Jenner, before proceeding up the valley to make a start on Caw and the rest of the Hall Dunnerdale land. Dennis, who had been infuriated by the frustration of his telephone conversation with Mr. Powell and more than ever convinced that Animal Research were at the back of all the trouble, had told everyone to look out for a dog wearing a green plastic collar.

  Mr. Ephraim himself, resplendent in new boots, sporting jacket (to use his own term) and pork-pie hat, and carrying for the occasion a borrowed twelve-bore of which his pride considerably exceeded his experience, was eloquent on the sartorial rewards to be distributed to the participants, but distinctly less knowledgeable about the way in which the hunt might best be organized. However, being a good-natured gentleman and anxious above all to stand well with customers and potential customers, he was perfectly agreeable to this part of the business being arranged by others, and watched appreciatively through his binoculars as the guns, spaced about sixty yards apart, combed the breadth of the hillside southward from Caw, reassembled, swung round westward to Brock Barrow and finally regained the valley road by Low Hall. Dennis had bagged a grouse and old Routledge, a noted wag, had first missed a snipe and then accounted for a slow-flying magpie as it cocked its tail on a branch. Otherwise they had seen nothing but sheep, meadow pipits, crows and buzzards.

  Mr. Ephraim and Mr. Furse (the latter taking copious notes and accompanied by a lady photographer) received them on the road with encouragement and nips of whisky, and they were further stimulated by a fine turn-out on the part of the various ladies of the valley--Gwen Williamson and her girls, Mary Longmire from the Newfield Hotel, Sarah Lindsay, Dorothea Craven ("Oh, what fun!"), Joan Hoggarth, Phyllis and Vera Dawson who kept the shop by the bridge, and several more. There was some disappointment that no one should as yet have seen the least sign of the dog marauder, but Mr. Ephraim, undeterred, made light of it.

  "Well, it's early yet, ain't it? Anyway, at least we've found out where the dog's not, and no more dead sheep on your land either, Mr. Lindsay, eh? What you think we'd better do now, Mr. Longmire? Go up the valley and work over Mr. Williamson's land?"

  "Ay, that'll do," answered Jack; then, turning to Harry Braithwaite, he added, "D'ye think so, 'Arry?"

  Since Mr. Ephraim found Mr. Braithwaite (whose Lancashire was extremely broad) altogether incomprehensible without interpretation, he contented himself with beaming on everyone, shepherding them into the hired minibus and leading the way up the valley in his car, leaving the ladies to go home to late breakfasts.

  The first leg of the hunt had also been observed with close interest by the tod and Rowf, from the concealment of a pile of tumbled boulders near the summit of Caw itself. It was only with difficulty that Rowf had been persuaded to leave Snitter asleep on Hard Knott, and he had at last agreed only when the tod had threatened to leave them both altogether.

  "Who's te knaw what's gone wrang wiv him? We canna bide wiv'm till he wakes. If we divven't shift oursels, we'll aall be finished--him an' aall. He can folly us back when he's pulled hissel' tegither. Yon's ne fyeul, on th' fell or off't. Poor sowl, it's yon dent in his head."

  They had already waited so long on Hard Knott, however--indeed, until the first streaks of dawn began to show behind the distant Wreynus Pass to the east--that the tod insisted that they must now make their way back by the highest and loneliest ground. They crossed the Duddon well above Cockley Beck, ran up Dry Gill in the first light and so on to Fairfield and the back of the Grey Friar. From here they made a straight five miles southward, passing over Goat's Hause, down the east side of Goat's Water and so, at length, along the eastern flank of Caw. The sun was gaining authority every minute and now, with less than a mile to go to their shaft, they lay down to rest in a patch of shade under a thorn-bush. As they did so the light wind veered round into the west and immediately the tod tensed and crouched flat.

  "What's the matter?" asked Rowf, copying him quickly.

  "Haald yer gob! Them lot o' th' fell, kidder! If ye got ne nose, ye got lugs, ha' ye not?"

  It slunk quickly uphill for two hundred yards, Rowf following, and then inched its way forward between the rocks. They could now see plainly the line of farmers, backs toward them as they combed the fell below. There was the sound of a shot and Rowf ducked lower still.

  "D'you think they're looking for us?"

  "Who else? Ne doot at aall. Sneaky sods, craalin' aboot roond our place. They should think shame! By, what wid Ah do if Ah'd th' power mesel'? Ah'd skite thim!"

  "They're moving off out of it now, though. Shall we go back?"

  "Go back? Nay, not for two morns. Mebbies more. Are ye daft?"

  "Where then?"

  "A quiet spot, an
d a lang way backa beyont, Ah warr'nd."

  "Not without Snitter," said Rowf emphatically. He waited for the tod to reply. After some moments it turned its head and stared at him without a word. Rowf, disturbed and excited as always by the rank, vulpine smell, stared back, watching the sun and moving shadows reveal and again cloud the irises of its eyes, flecked and peat-brown as the floors of shallow pools in the moss. At last he got to his feet.

  "If as many men as that are hunting the valley for us, then Snitter's in great danger. I'm going back for him."

  "Ye goin' on yer aan, hinny."

  Harry Braithwaite, Jack Longmire and the rest had finally decided that probably the best course would be to tackle next the mile-long north-west slope of the Grey Friar, from Fairfield and Hell Gill Pike down towards Cockley Beck and Wreynus Bottom. This stretch--by the time they had got up there and down again--would occupy the rest of the morning until lunch time. (Lunch, with beer, was, of course, being provided by Suitable Suits and they were looking forward to it.) Then in the afternoon ("If we've noan shot th' sod bi then," as Dennis remarked) they could conclude by getting up on Levers Hause and combing out the Tongue 'Us land on either side of Seathwaite Tarn. Mr. Furse, still indefatigably taking notes, boarded the minibus and set off with the rest for the top of Wreynus and the ascent of Wetside Edge, while Mr. Ephraim--who had no taste for climbing--disposing his binoculars and gun at the ready, remained alone at Cockley Beck.

  "If you drive it down towards me, gentlemen, I shall know what to do, shan't I? You might find it hung up to dry, eh, by the time you get down for lunch?"

  "Wi'owt he's ett it 'isself," remarked old Routledge, to a general laugh as the minibus moved off again.

  Mr. Ephraim sat on the parapet of the bridge in the cool November sunshine. Below him the brown Duddon chattered between its rocks. A late grey wagtail, dark-backed and clear yellow beneath, bobbed and flirted its way upstream from stone to stone and a robin twittered autumnally in a half-bare mountain ash. With a thrusting heave of its buttocks, a black-faced Herdwick scrambled up from a peat-rift and trotted away through the ling, while far beyond, the cloud shadows followed one another in ripples across the great slope of Stonesty Pike. On the Cockley Beck clothes-line, two or three brightly coloured dishcloths were cracking like whips in the wind.