The Plague Dogs

by Richard Adams

  But wait--come back here a minute! Were you gazing up Wetside Edge into the mist on Great Carrs, or watching the buzzard sliding sideways down the north wind from Pike O'Blisco? Look eastward into Westmorland, down past Wreynus Bridge and Great Horse Crag to Little Langdale and the road that comes snaking up out of the valley, nearly eight hundred feet to where we stand on this clear November morning. A car is coming up, twisting from side to side with the road; a green car--a Triumph Toledo, I rather think-anyway, the kind of car that not infrequently goes with a job. And who, pray, is the driver? Take your binoculars to him. Yes, I thought as much. How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of Sir Ivor Stone's emissary! We are to be routed out in our solitude. It is indeed he! Ladies and gentlemen--Digby Driver, the urban spaceman! Let us--er--get a load of him, shall we?

  Digby Driver had not always been known by that name, for the very good reason that it was not his original one. He had been born about thirty years before--in some year soon after the Second World War, in fact--in a midland county borough; and at that time his name was Kevin Gumm. True, he had not been christened Kevin, for he had never been christened (which was not his fault), but he had nevertheless grown up with that name, which had been given to him by either his mother or his grandmother. We shall never know which, for not long after his birth his mother had left him in the care of his grandmother before vanishing permanently out of his life. This was partly due to the arrival of Kevin himself, for his paternity, like Ophelia's death, was doubtful and his mother's husband had laid it, most resentfully, at the door of the American G.I.s who at that time were thick on the ground in England. He certainly had some evidence tending toward this conclusion; and although his mother had denied the accusation, poor Kevin became first a casus belli between them and before long the final disrupter of a marriage-tie which had never been anything but tenuous. Mrs. Gumm began to look elsewhere and before long struck oil in the person of a sergeant from Texas, with whom she "took up," as the saying goes. Kevin would certainly have met with no more favour from the sergeant than he had from Mr. Gumm, and Mrs. Gumm (whose name, by the way, was Mavis), divining this intuitively (no very hard matter), took care to give the sergeant no opportunity to form a view. By the time Kevin was old enough to talk, Mavis Gumm had not been among those present for nearly two years, and since her own mother had not the least idea on which side of the Atlantic to begin to look for her, she found herself reluctantly stuck with Kevin.

  William Blake remarked that the unloved cannot love, but he said nothing about the development of their intelligence. Kevin was above average. He grew up sharp enough, and very much a product of his time. Thanks to his circumstances and to various ideas current among well-meaning people in the fields of child psychology, social welfare and state education, he also grew up without respect or fear for parents (since he knew none), for God (of Whom, or of Whose Son, for that matter, he knew even less) or for the school authorities (who were prevented by law from subjecting him to any effective restraint or discipline). Consequently, he developed plenty of initiative and self-confidence. In fact, it never really occurred to him that any opinion or purpose which he had formed could be wrong, either morally or rationally. The possibility was never a consideration with Kevin, the concept not really being one which held any meaning for him. For him, the prime consideration was always practicability--whether, if he took this or that course, anyone was likely to try to frustrate him, and if so, the extent to which such opposition could be ignored, deceived, brow-beaten, terrified or, if all else failed, cajoled or bribed into submission. For his elders he grew up having about as much respect as has a baboon--that is, he respected them to the extent that they were able to harm or to exercise power over him. One brush with the juvenile court at the age of ten (something to do with breaking and entering a shop kept by a seventy-two-year-old widow and threatening her with violence) taught him that on balance it was better to avoid attracting the attention of the police, less on account of the possibility of punishment than because it indicated incompetence and involved loss of personal dignity. The following year he obtained his entry, in the eleven-plus, to the grammar-school stream of the colossal local comprehensive school. As has been said, Kevin was no fool and, since he had the intellectual ability, once he got a taste of secondary education he soon began to realize the advantages to be expected from raising himself beyond his origins and out of his background. The only factor in his make-up likely to interfere with such progress was his amour propre and the tremendous respect which he felt for the personality of Kevin Gumm. No adult was going to tell him what to do or stop him doing anything he wanted. His grandmother had long ago given up trying. His headmaster did not come into the picture--the school was far too big and he no more knew Kevin by sight or character than he was able to know sixty per cent of his pupils. As for the form-masters, they tended to reach a modus vivendi with young Gumm, partly because he was no slacker--indeed, capable of excellent work at times--but principally because nearly all of them were afraid to take him on--not altogether physically afraid (though to some extent that came into it), but certainly afraid of friction and unpleasantness, and of getting no support, if it came to the crunch, from higher authority. The easier course was to stick to the letter of the law by helping him to develop his intellect on his own terms and leaving his character out of account. It was some time during the middle years of the sixties that Kevin obtained a state-grant-aided place to read sociology at one of the provincial universities.

  Now he really began to spread his wings. As a rebel student, he was a match for all challengers, not excluding even the great "Megaphone" Mark Slackmeyer immortalised by Garry Trudeau. He made himself the bane and dread of the university authorities; and might very well have proceeded on this triumphant course right up to graduation, had the direction of his career not been suddenly altered by two discoveries: the first, that one of his several girlfriends was pregnant and the second that she possessed two large and aggressive brothers who intended to spare no pains to make Mr. Gumm regard the matter more seriously than he had hitherto thought he would. Thus stimulated, Kevin departed precipitately from the university and plunged into the great anonymity of London. Not long afterwards (since he had to make a living somehow) he accepted the advice and good offices of a friend who had offered to use his influence to get him a small job in journalism.

  To be perfectly honest, reader, I cannot be bothered to set out the details of the various steps by which Kevin turned himself from a student of sociology into a successful popular journalist on the London Orator. They took him about five and a half years and at times made up a hard road, but he eventually achieved his aim. The alteration of his image, coupled with the retention of his zeal and ability, amounted to a brilliant personal manoeuvre which I must leave to be recounted by his biographer. A new image was essential, a change of name, the cutting of his hair, a radical modification to his beard. He even increased the frequency with which he washed.

  He began by turning his energies to free-lance journalism and discovered, as others had discovered before him, that as long as he stuck to the kind of views which had distinguished him at the university there was too much competition and too little chance of escaping by patronage from a jungle where this sort of jeu was decidedly vieux. Oddly enough, it was the abandonment of a political slant which really set his feet on the right road, for he first distinguished himself as the librettist of a successful rock musical, based on Mozart's Marriage of Figaro and entitled Out for the Count. And it was while being questioned by various journalists and television interviewers in connection with this opus that he began to reflect that there was no reason why he should not study and adapt their techniques to his own purposes. After a lapse of time and several trials and errors, he managed to gain entry to the "stories of human interest" field of popular journalism.

  Here all his past life, from the earliest years, paid off, and all his talents were fully employed. In short, he had found his metier.
Kevin's ear was well to the ground and he soon built up a web of reliable contacts and sources of information. Did some wretched, distracted girl gas herself and her children one dark night in Canonbury? Kevin was on the doorstep by seven the next morning and by one means or another could always contrive to extract some interesting remark from the husband, the neighbours or the doctor. Was a child abducted and murdered by a psychopath in Kilburn? The mother had no hope of evading Kevin--he knew her better than she knew herself. Was there a fatal traffic accident on the North Circular, a near-miss by an intending suicide at Putney, a case of two typists caught in possession of drugs at Heathrow, a schoolmaster accused of interfering with a boy at Tottenham, a Pakistani arrested and bailed on a charge of living on the immoral earnings of schoolgirls at Tooting, a knifing, a shooting, a case of corruption; rape, ruin, bereavement, heartbreak, the riving open of some long-concealed private grief? Kevin was the lad to make sure the public did not miss it; and infallibly hit upon the original line (not necessarily salacious, but invariably personal and destructive of human dignity) calculated to make of his subject a target for ill-informed indignation or raw material for a few moments of vicarious and mawkish horror. Privacy, reticence and human worth melted before him like ghosts at cockcrow.

  It was while in Copenhagen, getting material for a special feature on pornography and sexual night clubs, that he first adopted the nom de plume of Digby Driver, by which he was later to be known to millions of London Orator readers and eventually even to himself. He had decided that he needed a better image or persona for the job--something a shade jokey, suggestive of youth, energy and good humour, but having--as it were, at a deeper level of loose and irresponsible association--an undertone of delving, subterranean perseverance in the pursuit of news ("Digby") coupled with that relentless, forceful energy ("Driver") which ought to characterize an Orator man. The idea worked excellently. Kevin Gumm had gone into Copenhagen. Digby Driver came out.

  And what the devil (I hear you asking) has all this got to do with Snitter and Rowf, with Animal Research and Dr. Boycott? Nothing, you have concluded? Your Highness shall from this practice but make hard your heart. In fact, since we are standing about in this wild and empty place--for many miles about there's scarce a bush--for the Triumph Toledo to complete its ascent from Langdale, we might perhaps ask ourselves, "Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?" It is a difficult task to exclude all pity from the mind when confronting a weeping girl whose child has been strangled by a maniac--to get in at her window when her husband has put you out of the door. In fact, it is probably harder than the examination of a mongrel dog which has just withstood a shock of three hundred volts and is about to receive one of four hundred--but we really must get on. Here he comes now, right up to the Three Shire Stone. The moguls of the London Orator, arrested--as indeed the entire public has been, to some extent, arrested--by the strange and macabre death of Mr. Ephraim, have sent none other than Digby Driver to investigate and report upon the matter. And believe me, if he doesn't find a story, then Dr. Boycott's a Copenhagen swinger and Snitter's as sane as Lear and the Fool put together.

  Once again, Snitter hastened forward to catch up with Rowf. The mist, pouring from his head like the flow of some forgotten tap left running by the tobacco man, swirled between them, through and among the bents and sedges, in and out of the grey, sharp-edged stones piled in long walls across the moor. Everywhere lay the smells of damp heather, of lichen on stones, water, sheep, fresh rain and acorns.

  "Where are we, Rowf?"

  "Going to look for food, remember?" Rowf paused and sniffed the air. "There! That was a rubbish-bin--no mistaking it--but a long way off, over there--did you get it?"

  The bitter sense of all that he had lost came pouring over Snitter, tightening in a sharp-edged spiral, diminishing him, paring away his vitality and memories, his very thoughts and all those inward recesses in which he had thought to hide. He stood still on the wet heather, feeling himself reduced to a tiny, hard point which must at all costs be kept safe, which must not be destroyed, or he would be gone; the last drop would fall from the tap and disappear into the ground. He waited, panting. Then, suddenly, unaccountably, the spiral reversed, his head was wrenched about and from it came pouring, like a fungus, long, white stalks of loathsome growth, blighting, killing and destroying, laying waste the spaces of the fell into which they writhed their way.

  "It's not real!" gasped Snitter, staggering in horror of the slimy, phantom antlers. "Not real!" He shook his head and the chicken-wire, a clumsy helmet, tumbled one way and the other, falling across from ear to ear. "Jimjam, I couldn't help it! I couldn't--"

  "Jimjam? What about him?" Rowf was there, a hirsute, dog-smelling shape in the dark, friendly but impatient.

  "D'you remember him?"

  "Of course I remember Jimjam. The whitecoats killed him."

  "I killed him."

  "Snitter, get up and come on! I remember Jimjam perfectly well. He told us the whitecoats put a tube down his throat and forced bitter stuff into his stomach. Then he went blind and peed pus and blood all over the floor. You never got anywhere near Jimjam. Of course you didn't kill him."

  "The blood and pus came out of my head."

  "There'll be a lot more blood coming out of your head soon if you don't come on. No, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it. I know you're not yourself; but I'm hungry--famished. Can't you smell the rubbish-bins?"

  "I'm sorry, too," said Snitter meekly. "If there's any rubbish about you can always trust me to find it, Rowf. I remember now--we're going to look for rubbish, that's right."

  They ran together across the back of High Wallowbarrow and then began to descend steeply, scrabbling over the loose gravel and stones of the Rake. On their right, in the dark, a rill went chattering down. Snitter ran across and drank, smelling as he did so the acrid fume, beneath his paws, of a disturbed anthill. At the first sharp little bite he lurched away, overtaking Rowf at the foot of the slope. They smelt fowls and cows, and stood watching light spread gradually across the cold sky.

  "There's a farm over there, Rowf, across the field."

  "Yes, but it's no good to us. Can't you hear the dog?"

  "Oh-I thought it was me."

  "Whatever do you mean?"

  "Well, there are bits of me all over the place, Rowf, you know. I'm not really sure where I am."

  "Neither am I. I know where the dustbins are, though. Come on!"

  They skirted the farm by way of the fields and scrambled over a stone wall into the lonnin. The barking of the dog died away behind them. A few hundred yards further on they came to the Duddon, swift and wide, seven miles below its source, surging noisily down beneath bare, black-budding ash-boughs in the bleak dawn.

  The lonnin became a narrow road. They found themselves approaching sheds and a house with a trim garden alongside. Beyond, a bridge carried a larger road over the river. There was neither smell nor sound of a dog. After the briefest of pauses Rowf led the way round to the back, nosed along the side of a shed and the base of a low wall and then, with all the determination and force of his hunger behind him, jumped at the piled stonework and clawed his way up and over into the yard.

  As Snitter fell back from the wall for the third time, he heard from the other side the clang and thud as Rowf knocked over a dustbin, releasing a surge of smells--tea leaves, bacon rinds, fish, cheese and cabbage leaves. He gave a quick whine.

  "I--I--Rowf, can you help? I can't manage--I mean--why, what a fool I am!" said Snitter. "Of course it isn't a real wall. It's only in my head. I can make a gap in it if I want to."