The Plague Dogs

by Richard Adams

  "Lawson Park? Yes, that's right, duty officer, I said. London Orator here. Yes, of course I know it's Sunday. Look, can you give me the home phone number of the young fellow I talked to at Broughton last week? No, not Boycott, no, his name's--er--yeah, that's it, Powell, Stephen Powell. What? You say he's sick? Oh, is he? Sick, eh? What's he sick with? You don't know? I seel And you won't give me his number? Right, thank you. Thank you very much. Good-bye."

  "What is the mysterious illness afflicting young research scientist Stephen Powell?" muttered Digby Driver to himself. " 'Animal Station Preserves Suspicious Secrecy.' Well, we'll play it for what it's worth, but it's not really what Desmond's after--not for a body-blow. It's got to be bigger than that. What we ought to be praying for is something nasty, nasty--really nasty, oh yuck! Come on, Driver, get with it! But what, what, what?"

  Mr. Driver, smiting his forehead with an open palm, proceeded to seek inspiration in the bar.

  "I don't think we shall ever be able to find the tod now," said Snitter. "If I were a mouse I couldn't even run as far as the gully in the floor."

  He sat up, looking round uneasily at the sky. "I suppose the buzzards will come, but I hope we're properly dead first. Tug tug, munch munch, I say, Beakrip, old chap, which d'you like best, Snitter or Rowf?"

  "Shut up."

  "Have you ever thought, though, Rowf, we shan't need food or even names when we're dead? No names--like the tod--just the wind making those little whistling noises along the ribs, like that yow's bones last night that had nothing left on them. Nothing--not even maggots. That'll be us. Thank goodness we're out of the wind here. It's enough to blow a cat over the hill into the tarn. Here I come help miaow oh splash how did that happen?"

  Rowf said nothing, licked Snitter's ear for a few moments and then let his head fall back between his numbed paws.

  "Rowf, do you--"

  "I can still smell that stuff you said the whitecoats put into the hole in your head."

  "You weren't cut open. All the dogs who were cut open smelt of it. If you'd been cut open you'd have it too and you wouldn't notice. Rowf, d'you really think it's because of us that the dustbins had been taken indoors last night?"

  "Probably. They're all afraid of us, aren't they?"

  "So they all know--every one of them--about me killing people?"

  A few moments later Rowf was asleep again--a light, wary sleep, in which exhaustion barely turned the scale against hunger and the fighting animal's fear of being surprised and killed without the chance of a struggle. Snitter pressed himself deeper into the cleft between Rowf's shaggy coat and the base of the crag and lay gazing out over the fell and the dark tarn below. The sun, which had been shining from a clear sky during the early afternoon, was now hidden behind a bank of clouds like an arctic sea. From height to height, across the bitter waste, the snow lay austere and silent, knowing neither hate nor pity for whatever creatures it would kill during the darkness of the coming fourteen-hour night.

  "I'm a whitecoat," murmured Snitter drowsily, looking down at the slate-coloured surface of Levers Water, like an eye-socket in a skull, surrounded by its white, still shores. "I need to find out how and in what way you two dogs are going to die under this particular crag. You'll have noticed that I smell very smooth and clean, which is just as it should be: and that I cover everything up. You must understand that I'm not insensitive to the situation of my charges. My experiments have taught me great respect for all creatures. Your life certainly won't be wasted. Even your bones will have a use--you should feel proud and interested. Let me explain. There's a kind of buzzard that looks like a maggot--flying, of course--"

  A flock of gulls drifted into sight over the crag, sailing up into an aureate beam, high and remote above the deepening twilight below. Not a wing moved as they glided silently against the darkening blue, their out-stretched pinions and white plumage tinged with gold as often as they circled towards the west.

  "Whatever have I been dreaming about?" said Snitter. "That mouse has been chattering nonsense in my head again. It's not surprising, really--I feel quite light-headed. We've come such a long way since the car yesterday morning, and not a mouthful, not even the lick of a dustbin lid. We'll never be able to pull down a sheep again--never." He dozed off once more, but started up almost immediately at the cry of a passing buzzard. "No more wading down becks for me. I spilt my brains into that beck, I believe; anyway, I could feel them running down inside my head, so there you are." He looked upward. "Those birds--they're beautiful, soaring round up there. They look just like this cold stuff the men have put down--silent and needing nothing. The birds lie on the sky and the white stuff lies on the ground. I used to lie on a rug, once. I wonder where they come from? Perhaps we could get there, Rowf and I. Perhaps that's where Kiff is. If we don't find the tod--and we never shall, now--we'll starve all to pieces. Well, we're starving now, come to that. Poor old Rowf--it's worse for him."

  All day they had been hoping against hope to come upon tracks of the tod. After the raid on the car the previous morning they had crossed the main road, rounded the northern end of Thirlmere and then wandered south-westward, up the forested slopes of Raven Crag, and so by way of the moor south of High Seat, to the lonely hamlet of Watendlath beside its little tarn. Here, although they had waited for darkness and gone most stealthily about their business, they had had no success and fled away empty, with the barking of angry dogs behind them. The sound of Digby Driver had gone out into all lands, so that here, as at many dwellings throughout the Lakes, even the dustbins had been taken indoors. The ducks and hens, naturally, were no less securely out of harm's way.

  That they were both weaker and more exhausted than on that warmer morning, more than seven days before, when Rowf had killed at dawn above Bull Crag--pads sorer, courage and hope lower, energy much diminished and bodies more quickly fatigued--these things they felt continually. Later that night, at moonrise, they had searched the dismal, snowy fell, but found not a single sheep, save for a skeleton, long picked clean, lying among sodden hanks of old wool. Giving up all hope of a kill, they went on southward, crossing Greenup Gill among crumbles of snow and thin splinters of ice which dissolved even as they dropped into the biting water. It was when they realized that they were once more near Bull Crag that the thought of the tod had returned to Rowf. Impelled partly, perhaps, by that abused but still dog-like sense of loyalty and duty which had so often made him feel ashamed of his flight from Lawson Park and the drowning-tank, he had begun by blaming himself once more for the quarrel and then insisted that, somehow or other, the tod must be found and persuaded to rejoin them: it was possible that he might have returned, by himself, to the old lair. So they had set out, towards moonset, to retrace the way by which they had come from Caw and Brown Haw. By noon of the following day their hunger had become desperate. Above Levers Water they had lain down to rest and Snitter, in a kind of foolish, light-headed gaiety of privation, had spent the afternoon chattering about anything that came into his head, while Rowf slept and shivered in the lee of a tall crag.

  "Shall we be ghosts, Rowf, d'you think?" asked Snitter, wriggling like a puppy. "I say, Rowf, shall we be ghosts? I don't want to be a ghost and frighten other dogs. Look, there's a pink cloud drifting over now, right above those white birds. I'll bet Kiff's on it. I wish we could go wherever those birds have come from. It must be warmer there, and I expect their tobacco man gives them--I say, Rowf, I can pee backwards on a rock, look--" He tumbled head over heels and got up crowned with a helmet of freezing snow. In the act of shaking it off, he suddenly stopped and looked about him in surprise.

  "Rowf, listen, I've just realized where we are! Rowf! D'you remember that day--the first day after we escaped--when we chased the sheep--that shepherd man came--and those dogs got so angry with us? It's the same place--remember, the water and these rocks, and look, that's the beck over there? I wonder what made me realize it just now and not sooner? And come to that, I wonder where all the sheep have gone? Up in the s
ky, d'you suppose?"

  As he spoke, the sun shone for a moment through a rift in the clouds, glinting stilly on the distant water. There was the smell of a cigarette and a sound of crunching boots. A blue, moving shadow appeared and the next moment a man--surely, the very man of whom Snitter had been speaking--came striding round the end of the crag and stood still, his back toward them, looking intently out across the tarn. At his heels was following one of the two dogs who had so fiercely resented their chasing of the sheep. Seeing them, it stopped, with a low growl, and at once the man turned his head and saw them also.

  Rowf rose slowly and stiffly from the depression which his body had made in the snow, hobbled out of range of the man's stick and stood uncertainly on the defensive. Snitter, almost as though at play with some chance-met stranger in a park, took a few gambolling steps towards the man, wagging his tail. At this the man immediately backed away, flinging down his cigarette, which quenched, in the silence, with a quick hiss like a tiny utterance of alarm. Then, as Snitter hesitated, he swung his stick, shouting, "Git out, y'boogger!", turned quickly on his heel and disappeared at a run. Evidently he was too much startled and frightened even to remember his own dog, for he did not call it and it remained where it was, facing Rowf in the chilly shadow. At length, in a guarded but not altogether unfriendly manner, and looking at the depression in the snow, it said, "Tha's bin layin' there a guidish while, then. Art tha noan cold?"

  Rowf made no reply but Snitter, having cautiously approached the dog, stood still while it sniffed him over.

  "By, tha smells queer," said the dog at length. "Where art goin'?"

  "Nowhere," answered Rowf.

  The dog looked puzzled. "How doosta mean? Tha'lt noan be bidin ont' fell the neet?"

  "We've nowhere to go," said Snitter.

  The dog, plainly at a loss, looked from one to the other.

  "Wheer's thy farm at? Tha'rt noan tourists' dogs, Ah'm varra sure--tha'rt nowt but skin and bone. What art doin' here?"

  There was a pause.

  "We live in a shed," said Snitter suddenly. "There are pink clouds like rhododendrons. I know it sounds silly, but I'm going to clean the cobwebs off my eyes and then you'll be able to see what I mean. Just for the time being I have to leave it to the mouse. Can you tell us why your man was afraid of us? Why did he run away? He did run away, didn't he?"

  "Ay, he did that. Ah've nobbut seen t' like once afore, an' that were when he reckoned dog were sick wi' rabies, like. It were yoong pooppy, an' he reckoned it were in convoolsions--it were foamin' an' that."

  "Rabies?" said Snitter. "What's that?"

  "Doosta not knaw? A sickness--kind of plague, like--that kills dogs; but it's noan common. Happen he thinks tha's got it--tha smells queer enoof, an' that head on thee like rat split oop belly."

  "But you're not afraid of us, are you?"

  "Nay. Ah'd knaw reet enoof if tha had plague or sickness like, but that's whit t' gaffer thinks, for sure. Else he'd not 'a run."

  "Where have all the sheep gone?" asked Rowf.

  The dog looked surprised. "Sheep? We doan't leave sheep ont' fell in snaw. Sheep were browt down yesterday, an' damn' cold work it were an' all. That's what we're on with now--lookin' for any more as might 'a coom down off tops lasst neet."

  "I see," said Snitter. "So we shan't be able to--yes, I see."

  "So ye're livin' oop an' down ont' fell?" said the dog. "By, ye're thin wi't, poor booggers. An' ye're noan reet int' head an' all," it added to Snitter. "Happen ye'll die ont' fell. Nay, cheer oop, poor lyle fella, it's gan to thaw bi morning, canst tha not feel it?"

  Langstrath

  A sudden shouting--" 'Ere Wag, 'ere Wag--" sounded in the distance and the dog, without another word, vanished like a trout upstream. In the view from the crag, the white fell stretched bare as a roof down to the tarn.

  "He didn't recognize us," said Snitter after a little, "and he obviously thought we couldn't do any harm."

  "We can't."

  "My feet are cold."

  "They'll be colder if we stay here. We've got to find some sort of shelter. It may thaw by morning, as he said, but it's cold enough to freeze your eyes out under this rock."

  "What a sad sight that would be," said Snitter. "I couldn't see anything, could I? Not a maggot not a mouse not a dustbin round the house. Cheer up, old Rowf. We might find the tod yet, and perhaps there's a bit of the world somewhere that nobody wants. Anyway, wouldn't you rather die here than in the whitecoats' tank? I would. It's little enough dignity we've got left. Of all the things the whitecoats stole, that's what I feel worst about, I think. I hope we die alone, like decent animals."

  Sunday the 21st November to Monday the 22nd November

  Digby Driver's assessment of Mr. Geoffrey Westcott, though characteristically flippant, exaggerated and uncharitable, had nevertheless been--also characteristically--by no means entirely inaccurate. While Mr. Westcott had never, in fact, seen the inside of a police court, either in a defendant or any other capacity, there was, notwithstanding, a certain unscrupulousness in his make-up, together with a kind of self-centred, insensitive roughness. He lived largely by his own rules and sometimes stretched even them. Humanity in general he did not care for, preferring objects, especially artefacts; and he was not, as a rule, concerned to conceal this preference. When it came to getting the best out of fine or delicate mechanism, he had penetration and unlimited patience; for people, little or none. He possessed an above-average intellect and strong powers of concentration, but together with his solitary single-mindedness there went a potential (and at times something rather more than a potential) for intolerance and even fanaticism.

  He had been the second of six children of a railway linesman, and in the cramped, overcrowded home had, in sheer self-defence, grown up tough and impervious. He had developed a preference for his own company, and a passion for acquiring and mastering technological instruments, so much more satisfying and solacing, in their smooth, controllable predictability, than the emotional inconsistencies of human relationships. During adolescence he grew still further apart both from his indigent parents and his rough-and-tumble brothers and sisters; and met with no opposition--rather the reverse--when, as soon as he had taken his A-levels, he left home and set up for himself. His family, in effect, forgot him.

  He secured a good starting job at a bank in Windermere, yet it was not long before he came to be generally regarded as a misfit. Dour and quick to take offence, he tended to get on the wrong side of his colleagues and on more than one occasion displayed a total inability to appreciate the client's point of view.

  Westcott did not need people or want to get on with them. Living alone and without luxury, his income was already sufficient for more self-indulgence and private enjoyment than as a boy he had dared to hope for. His life-style took the form of a fairly rigorous regime of self-denial, directed towards the acquisition of a planned succession of fine technological durables. It would, perhaps, be tedious to catalogue his possessions--the prismatic compass, the Zeiss binoculars, the wrist-watch which could play "Annie Laurie" under water while displaying in fluorescent script the date and operative sign of the zodiac (or something like that), the quadraphonic gramophone which made the sound of a piano seem to come from four directions instead of one (which might have seemed strange even to poor Westcott if he had ever been able to stop fiddling with the controls long enough to listen with any concentration), the three electric shavers, and so on. Not his least source of pride and joy, however, was his small collection of guns and pistols. These were, of course, illegal, but sometimes, taking out one or another, he would risk a few rounds' fire in suitably lonely and secluded places. He had a good eye and was no bad shot. With the only rifle he possessed--a Winchester .22--he reckoned himself particularly handy, and was fond of shooting match-sticks at twenty-five or thirty yards.

  Some of his money had not been honestly come by. He had certain shady acquaintances and had more than once allowed himself, his car or his r
ooms to be made use of by these people.

  Mr. Westcott possessed at any rate one friend and that was his landlady, Mrs. Rose Green, a middle-aged widow. In time an odd relationship grew up between these two, who had both experienced so little of what most people regard as affection. In winter, Mrs. Green would after a fashion reassure Mr. Westcott by pooh-poohing his fears of infection--for in this regard he was inclined to indulge a mild neurosis. When he was setting off for a long day on the Pillar or the Scafell range, she would make him sandwiches and admonish him to be sure to return punctually in the evening for oxtail stew. When she had a mind to spend a Saturday morning shopping in Keswick, Kendal or even Preston, Mr. Westcott, if he were not bound for the tops, would drive her there and back in the Volvo. They had little conversation--Mrs. Green was not a warm or talkative woman--but that in itself rather increased than diminished their mutual respect. For chat and laughter they felt, by and large, contempt.

  The indignity, inconvenience and loss which Mrs. Green and he had suffered from the Plague Dogs aroused in Mr. Westcott all the brooding resentment of which he was capable (which was quite some), and this his dealings with Digby Driver had done nothing to allay. It was true that Driver had paid him quite well for the photographs, but while interviewing him Driver had--like many others before him--found himself disliking Mr. Westcott, who counted and pocketed the money without a word of thanks and tended to answer questions with a glowering and defensive "What? Well, for the simple reason that ..." Driver had therefore begun to needle him, lightly but deftly, in his best Fleet Street manner, in his own mind comparing Westcott's reactions to those of a bull pierced by banderillas. Mr. Westcott had parted from Driver with the surly feeling--which he had been meant to have--that some of these smart London fellows thought they were too damned clever by half. Although on the following day the police had succeeded in persuading him that he could with safety resume the use of his car, they had not, of course, cleaned up the mess of eggs, butter and mud which had soaked well into the back seat, while the germicidal fumigator used by the local authority had had a noticeable effect on the upholstery (already torn in two places by Rowf's claws). Moreover the delicate valve-tuning, over which he had taken such pains, had been impaired by whoever had driven the car back to Windermere. Among his final questions to Digby Driver, before they parted, had been, "Why don't you go out and settle the damn dogs yourself, instead of writing newspaper articles about them?" To which Driver, perhaps a trifle stung, after all, by the thrust, had managed to reply only "Oh, we're content to leave that to burly dalesmen like you."