The Plague Dogs: A Novel

by Richard Adams

  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 métier. 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 exclu
de 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.”

  He limped his way along the line of an open, concrete-lined gully running from a square hole at the base of the wall to its further corner. Round the corner, as he had known—since he had himself just caused it to appear—there stood in the wall a green-painted gate of divided palings. Between these, Rowf could be seen nosing about. He had pushed aside the lid of the rubbish-bin and was pulling the contents across the yard. Snitter, belly pressed to the ground, wriggled and squeezed his way under the gate.

  “Mind, Rowf, careful! That’s a tin edge-it’s sharp!”

  Rowf looked up, bleeding from a cut along his upper lip. “Not half as sharp as I am! Cheer up, Snitter; don’t give way yet—we’re still alive! Here’s an old ham bone and you can have it all!”

  At the first lick Snitter realized that he was very hungry. Lying down out of the wind, in the lee of the shed, he began to gnaw.

  Phyllis Dawson woke with a start, looked at her watch and then at the window-panes. It was a little after seven and just light—a grey, cloudy, windy, leaf-blown morning, with rattlings of rain here and gone across the glass. Something had woken her—a noise—something unusual. But what? It wouldn’t be anyone trying to break into the shop—not at seven o’clock in the morning. But it might well be someone trying to help himself out of the locked petrol-pumps—that had been known before now.

  Seathwaite

  Phyllis slipped out of bed, put on her dressing-gown and slippers and looked out of the window. There was no one outside the front of the house. The road was empty. On the coping of the wall, the rain had washed clean the petroglyph outline of the great salmon caught by her father in the Duddon many years before. Beyond and below the wall, the river itself was running high, noisy and turbid, tugging at ivy-strands, pulling here and there at a trailing ash-bough, rocking its way down and under the bridge in tilted, glistening waves.

  At that moment Phyllis heard, coming from the back of the house, sounds of commotion—irregular noises of dragging, bumping and knocking. She called to her sister.

  “Vera! Are you awake?”

  “Yes, I am,” answered Vera. “Can you hear the noise? D’you think it’s a sheep got in at the back, or what?”

  “I can’t tell—wait a minute.” Phyllis made her way to a rear window overlooking the yard. “Oh, my goodness! It’s two dogs down there! One’s a big one! They’ve pulled the rubbish all over the place! I’d better get down to them at once. Oh, what a nuisance!”

  “But whose dogs are they?” asked Vera, joining Phyllis at the window. “I’ve not seen them before.”

  “They’re certainly not any of Robert Lindsay’s dogs,” said Phyllis, “and I don’t think
they’re Tommy Boow’s, either. They don’t look like sheep-dogs at all, to me.”

  “Oh, look!” said Vera, catching her sister’s arm. “Look—the collars! Green plastic collars! D’you remember Dennis said—”

  At this moment the smaller of the two dogs below moved, raising its head, and Vera drew in her breath sharply. The winter morning suddenly seemed still more bleak and grim. It was the kind of sight at which an Irish peasant crosses himself. Both the Dawson girls started back with a spasm of horror.

  “Lord save us! Whatever’s happened to it? Its head, look—it’s almost cut in two! Did you ever see anything like it?”

  “The other one—the big one—its mouth’s all bloody!”

  “That must be the dog—the dog that killed the poor Jewish gentleman at Cockley Beck! Don’t go down, Phyllis—you mustn’t—no, come back—”

  “I am going down,” said Phyllis firmly, from the stairhead. “I’m not hiding indoors while a couple of stray dogs pull our rubbish up and down the yard.” She reached the foot of the stairs, picked up a stout broom and the coke shovel, and began to draw the back-door bolts.

  “But suppose they attack you?”

  “I’m not standing for it! Whatever next?”

  “We ought to telephone the police first—or d’you think the research place at Coniston—”