by Mick Jackson
As he came to, he thought he saw some movement across the river. He tried to focus. Thought he caught sight of some figure as it retreated into the shadows. His heart was beating again now – ten to the dozen. And as he looked out over the bridge he happened to notice that the crate halfway across it was apparently upright – had somehow contrived to untopple itself.
The postman wondered if this wasn’t some other elaborate dream or hallucination. But the terrible discomfort he felt as he got to his feet told him otherwise. He looked out into the night, but saw no movement. Then he bent down and started pulling the rope in – very carefully, so as not to send the crate over again. And, long before he had it in his possession, he could see just how neatly the contents of the crate had been organised, with the letters tucked between the empty milk bottles and no sign at all of the loaves of bread.
As he lay in his bed that night he could come up with only two possible explanations, neither of which was likely to satisfy PC Harkins. Either some villager, riddled with guilt, had crept out and righted it. Or, in his stupor, Eric had crept out there and righted it himself. The disappearance of the bread and milk was a quite separate mystery. And to be fair, the possibility of bears being involved never entered his head.
8
The Great Bear
Who’d bury a boat? It was, the boys felt, a quite reasonable question – a question which, having formed in their heads, had proceeded to become lodged there almost as stubbornly as the boat was lodged in the ground. The fact that the mound where they’d discovered the boat was so high above sea level did nothing but add to their bewilderment.
Other people had their own ideas, but as far as the boys were concerned the only rational explanation was that at some point in distant history there had been a flood of such biblical proportions that the hilltops had been transformed into tiny islands, and the boat had been beached there – or conceivably even built there, like Noah’s Ark.
Now, deep in the night and with the mist thickening up all around them, the boys sat on the mound with their arms wrapped round their knees to try and generate some precious heat. Another three or four hours, they reckoned, and there might be a little daylight and, surely, no self-respecting looter of buried boats would go about their thieving business once the sun was up.
One of the boys had a torch and, at the other’s insistence, he turned it on to cast a bit of hope about the place. But the torch’s meagre beam did nothing but give the mist more substance, so it was soon turned off again. Then the boys just sat in silence, thinking how cold and uncomfortable they were, each one secretly hoping that the other might suggest abandoning their post so that they could go back home to bed.
The mound on which they sat was a familiar landmark – so familiar, in fact, that when they’d climbed up onto it only a week or so earlier to look out over the Levels, the boys couldn’t help but notice how something in its shape was slightly altered. A whole section of the ridge along the top appeared to have sunk a little, as if some minor collapse had occurred deep within it. And when they went down on their hands and knees they saw how the surface was laced with hundreds of tiny fissures and crevices.
Within the hour the boys had located a pick in a neighbour’s shed, had quietly removed it and were staggering back up the hill with it. That blasted pick was as heavy as an anchor – was such a weight that they had to carry it between them, taking turns at the business end.
Neither boy was entirely sure what they hoped to discover, but whatever it was they spent a good half-hour desperately hacking their way towards it and creating a hole almost two foot deep, turning up in the process a small heap of grit and chalk and gravel, before the pick had become so utterly unwieldy that they’d given up, in part through sheer exhaustion and in part through fear of serious injury.
The boys sat on the mound while they got their breath back, their shirts drenched with sweat. They stared out at the view before them, but as they talked one of them picked over the pile of earth, and was paying very little attention to it when he caught a glimpse of a tiny face staring up at him through all the soil and stones.
It was a strange, expressionless face. He picked it out and brushed the dirt off it. Just a smooth old stone, with a single scratch for a mouth and two blind eyes marked on it – features which looked as if they had been there for all eternity.
The boys spent quite a while wondering what to do with it. Simply looking at the thing gave them the willies. They considered keeping it secret. Considered putting it back in the ground, well out of the way. But the boys knew that even burying it was unlikely to stop them thinking about it. So they carried it back down the hill and showed it to their parents – a decision which they regretted within minutes of doing so.
Half an hour later the boys were climbing that hill for a third time, in the company of their fathers, who then did their best to outdo one another with their own shovels and spades. And in half an hour they’d dug a hole four times deeper than their sons’ effort and struck something solid and quite sizeable.
From that point on things progressed fairly swiftly, with more and more adults steadily getting involved. Alec Heydon, a local librarian-cum-historian, heard about what he felt amounted to an act of desecration taking place on what was very likely an ancient barrow and went haring up there and promptly requisitioned the entire site. Then, the following day, with a little help from one or two of his colleagues from the local archaeological society, he made his own discovery.
‘Ribs,’ he had announced to the small clutch of people gathered round the base of the barrow. It was the same term he employed in his letter to the professor at Oxford University, who duly jumped in his car and headed down the A420, post-haste.
‘Full marks,’ the professor told Alec Heydon soon after his arrival. ‘Ribs, without a doubt.’ Then he designated the site an official dig and drove straight home to pick up enough clothes and pipe tobacco to sustain him for however long the excavation was likely to take.
And then the word went round the village that ribs had been uncovered in that odd little mound overlooking the Levels. At the butcher’s the customers speculated as to what sort of ribs exactly they might be dealing with. Human ribs? Ribs off a mammoth, maybe?
‘Not ribs, as in a body,’ Alec Heydon had corrected them. ‘Ribs, as in a boat.’
When the professor returned he brought with him his own team of duffel-coated assistants, with their own special scrapers and brushes and sieves. Then the locals were herded back behind a rope, which created a fair bit of resentment, not least among the boys – and was tempered only by the fact that their fathers and Alec Heydon were herded back behind it alongside them.
But the following day, with the first fall of snow, the whole enterprise had suddenly ground to a halt. The professor didn’t seem unduly worried. He simply installed himself before the fire at The Coach and Horses, with a book and pipe and a glass of porter and patiently waited for the weather to change.
‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ Geoffrey Baines, the barman, asked him, ‘but aren’t you afraid someone might come along and steal whatever’s buried up there?’
The professor smiled and took another sip of his porter. ‘The only way anyone’s going to be stealing anything from up there,’ he said, ‘is if they happen to have their own gang of navvies. That ground’s as hard as steel.’
And this utterance too quickly entered circulation, as if it had been handed down by some great oracle. The boys were briefly heartened by it. But once the snow had stopped and the thaw had started, their buried boat again seemed suddenly vulnerable. The boys convinced themselves that news of their ancient boat had spread well beyond the village and that somewhere out there someone was plotting to steal it away. And no sheet of tarpaulin, frozen stiff and held down by rocks, was going to contain it. So they had taken matters into their own hands and, late at night, crept out of their bedroom windows and hiked up the hill to keep an eye on the mound and the boat moored deep inside it.<
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The first night had been a bit of an adventure. And when the moon crept out between the clouds and cast its icy light across the Levels it was as if a whole other world had been revealed to them – a strange and dangerous place which had almost nothing in common with its daylight equivalent. But on this second night they had sat and watched the mist come up around them. And after an hour or so had begun to feel quite cold and tired, and the novelty of being out in the night had suddenly worn quite thin. And what had, the previous night, seemed rather magical, now seemed downright dreadful and the boys began to sense that the mist had, hidden in it, all sorts of awful, unknowable things.
Neither boy had said a word for what felt like hours when one of them suddenly turned and squinted off into the mist. He was listening hard now, his eyes casting about for something concrete – something tangible. He slowly lifted a finger. The other boy looked over in the same direction, then shook his head. But the first boy continued listening, and the same raised finger shifted an inch or two to the right. And now they were both aware of it, whatever it was. Some sense of movement. Something moving in the mist.
The boys slowly got to their feet, still listening. And began to appreciate that whatever was out there was a great many in number – moving and breathing, and coming this way.
They crouched back down and, still facing forward, and with their eyes still searching, began to creep back off the mound. When they got to the bottom they turned and headed off into the fog, in what they sincerely hoped was the opposite direction to whatever advanced towards them. They scrambled away, backs bent and hands picking over the ground before them. But they had no idea where they were heading and arrived, quite suddenly, at a sheer drop, and one of the boys had to grab the other to stop him going over. Then they crept along the ridge, in search of some other way off the hilltop. And as they came around they saw the figures in the mist. There must have been a hundred or more of them – huge figures – moving with great conviction. The boys froze. The procession continued before them. But the moment the boys thought that most of the figures had passed them they got to their feet and ran.
They could have gone straight home – could have crept back into their beds and no one would ever have known what they’d been up to. But without a word being exchanged between them they raced around to The Coach and Horses and started hammering away at the front door.
The moment their fists struck the door a peculiar thing happened. The boys started crying – great breathless gulps, quickly followed by floods of tears. As if it had taken that sound or that simple action to break the spell and release them. Then all their emotions suddenly came tumbling out.
Geoffrey Baines was fast asleep and it took him a couple of minutes to come around, lay his hands on his dressing gown and find his way downstairs, by which time half the street was hanging out of their windows to see what was going on. Baines was still barely awake when he opened the door and found the two boys in such a state on his doorstep. But as soon as one of them managed to blurt out ‘Get the fella’, Geoffrey knew precisely which fellow they were after and turned and headed straight up to his room.
The professor was led down to the bar in his pyjamas and then the boys finally felt able to say out loud exactly what they’d seen.
‘It’s the navvies,’ said one, hitching a thumb over his shoulder.
‘The navvies …’ the other added, ‘… come for the boat.’
The mist was clearing now, the stars blinking back into existence. The bears had clawed most of the dirt off the top of the mound and were hacking away at the earth around the base.
The deeper they dug the darker the soil became, until the full curve of the boat was revealed – forty foot from bow to stern and eight foot across the gunnels.
Bears of England, the Great Bear told them, make haste.
Anyone who’d managed to sleep through the boys hammering at the door of The Coach and Horses was woken not long after by the sound of people charging up and down the street.
‘Looters, up on the hill,’ they shouted. And they called out for men and weapons, if they had them, and any sort of light or lantern, to guide their way.
It took several minutes for the villagers to get themselves organised and to stir up a little spirit. Then they all went charging up the hill. And all that running and scrambling seemed to generate an extra dose of courage, so that they began to imagine that whatever adversary might await them on the hilltop, they would be able to overwhelm it – for the village’s honour and the ownership of their earthbound boat.
But when they finally cleared the ridge they found the landscape quite transformed – almost unrecognisable. The earth that had once made up the barrow was now flung out on all sides, as if a bomb had been quietly detonated, leaving nothing but an empty pit.
As the villagers stood, dumbstruck, the bears carefully made their way down the other side of the hill with that ancient boat raised up on their shoulders – an earthy boat carried through the night. Some bears led the way. Some hung back to see if anyone followed. They took their time, but as soon as they reached the marshes they headed straight to the nearest channel, gently lowered the boat into the icy water and crept in alongside it.
They tucked their shoulders under the hull and pushed off. And carried the boat out, through the dykes and ditches, until they reached the deeper water. Then on, through the Levels and beyond, into the estuary.
Memories of bear-pits and dogs and baying children slowly receded. The Englishmen who’d hunted them, then briefly idolised them slipped away – along with London’s sewers and high-wire walking, and bread and beer in exchange for dead men’s sins. And the bears kept on paddling, just as some of them had once paddled their way to freedom down the River Thames.
As they passed the headland the sun slowly rose behind them. And they continued paddling, out into open water now. Until England itself finally began to diminish – began to slip from view. One or two of the bears glanced over their shoulders. Had one last look at cold, cruel England. Then they turned away, and pushed on again.
Author biography
Mick Jackson is the prize-winning author of the novels, The Underground Man, Five Boys and The Widow’s Tale. He also published, with the illustrator David Roberts, two acclaimed curiosities, Ten Sorry Tales and Bears of England.
Copyright
First published in 2009
by Faber & Faber Limited
Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2014
All rights reserved
© Mick Jackson, 2009
Illustrations © David Roberts, 2009
The right of Mick Jackson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–30660–2