The River Bank

by Kij Johnson

  The Toad lifted his head from the pillow and eyed her. “Where do they live?”

  “Why, the Hills!”

  That had an unpleasantly rustic sound. “Which hills?” he asked.

  “The Hills, of course! They are some distance from here, to the north and west. That way, I think.” She pointed at a black-and-white lithograph of The Monarch of the Glen upon one wall. “Or perhaps not. I am a little turned around, you know.”

  The Toad rolled upright and mopped tentatively at his cheeks. “Can you find the way from here, do you think?”

  “O, I would imagine so. I was with Beryl before, who is ever so much better with maps and train schedules and things, but—I mean, they’re hills! They’re large, so all we need do is look about a little. It should not be diffi—”

  They heard a door downstairs open and slam shut, and voices—several voices. “It is the doctor!” squealed the Toad.

  “O, good!” said the Rabbit, “Now we may have you looked at, and then make our—”

  But the Toad wasted no more time on fruitless speech. He rushed to the dormer, hopped onto the window-seat, threw open the casement, and looked out. It was a second-story window but it led conveniently onto a low sloped roof (the kitchen, had they known it). It was the work of an instant for him to heave himself over the sill and onto the roof. With a great clattering, he galloped across the tiles to a tree at the opposite end (it was a pear tree, quite overgrown), and threw himself into its thick branches. He did not shin so much as cascade down its trunk in a shower of leaves, small branches, and spiders and half-ripe pears; and landed upon all fours in a garden that smelled of wet dirt and carrots. Wasting not a moment, he galloped to the bottom of the garden, through a withy fence (fumbling the gate’s latch in his haste), and onto a small lane. He cast agonized glances to the left and right, but he was unobserved. Safe! No—there were light footsteps coming down the garden. Where to go, where to go? He sobbed aloud in terror.

  “Why, Toad!” said the Rabbit. She clipped the gate shut neatly behind them and stood beside him. “How fortuitous—a lane!” she said admiringly. “And just where we needed it, too. Which way shall we go? I brought your coat,” she added, and gave it to him.

  Rabbit—the Hills—her relatives—her reticule. “Excellent Rabbit, admirable Rabbit,” said the Toad humbly. “We shall go wherever you say.”

  The Rabbit led the Toad left along the lane until it debouched into another, slightly larger road, and turned left again. The moon was not yet up, but the eastern sky glowed with dim silver light, veiling the stars: it was this light the Rabbit was using to direct them. They walked a long time in silence, the Toad straining his every cell listening for pursuit, and the Rabbit, apparently, perfectly content with their midnight promenade. The moon at last shook free of the horizon and began to shine behind them, making long, deeply black shadows: a tall, infinitely slender Rabbit with ears that stretched yards ahead of them, and a rounder, less defined shape that was the Toad, thinned and stretched nearly to normal proportions. Each step took them into their own shadows, but always the shadows moved forward, as well. They saw few others: an Owl that swept past overhead but did not pause; a large party of bats dancing (noisily, thought the Rabbit, but the Toad heard nothing) just beyond the circle of light cast by a lantern outside a country tavern door; a Hedgehog and her family on their way home from a late visit to her sister’s. They avoided villages where people might be found.

  The moon was halfway to the zenith when the Toad at last gave up. He had been about to ask the Rabbit whether they might stop for a little, when they came to a Fox, leaning upon a stone wall and smoking a pipe in the darkness—“Onion sauce!” he jeered; “Garlic and butter!”—but he had dined already and otherwise he left them alone. Still, for a while after that, neither wanted to stop. But at last the Toad had had enough, which he evidenced by throwing himself down into the dirt in the middle of the country lane and refusing to go farther. He wailed (but softly, still mindful of the Fox), “I can’t go on—I can’t!” and it was the Rabbit who found a little corncrib that they climbed into. They spent the rest of the night there, and the Toad slept surprisingly well, though he woke up thirsty and ready for breakfast.

  Sadly, breakfast was not forthcoming—or at least there was nothing he would consider true breakfast: no soft-boiled eggs and rashers of bacon and kippers and toast and marmalade and jam and fresh butter and coffee and—well, it didn’t bear thinking about; but the Toad did think about it and couldn’t stop, even after they came to an orchard and filled the Rabbit’s kerchief with apples, and even after the Rabbit boldly went into a village and bought bread and cheese for them. She brought back as well a copy of a newspaper from Town (in fact, the same that Badger had been given by the Stoat, back in the Wild Wood), and they read it to one another as they ate their breakfast on a village common clustered with amiable but uninterested cows. The Toad had been in rather a subdued mood throughout the long night, but being called “dangerous,” “reprehensible,” and “blackguardly” in a single paragraph brought him into something more nearly approaching his normal bumptious state; and as the days passed and no one apprehended them, his glee grew.

  They travelled on foot, or by cadging such rides as they could find, which ranged from the backseat of a vast and impressive motor-car—they explained that they were on their way to Portsmouth to attend the deathbed of an agèd relative, and were treated with great kindness and head-pattings—to the tail of an oxcart, which lasted until the driver saw them and threatened them with his goad. They travelled north and west, as the Rabbit had suggested, and by the middle of the first afternoon, when they saw the distant blue shapes of hills against the sky, nearly faded into the thick summertime air, they were both satisfied that this was the correct direction.

  Every morning and evening there were newspapers filled with headlines in 48-point type (or even larger): Villainous Toad Still at Large! Scotland Yard Baffled; but no one seemed to associate this Toad and Rabbit with that Toad and Rabbit; or perhaps the excitements of urban crime simply mattered less out here.

  For once, the Toad regretted his notoriety. It came hard on a creature whose general practice when travelling was to strut up to proprietors saying, “Do you know who I am?” and then order the best chambers and meals; harder still, because he was a deeply hospitable creature and it went sorely against his nature for the Rabbit to pay for everything at the more modest hostelleries they frequented. If innkeepers looked askance at an unaccompanied female travelling with a male who was clearly no relation—for not everyone was as nearsighted as the kindly old woman who had rescued them, and her Ned (reckoning it was none of his business and rather hoping for a douceur for retrieving the Dustley) had said nothing—well, they stayed silent about it; paying custom was paying custom, after all.

  The Rabbit’s allowance, however, could not last forever, and now she showed her worth even more concretely. It turned out that she was quite adept at stealing eggs from beneath the hens, scoops of fresh butter from the churns, and, even, once, a ham hanging from the rafters of a cottage. The Toad was less useful, alas: his mood veered wildly between abject despair and unjustified self-confidence. In one moment, he could hardly bring himself to eat more than a morsel of whatever food the Rabbit managed to find for them; in the next, his natural optimism returned and he assumed that all would be well. Grandiose plans that involved stowing aboard an ocean liner and emigrating to America to become a sort of combination railroad magnate and cowboy—“The wide open spaces!” he cried in ecstasy; “Git along o’ye! Twelve points up!”—alternated with visions of drawing and quartering, and of being broken upon the wheel.

  The countryside grew rounder and dryer, and there came a point when it was clear that they were at last no longer approaching, but actually in the hills.

  “Well?” said the Toad. They were standing at a crossroads, and the Rabbit was peering down each road (including the one they had come up) with a flustered expression. He ma
y perhaps be forgiven for his testiness. It was nearly dinner time of the third day, and breakfast, elevenses, luncheon, tea, and “a little bite of something to tide us over ’til dinner” had been sparse, to put it lightly—apples, apples, and more apples—for the countryside had grown less populated, and there had not been so many places where the Rabbit could exercise her acquisitorial skills. This had been puzzling her somewhat, for in her recollection (and she might be a little flighty, as people said, but surely she would not be misremembering after only a few months away?), the Hills were simply packed with residents. Indeed, her dear father was always complaining about the crowds and threatening to move away, though nothing ever came of it. A terrible doubt assailed her.

  “Do you know, Toad,” said she, hesitantly. “I wonder whether these are perhaps not the right hills.”

  “What?” said the Toad. “What?”

  Chapter Eight

  A Den of Thieves

  There are moments when an author must make a choice: whether to present a scene in all the living poetry of its details, or to substitute a paragraph that advances the reader through the narrative in a manner that is economical, succinct, and efficient. The Toad’s response to the Rabbit’s disclosure offers such a choice to the author—immediacy or concision—but alas! The decision is made for us: our clumsy pen finds itself inadequate to the leisurely challenge of capturing each nuance of Toad’s vexation, distress, dejection, wretchedness, and fear: his tearful accusations and sobbing recriminations; his thrashings about and headlong weepings; his first gasp of astonished disbelief and his final gusty sob. The fickle Muse has denied to us her golden touch, and so we instead say merely that the Rabbit’s disclosure—and she was quite right; these were not the Hills they sought but other, quite different hills—came as an unpleasant shock to the Toad. He wailed and wept, and the Rabbit could only look remorseful and wring her paws, saying, “But indeed, I am not good with directions!”

  Still, there came an end to it at last. By now it was dusk, the sky purpling as the shadow of the (wrong) hills rose. The Toad sat in the road with his back against the signpost and his spindly legs stretched out to their full length before him. He was slumped over; and, disheveled, tearstained, and dusty as he was, he might almost have been mistaken for a bundle fallen from the back of a cart, save for the woebegone sniffling he emitted every few seconds, as though he were running on clockwork: a rhythmic counterpoint to the lovely liquid notes of the evening’s first tawny-voiced nightingale.

  In contrast, the Rabbit stood beside him, still looking very nearly as neat as she had when they left town, if a bit more crumpled. Somehow in their travels, she had found the means of scrubbing the berry stains from her skirt, and she had even been able to sew up the rents where the bramble had torn her gown, for her mother had told her always to carry needle and thread (along with other oddments), and so, most conveniently, they had been in her reticule. But she had lost her hat.

  She was a sanguine creature, and it took more than the Toad, even the Toad at his worst, to put her off her stride for long. Long before the end of his fit, she had begun looking about, frowning this way and that, and— “O! I know where we are now!” she said suddenly, well before he had subsided entirely into dejected silence.

  A fresh sob burst from the Toad, who added bitterly, “How do you know?”

  “No, I truly do! Indeed, we are not so far off as we might be. I am just too far north, that is all. Do you see there?” She pointed.

  “Yes,” he sniffled, not looking.

  “My home is just past those trees—that tall clump on the hill, with the single towering oak in their midst,” she said happily. “My home, and all my relations, and dear Beryl’s family, and the Hares and the dear Dormouses and all our other neighbors, and—and everyone! Home!”

  The Toad looked up. She was gazing southward, toward Hills that rose, row after row growing more diffuse until they faded entirely into the purpling dusky sky. Instead of being nearly covered with trees with a few open fields, as these hills were, he could see that over there it was all grass and fields, and the trees were mostly limited to the hedgerows.

  The Rabbit said, more softly, “Those trees—on the top of the tallest hill—I remember them. My brothers and sisters and I were always running up there to play whenever we could sneak away. It was quite exciting—the seven of us—we would play Pirates, and Highwaymen, and Cavaliers and Roundheads, and—”

  “You are sure?” he interrupted, suspicious. “We won’t get there and have you say, ‘O, I am wrong, it is not these trees, it is those trees!’ will we?”

  She continued, unheeding, “—and we said that the tallest tree was the White Tower, and we meant to behead my littlest brother because he was the Pretender, except that Mother found us before we could complete the task. So we never did.” She sounded disappointed.

  But the Toad was not attending, either: “—because,” he said with a quiver in his voice, “if you are wrong—”

  But the Rabbit shook herself, and gazed down at him for a moment, and her absent expression reassured him more than anything else might have. “The Hills, Toad! The air is so clear, not at all like the River Bank, where it is so thick; and you can see for miles and miles, and the earth under your toes is light and chalky, not clotty and dark. It has been very interesting, coming to the River Bank with Beryl, and learning to boat, and meeting you all—but— O, the Hills!” She added seriously (and she was seldom serious), “I know they are Home, Toad. I can feel it. You know.”

  The Toad was a frivolous creature, but he did know—deeply, intimately—the emotion that played across her face. He felt the same way every time he returned to the River Bank after an absence and saw the warm stone walls and shining windows of Toad Hall, the glowing grounds and the stands of trees, each trunk and branch as familiar as his own limbs—and beyond everything, the special, specific shape and sound of the River as it passed just there. He knew. It was Home, calling to her. The Rabbit might have been mistaken before this, but no longer.

  He brought himself shakily to his feet. He could see the crown of trees she was pointing to, but only as shadows now; the very Hills themselves were already fading into the twilight. “We shall never make it tonight!”

  “No,” said the Rabbit sadly. “But tomorrow we shall! We must find a place to stay tonight, is all—and quickly, before the Foxes come out.”

  The Rabbit and the Toad followed the lane that led south from the crossroads as it slipped into a fold of the hills and moved into the shelter of a stand of trees, where night had already collected. There was no good place to walk: there were too many worrisome noises in the hedges that fringed the lane, sudden rustlings and little mocking voices; but when they walked in the middle, they heard an Owl’s cruel, low laughter in the branches overhead. The Toad’s heart was making what felt like determined attempts to escape through his throat in a trembling scream, but he said nothing as they trotted through the darkness, and even tried to still his breathing: under the circumstances, no easy task for a Toad of nervous disposition but indolent habits. As for the Rabbit, she said nothing but only pulled out the little pocketknife her mother had always advised her to carry in her reticule, and pattered on as quickly as the Toad could move.

  The darkness under the trees deepened. The voices in the hedges grew louder, the rustlings closer. The Owl laughed again, and they heard her shake out her feathers, as though preparing to fly. The air ahead of them was a little lighter, and they quickened their pace—even the Toad finding resources he did not know he had.

  And then— O blessèd Chance! They were clear of the trees, and they could see around them, and there—just ahead—was the dim shape of a large building in a clearing, and they absolutely ran toward it. They saw a dark line where a door was cracked open, and they raced through and slammed it to, just as the Owl on silent wings approached.

  They heard her catch herself before she could hit the door, and then her low voice: “Why, dear things! Come
out and play!” But they did not, and after another of her cruel laughs, she floated away and was gone.

  “What a lucky circumstance!” said the Rabbit, when she could draw breath again. She looked about. They were in a tall dark space, filled with farming implements and piles of hay, with empty box stalls and rooms lining one side, a little two-wheeled whiskey leaning upon its shafts against a wall. “Why, Toad, it’s a barn! I have never slept in a barn. It shall be a new adventure for me.”

  “No more adventures,” moaned the Toad despairingly.

  “This will perhaps be the last adventure before we get to the Hills,” she said regretfully. “I don’t think much of it, but beggars cannot be choosers, after all. Anyway, there is hay everywhere, so we shall sleep soft at least! And in the morning, off we will go.”

  Now that the fear of the Owl and the horrid voices in the hedgerows was loosening, the Toad was feeling somewhat better. “I suppose there’s no food? No pork-chops, or salads, or charlottes russes, or—”

  She shook her head. “Unless you can eat oats?” She had lost the last of the apples in their flight.

  “Raw? Certainly not,” he said indignantly, then sighed heavily. “Then I suppose there is nothing to do but sleep.”

  They crawled up into a haymow that looked down onto the barn’s main floor. A Mouse there, seeing they were only a Rabbit and a Toad, said, “You! I was ’ere first. You pipe down an’ don’t push, a’right?” before returning to sleep.

  The Toad wriggled and tossed, and complained that the straw made his skin itch. His nose would not stop tickling; he knew, knew, he should not be able to sleep for sneezing. But they snuggled in anyway, and while his nose did not stop tickling, he did not sneeze (not then, at any rate), and he did fall asleep after all, for when the door slid open again, he awoke to find himself sitting stock upright in the straw with a scream trembling upon his lips.