The others were there waiting for us when Dadda stopped the Land-Rover at the foot of Fiendsdale Clough, but there was still no Jeff.
‘It’s not true what they say about bad pennies, is it?’ said Dadda.
‘We could have done with another pair of hands today, though,’ I said.
‘We’ll cope without him,’ said Dadda. ‘We always have done.’
Lighting his roll-up, he got out and went to talk to Bill.
Kat stared through the brown rainbows the wipers had smeared on to the windscreen.
‘Are you coming then?’ I said.
‘I can’t,’ said Kat.
‘You’re here now.’
‘Only because I didn’t want to be on my own at the farm,’ she said.
‘But you’ll be on your own if you sit here,’ I said.
‘Please don’t make me be with the others,’ she said. ‘Not today. I don’t think I can look at Grace.’
‘It was hot in the room last night,’ I said. ‘You were just tired. That’s all.’
‘I know what I saw, John,’ she said. ‘It was vile.’
She put the heel of her hand to her eye.
‘I must be ill,’ she said.
‘You’re not ill.’
‘Then how do you explain what I saw last night?’ she said.
‘We can go and see the doctor in Clitheroe this afternoon if you’re worried,’ I said.
‘I want to see my doctor,’ said Kat. ‘Not some stranger.’
Dadda finished his conversation with Bill and waved us out of the Land-Rover.
‘We need to go,’ I said.
‘If I’ve got to come, then I’m coming with you,’ said Kat.
‘Put your scarf on, then,’ I said.
‘And when we’ve finished, we’re going home, aren’t we?’ she said.
‘And leave everyone else to do the work?’
‘But we only came for Gathering,’ said Kat.
‘Well, things have changed,’ I said.’
Dadda knocked on the window.
‘Come on,’ he said through the glass. ‘We’re starting late as it is.’
The others all looked at Kat when she got out. Grace had on a thick woollen hat which she pulled down further and went to throw stones into the river. She made a show of it, of course. She wanted to make sure that Kat felt guilty. But she’d live. Lennie Sturzaker had snatched out tufts of my hair often enough for me to know that she’d only have a tender scalp for a day or so.
‘She’s coming with us then, is she?’ said Liz, looking at Kat as she put on her gloves.
‘She came here to help with Gathering, didn’t she?’ I said.
‘Well, just keep her away from Grace,’ said Liz. ‘And me.’
‘Oh, give over,’ said Angela. ‘Grace is all right. We’ve not time for falling out when we’ve got work to do. Anyway,’ she went on, adjusting Kat’s scarf and pulling the belt of Liz’s old coat tighter, ‘we can’t have Katherine sitting about in the cold with a baby on the way, can we?’
‘Go on, Grace,’ said Liz. ‘You get going with Granddad Bill.’
Grace nodded and Bill took her hand.
‘I didn’t mean to hurt her,’ said Kat. ‘I don’t know what happened.’
‘Your mind can play funny tricks when you’re expecting,’ said Laurel. ‘You think all kinds of odd things are true.’
‘I didn’t,’ said Liz.
‘Well, you’ve forgotten then,’ said Angela. ‘You certainly weren’t yourself whenever you were pregnant.’
‘Am I meant to feel sorry for her or summat?’ said Liz. ‘You saw what she did to Grace.’
‘And she’s said sorry,’ said Laurel.
‘Just keep your mind on the job,’ said Angela.
Liz set off before Angela had finished speaking and caught up with Bill and Grace on the path beside the clough.
‘Ignore her, Katherine,’ said Angela. ‘She’s just angry at Jeff.’
‘No word then?’ I said.
‘He’ll be here today,’ said Laurel. ‘He’ll have got caught up in traffic somewhere.’
‘Hasn’t he called?’ said Angela.
‘I don’t think he gets a chance while he’s on the road,’ said Laurel.
‘He must have to stop some time,’ said Angela. ‘They have payphones at service stations, don’t they?’
‘Aye, but he’ll be tired after all that driving,’ said Laurel. ‘He’ll just want to sleep.’
‘I’d have thought he’d want to speak to Grace more,’ said Angela.
‘He probably means to phone,’ said Laurel. ‘I don’t know why he doesn’t. Perhaps he forgets. Please don’t make out that he doesn’t care about us. He’s still trying to find his way. He can’t get everything right.’
Bill was calling her and, her cheeks flushed, she put her hands in her pockets and went to join him.
‘Where is he?’ I said. ‘Does she even know?’
‘I don’t think anyone knows,’ said Angela. ‘Not really.’
‘Bill says he’s got mates in Scotland,’ said Dadda, opening the back of the Land-Rover.
‘Aye, well, he might be best off staying there then,’ said Angela. ‘Let Liz and Grace get on with their lives here. I’m sick of that bastard breaking their hearts.’
Dadda sent the dogs on their way. They went off immediately, sniffing and nosing up and down the rocks, Fly making a dash up the path, Dadda calling her back and giving her a clip on the nose.
I couldn’t blame him for being on edge. Even though the Gaffer had done less and less of the chasing and whistling as he’d got older, he hadn’t ever fully handed responsibility for Gathering to Dadda. Organising Gathering was the last thing a hill-farmer in the Endlands let go.
Like all the other Pentecosts, the Gaffer had spent most of his life understanding how to work the dogs and bring every one of the sheep safely down the narrow track by Fiendsdale Clough and over the Moss to the farm. He knew from his own experience, of course, that there was only a certain amount that Dadda would ever learn from watching him, and that doing was the only way to acquire any skill, but he had a possessiveness over Gathering that he couldn’t quite shake off. It wasn’t arrogance, I don’t think, or even the fear that under another’s supervision the whole thing would fail, but a reluctance to give up wrestling with the moorland. Go up there and it looks as if it hasn’t changed since the glaciers retreated and yet no two days are the same, certainly no two Gatherings. That year it might have been cold and clear, but the one before, cloud had dropped so low as we were going over the Moss that it became almost impossible to separate the track from the marsh and we’d nearly lost some of the ewes.
Every year, like his father and his father before him, the Gaffer would learn a little more about the movement of water, wind, light and cloud; the growth and spread of bog-moss, the deception of peat, the network of furrows that the heather disguised. They were scraps of victories, but enough to keep him coming back to the high pastures despite his age, rather than sitting by the fireside at the farm.
‘The moors are different for everyone, Johnny lad,’ he said. ‘You’ll understand them in your own way.’
The moor he knew had died with him. Dadda would have to find his own. And the thought of that had surprised him, I think. He hadn’t quite expected to feel like a novice here at the age of fifty-four.
∾
Age, aches, lack of sleep, hangovers, bad chests and bad dreams meant that everyone made their way up Fiendsdale Clough at a different pace. The dogs, as always, had the most energy and were well ahead of us within half a minute, their breath steaming when Dadda called them to stop.
‘That’s it then, Tom,’ said Angela, rubbing the backs of her hands as she walked next to him. ‘Winter’s on its way.’
We’d had the first raw night of autumn and woken that morning to find the kitchen windows covered in cock-feathers of frost. The air still had its night-hardness and the valley was so undisturbed t
hat every sound was as sharp in the ear as it was at source: the river, the trees moving in the Wood, the geese on the Moss. Over the last few days, the flock had swelled in numbers, massing in a chorus of unoiled voices. Hundreds of them were packed together on the islands of rushes and grass that whalebacked out of the ice.
Somewhere underneath the glassy sheets and the black sludge was the van that the boy had driven to the farm. If Dent came, he might stand and look for as long as he liked and find no trace of it.
Here in the clough, we’d already lost the sunlight and walked in a shadow that at that time of year would linger in the ravine all day. The temperature dropped a few degrees more and as the water fell next to us it struck the rocks with an alpine clarity, kicking up spray and noise.
With the path so thick with ice in places, we made slow progress and I was glad that I had the crook in my hand to steady myself and Kat, who followed me in slow, uncertain footsteps.
The shepherds had always made their own crooks in the Endlands over the winter when snow kept them indoors, peeling ash wood for the shank and boiling the horn soft enough to bend it into a serif. The one that I used had been made before Joe Pentecost’s time, the ripples on the handle worn down with use. It was proof that men I’d never met had spent their lives working hard to preserve the Endlands for children they’d never know—just as the Gaffer had protected the sheep that night back in the spring. Not because he had any desire to hurt the boy who’d come to steal them but because the flock didn’t just belong to him. It belonged to Dadda and it belonged to me and Kat and our children and theirs.
Going back to Suffolk would be like taking each crook and snapping it over my knee.
∾
Our line stretched and broke for a while, leaving Laurel and Angela at the rear, and we came back together in ones and twos, regrouping where the steep section levelled out. This was as far as Angela’s body would take her and for as long as I could remember she had been in charge of marshalling the path here when the flock was driven down. She, Laurel and Grace would spread themselves out and make sure that none of the sheep ended up straying too close to the edge and falling into the clough. Grace still wouldn’t look at Kat and stuck close to Liz, asking about Daddy and if he was going to be back before they woke the Owd Feller and crowned the ram?
‘I’m sure he’ll try,’ said Liz.
‘I want to tell him about Devil’s Day,’ said Grace. ‘He’ll want to know everything.’
Now she looked in Kat’s direction and made sure that Kat heard her.
‘I’ll have to show him my head,’ she said.
‘There’s nowt to see, Grace,’ said Angela. ‘Go on, you go and stand with Laurel. Let your mam go up to the ridge.’
Liz went off with Bill and Dadda, and Kat and I followed several yards behind.
‘What’s Jeff going to think of me?’ said Kat.
‘You’re assuming he’s going to turn up,’ I said.
‘But what if he does?’ said Kat. ‘The first thing Grace will tell him is that I pulled her hair out.’
‘If he does come home,’ I said, ‘she’ll be so excited that she’ll forget.’
‘Well, if Grace doesn’t tell him, Liz will,’ said Kat.
‘Don’t worry about her,’ I said. ‘She’ll get over it.’
But when we came to the ridge Liz took up her position and kicked the cold out of her toes on a wall of peat and didn’t look at Kat as we came past and went to help Dadda and Bill.
The soft, brown uplands that I’d crossed with Dadda only two days before as we tracked the deer had gone. Now everything was metal-hard, compressed by the weight of the sky. And seeing the moors for the first time, Kat couldn’t help but stare at the miles that unfolded from where we stood.
In the sharp air, the sunlight picked out the crowns of stone on the distant ridges, making the moorland seem bigger still.
I thought about the voice Dadda and I had heard at Blackmire Edge. Now I couldn’t be sure that it had been a voice at all. It didn’t seem likely. If it had been someone who’d got lost while they were walking or looking for birds, then they were a long way out on the moors, much further than strangers usually went. And the wind up here shifted sound across such distances that it was easily distorted. We might have heard one of the ewes, or a bird, or it might have been the wind itself.
Down in the shelter of the valley there hadn’t been a flap, but up here gusts came in sharp waves blowing the frost from the grass humps and making the dogs blink. Over to the west, clouds were beginning to pile on the horizon, and Bill kept looking over his shoulder as we walked.
‘What do you reckon, Tom?’ he said.
‘We’ll be down long before that reaches us,’ said Dadda.
‘You say that,’ he said. ‘But remember last year?’
‘We’ve had it worse,’ said Dadda.
1947, 1963, 1975, 1981, 1982, they were all chapters in a chronicle of vicious autumns, when ash trees were uprooted in windstorms and the spines of bridges swept away in rising floods; when the Dyers’ cowshed lost its roof, our barn its heavy doors; when lightning punched the Beasleys’ pig field and killed half the herd.
Certain Gatherings were remembered for what was lost or damaged. Look at the maps—all the evidence is there.
‘Still,’ said Bill. ‘I don’t think we should drag our heels.’
‘Do we ever?’ said Dadda.
‘I’m just saying,’ said Bill.
‘Kat’s not going to hold us up,’ I said. ‘If that’s what you mean.’
‘I’m sure she wouldn’t mean to get in the way,’ said Bill. ‘But if you’re not used to the job . . .’
‘Give her something to do then,’ I said.
‘You stand yourself there then,’ said Dadda, looking past her to the Wall. ‘Make sure none of them get through.’
Kat made her way over to the large gap between what Jim had rebuilt and the next line of rubble, wading through the heather, her arms spread like a tightrope-walker.
‘She’d have been better off on the path,’ said Bill.
‘She’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘She needs to learn what to do.’
Bill looked at the coming weather again and carried on, following Dadda and the dogs.
The sheep were spread out across the pastureland, their shadows stretched by the low sun, each one giving off wisps of white breath as they cried. The grass they chewed was stiff with rime and the heather brittle. The moorland had sustained them for as long as it could but now they had to come down. Most of the ewes would stay in the bye-field for the ram, but the four-shears—the older girls with the worn-down teeth—would be taken to auction. Up here in the hills, their lambing days were over, but a lowland farmer with more space and softer grass might get another season or two out of them yet. The males that had been born in the spring—sturdy and rumpish now—would be taken to the abattoir. And the gimmer-hoggs given another year to grow to wombhood before they were tupped.
For years now, the strategy had been to corral the sheep by the ten yards of the Wall that Jim had reassembled at the foot of Poacher’s Seat and then flank them on either side with the dogs. That way, when Musket and Fly advanced there was only one way the sheep were likely to go. The difficulty was in scouring them out of all the crevices and hollows in the first place and preventing them from being so terrified that they forgot their hefting and headed over the broken-down patches of wall into the old grouse moor.
Fly was a little over-eager at first and Dadda had to shout to get her boisterousness down to a wolfish tread. Otherwise, the sheep would have been scattered before we’d even started.
Being the elder dog, obedience his first thought, Musket reacted to the calls and whistles as soon as they were made and went over towards Poacher’s Seat, snaking his way through the heather humps to the top and then moving the sheep that were grazing there down on to the level ground. As they hobbled along (sheep always look lame when they run) Musket took little diversions int
o the hidden runnels and peaty troughs to chase out the ewes and lambs, who emerged with the red grouse.
Others were feeding along an isthmus of grass that lay between two mossbogs and Dadda sent me to the far end of it to push the sheep towards the Wall. Musket and Fly were dispatched to the edges of the bogs so that the sheep would not think about making a sideways dash and ending up in need of rescue. Over the years, we’d lost ewes in that exact way, drowned in sludge before we’d got within fifty yards of them.
Musket kept pace with me as Dadda made him do, but Fly was too quickly ahead and with her barking she caused the sheep at the front of the pack to turn into the ones behind. Dadda quickly whistled and shouted and Fly backed off sulkily, allowing the sheep to move again when I urged them on.
A few—mavericks or imbeciles—tried to dart past but I moved quickly, making a fence rail with the crook to bring them back into line. They switched direction, wild-eyed and clumsy, and re-joined the flow, their hooves hollow on the frozen ground.
We worked like this for half an hour or so, flushing the sheep from every dip in the moorland and holding them by the Wall. Kat clapped her hands if the sheep came close but generally her presence was enough to make them double back and slot themselves between the other humps of fleece.
While the dogs kept them bunched together, Dadda made a head-count, and then Bill did the same. They made a second tally, and then I totalled them again.
‘I make it sixty-one,’ said Dadda.
‘Same here,’ said Bill. ‘John?’
‘Sixty-one,’ I said.
‘That’s not all of them, then,’ said Bill.
‘Nothing like,’ said Dadda.
Seventy animals—ewes and lambs—had been sent up in the springtime. It was written in the ledger with the marbled cover that the Gaffer had used for years, the one I still use now. Dadda climbed up on to some of the rubble of the Wall and scanned the grouse moor.
‘Go on,’ he said and Musket kinked between the stones to go off in search. Fly tried to follow him but Dadda lifted his voice and she stayed put, lying down and watching the sheep which grew more restless as Kat came over from where she’d been standing.
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