The Plague Dogs (12 page)

Rowf considered. "A man may come—we don't know. Those other sheep this afternoon belonged to a man; so this one must have too. He might have a gun, as those dogs said."

"The same man?"

"Or a different man. It doesn't matter. We must get away."

"But where?"

"I don't know. They've put tanks everywhere, you see—there's another one down there."

"But, Rowf, you know the whitecoats never come at night. We've got time to find somewhere to hide, somewhere to run before the sun, before the gun." Rowf blew out warm, steaming breath. "Hide?

They might be watching us now."

"How could they be?"

"Well, they might have something that makes things look close when they're far off. They might be watching from right away over there."

"Oh, that's silly, Rowf. I know they can disappear and breathe fire and create light and all sorts of things, but they couldn't possibly do that. You're letting your imagination run away with you." Rowf yawned wide and licked his chops. Snitter could see fragments of sheep's flesh and sinew hanging between his teeth. "Anyway, we may as well go down into that valley as anywhere. If I can."

"If you can?"

"I'm bruised to pieces. I had to hang on by my teeth while that brute battered me against everything it could find. You can try it next time. I'll have to go slowly."

They set off down the hillside, Rowf scrambling and limping in and out of the rocks on three legs. Snitter, who could have gone twice as fast, kept running nervously from side to side, pushing his nose under stones and again turning to look out across the empty valley. The noise of the far becks came up with a wavering sound, receding and returning, and the outline of the distant, long shoulder of the Friar, too, seemed oscillating minutely to and fro, as though, poised yet not absolutely stable, it was sharing the movement of the air—or perhaps, thought Snitter, as though he himself had become a little giddy with gazing across the moonlit distance. As they came down on the wet moss the illusion left him. His paws were sinking in soft ground, boggy, full of watery rifts, and he was coaxing Rowf forward to no destination that he knew of. They could no longer see as far as the tarn and the outlines of the surrounding heights were altered, humped shapes against the night sky. Rowf stopped to drink, lapping noisily, and then lay down in a patch of rushes. "You'd better go on, Snitter—wherever you're going. I've had enough—until tomorrow anyway."

"But if you sleep there, Rowf, in the open—"

"Might as well lie here as anywhere. Where were we going, anyway? I've got to rest, Snitter.

My leg hurts."

"Caught stealing up on the table—"

"Snitter, let me alone!"

He bared his teeth. Snitter, catching the smell of his pain and exhaustion, went pattering quickly away, in and out of the bents and rushes. Suddenly it seemed, at this moment, a small matter to leave Rowf. He could not help him. Not his energy, but his resources were at an end. His ignorance lay all about him like a marsh, his madness within him like stagnant water. In this artificial, man- made wilderness he had no idea what might disclose itself, what might be lying just out of sight in any direction; nor, if granted the power to see, would he have been any wiser about what he ought to do.

Once, there had been a master and a home: then, after the lorry—afterwards—the canine block, the tobacco man and the knives of the whitecoats. The escape from the whitecoats—all the cunning, courage and endurance—had proved useless because there was nowhere he and Rowf could go, no life which they could live. He remembered what Rowf had said in the pen—"There might be something worse through the door." True, there was no enemy present now, but since their escape they had not met with a single friend, animal or human, and though nothing had happened when they killed the sheep, he knew intuitively that they had committed a crime which was bound to come to light, a crime the perpetrators of which would not be forgiven. "He'll fill thee wi' lead, joost." Might it not be better to put an end now to the anxiety and fear, to accept that they had no alternative but to suffer as the whitecoats required of them? Rowf had said so from the outset; had joined him, against his own conviction that they had no chance, only because he could not face the metal tank again. Where could they go, what could they do, what plan could they make in such a place as this? They would simply wander about until a farmer shot them or took them back to the whitecoats.

Put an end, then. But how? Which way back to Animal Research? Please, sir, could you direct me to the nearest whitecoat? Do you happen to have seen a street lying about anywhere—a shop, a house, a dustbin? You see, I'm lost. My head was cut open and I fell in when I wasn't looking and now I seem to have kicked my brains to pieces trying to get out. There are leaves floating in black milk—I'm just looking for the way—no, not the way home, thought Snitter. I won't call it that.

The stream in the middle of the Moss was wide—a good five feet at the place where he came to it, and deep on the nearer side. As he stopped, peering down from the bank into the dark water, he suddenly saw, reflected over his shoulder, the figure of a man—grey-haired, dressed in an old brown overcoat and yellow scarf, carrying a walking stick, his lips pursed to whistle. As the man nodded and bent to pat him, Snitter leapt round and jumped up at his knees, barking for joy. There was no one there, and he fell forward on the squelching peat.

I wish it would stop. I thought it had. It always takes me unawares. I never remember. I always say next time I'll take no notice, but I never do. I mustn't sit here thinking about it; I must do something else at once. He plunged into the beck, pulled himself out on the further side, scuttered up the bank and shook the water off. The wet ground was no different, but about two hundred yards away, at the foot of the hillside where it rose above the bog, he could now see a kind of platform of smooth grass, a square, flat-topped, steep-sided mound jutting out from the foot of the hill. It was so plainly artificial that at first he took it for another hallucination, and sat watching it to see whether the figure in the brown tweed coat would reappear.

But all remained empty and quiet, and at length, half-hoping to find a whitecoat to whom he could give himself up, he ran across the intervening distance and up the steep bank.

On top was a levelled space of turf and small stones, perhaps half the size of a lawn tennis court. It was completely empty, but on the further side, where the foot of Great Blake Rigg, the south face of the Grey Friar, rose like a wall, was a symmetrical, dark opening lined and arched with stones—

a doorway without a door—as wide as a man is tall and almost twice as high, apparently leading underground into the heart of the mountain.

Snitter sat staring in astonishment. There were no signs of human use or occupation, no sounds from inside the cavern, no man-smells that he could perceive. He went cautiously closer. He could hear currents of air whispering and echoing within. "There's a garden in its ear," thought Snitter, "but there's no one there, unless they're hiding or asleep. There's more in this than meets the nose, if I'm any judge."

The only smells were those of clean stones and subterranean moisture. Keeping close to one wall and ready to run on the instant, he crept inside.

He found himself in an empty, spacious tunnel, more or less the size of the opening itself, its high, barrel vault smoothly and regularly arched with flat stones set close together, edge outwards, its floor a clean, dry shale of similar, loose stones. Some of these rocked slightly under his paws, but otherwise the ground was even and without faults. The tunnel ran back into the heart of the mountain and from the movement of air, as well as the tiny echoes he could hear, he realised that it must be very deep.

He moved forward, looking about him. As he went on, the dim light from the cave mouth receded, but otherwise there was no change. The tunnel remained level, arched above and shaled below.

He came to the mouth of a drift running in from one side, and stopped to smell and listen. It was dry, chill but not cold, and apparently not very deep. As he turned to go back to the main shaft, he saw the opening to the fell as a distant semi-circle of dark blue, with one star twinkling in the middle.

Half an hour later, Snitter found Rowf where he had left him, asleep under a patch of bog myrtle. There was a light drizzle of rain, though the moon, setting in the west, was clear of cloud.

"Rowf, come back! Listen! Listen to me!"

"Why didn't you go? I thought you'd gone, I told you to go."

"I have gone. The mouse-hole, Rowf, the gully in the floor—it's real—we're mice—"

"Oh, let me alone, you brain-sick puppy!"

"The whitecoats can't catch the mice, Rowf! It's safe in the rhododendrons—I mean the hole in the floor—"

"It's a pity they didn't cut your head off while they were about it. You couldn't talk nonsense then. My leg feels like a door in the wind—"

Snitter made a great effort. "There's a place, Rowf, a place—secret, dry, out of the rain. I believe we couldn't be found there."

"Couldn't be found there?"

"By men—whitecoats or farmers—anyone."

"Why not? They must have made it."

"Yes, and come to that they made the gullies in the floor, where the mouse lived. Rowf, you're wet through—"

"It's clean water—"

"You'll get fever." Snitter nipped his fore-leg and dodged away as Rowf snarled and clambered shakily to his feet. "I'm sure I've found something good."

"How can there be anything good in a place like this?"

"Come and see."

When at last he had persuaded Rowf across the beck and up the steep bank to the grassy platform, the moon had set and they could barely make out the mouth of the cavern. Snitter led the way in, hearing behind him the clattering of the shale as Rowf limped on his painful leg. In the blackness of the first drift he lay down and waited for Rowf to join him.

For a long time they lay silently together on the dry stones. At last Snitter said, "Wouldn't there be a chance, do you think; if only we could go on killing food? It's deep—right down inside your head

—and warm—out of the wind— and we could go a long way in if we had to—no one could find us—"

Rowf, lying stretched out on his side, raised his head sleepily. "Come over here; we might as well keep each other warm. Unless it's some sort of trap—you know, suppose a whitecoat suddenly comes in and makes light—"

"There's no smell of men at all."

"I know. They made it, but they've gone. Or else it's like the drains—"

"No, it isn't like the drains," answered Snitter. "We must always remember that, too. The whitecoats couldn't get down the drains; not even the tobacco man could. But they could come down here all'right if they wanted to; perhaps while we were asleep. So they mustn't find out we're here at all."

"Unless they know now. Unless they can see us now."

"Yes—but somehow I feel they can't. How does it smell to you?"

Rowf made no answer for a long time. At last he said, "I believe—I'm almost afraid to believe, but yes, I do believe you're right, Snitter. And if you are—"

"Yes?"

"It'll prove that we were right to escape after all; and we'll have a chance to prove—to ourselves anyway—that dogs can live without men. We'll be wild animals; and we'll be free."

FIT 3

Sunday the 17th October

It was not until some twelve hours later, on Sunday morning, that Tyson, his cap not actually removed (an action as unthinkable as for Santa Claus to shave his whiskers) but thrust vertically to the back of his head as a kind of cryptic token of a kind of cryptic respect, stood facing Mr. Powell outside the staff common room at Lawson Park.

"Ay, theer's the two on them gone," he said for the second time. "Ah thowt Ah'd better let thee knaw, like, first thing off. Theer noan anywheers int' block, but happen theer noan that far awaay."

"Are you sure they're not still in the block?" asked Mr. Powell. "I mean to say, there doesn't seem any way they could have got out, really. Are you sure they've not crept in behind something?"

"Theer noan int' block," repeated Tyson, "and Ah reckon theer nowheers about t' plaace at all.

But happen they'll noan have gone far."

"It'd be much the best thing if we could find them today," said Mr. Powell.

"You and me, I mean. Then there'd be no reason for either Dr. Boycott or Mr.

For-tescue to know anything about it at all. They're both away till tomorrow morning, so that gives us twenty-four hours."

"Soombody moosta seen 'em, like," said Tyson. "Lasst time they were fed were Friday neet, so they'll 'ave had a go to get some groob out of soomwheers." He paused. "Happen they might a bin chasin' sheep ont' fell an' all. That'd be a reel do, that would. That's offence against law, tha knaws, bein' in possession of dog as woorries sheep."

"Oh, my God!" said Mr. Powell, appalled by the sudden thought that he might be held personally responsible. "Tell me again how you found they were gone."

"Well, like Ah toald thee, it were Sat'day evening when Ah coom in at usual time, to feed animals an1 that," said Tyson. "An' Ah seen reel awaay that yon black dog, seven-three-two, were gone out of it caage. Door were oppen, see, an' spring o' catch were broaken. It moosta snapped some time affter Friday neet, for it were awreet then."

Tyson had, in fact, taken a screwdriver to the catch mechanism of the pen door. It was not that he was afraid of dismissal, or even that he cared particularly about reproof from the Director or from Dr. Boycott. It was, rather, that in some curious, scarcely conscious manner, he felt that by breaking the spring of the catch he was actually altering what had happened.

After all, if the spring had snapped of its own accord, on account of metal fatigue or some fault in the steel, then that would have explained the dogs' escape. Now the spring had snapped, and therefore it did account for the escape—to himself as well as to others—and saved a lot of pointless speculation and enquiry. In Tyson's world, things that had happened had happened, and enquiry was a waste of time. If, for example, matters had so fallen out that it had been Tom who had reported the dogs' escape to himself, he would simply have cuffed his head and sworn at him, whether Tom were to blame or not (much as the Aztecs used to execute messengers who brought bad news) and then begun to try to put things right. The spring was now deemed to have snapped; a state of affairs not vastly different, come to that, from the building of t Animal Research itself having attracted deemed planning permission from the Secretary of State.