The Plague Dogs (35 page)

—to make it easier to break bits off, obviously. Well, my dam told me that moons are actually huge—

enormous—only they don't look it because they're so high in the sky. The man who slices the bits off brings them down here, and 'then they're used for making those lights on the cars. Clever, isn't it?"

"Do they last long—when they're lights, I mean?"

"Not very long—only about a night, I should think, because you hardly ever see them shining by day. They must keep changing them. You can tell they're quite . Different from the still sort of lights men make indoors by ; lifting up their hands. Sn'ff! Sn'ff! How that car smell : ijtakes me back, too! It's a cheerful, natural sort of smell, ; isn't it?—not like these foul rocks. Let's stay here and jrest a bit, tod."

"Nay, git ower, ye gowk. Bide aboot o' th' road an' ye'll be gud an' deed."

Snitter scuttled across in an interval of darkness, joined the tod in the bed of Birkside Gill and looked up at the long Helvellyn ridge fading into distance and moonlight above them.

"O for the wings of a sheep!" sighed Snitter, as they began once more to follow the inexorable tod up the gill's pools and cascades towards Willie Wife Moor.

"Wings of a sheep, Snitter?"

"Yes—they had them once, you know. What happened was that one flew up into the sky, so naturally they all followed. Then they took off their wings and began feeding and as the sun moved on across the sky they went with it, to keep warm. Well, towards evening a wind got up and blew all their wings away from the place where they'd left them. They never got them back—you can see them all up there, blowing along in the blue to this day."

"But how did the sheep get back to the ground?"

"Why, a long way off the sky curves down and touches the land—you can see it does. They had to walk round the long way—took them ages."

"Well, I never knew that. You are a clever little chap, Snitter. He's clever, isn't he, tod?"

“Ay, clever as th' north end of a sooth-boond jackass." The tod lay down.

"Ye kin bide a while noo, lad. It's a canny bit run yit an' Aa haven't the list t' do it."

When at length they had passed Nethermost Pike, reached the western end of Striding Edge and were looking down the almost sheer six hundred feet to Red Tarn' shining smooth in the moonlight, Rowf curled his lip and swore.

"My teeth in your neck, tod, you never told me we'd be living on the edge of one of these blasted drowning-tanks! And no men, you said—why, the whole place smelts of men like a rubbish-tip

—tobacco, old bread—what are those other smells, Snitter—"

"Oo—potato crisps, women, chocolate, ice-cream squishy squish. That was another of Kiff's songs. O mutton-bones, chicken and cheese, they're things that are Greenup and Eagle Crag certain to please, but what I like the most is a jolly lamp-post—'"

"Shut up! Tod, scores of men must come here—"

"Why ay, but not in winter an' not where yor gannin'."

"I'm not going down to that tank," said Rowf. "Nay, divven't fash yersel', ninny." The tod seemed almost conciliatory.

Snitter, sitting back on the stones, raised his muzzle to the cloudy, sailing moon. With as little reason and almost as much delight as the migrant blackcap in May, which sings on the outskirts of an English copse, heedless that in six months' time some hirsute swine in Italy or Cyprus, with call-pipe and quicklime, will murder it for some other swine in Paris to eat in aspic, Snitter gave tongue in the moonlight.

"O friendly moon,

As bright as bone,

Up in the sky

You rot alone.

The cracks and marks

That I can see

Are no great mystery to me.

It's plain to my

Observant snout,

Maggots go in

And flies come out!

"Now if a fly,

On pleasure bent,

Sat down on my

Warm excrement, I wouldn't mind

One little bit. I'm really kind—"

"Oh, come on, Snitter!" said Rowf. "What's the use of sitting there, singing rubbish?"

"A lot," answered Snitter. "When I sing, people in the sky throw bits down to me. Or Kiff does, or someone. You don't believe me, do you? Look!"

ON THE HELVELLYN RANGE

He pattered away a few yards among the rocks and a moment later they could hear and smell him routing out and munching the damp remains of an abandoned packet of crisps. He ran back to them with the plastic bag stuck over his muzzle.

"Woff fioffle floof." He snudged it off with, one front paw. "Would you like it, tod? I'm afraid it's not really what it was just now."

Without a word the tod set off northward along the summit, towards Low Man.

Half an hour later they had descended a thousand feet and come to the ruined flue below the eastern slopes of Raise—an ugly, enseared landscape, riven with the scars of old industry—and here, in a kind of little cave formed by part of the ruin, they went to ground and dozed restlessly for two or three hungry hours. At moonset the tod roused them and led them a mile down the beck to the hamlet of Glenridding where, under its shrewd guidance, they foraged among the dustbins for what little they could get.

"Dustbins is as dangerous as owt else—thet's why ye were nigh booggered Doonerdl: ye took ne heed. Ye've to push th' lid off, grab whit ye can an' away while they're still thinkin' what wez yon.

Nivver hang aboot." They returned to their lair in the darkness before dawn, half-filled and half-poisoned, Rowf stopping repeatedly to excrete a foul fluid over the stones along the beck. Snit-ter's high spirits had evaporated and he felt tired out. Once in the chilly hole, he curled up beside the tod and fell asleep at once. Digby Driver, having made a telephone call to Mr. Simp-son in London and dictated his second article to the Orator, returned into Dunnerdale. He certainly did not intend to be in or near Coniston when the article appeared. Having reconnoitred from the bar of the Traveller's Rest to the bar of the Newfield, he proceeded to follow the kindly advice of Jack Longmire (landlord of the latter) to the effect that Mr. Bob Taylor knew a great deal about the whole valley, being up and down Duddon.

At nearly all times of year, fishing. He was lucky enough jo find Bob in, tying trout flies at a table by the fire. "Yes, I'm fairly sure now that I must have seen one -Of those dogs crossing the Duddon on the very morning it escaped from Miss Dawson's," said Bob, pouring sherry for Digby Driver and himself. "At least, if it wasn't, I'm iore I don't know what a strange fox terrier was doing; swimming the Duddon on its own in quite a lonely spot, wasn't it a black-and-white fox terrier that Miss Dawson caught in her yard?"

"So I believe," said Driver. "So if you're right, that's the dog that's been killing sheep in the hills east of the Duddon, and it returned there as soon as it escaped. But why hasn't anyone seen it up there?

Where's it hiding, d'you think?"

"Hard to say, really," replied Bob reflectively. "Are there any lonely barns or sheds up that way?"; "None at all," said Bob, deftly concluding the manu-r facture of a black gnat with two fragments of a starling's feather. "All the same, it would be very unlikely to be. -. living in the open, I'd think, for two reasons. One's simply the time of year and the weather; and the other is that if lit were, someone—Dennis Williamson or somebody—would have seen it up there by now."

"So?"

"So it must have found some sort of underground refuge."

"Like?" I' "We-ell, let's think; perhaps an old shaft or slate work-ling of some kind; or the old coppermines—somewhere Vtike that."

"What are the actual likeliest places, d'you know?"

"I think it's hardly possible to be comprehensive about ~that," replied Bob, who in his time had been first a Schoolmaster and then a town planner in Whitehall, and accustomed to answer questions with precision. "But it were anything to do with me, which thank goodness isn't, I'd be inclined to have a look at the old Sea-aite coppermine shaft, up beyond Seathwaite Tarn, and perhaps, over the top, at the area of the quarries south of"the summit of Coniston Old Man; yes, and the Paddy End mining area too."

"Where are they, exactly?"

Digby Driver spread out his map and Bob showed him. Not long afterwards, Driver refused Mrs. Taylor's hospitable offer of luncheon and took his leave. He returned up the Duddon valley, left his car in the line near Long House, took a torch with him and set out for Seathwaite Tarn. Having rounded the tarn along the north shore, he reached and entered the coppermine shaft; and here he smoked a cigarette, throwing down the empty packet as deftly as any Islington yob at the Angel. Like Dennis before him, he drew blank, but did not fail, nevertheless, to observe the gnawed bones, excreta and other evidence of relatively recent canine occupation. He was too ignorant to be able to tell whether the occupants had left some time ago or whether they had merely gone out and might be returning.

"H'm," mused Digby Driver thoughtfully, "What's to be done now, I wonder? This mustn't leak out. No, no. It would never do, would it, if that dog—if those dogs—were to be caught too soon?

Never, never. They're lucky to have me, they are indeed." Monday the 15th November "Good God!"

said Dr. Boycott, aghast.

He sat staring at the front page of the Orator with a kind of stupefaction. Mr. Powell, behind his shoulder, also stared, lips compressed and eyes moving from side to side as he read.

ARE RUNAWAY DOGS CARRYING BUBONIC PLAGUE?

(From Digby Driver, the Orator's Man-on-the-Spot)

The tranquil inhabitants of Lakeland, England's celebrated rural area of natural beauty, got a shock yesterday. The reason? It has at last been revealed mat, contrary to the bureaucratic silence hitherto preserved by Whitehall's Animal Research Station at Lawson Park, near Coniston, the mystery dogs who for some days past have been playing cops-and-robbers among the sheep and hens of farmers, are in fact escapees from the Station's experimental [editor's note: word, possibly sentence, is missing from this passage].

An official statement, issued two days ago by Animal Research, typically concealing as much as it informs the public, now that on a date last month two dogs escaped. That tells tittle. But would they have told the public that much without Orator?

There are, therefore, THREE dogs Involved, the third is, you've guessed It! The public's watchdog, the London Oratory Britain's highest-selling dally paper. Cagey what the statement did NOT

say was that the dogs are identical with those who have been killing sheep in the Lake District and were discovered by Dunnerdale shopkeeper Phyllis Dawson red-tended in a daring raid on her premises, as reported in these pages. Yet miss is virtually certain. What kind of time is this to be cagey, when public safety is at stake? Yet this is what the scientists of Lawson Park, who are paid with the taxpayer's money, are doing.

To them the Orator says, "Wake up, gentlemen, if not, we shall have to wake you up, in the public interest"

Sinister et a more sinister reason, as it seems, looms in the background among teacups and clanking inventions . ,,._' the story.

The Orator is now able to purvey to its readers the exclusive information that at the time of the dogs'

escape, when, b now known, they were alone and at large in the Station's laboratories for long hours on the "night of the crime," investigations were taking place in those very laboratories into bubonic plague. This terrible killer-disease, which once decimated the London of merry monarch Charles II three hundred years ago, now been unknown in this country for many years past, being carried by flea-parasites of the common rat. Did They?

' Could the escapee dogs, before their getaway, have met up with deadly infected fleas? We know that dogs like rats, and fleas dogs. But does the British public like secrets, deception and [e]?

That is why the Orator says today, to the men of Lawson: "Open your doors, gentlemen, open your minds and learn to trust the people."

"Cooler!" said Mr. Powell. "And what exactly does A do now, I wonder?"

"I don't know what the Director will do," replied Dr. Boycott, "but I know what I'd do in his place. I'd get Whitehall to issue a categorical statement immediately that the dogs couldn't possibly have had any contact."

"And what about the dogs? Do we have to go out and try to catch them now?"

"If it was me, I'd take instructions from Whitehall on that. This is one situation where Whitehall migttt be some help to us. The dogs'll have to be shot now, obviously—not just caught, but shot dead, and the quicker the better. What I want to know is, how did the Orator man get hold of all this?"

"Goodner, d'you suppose?" asked Mr. Powell.

"Goodner's always been as canny as they come. A man of his age and experience— if he was prone to indiscretion he'd have fallen down a long time before now. I dare say discretion was one of the assets he'd already shown he possessed before he got the job. Not just anybody gets put on germ warfare, you know. There's too much at stake."

Mr. Powell picked up the Orator and re-read it with a demure travel of regard, frowning the while. He was at a cold scent, but it was certainly rank; and sure enough, after another half-minute, Dr.

Boycott cried upon it.

"Have you said anything to anyone?" asked Dr. Boycott suddenly and sharply.

Mr. Powell started. "Me? No, not a thing, chief, straight up."

"You're absolutely certain? Not to anyone? How about that fellow you said gave you a lift back from Dunner-dale?"

"I can't remember what we talked about. Nothing that's security, that's for sure."

"But he couldn't help knowing you were from here and that you'd gone over to Dunnerdale after the dogs. Did he ask you any questions?"

"I said something about the dogs, I believe—nothing much—but certainly nothing about Goodner's work or bubonic plague. Well, I couldn't, could I? I don't know nything. I didn't even know he was doing plague, come to that."

"Well, all right. It's a matter for the Director now. Save it for the judge, as the Americans say.

It's possible. that nothing more will come of it. Dogs can't contract bubonic plague, you know. If they could, and those dogs had had any contact, they'd be dead by now. Presumably we've only got to say so and the whole thing'll die down. But all the same, the quicker they're shot the better."