The Runaways (18 page)

Pat thought for a moment, but not because she didn't know the answer. It was an exact description of Johnny Pickering. She knew the Major well. He was a nice man and she liked him. But she liked Johnny, too. The Major's innocent question did not fool her. He had asked it in just the same way as her mother and father did when they were trying to get something out of her, or to trick her into giving something away she didn't want to give. So she said casually, ‘ No, sir, I can't say that I did.'

And that – for all his cleverness and professional training – was as far as Major Collingwood got for the moment.

It was about this time that Mrs Lakey discovered that the Boy was living with Joe.

Mrs Lakey was a keen fisherwoman. On two mornings while fishing the pool below the hatchway for trout she had looked across the field and seen Johnny feeding the pigs in Joe's ramshackle pen. As, on each occasion, the time was half-past seven of a Sunday morning – for Mrs Lakey believed that it was the early fly-fisher who caught the best trout – she found it a little unusual.

A few days later when she had to call on Joe to give him some directions about dogs' meat supplies she tackled him in her usual straightforward manner.

‘Joe,' she said.

‘Yes, Ma'am?'

‘Is that Boy living with you?'

‘What boy, Ma'am?'

‘Don't wriggle like a worm on a hook with me, Joe. The Boy.'

‘Oh, you mean Johnny, Ma'am.'

‘You know perfectly well who I mean. He's living with you?'

‘Yes, Ma'am.'

‘Why?'

‘Well, 'cos in a way, I'm kind of his uncle. Distantly relationed, you might say, to his aunt.'

‘Being you, you might say anything. Why isn't he with his aunt?'

‘The one at Crockerton, you mean. Ma'am?'

‘I've never heard of another.'

Joe smiled. ‘ Oh, yes, Ma'am, he's got another. What lives in Bristol. And that's where 'is Crockerton auntie is right now. Lookin' after her, 'cos she's sick. Got a very bad leg. Plays her up somethin' cruel every summer. Not to mention hay fever. Martyr she is to every ache and pain goin'. I remember 'er as a small girl – always a-pickin' up somethin' or the other. A medical wonder she is, really. Once ' ad mumps three times running as a girl –'

‘I don't imagine she could have had it as a boy. And I'm not in the mood for medical fairy stories. The Boy lives here with you?'

‘Yes, Ma'am.'

‘With his aunt's permission because she's away?'

‘Yes, Ma'am.'

‘And you're kind of distantly his uncle?'

‘Yes, Ma'am.'

‘And no doubt you're seeing he doesn't get into bad ways?'

‘Yes, Ma'am.'

‘Never poaches, does he?'

‘Oh, no, Ma'am.'

‘Or worms for trout?'

‘Oh, no, Ma'am. And he goes to church sometimes of a Sunday.' Joe put on a very serious face. ‘And I really do hope. Ma'am, as how you don't think that I ain't a fit and proper person to bring up me own nephew. Ain't he given you every satisfaction at Danebury, Ma'am?'

‘He has, Joe. And that's the way I want it to go on. So, you watch your step with him. He's a good boy as boys go.'

‘The best, Ma'am. Couldn't be in better hands than with me, Ma'am. Though I says it meself.'

‘And if you didn't say it yourself who else would?'

When Mrs Lakey got back to Danebury House she told Miss Milly about the Boy's change of abode. Mrs Lakey privately felt that Joe was as fit a person as anyone for a boy to live with, though she wouldn't have said so to his face. If fishing was dull she wasn't above putting a worm on a hook herself to get a trout. Apart from all this, Mrs Lakey was a person who – though always ready to help if asked – was a great believer in letting other people, especially young people, work out their own problems. She didn't know what the Boy's problem was, but as far as she could see he was coping with it perfectly capably at the moment.

By the first of June the cheetah cubs were seven weeks old. They were faster and steadier on their feet and could mouse-hunt for themselves, and were sometimes quick enough to take a slow-moving young lark or green plover in the long grasses. But they were still too young to run down a rabbit or a hare. Yarra provided the bulk of their food for them. The odd small stuff they caught for themselves would by no means have kept them alive.

However, there were times now when Yarra, sensing the future when they would have to fare for themselves, would sometimes cuff them away from the game she brought back. She was deliberately making them hungry now and then to strengthen their own hunting instincts. She would eat first, spitting and mock-snapping at them if they tried to approach until she had had her fill. If she awoke in the night to find them sucking at her dugs she would roll away from them, denying them the little milk flow that remained. Also in her, though not understood by her, was now a different kind of restlessness from the one she had known when she had been carrying her young. Yarra, like all her kind, was a sociable, pack animal. She did not like to live alone. Now that the cubs were growing and her maternal instinct had been satisfied, there was a new want in her. She had a need for the company of her own kind. This restlessness made her, when she left the cubs sleeping in the den, roam wider than she had done in the past. Somewhere in the vastness of the plain there had to be others of her kind, another Apollo to mate with, and other cheetahs to pack and hunt with. It was this that one night took her quartering and hunting into the face of a stiff north wind which was blowing almost a gale across the plain.

Once or twice she put up a rabbit, began the chase and then broke off. She was hungry but there was a stronger need inside her. Within an hour she was, although still on the plain, in new country to her. The wind whipped and flattened the tall grasses, blowing out of a cloudless sky that was ablaze with stars. Now and again she heard a small brown owl call. She watched the navigation lights of an airliner wink and blink across the sky. She scented deer twice but ignored the instinct to hunt.

Eventually she came out on to a high bluff at the northern extremity of the plain. A wire fence ran along the ridge of the bluff. Below, the land fell away into a great valley, the fields seeded with corn, the long slopes broken here and there with patches of woodland. Two miles away the occasional head-lights of a car moved along an unseen road.

Yarra turned left along the fence, the wind buffeting at her thick, rough coat. Once she squatted on her haunches, sphinx-like and immobile, and then raised her head and gave two or three angry, rasping calls. She moved on and put up a rabbit from the lee of a gorse bush. She leapt and caught it by the neck, clamped her jaws hard, holding it until it died of suffocation. She dropped it and passed on.

When the fence angled downwards, following the slope of a combe-side, she followed it for a hundred yards to the foot of the combe. Here the fence ran along the edge of a large grove of tall beech trees. The high wind was bending and whipping the leafy top branches of the trees, making a loud soughing and whistling noise. Yarra stopped just short of the wood. Beyond the fence was a pasture field, the grass short from cattle grazing. A new scent came downwind to her.

It was a scent she had known before, but not for a long time now. Sometimes it had come to her in the cheetah enclosure at Longleat. She had also known it now and again in her first days of escape. She lifted her muzzle into the wind and took the scent. From the side of the wood which ran down the edge of the pasture there came a low, anxious, bleating sound. With the sound came a movement which Yarra saw at once.

At the woodside in the pasture something small and white stirred. The bleating sound came again, almost drowned by the rushing noise of the wind through the beeches.

The white object moved again but stayed in the same spot. Curious, Yarra leapt the fence and began to walk slowly towards the object.

The side of the beech wood bordering the field had been fenced off with strands of barbed wire which ran on thick posts. Posts and barbed wire were old and in places had collapsed. Twenty yards from Yarra strands of wire lay coiled and twisted on the ground. Caught by the leg in one of the coils was a small calf. In its struggles to escape the coil had pulled tighter and now it was firmly trapped. It was an Ayrshire calf, white-coated with a scattering of brown markings.

As Yarra approached it made an anxious, lowing sound and then stood still. It saw Yarra. Yarra watched the calf. It was no larger than some of the deer she hunted and she waited for it to move. From its scent she knew it was good eating. The fact that it stood still made her curious. Slowly, with her high-shouldered, deliberate walk, she paced towards the calf, but made a small half-circle to come past it. This brought her slightly upwind of the calf and her scent reached it. Catching Yarra's scent, and instinctively sensing the menace in the way the cheetah walked, the calf plunged and bleated and tugged against the wire that was trapping one of its hind legs. The length of wire pulled away from a holding staple in its rotting post. The calf bounded forward about six feet and was brought up with a jerk as the wire was held by the staple fastening in the next post.

The movement excited Yarra and she raced in and leapt. She landed on the calf's back and brought it crashing to the ground. Yarra's jaws clamped across the back of the calf's neck, choking all sound from the animal.

Her weight holding the calf down, Yarra tightened her grip. The calf kicked and struggled under her as she slowly throttled it, worrying and shaking its neck. High above, the wind, funnelling up the narrow combe, roared and whistled through the tall beeches, ripping off leaves and small twigs.

From farther down the sloping pasture the calf's mother had heard the distress calls of its young. She came downwind now, along the edge of the wood, seeking her calf. The wind carried her scent to Yarra, but her nostrils were full of the same scent from the calf. Also, Yarra heard no sound of the cow's movement towards her because it was drowned by the high soughing of the gale wind blowing through the trees.

The calf died under Yarra. She opened her jaws and released it. As she did so, she saw the movement of the Ayrshire cow almost on top of her.

The Ayrshire was a big animal. She had calved more than once before. She had a sleek white hide, blotched with cherry-red and brown markings over her forequarters. Like all Ayrshires her horns were very distinctive. They were long, and curved outwards and upwards and then slightly backwards. Formidable weapons. Under any other circumstances the cow would never have approached Yarra. But now she was impelled by her maternal instincts.

She lowered her head and rushed at Yarra. Yarra turned and leapt sideways to avoid her. She was a fraction too late. As she rose into the air, the cow jerked her head with a quick sideways slash of her horns. The left-hand, long, curving horn struck Yarra in the side, daggering deep into her belly just below the bottom of her rib cage.

Yarra gave a sharp angry, spitting snarl of rage and pain as she was flung high through the air. She thudded to the ground, rolled over, found her feet and then raced away as the cow came charging after her.

Yarra leapt the boundary fence and kept moving fast. Blood dripped from her wound. She went up to the head of the combe and headed southwards, back across the plain towards her den and her cubs.

As she moved, the pain in her belly nagged her. Once she halted and sat and licked at the wound.

Behind her in the pasture field the Ayrshire cow nuzzled and sniffed at the prostrate form of the calf. No movement came from it. (The next morning when the farmer saw it, he was to think that foxes had found the trapped calf and killed it, but had been driven off by the mother before they could eat it.)

Yarra took a line straight across the plain for her den and her cubs. She had three miles to go. With every step she took her pain increased and she grew more and more exhausted, and weaker and weaker. Behind her the gale-flattened grasses and the bare tracks were spotted with the trail of her life blood.

She kept on, following her line and her instinct to return to her cubs. Now and again she stumbled, only to pick herself up and move on. She reached the top of the ridge above the den and half-rolled, half-slid down the slope to the little screen of trees in front of the cave entrance.

She stood at the entrance, exhausted, her flanks heaving with the effort of breathing, her head dropping lower and lower on her long neck. She took a step forward to the entrance, staggered and fell. As she struggled to rise again and reach her cubs, she died.

Yarra died on a Friday long before daybreak. As morning came the wind which had been all night in the north slewed round into the north-west and brought thick, low-flying clouds sweeping over the plain. Rain began to fall steadily, a hard, warm, persistent summer rain.

The cubs, waking from sleep at first light, came out of the den and found their mother. She lay stretched out stiffly, the rain soaking into her pelt. They sniffed around her, not understanding her immobility. The male pawed for a moment or two at her neck to wake her and butted at her with his head. Then, not liking the hard, driving rain, he shook his body free of the clinging water drops and trotted slowly back into the den. The female stayed outside longer. She was hungrier than her brother. This was the time of day when normally Yarra took them for their morning hunting. She walked around Yarra making small mewing noises and then, getting no response, bad-tempered little spitting sounds. She crouched, flicked her small tail and jumped once or twice playfully at Yarra's flank. Yarra showed no movement. The cub, hungry, nuzzled at Yarra's dugs, hoping for milk. No milk came. After a while she moved back into the cave.

Yarra lay under the rain. The water, gathering on the steep slope above the den, now began to run down through the grasses in growing trickles and rivulets.