Fraser's Voices (2 page)

Nephesh was easier to find. He hunted around the gardens by night and Fraser could often hear him from his bedroom window.

That night he called to him. “Nephesh.”

“What moves?” asked the owl, backing his wings and turning in flight to see who was calling him.

“Who killed all those hens?”

“Who asks?” The owl was suspicious and circled the house, peering with his enormous eyes.

“Here I am, at the window. I can speak your language.”

“Ah! So it's true. I had heard from the bats, and Hobdax, the hedgehog had some second-hand tale to tell, but I did not believe that it was true. So you speak our language?”

“Who killed the hens?” repeated Fraser.

“Why should I know that?”

“Everyone says that you know all that happens by night,” flattered Fraser.

The bird circled once more and perched on a chimney pot. He was pleased by the compliment and fluffed out his feathers with pride.

“Yes,” he put his head to one side, “that is true. I hear most things that move in the night and whatever can be seen I see.” Fraser tensed in expectation, his fingers gripping the windowsill. “But I do not know who killed the hens.”

“I thought you knew everything.” Fraser risked being cheeky.

“I do; I do,” hooted the owl indignantly, “but this thing travels by water. He came down the burn that runs by the edge of the garden and he escaped the same way back into the wood, so that men and dogs could not track him. Am I a duck that I should see underwater?”

“An otter?” suggested Fraser.

“Definitely not an otter. No otter would kill like that. It was no animal I know of. Ask Sebek the Pike.”

Fraser had to start all over again.

“Pike? Not worth catching,” said a local angler. “Not much fight, no taste, nasty brutes. But if you really want to find a big one… “ he directed Fraser to a deep pool in the Ballagan Burn down at the bottom of the wood and just above the rocky outcrop where it takes its last wild leap into space before flowing tamely into the loch.

Here, he was told, lived the great-grandfather of all the pike in Argyll. “Mind you don't fall in. He's as big as a crocodile, that one.”

The pike was there, right enough. When Fraser lay on his side at the edge of the pool he could just see the silvery glint of the monster's scales through the dark brown, peaty water. But how to talk to him? It had never, until that moment, occurred to Fraser that fish could talk. But then he hadn't known that birds could either.

Eventually he asked a moorhen. After the usual startled flapping which was always the response when he spoke to a bird he hadn't met before, she settled down in the safety of a thicket of reeds and told him, “You'll have to shout. They're very deaf, fish. But he probably won't answer you anyway. He's also very rude… unless,” she added as an afterthought, “you promise him worms; he's very greedy.”

This turned out to be good advice. At first when Fraser spoke to him, Sebek just buried himself deeper in the mud at the bottom of the pool, if he heard him at all.

But after lunch Fraser came back with some tit-bits – the thick fat from a pork chop, two lumps of mouldy cheese his mum had been going to throw out and several worms he had dug out of the garden.

This did the trick and slowly the great fish rose, four feet from nose to tail, eyes staring straight ahead, mouth slightly open, showing long thin teeth, like needles. The coots and moorhens retreated to a safe distance for, although Sebek is lazy and such a poor swimmer that he is a joke among the trout, he can launch himself with one thrust of his tail like a torpedo on an unwary fish or waterbird and once those backward pointing teeth have closed on anything they cannot release their grip.

Sebek gulped the fat and cheese greedily.

“What moves?” asked Fraser.

“Who calls?” The pike's voice sent shivers down Fraser's spine, like a heavy file rasping over rotten wood.

Sebek could not see things out of the water very well and he was wary.

“Who killed all the hens in the man's garden?” Fraser knew his question by heart now.

“Hens? What are hens? What is a garden? I never leave this pool.”

Fraser realised his mistake. Sebek was no Eye of the Wind, or even Nephesh who saw and heard most things.

He tried again. “A strange animal has killed a lot of birds. Do you know who it is?”

“I have taken birds,” reminisced the pike. “Coots, ducks.”

“But this is an animal that comes out on land,” insisted Fraser.

The slow, cold-blooded fish continued with his memories. He was not to be hurried. “Animals too, frogs and voles. And once a young puppy dog came to drink. He waded in too far and I took him. I remember a human like you howling on the bank.”

“But this killer was an animal that can leave the water.”

“It has not come here. I would have taken it if it had. I never leave this pool now. You will see that I am very large and cannot now pass the shallows upstream. Once, when I was smaller, I…”

Fraser cut in, “But surely other fish tell you what moves upstream?”

“They do sometimes, the trout and the perch, but they avoid me. Few of them care to spend the time of day with me in my pool.”

Fraser had exhausted the supply of worms he had brought with him and Sebek, whose only interest in the conversation, apart from boasting about his past exploits, had been in the bait, sank slowly to the deep dark bottom, like a water-logged tree trunk beyond the range of Fraser's questions.

The pale glow in the west had faded and in the opposite sky a low, orange moon was still too dull to give much light. Suddenly One-eye was at the mouth of the earth, nose wriggling, tasting the air before cautiously stepping out of the mouth of the burrow. He paused there for a second, still near enough to twist and bolt back underground, but the signs were safe; no strange scents and only the call of Nephesh as he slipped among the branches, his luminous, magnifying eyes scanning the ground for the least twitch of whisker or tail which would betray a mouse or vole.

“What moves?” barked One-eye.

“Nothing moves,” hooted Nephesh, meaning that all was well.

One-eye stepped delicately from the play area just beyond the mouth of the den where generations of his cubs had tumbled and scratched and learned the first tricks of hunting; then he was on an old trail, trodden by his father and by generations of foxes before him.

He followed it through the wood, down by the side of the field. By now the lemon moon, climbing higher, was beginning to cast shadows, but below the trees all was blackness and One-eye moved by scent. Here the main trail was criss-crossed by the tiny traffickings of the wood-folk; recently a vole had hurried across into the cover of dense grass; further along a shrew had caught a beetle and had left the indigestible debris – legs and hard wing cases – as evidence of the murder; much earlier – too long ago to be of interest – a rabbit had hopped across the trail and sat on its hind legs – the grass was flattened – to survey the open field beyond the shelter of the trees.

One-eye's nose and whiskers and tongue told him all this and his old fox's brain knew what it meant just as Fraser's dad could look at a jungle of figures on a computer print-out and interpret the world of business.

Suddenly One-eye stiffened. Here was something unexpected; not strange or hostile but simply too good to be true.

“Carrion,” his nose told him and it was as tempting as the smell of bacon frying to a hungry man.

He tracked it down the trail, for that kind of smell carries a long way. Then he saw it, the haunch of a rabbit. It must have lain for a week or more, for little things with many legs were beginning to fasten on the flesh.

At close quarters the smell was intoxicating, almost overpowering – yet there was something strange about the way the carcass lay that alerted One-eye's suspicions. So he checked, sniffed, looked and looked again and saw, like a spider's web of gleaming grey metal, the cage around the bait. It didn't move; it had no smell. Had he been younger, or perhaps hungrier, One-eye would have ignored it and gone for the meat, but he had not become One-eye, the survivor, for nothing and, sensing something unnatural which he did not understand, he stepped aside and followed the old trail till it led him away from that tantalising smell and on to the mice and frogs and other small game which were his night's normal business.

The moon, now silver, clambered over the backs of clouds up into a black sky, casting cold light across the fields and into the chequered spaces between the shadows of trees in the wood. The old trail shone like a marble causeway until its outline was broken by the hatching and blotching of the woodland shadows.

Along it came, snuffling and panting, One-eye's fellow lodger in the earth, Barook the Badger. Slowly he came, short of sight, rooting like a pig, grubbing for worms.

One-eye, who prided himself on being a hunter and delighted in nothing more than the sudden explosive charge and the capture of a young rabbit or hare off guard, despised Barook as a plodding, dull-witted beast content to live on worms and slugs. But he respected him too, for those powerful jaws and long claws were One-eye's protection against the only enemy he had to fear underground. Barook wasn't very clever and had no taste when it came to feeding, but, face to face in a narrow passage he would tear to pieces any terrier foolhardy enough to trespass on his territory.

Barook, grovelling for small crawling things, plodded down the trail following One-eye's scent till he came to the place where the fox had stepped aside. To be fair to him, he might have wondered why One-eye had done this so abruptly, but by then the delicious smell of dead rabbit was engulfing him in wave after wonderful wave.

He could smell no threatening scents and there were no strange sounds and so, without noticing the tell-tale metal web, he went for the bait. As his teeth met in it he heard, behind him, the clang of a portcullis.

The moon turned to copper and slunk out of the sky, the shadows it cast fading in the first grey glimmering of the dawn. Then the creatures of the night knew the time had come to return to their lairs before day revealed their secrets to the hawks and the dogs – and man.

One-eye trotted back along the trail with a good enough night's work inside him till he came to the strange scaffolding and inside it, as if to confirm his doubts, Barook.

“What moves?” asked One-eye.

“This moves. This web. I can't get out.”

“You're trapped,” snapped the fox.

“How do I get out?”

“You don't. You wait there till they come for you.”

“By the bones of dead badgers, I will not,” swore Barook, for he knew something about traps and what happened to those who were caught alive in them; and he tore at the cage till the blood spurted from his mouth and the pads of his paws.

The fox watched without emotion. He knew that there often comes a time in an animal's life when it makes one fatal mistake and finds itself with a weasel at its throat or a hawk's talons in its sides and then there is nothing more to be done. It seemed to him that Barook's death was already clenched around him and that he must get away as quickly as possible.

So he was just about to turn down the trail again when he remembered something and stopped.

“Get me out!” raved Barook.

“Wait,” said One-eye. “The other day I heard a strange tale from Eye of the Wind of a boy who speaks our language. If it is true, perhaps he could help.” And he bounded into the dawn.

Fraser had been asleep. Neither the growing light nor the full-throated dawn chorus of all the birds in Argyll had wakened him for it was still too early for most humans to be about, but something else had disturbed him.

What could it have been?

Then he heard it again – a tap-tapping at his window. This was not unusual. Some of the larger birds, jackdaws for instance, tapped on the pane quite often, possibly for insects. But then he heard a voice.

“Boy with the bird's tongue, boy with the bird's tongue, can you hear me?”

Fraser was wide awake at once. It was the first time a bird had ever started a conversation with him.

“What moves?” he whispered.

“Put your head out of the window and listen.”

Fraser got up, drew back the curtain and opened the window. Immediately a magpie flapped off to a tree and, settling in a low branch, spoke to something on the ground in the bushes.

“There he is.”

There was little light yet and before Fraser could see anything in the shadows below the sycamores he heard a noise halfway between a whine and a growl; the animal seemed uneasy about speaking directly to a human inside a house.

“Is it true what Eye of the Wind said? Can you understand me?”

“Yes,” said Fraser realising now that he was talking with a fox.

“Then follow me.”

Never in his life had Fraser come across a story in which a fox called on a boy to follow him, or a boy followed a fox.

“But the animal was insistent. “Come. At once.”

“I'm coming. Wait a moment; humans need clothes.”

Pulse pounding, he pulled on jeans and a sweater, crammed his feet into a pair of trainers and slipped over the window sill on the trail of a wild creature that had asked him to follow it.

One-eye – Fraser could see now that the fox he was following was the one he had heard about and had been trying to help – trotted ahead, but stopped frequently to look back and make sure the boy was following. The trail led through a gap in the garden wall round the edge of a field and into the wood. Here One-eye seemed to feel that his mission had been completed, for he flattened his body to the ground, gave several sharp barks, “Here! Here!” and, clearly uneasy in the growing light of day, cantered off into the undergrowth…

Fraser looked about. It was not yet quite light under the trees.

Then he heard a gruff voice, “Can you get me out?” and saw the trap – a steel cage with a deadweight door released by pressure on a pad just in front of the bait. He'd often seen them before and one of the gamekeepers had shown him how they worked. Inside this one was a large badger bleeding from mouth and paws.

It never occurred to Fraser not to release the animal. He had been brought into the secret confidence of wild things and he could not have betrayed that confidence. Quickly he lifted the trapdoor and the badger scrambled out and vanished into the undergrowth. Fraser was somehow disappointed. What had he expected? That a frightened wild animal would sit up and give a paw, like a poodle, and say “Thank you”?

He turned and was just about to make his way home, hoping that he had not been missed from the house, when that rough voice called to him from the density of a bramble thicket where the animal felt safe.

“I owe you a debt. My people have long memories. One day I will repay.”

Then, with a scuffling in the undergrowth, he was gone.

Fraser was not to know how soon he would have to count on that promise.