The Crowstarver (11 page)

Mister handed it to him, smiling.

‘You've surely never been in the river, sir?' Tom said.

‘No, no,' said Mister. ‘I've been fishing. I dropped a line off the bridge and managed to hook it. Took a bit of patience, I don't mind telling you. Each time I nearly succeeded, the current would beat me at the last minute, so I put a little lead sinker on to weight the hook and managed to get it through the ring at last. I tell you, when I pulled it up, I was as proud as if I'd landed a good-sized trout.'

‘Oh we are grateful, sir,' said Kathie. ‘Spider, what d'you say?'

Spider stood, grinning hugely. He looked at his parents. ‘Spider's knife,' he said. Then he
looked at Mister and pointed a finger at him. ‘He's a good un,' he said.

Before its loss, Spider had only used his knife in a fairly aimless way, whittling at odd sticks and bits of wood with no particular end in view. But after its recovery, he began, by some chance, to make use of it constructively, in fact to carve things with it. Unsurprisingly, he carved animals. Maybe it began because he picked up a piece of wood that in shape already resembled some creature or other, but before long he succeeded in carving what looked quite like a dog. He made several of these, improving all the while, until one day he came into the cottage kitchen where Kathie was baking, and thrust something into her floury hand.

‘For Mum,' he said.

‘What is it?' said Kathie.

‘Moss,' said Spider, and indeed Kathie could now see clearly that the carving was, apart from colour of course, a rough representation of a Border Collie.

‘Oh thank you, Spider my love,' said Kathie. ‘There's clever you are!'

Tom said much the same, some days later, when he too received a present.

‘Barrit,' said Spider, ‘for Dada,' and a pretty
good rabbit it was too, sitting up, ears pricked, alert for danger.

Neither Kathie nor Tom knew anything about naive art or indeed art of any kind, but they could see now that Spider, despite all his handicaps, had some gift for carving in wood. His next efforts proved this beyond doubt.

Though there was much about the world that Spider did not understand, his recent experience had left him with two definite impressions. The foreman had pulled him out of the nasty cold river. The farmer had rescued his most prized possession, his knife. Now that he had made presents for the two most important people in his life, his mother and father, he would make two more for the men who had helped him. The common element that bound both men to him was, in his mind, water, and now he set to work to make two more models, both of water creatures.

When the first of them was ready, he took it down to the stables with him in the pocket of that old army greatcoat that had once been much too long for him but was not now.

Percy Pound usually left Spider till last when giving out his morning orders, and so the other farm men had gone and there was no-one else in
the stables except for the horseman down at the far end when Spider approached the foreman, and pulling the gift from his pocket, proffered it to him.

‘For Per-cy,' he said.

Percy took the carving. It was of a long low short-legged animal with a round head like a cat and a long tapering tail. It was brown in colour, for Spider had by chance made it from a piece of chestnut wood.

‘For me?' said Percy.

Spider nodded. ‘Hotter,' he said.

‘I can see it is,' said Percy.‘A right good likeness too. Thank you, boy, thank you. I shall treasure it.'

The model Spider next made was of a fish. He had cut this from a piece of yew, so that the wood was red in colour, and he had even scratched with painstaking care a pattern of scales upon it with his knife-point.

‘Fish,' he said proudly as he showed it to his parents.

‘It's lovely,' they said.

‘For Mister,' he said.

In all the years he had worked at Outoverdown Farm Tom had never actually been to the Yorkes' house. It was not the original farm
house, a modest building adjoining the farmyard, in which Percy Pound and his family lived, but a rather more imposing manor house just outside the village, with stabling and a fine garden.

Rather than go to it, Tom and Kathie decided that the best plan would be to intercept Mister and his wife after church. They themselves were not churchgoers but they knew that the Yorkes were, so the next Sunday morning they all stood by the lychgate waiting, Spider carrying his gift which Kathie had carefully wrapped. When Mister and his wife came down the church path, Tom pushed Spider forward.

‘Excuse me, sir,' Tom said. ‘My boy's got something for you.'

Spider held out the wrapped fish. ‘For Mis-ter,' he said.

The farmer smiled. In his own house his wife always referred to him as ‘the Major', when talking to the servants, and on the hunting field he was ‘Major Yorke', but he knew quite well what the farm men called him, though never to his face.

‘A present?' he said.

Spider nodded.

‘It's his way of thanking you,' said Tom, ‘for getting his knife out of the river.'

The farmer unwrapped the fish carving and
held it out for his wife to see. ‘Just look at that!' he said.

‘That's lovely!' Mrs Yorke said.

‘You made that, Spider?' asked Mister, and he could not keep a note of incredulity from his voice.

Spider nodded.

‘He's carved quite a few things lately,' Kathie said.

‘With that knife you fished up for him,' added Tom.

‘How glad I am that I did,' said Mister, and they all smiled, the Sparrows with pride in Spider, the Yorkes with pleasure at the realization that this poor damaged boy could make such an object. Spider smiled because the rest were smiling.

Not long afterwards, Spider was sitting on the bank of the Wylye, listening and watching and mimicking the cries of the waterfowl when he suddenly saw a movement on the far bank. The river was not wide at this point, and directly opposite Spider a willow leaned out at an angle over the water. Among the exposed roots of this tree there was a sizeable dark hole, and it was in this hole that he saw the movement.

Then he saw the round face of an otter, looking out. The animal was looking directly at
him, testing the wind with upraised head, a wind which must have carried the boy's scent. But instead of immediately disappearing back into its holt, as any other otter would have done at the sight of a human so close, it gave a short sharp whistle and came out and down to the water's edge. Then a second, slightly smaller otter emerged from the mouth of the holt and came to join its mate. The firstcomer, the dog otter, slipped into the river, and the bitch joined him.

Spider sat, still and silent, seeing only strings of bubbles rising to the surface as the pair hunted in partnership. Presently they both suddenly appeared, and hauled themselves out, oily-smooth, on the near bank right below him.

The dog had a big fish in his mouth, and after some noisy bickering, he and his mate settled down to eat it, taking not the slightest notice of the watcher on the bank above.

No-one would have believed Spider if he had had the power to describe the utter fearlessness of these wild animals, almost within touching distance of him, but Kathie believed him, implicitly, when he came in that evening and told her, in his limited way, what he had seen.

‘Hotter!' he said to her, and then he put a
forefinger crossways between his teeth and made chewing faces. ‘Fish!' he said, and then in his excitement he put together what was without doubt the longest sentence he had ever spoken in his life. ‘Hotter!' he said again.‘One, two hotters, catch big fish, eat big fish, Spider see!'

A
bove all things, Mister loved horses. As an infant, he had ridden before he could walk, and though he had always lived surrounded by dogs and had, since taking over the farm, a deal of pride and interest in his cattle, his sheep and his poultry, the horse was for him the most beautiful of God's creatures.

In the Great War he had been a cavalryman, commanding a squadron of the 17th/21st Lancers (and, as things turned out, he thanked God he had not been a foot-soldier).

He hated to part with a horse, and so, apart from Em'ly and Jack, now seconded to Ephraim Stanhope in the carthorse stables, there were several others, retired from the hunting-field on account of age and loss of pace, that lived a happy
retirement up on the downs. Not only did Major Yorke dislike selling such old friends, he was also a sucker for acquiring new ones, and only the fact that his wife reined him in very tightly, especially on his Irish trips, stopped Outoverdown Farm from being covered in horses.

One day however, when Mrs Yorke was away visiting relatives, a most intriguing advertisement caught Mister's eye. There had been an American travelling roadshow in the county, a kind of blend of circus and fun fair, one of whose attractions had been a rodeo. Now the whole outfit was packing up and returning to the States, and the owners had decided to sell all the rodeo horses, six of them, rather than ship them back home.

The broncos, as the advertisement styled them, were to be sold at auction in Salisbury market.

At this sale, perhaps because he was temporarily free of Mrs Yorke's restraining hand, perhaps because no-one else seemed especially keen to bid for these half dozen rather wild-looking beasts, Mister had a rush of blood to the head and bought the whole lot.

When the haulier arrived back at Outoverdown Farm with them, Mister was waiting, with the horseman, at the junction of the
road with the drove, up which Percy Pound had already ridden his motorbike. He would open the gate into the most southerly piece of downland, and then wait there, to turn the horses in, for the drove continued on beyond the boundary of the farm, until it eventually met the next main road.

‘We're going to run them up into the Far Hanging. They're a bit on the frisky side, I think, so they can let some steam off for a while and then we'll see what we can do with them,' said Mister.

‘Up to your weight, are they, sir?' asked Ephraim, as the haulier was unscrewing the clamps prior to letting down the tailboard of the cattle-lorry.

‘I don't know about that,' said Mister.‘To tell you the truth, Ephraim, I bought them because I felt sorry for 'em, I suppose. They haven't had much of a life – these rodeo chaps, they put a cinch round the horse's belly and draw it up tight, to make 'em buck, you know, damned cruel.'

At this point, the haulier dropped the tailboard and opened out its wings. Then suddenly there was a violent explosion from the dark interior, and out rushed the rodeo horses and thundered down the tailboard and set off up the drove, neighing and whinnying, leaping and kicking
like mad things, as though this was their first taste of freedom for ages, which it probably was.

‘They'm bucking broncos all right, sir,' said Ephraim.

He just had time to see – before they settled into a gallop – that they were strong-looking animals and of unusual colours. Four were piebalds, one a pale red, one a greyish yellow, or, as the sale catalogue listed them, using American terms: ‘Four pintos, one sorrel, one buckskin'.

Farmer and horseman began the long walk up the drove after the horses but before they had gone very far, they heard the noise of the foreman's motorbike returning.

‘You got a right lot there, sir,' he said grumpily as he stopped beside them (the wind was sharp and his knee was hurting). ‘Take some breaking, they will. They come up to me full gallop and then off and away over the Far Hanging like the wind. Wouldn't surprise me if they was to jump the boundary fence and keep going. They could be in Dorset by tonight. Mebbe they're making for America. Best place for 'em, from what I could see.'

‘Oh they'll be all right,' said Mister. ‘They'll soon settle down.'

But they didn't.

Over the next few days they behaved like the wild creatures they were, mustangs, feral horses rounded up specifically to be used in a ‘Wild West' show. For all their captive lives they had been used to a routine wherein they were penned while some likely lad was lowered on to one or other of them. Then the cinch would be tightened, the pen door opened, and out into the makeshift ring would go the bronco, kicking madly against the pain of the cinch, while the amateur cowboy on its back promptly fell off it.

Now they were free again, and the Wiltshire downs were a fair substitute for their native prairies, and they had no intention of ever being caught again.

Each day Mister rode out into the Far Hanging on his big bay, and each day, at sight of him, or Percy on his motorbike, or of Tom on foot among his ewes in a neighbouring piece, the broncos would kick up their heels and gallop away into the distance.

Mister consulted the horseman, and Ephraim said that the only thing to do was to drive them into a confined space where it might be possible to handle them.