The Plague Dogs (9 page)

Snitter, whining with terror, crept into the bracken and hid himself. Rowf, however, dashed at the wheels, and ran snapping for some distance behind the lorry before coming back to the place where they had first seen it. The back was open, with chains on its metal sides which clanked and slapped as it swayed along; and evidently loaded with wet gravel or stone spoil, for Rowf's black muzzle was daubed with a yellowish, ochreous sludge which had run out of the back. He sat on his haunches, wiping at his face with one front paw.

Snitter emerged from his hiding-place and came back to him.

"What's the matter? I thought you said men—"

"A lorry, Rowf!—"

"I chased it away all right! Damned thing, it shat all over my nose—it must have been terrified, grrrrrr-owf!"

"Lorries—the—the blood!—they shut me up—don't do it any more, Rowf! You won't?"

"What a strange beast you are, Snitter! One moment you're—"

"I know what I'm talking about. Yes, I'm mad all right, but it's only the wind. It blows through my head, you know, where the brains used to be. Once the flies get in—"

"They won't. Let's get on. Wherever that lorry came from there might be some more men—

better ones, you say. I doubt it myself, but if that's what you want to find so much—"

Soon they came to the heavy waterfall below Miners Bridge and now it was Rowf who sheered away at sight of the falling water.

"It's all right, Rowf. There aren't any whitecoats here—"

"How do you know?"

"Smell."

"I don't care—I'm not going down there."

From some distance beyond the fall they could now hear the grinding of a lorry in low gear and the intermittent rattling, sliding and hissing of stones being loaded. They went cautiously on. Stronger than the smells of diesel and of men, the very ground ahead of them seemed to be exuding a strange, disturbing scent; earthy, a smell of rain-washed stones bare of grass—a trampled, empty smell. Snitter seemed half-attracted and half a prey to misgiving. They came to a smaller beck running beside the track and he lapped doubtfully at it, licking his chops in distaste.

"I don't know—I can't make it out. Have they taken all the grass away? Something's tainted the water—can you taste it?"

"It's metal. I should know. You stay here, Snitter. I'll go and have a look round. If I come back running, don't hesitate—just follow me as fast as you can."

Rowf scrabbled up a nearby pile of stones and disappeared. A few moments later Snitter, hearing him bark, followed. Together they looked in astonishment across the wide hollow among the hills to which they had climbed. The entire area ahead was void of vegetation, rocked and cratered as the moon. Across it stretched a track, where rainwater glistened in deep ruts, and beside this a cloudy stream ran in a kind of trough. Brown mud lay everywhere, and in the distance a pile of shale rose like a giant's unlighted bonfire. Far off, across the waste, a dirty lorry crept, rocking and splashing. As the two dogs watched, it backed slowly towards the pile, in obedience to a man in a yellow helmet who shouted, gesturing first with one hand and then the other. Somewhere out of sight the engine of a pump was put-putting steadily and they could see, dark against the tawny ground, the line of a thick, black hose, its spout discharging into the stream, This was Coppermines Valley, once a mining site but now, its lodes long worked out, frequented only for small-scale winning of gravel and spoil by anyone who cared to bring a lorry; hence the activity on a Saturday morning. It was a scene of squalid desolation, of ragged spoil heaps and other debris of abandoned industry. In all directions across the disfigured landscape, channels, raw and man-made, ran like millraces, streaming down steep slopes or cutting unnaturally over patches of encroaching fell. A long way beyond, the hillsides resumed their crags and bracken, from which the breeze carried faint, mossy odours, partly occluded by the nearer smells of the workings. The two dogs gazed for some time in silence. "That explains it, of course," said Snitter at length.

Rowf scratched the back of one ear with a hind paw and scrabbled uneasily at the ground.

"That explains it, Rowf, don't you see? This is the part they're making now. They've just finished taking away all the streets and things and they're starting to put in the big stones and grass.

When they've finished here I suppose they'll go lower down, to those houses we've come from; take them away and make that place into rocks too. But why? Especially if the houses belong to whitecoats? I can't make it out at all. There's no sense in it, and you can't even get out of the wind." Snitter shivered and lay down. "Out of the wind? It's the world we can't get out of."

"These may be the wrong sort of men too. They don't look much like masters to me, but all the same I'm going to try. What else can we do?"

Leaving Rowf sniffing the pungent, bitter scent of brown ants scurrying over their mound, Snitter ran quickly across the waste, splashed his way through half a dozen great puddles between the piles of shale and, wagging his tail, approached the driver of the lorry, who was kicking moodily at one of his front tyres. As the driver caught sight of him he stopped uncertainly, half-afraid and turning as though to make off. The driver, straightening his back, shouted over the bonnet to the man in the yellow helmet.

"Eh, Jack, 'ast seen yon afore? Whose is it, d'y know?"

"Nay. No dog 'ere. Nowt to do wi' place, like. What's yon on it head?"

"Dunno. Git away-aym! Goo on, get off, y' boogger!" shouted the driver, picking up a stone.

Snitter turned and ran as he threw, missed and returned to his kicking of the tyre.

Rowf looked up from the anthill.

"What?"

"He was kicking the lorry—he was angry before I came; I could smell that."

"I suppose they must make the lorries run about in that place—tie wires on them, push glass things into them—all that. D'you remember Kiff told us they used to tie wires on him to make him jump?"

"They wound a cloth round his leg, he said, and pumped it tight with a rubber ball-thing. These are the wrong sort of men—"

"All men—"

"AH right," said Snitter sulkily. "I admit I was wrong, but I haven't given up yet. We must go and look for some other men, that's all."

"Where?"

"I don't know. Let's go up that hill over there. It's in the opposite direction from the whitecoats'

town, anyway."

They loped across the bare ground, past the old youth hostel hut and the millrace beyond, splashed through Levers Water beck and began to climb, on the line of Low Water beck, into the high wilderness on the eastern slopes of the Coniston range. The wind freshened, its sound in the heather rising at times to a shrill whistling, and carried the clouds continually across and away from the sun moving on towards noon, while their shadows, with never a sound, flowed down the slopes faster than swallows or drifting rain. Among the stones nothing moved. Further and higher into this solitude, with many halts and pauses, the dogs hesitantly ascended as the morning wore on. More than once, topping a slope or rounding a boulder, they came unexpectedly upon a grazing yow, and as she made off chased her, barking and snapping at her heels for forty or fifty yards until they lost interest or some other scent distracted them from pursuit. Once, not far away, a circling buzzard closed its wings and dropped into the grass. Some small creature squealed, but before they reached the place the buzzard rose again with no prey to be seen in beak or talons. Rowf watched it turn into the wind and slide away.

"Better not fall asleep here."

"Not in the open, no. Snippety-snap—don't bother to open your eyes—you haven't got any."

Snitter's short legs were tiring. He lay panting on a patch of smooth turf littered with sheep's droppings while Rowf, in curiosity, cast unsuccessfully about for traces of the buzzard's victim.

Still climbing, they crossed a green path and above it the stream became yet more narrow, with many shallow falls into brown pools overhung by glistening patches of liverwort and tussocks of grass fine as horsehair. The ascent grew steeper until, reaching at last the lip of yet another hanging valley, they came all unawares upon Low Water, that still and secret tarn that lies enclosed under the precipices of Old Man and Brim Fell.

Rowf, leading the way past strange, pillar-like rocks canted upright as though set by human hands long ago, shrank back from the outfall, cowering at sight of the placid pool. In this seldom-visited place, windless and silent, the tarn and its surroundings lay as they must have lain for millennia past, unchanged by any accident or act of man. Through the limpid, grey-green water, perhaps a hundred and fifty yards across and nowhere more than a few feet in depth, could be seen clearly the stones of the bed, streaked here and there with a peaty silt. On the further side, the screes of Old Man fell sheer into the rippleless shadows, the mountain, rising nine hundred feet to its summit, shutting off half the sky above. In the unexpectedness of the tarn's disclosure, and the stillness of its stones and water, there seemed a kind of malignant vigilance—the cold assurance of one who, in silence, watches a fugitive or culprit unawares, waiting without haste for the moment when he will turn and look up, to learn from that impassive face that flight or concealment is useless and that all that he supposed secret has been observed and known from the first.

With a howl of dismay, Rowf fled up the slope towards Raven Tor. Snitter overtook him in a stony gully and he turned on him, panting and snarling.

"I told you, Snitter—I told you, didn't I? It doesn't matter where we go. The whitecoats—"

"Rowf, there's no one there—nothing—"

"You never saw the tank—it's just like that—in fact that is a tank, only a bigger one—the water doesn't move—you can see right down into it—then they pick you up-"

As some honest soldier might find his straightforward, workaday warmth and staunchness no match for the onset of shell-shock in a comrade, so Snitter, his desire to reassure overwhelmed by Rowf's vehemence, lay down without further talk, feeling against his own body his friend's tension and fear.

After some time Rowf said, "I suppose they must be waiting somewhere—the whitecoats.

Where do you think they're hiding?"

"It's not for us—not that water—it's too big—they must have made it for some bigger animal—"

Snitter, unable to explain away the sudden and unforeseeable appearance of the tarn and almost convinced by Rowf's terrified certainty, was nevertheless still searching for some kind of reassurance.

"What animal, then? They obviously made it, didn't they—those men down there with the lorries—"

"For the sheep, of course," said Snitter, hoping desperately that it might be true. "Yes, that must be it. I tell you, we've escaped. They do it to other animals here—not to us. Look at the clouds—look at the beck—they only go one way—they never go backwards, do they? We shan't go back either."

"We can't stay here, though." With a down-pattering of stones, Rowf got up and padded over the shoulder of the tor.

The sight of Levers Water, a much larger tarn, with men's work clear to be seen in the concrete embankment and dam at the outfall, provoked in him, surprisingly, no further fear. As a stag or fox, having started up at the first scent of hounds or sound of the horn, will then collect its wits and begin in earnest to call upon its powers of cunning and endurance, so Rowf, having once come upon and accepted the evidence of what he had all along more than suspected—the ubiquity of the whitecoats—

seemed now to have braced himself to contend with it as best he could. Within seconds of their first glimpse of the lake four or five hundred yards away at the foot of the slope, he had drawn back and crouched down behind a boulder. As soon as Snitter was in concealment beside him he wormed his way forward to a place from where, between two stones, he could look out over the water without exposing himself to view.

For nearly an hour the two dogs lay watching for any sign of human presence or approach.

Once, almost a mile away, a man appeared over the shoulder of High Fell on the further side of the lake. For a few moments he remained within their view, waving one arm and shouting loudly to someone or something out of sight. His high-pitched, stylized cries carried clearly across the valley.

Then he strode on and was lost to sight.

"He wasn't—well, he didn't look like a whitecoat," said Rowf uncertainly.

"No. But he looked like the tobacco man, and he sounded rather like him, too."

Snitter had become devil's advocate. "All the same, that other water back there, where we've come from—it wasn't like anything you've ever told me about the tank—"

"It was—I tell you—just because it didn't smell of metal—"

"Smell's always the thing to go by, but I admit that doesn't necessarily mean it's all right. Lorries don't smell of anger, for the matter of that—no blood, no mouth-smell, nothing—but they come and kill

—"

He broke off. Rowf made no reply and after a little Snitter went on, "But what's going to become of us? What are we going to do? They've taken away the whole natural world. There's nothing to eat. We'll have to go back."

For a long time Rowf made no reply. At last he said, "There's something—a smell in my mind

—pitter-patter—very small—whiskers—"

A gust of wind came pushing round the shoulder, raced away down the fell and wrinkled, tugging, across the broken cloud reflections on the surface of the tarn. They could see the ripple pull up sharp and turn towards the outfall as it met and mingled with some other air current in the basin.

"A mouse—there was a mouse came into my pen—we talked—"

"They're bits of biscuit that get left over, you know. Make yourself a few teeth from bone splinters, pick up a tail and off you go. Well, it's a living.

Sometimes they're fleas trying to better themselves. My dam told me. That must be why there's one in my head, I suppose. They get everywhere."

"This mouse said men never did anything to him—not like us—"

"Then they couldn't have given him food either."