The Plague Dogs

FIT 6

What place in all the Lakes can surpass, in grandeur and beauty, the summit of Wreynus Pass and the high solitude of the Three Shire Stone? Where, if not here, is to be found the heart of the Lakeland—here, where the northern shoulder of the Coniston range meets the southern tip of the great Scafell horseshoe, and Langdale reaches up its arms to Dunnerdale across this desolate band of rock, turf and ling? Stand, reader, here—by the long stone itself, if you will, or at the summit of the pass—at dawn on a June morning, or at dusk of a rainy November nightfall. What, in the emptiness, do you hear, listening with closed eyes and fingers resting upon the squared edge of the stone? Nothing that you would not have heard a thousand years ago. Down the long, bare ridges on either side sounds the wind, tugging in uneven gusts over the slopes, breaking, as strongly as round a cathedral, about the corners of the greater crags that oppose their masses to its force. Up from below—from before and behind you—wavers the distant sighing of the becks, the sound coming and going on that same wind; and the occasional cry of hawk, buzzard or crow sailing on the currents in obedience to behavioural instincts evolved tens of thousands of years gone by. A curlew cries, “Whaup, whaup,” and something on Wetside Edge—a grazing yow or wandering fox—has put up a blackcock which rockets away, rattling in its throat with a noise like Mr. Punch about his gleeful mischief. A sheep bleats close by and little, cloven hooves—ah, here is a new sound—rattle across the metalled road. Open your eyes—unless a car comes there will be nothing else to hear except, perhaps, the thin note, now and again, of twite, pipit or shrike.

What do you see—for the wind, though sharp and bleak, is nevertheless friendly in blowing away the mist that might have enclosed you, muffling all sound, confusing north with south and compelling you to stumble your way from cairn to cairn along the tops, or to follow the course of a beck until it led you down below the mist-ceiling—what do you see? To the south, the mile-long shoulder of Wetside Edge comes curving down from Great Carrs, falling away into the dip below Rough Crags, where the river Brathay, itself no more than a beck, tumbles, cold and lonely, towards the meadows of Fell Foot and Little Langdale Tarn. To the north, the summit of Pike O’Blisco rises beyond its south face that they call the Black Crag. Behind you stands Cold Pike and between the two, on the other side of the saddle, so that you cannot see it from here, lies the little Red Tarn—barely two hundred yards long but big enough, no doubt, to cast a chill into the heart of our friend Rowf, should he ever happen upon it in his wanderings. The high, uneven ridge of the Crinkle Crags you cannot see—not today, for over it the vapour is still lying, a grey cloud extending from Gladstone Knott right across to Adam-a-Cove and back along Shelter Crags to Three Tarns. But walk over a little way to the west, back over the crest of the pass, across this high watershed. There, below you, patters the narrow, stony stream of the infant Duddon itself, gaining from tributary beck to beck as it runs down, alongside the road but well below it, all of two miles to that bridge, that very gate where Snitter faced Mr. Ephraim on the road. Beside its course stand great tussocks of grass over which you can trip and measure your length in the soaking peat, tracts of bilberry, bog myrtle, wet moss and boulder-broken turf strewn with lichened stones; and on either side, stretching up the fell and all along the banks, the dry stone walls built of those same rocks and boulders, gathered and piled by men—whence came their patience?—dead these two hundred years and more.

Despite their seeming emptiness, many men have in fact marked these hills—marked at least their surface, though they have not changed it, as the great fens of East Anglia have been changed or the once-forested Weald of Sussex. Beyond your view from Wreynus, away over the crest of Hard Knott, on its western slope and not far above Bootterilket, lies the Roman camp they call the Castle. Mediobogdum the Romans called it, and here, where the rock-face falls to the grassy platform of their parade ground, the legionaries must have stood cursing as they looked out over the wet, windy heather, with lice in the tunic and a cold in the nose, all the way down the valley of the Esk to its sandy estuary at Ravenglass. The Duddon valley was held by a Norman and its tenure is recorded in Domesday Book. Here, where you stand, a beacon burned to pass on news of the Spanish Armada. Wordsworth tramped over the Wreynus—indeed, he knew the Duddon valley from Wreynus to the sea, and late in life wrote a not-terribly-arresting sonnet sequence about it. And Arnold of Rugby and Ruskin and G. M. Trevelyan and Beatrix Potter and all the Everest climbers from Mallory to Hillary and for the matter of that, Mr. Switchburg B. Tasker of Nebraska, for on his vacation last summer he drove over here in a hired Renault and I observe that he—or somebody—has scratched his name on the face of a nearby rock. Never mind, Switchburg, old boy, the rain will rain and the lichen—Hypogymnia physodes, perhaps; or Parmelia conspersa, or perhaps the pretty, rust-coloured Lecidea dicksonii—will grow over the blurred place, and later on you’ll be able to join the Roman and his trouble, just like A. E. Housman. There’s glory for you: well, all that you or I—or Rowf and Snitter, for that matter—are going to get, anyway.

Who is there who does not sometimes need to be alone, and who is not the poorer deprived of that strength and solace, even though he may not himself be conscious of his loss? This hundred years and more great Pan has been disdained and robbed and his boundaries diminished—the boundaries of a kingdom which many fear and shun, having had, no doubt, too much of it in the past against their will: the kingdom of solitude and of darkness. White stands for good and black stands for bad, we learned as children (though half the human race is black). If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! said the good Lord, and so we misapply the metaphor and pray, O God, give me more light, until I come to walk in the courts-heaven help us!—of everlasting day. And what will then become of your dreams, and of the phantasms that your own heart has summoned out of firelight and the dark; those fancies that do run in the triple Hecate’s team from the passage of the sun? I would not trade them for all the golden crowns to be cast down around the crystal sea. There shall be no night there? So much the worse, for light and darkness, sons of Man, for us are complementary. Think otherwise to your harm. Great Pan has retreated, if not fled; before the borough surveyor, that excellent and necessary man, with his street-lighting, his slide rule, duffle coat and gum-boots in the rain. And a good job, too, did I hear you say? Yes, indeed, for a hundred years ago it was a dark and lonely life for all too many, and now they are neither ignorant nor afraid, and at all events believe themselves less superstitious. And my goodness, how mobile they are! On a fine Saturday in summer the summit of Scafell Pike may well be thick with those who have climbed it, having first journeyed towards it by train, car, motorbike and even aeroplane. No one need be alone any more, in that solitude where Socrates stood wrapped in his old cloak in the night, Jesus told Satan to get behind him and Beethoven, in his scarecrow coat, walked through the fields with the voice of God sounding like a sea in the shell-like spirals of his ruined ears. Strange paradox! In solitude great Pan confers a dignity which vanishes among crowds and many voices. Great Pan is half animal and incapable of pity as the tod, sending fear, strange fancies, even madness to trouble the lonely and ignorant. But shun him altogether, tip the balance the other way entirely and another—a vulgar, meaner—madness will come upon you—even, perhaps, without your awareness. Do you think great Pan is going to stand idly by while Dr. Boycott stabs and maims and drowns his creatures in the name of science, progress and civilization?

But wait—come back here a minute! Were you gazing up Wetside Edge into the mist on Great Carrs, or watching the buzzard sliding sideways down the north wind from Pike O’Blisco? Look eastward into Westmorland, down past Wreynus Bridge and Great Horse Crag to Little Langdale and the road that comes snaking up out of the valley, nearly eight hundred feet to where we stand on this clear November morning. A car is coming up, twisting from side to side with the road; a green car—a Triumph Toledo, I rather think-anyway, the kind of car that not infrequently goes with a job. And who, pray, is the driver? Take your binoculars to him. Yes, I thought as much. How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of Sir Ivor Stone’s emissary! We are to be routed out in our solitude. It is indeed he! Ladies and gentlemen—Digby Driver, the urban spaceman! Let us—er—get a load of him, shall we?

Digby Driver had not always been known by that name, for the very good reason that it was not his original one. He had been born about thirty years before—in some year soon after the Second World War, in fact—in a midland county borough; and at that time his name was Kevin Gumm. True, he had not been christened Kevin, for he had never been christened (which was not his fault), but he had nevertheless grown up with that name, which had been given to him by either his mother or his grandmother. We shall never know which, for not long after his birth his mother had left him in the care of his grandmother before vanishing permanently out of his life. This was partly due to the arrival of Kevin himself, for his paternity, like Ophelia’s death, was doubtful and his mother’s husband had laid it, most resentfully, at the door of the American G.I.s who at that time were thick on the ground in England. He certainly had some evidence tending toward this conclusion; and although his mother had denied the accusation, poor Kevin became first a casus belli between them and before long the final disrupter of a marriage-tie which had never been anything but tenuous. Mrs. Gumm began to look elsewhere and before long struck oil in the person of a sergeant from Texas, with whom she “took up,” as the saying goes. Kevin would certainly have met with no more favour from the sergeant than he had from Mr. Gumm, and Mrs. Gumm (whose name, by the way, was Mavis), divining this intuitively (no very hard matter), took care to give the sergeant no opportunity to form a view. By the time Kevin was old enough to talk, Mavis Gumm had not been among those present for nearly two years, and since her own mother had not the least idea on which side of the Atlantic to begin to look for her, she found herself reluctantly stuck with Kevin.

William Blake remarked that the unloved cannot love, but he said nothing about the development of their intelligence. Kevin was above average. He grew up sharp enough, and very much a product of his time. Thanks to his circumstances and to various ideas current among well-meaning people in the fields of child psychology, social welfare and state education, he also grew up without respect or fear for parents (since he knew none), for God (of Whom, or of Whose Son, for that matter, he knew even less) or for the school authorities (who were prevented by law from subjecting him to any effective restraint or discipline). Consequently, he developed plenty of initiative and self-confidence. In fact, it never really occurred to him that any opinion or purpose which he had formed could be wrong, either morally or rationally. The possibility was never a consideration with Kevin, the concept not really being one which held any meaning for him. For him, the prime consideration was always practicability—whether, if he took this or that course, anyone was likely to try to frustrate him, and if so, the extent to which such opposition could be ignored, deceived, brow-beaten, terrified or, if all else failed, cajoled or bribed into submission. For his elders he grew up having about as much respect as has a baboon—that is, he respected them to the extent that they were able to harm or to exercise power over him. One brush with the juvenile court at the age of ten (something to do with breaking and entering a shop kept by a seventy-two-year-old widow and threatening her with violence) taught him that on balance it was better to avoid attracting the attention of the police, less on account of the possibility of punishment than because it indicated incompetence and involved loss of personal dignity. The following year he obtained his entry, in the eleven-plus, to the grammar-school stream of the colossal local comprehensive school. As has been said, Kevin was no fool and, since he had the intellectual ability, once he got a taste of secondary education he soon began to realize the advantages to be expected from raising himself beyond his origins and out of his background. The only factor in his make-up likely to interfere with such progress was his amour propre and the tremendous respect which he felt for the personality of Kevin Gumm. No adult was going to tell him what to do or stop him doing anything he wanted. His grandmother had long ago given up trying. His headmaster did not come into the picture—the school was far too big and he no more knew Kevin by sight or character than he was able to know sixty per cent of his pupils. As for the form-masters, they tended to reach a modus vivendi with young Gumm, partly because he was no slacker—indeed, capable of excellent work at times—but principally because nearly all of them were afraid to take him on—not altogether physically afraid (though to some extent that came into it), but certainly afraid of friction and unpleasantness, and of getting no support, if it came to the crunch, from higher authority. The easier course was to stick to the letter of the law by helping him to develop his intellect on his own terms and leaving his character out of account. It was some time during the middle years of the sixties that Kevin obtained a state-grant-aided place to read sociology at one of the provincial universities.

Now he really began to spread his wings. As a rebel student, he was a match for all challengers, not excluding even the great “Megaphone” Mark Slackmeyer immortalised by Garry Trudeau. He made himself the bane and dread of the university authorities; and might very well have proceeded on this triumphant course right up to graduation, had the direction of his career not been suddenly altered by two discoveries: the first, that one of his several girlfriends was pregnant and the second that she possessed two large and aggressive brothers who intended to spare no pains to make Mr. Gumm regard the matter more seriously than he had hitherto thought he would. Thus stimulated, Kevin departed precipitately from the university and plunged into the great anonymity of London. Not long afterwards (since he had to make a living somehow) he accepted the advice and good offices of a friend who had offered to use his influence to get him a small job in journalism.

To be perfectly honest, reader, I cannot be bothered to set out the details of the various steps by which Kevin turned himself from a student of sociology into a successful popular journalist on the London Orator. They took him about five and a half years and at times made up a hard road, but he eventually achieved his aim. The alteration of his image, coupled with the retention of his zeal and ability, amounted to a brilliant personal manoeuvre which I must leave to be recounted by his biographer. A new image was essential, a change of name, the cutting of his hair, a radical modification to his beard. He even increased the frequency with which he washed.

He began by turning his energies to free-lance journalism and discovered, as others had discovered before him, that as long as he stuck to the kind of views which had distinguished him at the university there was too much competition and too little chance of escaping by patronage from a jungle where this sort of jeu was decidedly vieux. Oddly enough, it was the abandonment of a political slant which really set his feet on the right road, for he first distinguished himself as the librettist of a successful rock musical, based on Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and entitled Out for the Count. And it was while being questioned by various journalists and television interviewers in connection with this opus that he began to reflect that there was no reason why he should not study and adapt their techniques to his own purposes. After a lapse of time and several trials and errors, he managed to gain entry to the “stories of human interest” field of popular journalism.

Here all his past life, from the earliest years, paid off, and all his talents were fully employed. In short, he had found his métier. Kevin’s ear was well to the ground and he soon built up a web of reliable contacts and sources of information. Did some wretched, distracted girl gas herself and her children one dark night in Canonbury? Kevin was on the doorstep by seven the next morning and by one means or another could always contrive to extract some interesting remark from the husband, the neighbours or the doctor. Was a child abducted and murdered by a psychopath in Kilburn? The mother had no hope of evading Kevin—he knew her better than she knew herself. Was there a fatal traffic accident on the North Circular, a near-miss by an intending suicide at Putney, a case of two typists caught in possession of drugs at Heathrow, a schoolmaster accused of interfering with a boy at Tottenham, a Pakistani arrested and bailed on a charge of living on the immoral earnings of schoolgirls at Tooting, a knifing, a shooting, a case of corruption; rape, ruin, bereavement, heartbreak, the riving open of some long-concealed private grief? Kevin was the lad to make sure the public did not miss it; and infallibly hit upon the original line (not necessarily salacious, but invariably personal and destructive of human dignity) calculated to make of his subject a target for ill-informed indignation or raw material for a few moments of vicarious and mawkish horror. Privacy, reticence and human worth melted before him like ghosts at cockcrow.

It was while in Copenhagen, getting material for a special feature on pornography and sexual night clubs, that he first adopted the nom de plume of Digby Driver, by which he was later to be known to millions of London Orator readers and eventually even to himself. He had decided that he needed a better image or persona for the job—something a shade jokey, suggestive of youth, energy and good humour, but having—as it were, at a deeper level of loose and irresponsible association—an undertone of delving, subterranean perseverance in the pursuit of news (“Digby”) coupled with that relentless, forceful energy (“Driver”) which ought to characterize an Orator man. The idea worked excellently. Kevin Gumm had gone into Copenhagen. Digby Driver came out.

And what the devil (I hear you asking) has all this got to do with Snitter and Rowf, with Animal Research and Dr. Boycott? Nothing, you have concluded? Your Highness shall from this practice but make hard your heart. In fact, since we are standing about in this wild and empty place—for many miles about there’s scarce a bush—for the Triumph Toledo to complete its ascent from Langdale, we might perhaps ask ourselves, “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” It is a difficult task to exclude all pity from the mind when confronting a weeping girl whose child has been strangled by a maniac—to get in at her window when her husband has put you out of the door. In fact, it is probably harder than the examination of a mongrel dog which has just withstood a shock of three hundred volts and is about to receive one of four hundred—but we really must get on. Here he comes now, right up to the Three Shire Stone. The moguls of the London Orator, arrested—as indeed the entire public has been, to some extent, arrested—by the strange and macabre death of Mr. Ephraim, have sent none other than Digby Driver to investigate and report upon the matter. And believe me, if he doesn’t find a story, then Dr. Boycott’s a Copenhagen swinger and Snitter’s as sane as Lear and the Fool put together.

Once again, Snitter hastened forward to catch up with Rowf. The mist, pouring from his head like the flow of some forgotten tap left running by the tobacco man, swirled between them, through and among the bents and sedges, in and out of the grey, sharp-edged stones piled in long walls across the moor. Everywhere lay the smells of damp heather, of lichen on stones, water, sheep, fresh rain and acorns.

“Where are we, Rowf?”

“Going to look for food, remember?” Rowf paused and sniffed the air. “There! That was a rubbish-bin—no mistaking it—but a long way off, over there—did you get it?”

The bitter sense of all that he had lost came pouring over Snitter, tightening in a sharp-edged spiral, diminishing him, paring away his vitality and memories, his very thoughts and all those inward recesses in which he had thought to hide. He stood still on the wet heather, feeling himself reduced to a tiny, hard point which must at all costs be kept safe, which must not be destroyed, or he would be gone; the last drop would fall from the tap and disappear into the ground. He waited, panting. Then, suddenly, unaccountably, the spiral reversed, his head was wrenched about and from it came pouring, like a fungus, long, white stalks of loathsome growth, blighting, killing and destroying, laying waste the spaces of the fell into which they writhed their way.

“It’s not real!” gasped Snitter, staggering in horror of the slimy, phantom antlers. “Not real!” He shook his head and the chicken-wire, a clumsy helmet, tumbled one way and the other, falling across from ear to ear. “Jimjam, I couldn’t help it! I couldn’t—”

“Jimjam? What about him?” Rowf was there, a hirsute, dog-smelling shape in the dark, friendly but impatient.

“D’you remember him?”

“Of course I remember Jimjam. The whitecoats killed him.”

“I killed him.”

“Snitter, get up and come on! I remember Jimjam perfectly well. He told us the whitecoats put a tube down his throat and forced bitter stuff into his stomach. Then he went blind and peed pus and blood all over the floor. You never got anywhere near Jimjam. Of course you didn’t kill him.”

“The blood and pus came out of my head.”

“There’ll be a lot more blood coming out of your head soon if you don’t come on. No, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. I know you’re not yourself; but I’m hungry—famished. Can’t you smell the rubbish-bins?”

“I’m sorry, too,” said Snitter meekly. “If there’s any rubbish about you can always trust me to find it, Rowf. I remember now—we’re going to look for rubbish, that’s right.”

They ran together across the back of High Wallowbarrow and then began to descend steeply, scrabbling over the loose gravel and stones of the Rake. On their right, in the dark, a rill went chattering down. Snitter ran across and drank, smelling as he did so the acrid fume, beneath his paws, of a disturbed anthill. At the first sharp little bite he lurched away, overtaking Rowf at the foot of the slope. They smelt fowls and cows, and stood watching light spread gradually across the cold sky.

“There’s a farm over there, Rowf, across the field.”

“Yes, but it’s no good to us. Can’t you hear the dog?”

“Oh-I thought it was me.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“Well, there are bits of me all over the place, Rowf, you know. I’m not really sure where I am.”

“Neither am I. I know where the dustbins are, though. Come on!”

They skirted the farm by way of the fields and scrambled over a stone wall into the lonnin. The barking of the dog died away behind them. A few hundred yards further on they came to the Duddon, swift and wide, seven miles below its source, surging noisily down beneath bare, black-budding ash-boughs in the bleak dawn.

The lonnin became a narrow road. They found themselves approaching sheds and a house with a trim garden alongside. Beyond, a bridge carried a larger road over the river. There was neither smell nor sound of a dog. After the briefest of pauses Rowf led the way round to the back, nosed along the side of a shed and the base of a low wall and then, with all the determination and force of his hunger behind him, jumped at the piled stonework and clawed his way up and over into the yard.

As Snitter fell back from the wall for the third time, he heard from the other side the clang and thud as Rowf knocked over a dustbin, releasing a surge of smells—tea leaves, bacon rinds, fish, cheese and cabbage leaves. He gave a quick whine.

“I—I—Rowf, can you help? I can’t manage—I mean—why, what a fool I am!” said Snitter. “Of course it isn’t a real wall. It’s only in my head. I can make a gap in it if I want to.”

He limped his way along the line of an open, concrete-lined gully running from a square hole at the base of the wall to its further corner. Round the corner, as he had known—since he had himself just caused it to appear—there stood in the wall a green-painted gate of divided palings. Between these, Rowf could be seen nosing about. He had pushed aside the lid of the rubbish-bin and was pulling the contents across the yard. Snitter, belly pressed to the ground, wriggled and squeezed his way under the gate.

“Mind, Rowf, careful! That’s a tin edge-it’s sharp!”

Rowf looked up, bleeding from a cut along his upper lip. “Not half as sharp as I am! Cheer up, Snitter; don’t give way yet—we’re still alive! Here’s an old ham bone and you can have it all!”

At the first lick Snitter realized that he was very hungry. Lying down out of the wind, in the lee of the shed, he began to gnaw.

Phyllis Dawson woke with a start, looked at her watch and then at the window-panes. It was a little after seven and just light—a grey, cloudy, windy, leaf-blown morning, with rattlings of rain here and gone across the glass. Something had woken her—a noise—something unusual. But what? It wouldn’t be anyone trying to break into the shop—not at seven o’clock in the morning. But it might well be someone trying to help himself out of the locked petrol-pumps—that had been known before now.

Phyllis slipped out of bed, put on her dressing-gown and slippers and looked out of the window. There was no one outside the front of the house. The road was empty. On the coping of the wall, the rain had washed clean the petroglyph outline of the great salmon caught by her father in the Duddon many years before. Beyond and below the wall, the river itself was running high, noisy and turbid, tugging at ivy-strands, pulling here and there at a trailing ash-bough, rocking its way down and under the bridge in tilted, glistening waves.

At that moment Phyllis heard, coming from the back of the house, sounds of commotion—irregular noises of dragging, bumping and knocking. She called to her sister.

“Vera! Are you awake?”

“Yes, I am,” answered Vera. “Can you hear the noise? D’you think it’s a sheep got in at the back, or what?”

“I can’t tell—wait a minute.” Phyllis made her way to a rear window overlooking the yard. “Oh, my goodness! It’s two dogs down there! One’s a big one! They’ve pulled the rubbish all over the place! I’d better get down to them at once. Oh, what a nuisance!”

“But whose dogs are they?” asked Vera, joining Phyllis at the window. “I’ve not seen them before.”

“They’re certainly not any of Robert Lindsay’s dogs,” said Phyllis, “and I don’t think they’re Tommy Boow’s, either. They don’t look like sheep-dogs at all, to me.”

“Oh, look!” said Vera, catching her sister’s arm. “Look—the collars! Green plastic collars! D’you remember Dennis said—”

At this moment the smaller of the two dogs below moved, raising its head, and Vera drew in her breath sharply. The winter morning suddenly seemed still more bleak and grim. It was the kind of sight at which an Irish peasant crosses himself. Both the Dawson girls started back with a spasm of horror.

“Lord save us! Whatever’s happened to it? Its head, look—it’s almost cut in two! Did you ever see anything like it?”

“The other one—the big one—its mouth’s all bloody!”

“That must be the dog—the dog that killed the poor Jewish gentleman at Cockley Beck! Don’t go down, Phyllis—you mustn’t—no, come back—”

“I am going down,” said Phyllis firmly, from the stairhead. “I’m not hiding indoors while a couple of stray dogs pull our rubbish up and down the yard.” She reached the foot of the stairs, picked up a stout broom and the coke shovel, and began to draw the back-door bolts.

“But suppose they attack you?”

“I’m not standing for it! Whatever next?”

“We ought to telephone the police first—or d’you think the research place at Coniston—”

“Afterwards,” said Phyllis firmly, flung open the door and stepped into the yard.

The bigger dog—an ugly-looking beast—had evidently been alarmed by hearing the bolts drawn. It stood glaring, the head of a chicken hanging from its bloody jaws; a sight to daunt a good many folk.

“Go on, be off with you!” cried Phyllis. She threw the shovel at the dog and followed it up with a blacking-brush—the first missile that came to hand. The brush hit the dog, which ran a little way and stopped. One paw had become entangled in a clutter of old sellotape and wrapping-paper, and this trailed behind it along the stones. The squalid mess all over the yard roused Phyllis—who was tidy, neat and deft as a swallow in all she did—to a total disregard of possible danger.

“Will you get out of here?” she cried, rushing upon the dog with broom extended and flailing from side to side. “Go on—out!” She caught up with the fleeing dog, pushed it hard with the broom and then chopped downwards. The head of the broom struck the stones and came off the handle. In the same instant the dog, with potato peelings flying from under its hind feet, got clear of the sellotape, leapt the gate and disappeared.

Phyllis, victorious, turned back, a little breathless, and stood for a moment leaning on the broom-handle. As she did so her eye fell upon the second dog, which in the heat of action she had forgotten. It was indeed a terrible sight—the wreck of what had once been a pedigree, black-and-white, smooth-haired fox terrier. One paw was held awkwardly off the ground and the left flank was plastered with a mixture of dried mud and blood—whether its own or the other dog’s was uncertain, for it had no discernible wound. The stitched gash in its skull was more than Phyllis could regard steadily. After one glance she turned away, went across the yard and opened the door of the shed.

“I don’t think this one’s likely to give any trouble, Vera,” she called. “Poor little thing! I think it’s been taken badly—and no wonder, either, with that head.”

The dog remained where it was, looking from Phyllis to Vera and back again in a frightened, furtive manner. After a few moments it got up, its tail between its legs, and, shaking from head to rump, began to slink across the yard.

“I think it’s hungry and frightened to death as well,” said Vera, bending down to the dog. “What’s your name, then?”

“It might be best not to touch it,” said Phyllis. “I feel very sorry for it, but it may have something catching, especially if it’s come from that research place. We’ll shut it in the shed and telephone the police at Broughton. They’ll know what to do.”

Vera went back into the house and returned wearing the heavy leather gloves which she used for dispensing petrol and oil to customers. The dog struggled feebly as she put two fingers under the green collar—there was plenty of room—and led it into the shed. As an afterthought, she threw in the ham bone it had been gnawing and some old slices of cold meat, shaken out of their wrapping of greaseproof paper (which Rowf had overlooked). She was a kind-hearted girl.

When she came in and began washing her hands, Phyllis was already on the telephone.

Rowf, shivering partly from shock and partly from the bitter morning air, raced up the western slope of Caw. He ran with no attempt at concealment and from time to time gave tongue, scattering the Hall Dunnerdale yows from beneath crags and out of the shelter of heathery clefts. Sheep-dip he could smell, and withered bilberries. He paused an instant over faint traces of gunpowder in an old, sodden cartridge—it was, in fact, the very one with which old Routledge had shot the magpie. Then, hunting on, he lit upon some carrion under a rock, a live hedgehog, a sodden cigarette-butt, the place where a blackcock had roosted for the night, the track of a hare leading northward—everything but what he was seeking. Tired out after the long night, he limped across Brock Barrow, bloody nostrils to the ground, and forced himself to run once more as he came up on the long shoulder of Brown Haw. He stopped to drink and then, as he raised his muzzle once again to the cloudy, grey sky, suddenly caught, strong and clear, the reek he had been looking for. In the same moment a soft, mocking voice spoke from the bracken.

“What fettle th’ day, kidder? The way ye wor runnin’ Ah thowt yer arse wez afire.”

Rowf spun round, but could see nothing. He waited, fuming with impatience, and after some little time caught a glimpse of the tod’s mask peering from a tangle of grass ten feet away.

“Lost yer bit marrer? Noo there’s a bonny goin’ on.”

“Tod, come with me quickly, now, or I’ll bite your head off. Snitter’s in bad trouble. If you can’t get him out, no one can.”

There was silence inside the cylinder as Mr. Powell chalked up the monkey’s score—24 plus. He paused a moment and then tapped the metal with his pen, but there was no response from the occupant. He turned to other matters.

Mr. Powell had come in early to examine and record the hairspray rabbits; a routine job which he should really have completed on the previous evening. The rabbits were assisting in the tests statutorily required before Messrs. Glubstall and Brinkley could market their newly developed “Rinky Dinky” hairspray. The matter had become urgent, since the first tests had yielded somewhat ambiguous results. Messrs. Glubstall and Brinkley were impatiently awaiting clearance, both to manufacture in bulk and also to launch the initial advertising campaign. (“He’ll look at you with new eyes when you’re using—Rinky Dinky!”)

During instillation the rabbits had been restrained in canvas sleeves, in which they had remained for about fifteen minutes before being transferred to individual steel lockers with adjustable apertures in the doors. Each rabbit sat in a separate locker, with its ears and head protruding through the hole in the door, the edges of which were then closed round its neck so that it could neither withdraw its head nor touch its eyes with its paws. Mr. Powell’s task was to assess damage to the eyes of each rabbit by measuring corneal thickness.

Having put on his white coat and washed his hands with disinfectant soap, Mr. Powell, thoughtfully tapping his front teeth with his pencil as he read, consulted the log which Miss Avril Watson, his colleague who had carried out instillation, had considerately left open on the laboratory desk.

“‘Instillation carried out between 12:00 and 12:33 hours,’ yesterday—h’m, h’m—so that makes—er—a little over twenty hours now—that’s O.K. ‘No unusual features’—good—‘All rabbits struggled violently upon instillation’—well, wouldn’t you, Avril, dear, eh? ‘Three screamed’—now that’s really useless information; what more does that tell us? ‘Swelling occurred rapidly. Individual checks at 1800 hours showed tissue in a swollen state in each case. Average corneal swelling of 164.14 per cent of normal size’—there’s one good hard fact, anyway—‘lachrymation’—well, obviously—‘fairly severe erythema and oedema formation’—yes, well, let’s cut the cackle and have a shufti for ourselves.”

The disembodied heads of the rabbits, fixed side by side in a long row, gazed from their lockers at the green-painted, opposite wall. So unnatural, against the dully gleaming background of the metal doors, appeared this straight line of uniform heads without bodies, that the still-sleepy Mr. Powell, yawning and absently exercising the privilege of rubbing his eyes, entertained for a moment the illusion that they were not in fact the heads of living creatures but rather a frieze from some elaborate decoration—as it were, the heads of angels or of the resurrected elect, ranged behind Father, Son and Virgin in some carved tympanum of a west front or reredos of a high altar. (For Mr. Powell, who had grown up in merry Lincoln, had been in his time a choirboy and was by no means unfamiliar with such sights.) However, the elect are not usually depicted with mucous eyes (indeed, we have it on good authority that God will wipe away all tears from their eyes) or with twitching noses, so that after some moments the illusion vanished as Mr. Powell approached Rabbit No. 10,452 (Animal Research used, on average, about 120 rabbits a month).

“Oh bun, oh bun,” murmured Mr. Powell under his breath, as he took hold of the ears with one hand and opened the locker with the other, “thy task is done, thou soon wilt be—”

There was a tap on the laboratory door.

“Come in,” called Mr. Powell without turning round, “Thou soon wilt be a—a skellytun. A skellytun in the cupboard, bun. Well, that’ll be your next job, I dare say. Some secondary modern bio. class. Mustn’t waste you. Corneal swelling 170.2 per cent of normal. Let’s get that written down.”

“Excuse me, sir.”

Mr. Powell had supposed that the person outside must be Tyson’s boy, Tom. He now looked up and saw, with something of a shock, a policeman standing at his elbow. He released the rabbit’s ears and instinctively rose to his feet.

“Sorry if Ah startled you, sir.”

“Oh, that’s all right, officer. I wasn’t expecting to see you, that’s all. Anything wrong? By the way, d’you mind my asking how you got in? Only I thought the place was still locked up. I’m early, you see.”

“Oapened a window-catch, Ah’m afraid, sir. Ah rang bell at door, but there was no reply, like. We soomtimes have to gain entry to premises at our discretion, y’ know, if it seems joostified int’ circumstances—say we think there’s soomthing in jee-oppardy. Only anything’s in jee-oppardy, y’see, it becooms necessary to take oonwoanted steps—”

“Yes, of course. Well, what’s up exactly?”

At this moment the rabbit blundered into a wooden rack of test tubes. Mr, Powell lifted it back into its locker and adjusted the steel aperture round its neck. The policeman waited patiently until he had finished.

“Well, Ah’ve joost coom oop from Coniston, sir, y’see. It seems there’s a lady in Doonnerd’l, a Miss Dawson at Seathwaite, who says she’s got one of your dogs shut oop in her shed.”

“One of our dogs, officer?”

“That’s what it leuks like, sir. It seems Miss Dawson woke oop this morning and found this ’ere dog havin’ a go at the roobbish-bin, so she roons down, grabs it, like, and pushes it int’ shed.”

“Did she now?”

“Ay, she did that. Seems she saw it had green collar, like, and a big coot across it heed. So Miss Dawson, she reckoned it moosta coom from here, and she rings us oop. Well, sergeant rings here hafe an hour ago, but couldn’t get any reply—”

“Well, he wouldn’t, of course, not so early—”

“Ay, that’s it, sir. So he says to me to coom oop here and try to find soomone to talk to about it.”

“Well, I suppose I’m someone. I’ll tell the Director as soon as he comes in.” (And won’t he be delighted? thought Mr. Powell. This is really going to take some getting out of.)

“Ay, well, it’s like this, y’see, sir. Ah’m to assk whether soomone will kindly accoompany me to Doonnerd’l and see the lady—well, see the dog too, y’ know—identify it an’ that.”

“What, now this minute?”

“As seun as possible, sir, if you please. Y’see, if it is in fact saame dog that’s been killing sheep and’s been soomhow mixed oop with yon nassty fatal accident at Cockley Beck, it ought to be identified as seun as possible and removed from the lady’s premises. Naturally, she feels soom anxiety, y’see—”

In jee-oppardy, thought Mr. Powell. Oh hell, I don’t see how I can refuse. My eye, why’s it always have to be me?

“All right, officer, I’ll come along at once, if you don’t mind just hanging on while I scribble a note to let my boss know what’s happened, when he comes in.”

“Ah’m greatly obliged, sir.”

A few minutes later Mr. Powell and the policeman were speeding on their way to Dunnerdale, while in the clock-ticking solitude of the laboratory the rabbits continued their vigil.

Snitter lay motionless on the floor of the shed, belly to the ground and eyes half-closed. His muzzle, laid upon his paws, had remained still for so long that his condensing breath had formed a tiny pool of moisture, which glistened in the half-light. His entire being was filled with a sense of quiescence and contentment; and of a riddle answered so unexpectedly and in so astonishing a manner that there could be nothing to do but meditate upon it with a wonder transcending all such petty ideas as hunger, the future or his own safety.

When the lady with the thick leather gloves had first made towards him, he had cowered away in fear. Yet this fear had been not altogether for himself, but because he had felt it likely that if she touched him she would fall dead; and the thought of this—a repetition of the terrifying explosion as the air about them shattered, driving its sharp fragments into her face; the blood, and her shuddering, silent fall, like that of a dog which he remembered dropping dead from poison in the pen next to his own; the soft, scuffling thud as the body met the ground—the prospect of inflicting such another death was unbearable. When her fingers gripped his collar he had struggled for a few moments but then, true to his nature, had acquiesced at the sound of a kind voice and made no resistance as she opened the shed door and led him into a twilight smelling of apples, dust and wood splinters. He had wondered what she was going to do; but having patted him, spoken a few words and considerately returned his ham bone, she had left him alone.

After the first shock of surprise it was plain enough to Snitter where he was, for after all he had known the place all his life, every feature of it. Once it had been brighter, tidier, cleaner, brisker-smelling. All the same he was, in fact, nowhere but where he had always been; only now he was actually seeing it for the first time. He was inside his own head. There were his eyes, straight above and in front of him, two square, transparent apertures, side by side, through which the morning light showed fairly clearly. True, they were somewhat grimy—even cobwebbed in places—but that was only to be expected, all unfortunate things considered. He would clean them up later. But he must be situated rather low down in his head, for all he could make out through his eyes was the sky. Directly between them, lower down and straight in front of him, was his muzzle—mouth, nose; both? That was puzzling—a fairly large aperture at ground-level, through which he could perceive smells of rain, mud, oak leaves, a tom-cat somewhere in the offing and still-more-distant sheep. Inside, the place appeared, alas, only what one might expect after all this time—distinctly a mess, untidy and neglected; and about the shelves a beggarly account of empty boxes were thinly scattered to make up a show. But what put the whole thing beyond doubt was the concave cleft running down the middle of the floor, from the place where he himself was lying to his own muzzle in the centre of the further wall. He had always supposed that the cleft must be narrower and deeper in appearance—it certainly felt deeper—but nevertheless he had been right all along about one thing. Pushed into the opening and covering the outlet was a rough ball of chicken-wire, in which were embedded a few old leaves, some chips of wood and scraps of sodden paper. It was clear enough, too, how the cleft had affected him and why he so often felt odd and confused, for on one side of it lay a stack of small logs, with a cleaver and block, while on the other were two rows of clean, resin-smelling splinters tied in bundles—obviously the part which had been split when the cleft was made.

“So it was the splinters,” said Snitter, getting to his feet and sniffing them over. “Of course, it must have been some of those splinters that made the dark man’s face bleed. But then what made the awful bang? Oh, well, if the lady lets me stay here long enough I suppose I shall come to understand that and a good deal more. My goodness, though, what a mess the place is in! I wish those flies hadn’t got in. Maggots and flies—who wants a lot of flies buzzing round inside his head? Well, now I’m here I’d better make a start on my eyes. How funny it’ll be to clean them from inside! I hope it doesn’t hurt.”

He jumped up on a shelf running along the further wall, just below the level of his two cobwebbed eyes. There followed a twinge of pain in his head as some light, unseen object fell from beneath his paws and shattered on the ground below. He wondered what part of him it might have been. Still, he could feel nothing immediately wrong. He waited a few moments to recover himself, then put his fore-paws on the narrow, dirty sill and looked out through his right eye.

It was just as he had expected. He was looking at the expanse of grass and heather outside the wall down which he and Rowf had sniffed their way before he had jumped over the gate. He could see Rowf’s paw marks in a patch of mud immediately below. He raised one of his own paws and, a little surprised to find the inner surface of his eye so insensitive, pulled down a clot of sticky, dusty cobweb. The dust made him sneeze and he scuffled on the shelf, trying to get the mess off his paw and snapping at a fly that flew against the pane, recovered itself and buzzed away.

“The trouble is, I don’t think I can reach as far as the top part of this eye,” said Snitter. “I wonder why not? I suppose the whitecoats must have taken some of the inside of my head out—it really does seem awfully empty—and that’s why I can’t climb all the way to the top. Of course when my master—when my master was al—”

He broke off sharply, stared out and then edged along the shelf to get a clearer view. He had caught sight—he was almost sure he had caught sight—of Rowf and the tod creeping through the long grass a little way to his left. Yes, there they were, beyond all doubt, Rowf conspicuous enough, the tod all but invisible except in the moments when he inched forward.

But why can’t I hear them? thought Snitter. Goodness knows where my ears are—somewhere out to the sides, I suppose. What do they look like, anyway? Oh, well, never mind; I suppose I can smell the tod. You generally can.

He jumped down and made his way across to his wiry, cold nose. Yes, sure enough, it was clear that not only Rowf but the unmistakable tod were close outside. A moment later Rowf’s muzzle appeared, half-blocking the light.

“Snitter! Are you sure you can’t get out? Have you really tried?”

The question caught Snitter unawares. Was he shut in? No—obviously you couldn’t be shut into your own head against your will. But if he wasn’t, why was it apparently impossible to use his eyes and muzzle at the same time?

“Well, no—you see, Rowf—”

“Come on, then! Quick, too—before the whitecoats come!”

“No, I can’t come out, Rowf. I mean, if I do I shall be mad again. I’ll explain. You see—”

“Snitter, listen, for goodness’ sake! This is no time for one of your turns. I’ve brought the tod here to tell you how to get out. Whatever he tells you to do, do it. If he can’t get you out, nobody can. But you’ve got to be quick.”

Rowf’s muzzle disappeared and a moment later Snitter not only smelt but saw the tod, peering in at him through the chicken-wire.

“Cum oot, ye greet fond article! Sharp wi’ ye noo—afore wor aall knacked!”

“Listen, I want to explain,” said Snitter. “I can’t possibly come out. You see—”

“Reet afore ye there—yon back-end drain, straight afore ye! Yon’s aye the way oot of a shed. Slip yersel’ oot o’ that sharp, ye greet nanny-hammer!”

As Snitter was considering how best to explain the extraordinary situation in which he found himself, the tod gripped the wire ball in its teeth and tugged it out through the opening in the base of the wall. Snitter, with a yelp of pain and shock, thrust his head and shoulders into the widened opening and tried to snatch it back. As he did so, he became suddenly aware that an enormous door had opened in the back of his head, letting in a blaze of light and a rush of cold air. With these came a scraping of men’s boots, the sound of human voices and a moment later, faint but dreadfully, unmistakably clear, the smell of the whitecoats—the smell of their hands and their horrible, clean clothes.

Terrified, Snitter crushed and forced his body through the aperture. Behind him he heard a quick plunge of heavy feet and felt a human hand grabbing at his hind-quarters. He scrabbled in the hole, feeling pain along his left side as some pointed excrescence scratched him. Then he was out in the wet grass, bleeding down his flank, with Rowf dragging him forward, teeth in the scruff of his neck. He scrambled to his feet.

“Now run, Snitter, run like a hare, or I’ll bite your arse off!”

Together they tore down the valley towards Ulpha. Half a mile away, as they lay panting in the shelter of a leafless hazel copse, the tod joined them without a word and at once made its way to a high, bracken-covered bank on the outskirts, whence it could look down on the road outside and the fields sloping to the Duddon beyond.

As he drove down into Dunnerdale, it occurred to Digby Driver that he could do not only with some petrol but also with something to eat. He had arrived in Ambleside late the previous night and set out again—after a snatched breakfast which he was already beginning to forget—at half past seven that morning. His general plan was to run down the valley, stopping for a look at the scene of the fatal accident at Cockley Beck, and then, having got some idea of the kind of terrain in which the mysterious dog was operating (for he had never before been in the Lake District), to move across to Coniston in the early afternoon and see what chance there might be of talking to one or more people from Animal Research. A certain kind of reporter might have telephoned the Director and tried to make an appointment for an interview with a representative of the station, but Digby Driver was not that kind of reporter. The last thing he wanted to send back to the Orator was a piece based upon any kind of official release and the last thing he wanted to learn was whatever the Director of Animal Research might decide he wanted to tell him. He was after a sensational story and this, of course, could not be constructed out of mere truth; not out of officially released truth, anyway. It was essential that the news-reading public should feel, first, that the community was in danger and secondly that people—well-off people, “official” people—who ought to have known better, were to blame for it. As he got back into his car and drove down through the green fields south of Cockley Beck, Digby Driver reflected with satisfaction on some of his past triumphs. The to-do over clean air a few years ago—now that had been something like! The facts, as released by the Department of the Environment, had shown that by the early seventies the air over the country as a whole was cleaner than at any time during the previous hundred and twenty years at least; but by the time Digby Driver had finished with the matter, the advances in domestic smoke control appeared nugatory, while the Alkali Inspectorate had become irresponsible, incompetent sinecure-holders, fit only to be swept away as an obsolete liability. Of course, nothing in the way of statutory reform had followed from Digby Driver’s articles. This was not surprising, since the British Clean Air Acts were already the most sensible and effective of their kind in the world and were not capable of being improved. But this was not the point. The point was that thousands of people had been scared, had bought the Orator like billy-o and been prevented from grasping that, in an adverse and difficult world, one blessing which they could count was the great improvement in clean air effected by local and central bureaucracy during the previous fifteen years.

Then there had been the lead-poisoning scare—ah! happy days for environmental correspondents! “And it’ll go bloody hard,” said Digby Driver to himself, “if there isn’t some angle to be found on a research station where as much goes on as it does at this A.R.S.E. place. But which would go best, I wonder—darling doggies, or gross irresponsibility? Gross irry for choice. Who gives a damn about darling doggies these days, anyway? And where the hell am I going to find a petrol station in this blasted outback?”

In this last matter, however, Digby Driver was more fortunate than he had expected. A mile down from the Newfield (where he had narrowly missed not only a ginger cat but also one of Harry Braithwaite’s dogs), he came once more upon Duddon, pouring southward in gleaming planes of noisy, wall-slapping, pewter-coloured spate. Just the other side of the bridge and a few yards up the side-road stood not only some plain and palpable petrol-pumps but also, if he were not mistaken, a village shop, doubtless full of biscuits, chocolate and cigarettes. Digby Driver drew in to the pumps, got out of the car, strolled back and forth a few times beside the wall above the river, glanced at the petroglyph of the salmon on the coping, and then pooped his horn.

Vera Dawson appeared with haste, smiles and apologies.

“I’m so sorry to keep you waiting! I didn’t see there was anyone here or I’d have been out directly.”

“That’s all right,” replied Digby Driver, pitching his cigarette over the wall into the Duddon. “Who’d want to be in a hurry in a lovely spot like this? Real old-world charm and peace, eh?”

“Well, there’s plenty see it that way,” replied Vera pleasantly, as she screwed the cap off the petrol tank, “but as a matter of fact we’ve had a bit of a rumpus this morning—quite a to-do while it lasted.”

“Really—what sort of a to-do?” enquired Mr. Driver, his professional acumen instinctively aroused. “Fill her right up, please.”

“Well, early this morning some stray dogs broke in and upset our dustbins,” said Vera, “and we felt fairly sure one of them must be the dog that’s been causing all the trouble round here—”

“Really? What made you think that?”

“Well, both the dogs had green collars, and they say that shows they come from the Coniston research place. We had one of them shut up in the shed and there’s a young gentleman come over from Coniston with a policeman. They’re still out at the back now, but unfortunately the dog got away before they could get hold of it.”

Thank goodness for that, thought Digby Driver, and what a turnup for the book to walk right into the middle of something like this!

“Oh, that was bad luck,” he replied. “So the research chap had his trip from Coniston for nothing? No, I think she’s O.K. for oil, thanks. Five forty-eight? There we are—five fifty; and a whole tuppence, all for me. Thanks.”

At this point Mr. Powell and the policeman appeared, in conversation with Phyllis, who was politely seeing them to their car.

“—and if either of them should turn oop agaain, like,” the policeman was saying. “If y’ see them round plaace at all, doan’t hesitate about telephoning us. It’s better to telephone than not to, like. And if y’ can keep them in sight—y’ know, if it’s practicable—that’d be best.”

“Yes, of course,” replied Phyllis. “I must say I hope they don’t come back, though.”

Digby Driver stepped forward, smiling politely.

“I’ve just been hearing something about this bit of trouble of yours over the stray dogs,” he said. “I hope they didn’t do any damage?”

“No, luckily not,” answered Phyllis. “Of course, they’ve pulled the rubbish all over the yard and made a terrible mess, but nothing worse than that. And these two gentlemen have been very helpful in tidying it up for us.”

“I suppose you’re anxious to get hold of the dogs, aren’t you?” pursued Driver, turning to the policeman.

“Ay, well, stray dogs killin’ sheep’s a serious matter oop ’ere, y’ knaw,” replied the policeman. “And then it’s been aggravaated, like, by this ’ere tragic death, y’see—very naasty, that was.”

“Yes, indeed, I read about it in the paper,” said Driver, offering his cigarettes round the company. Phyllis, Vera and the policeman declined, but Mr. Powell was more forthcoming.

“And if I’m not mistaken, you must be the poor bloke from the research laboratory,” went on Driver, flicking his cigarette lighter between Mr. Powell’s cupped hands. “You carry the can, do you?”

“Well, I don’t know yet whether we do or not,” answered Mr. Powell, recalling as he spoke the Director’s policy of silence, as expounded by Dr. Boycott. “I still need to get a sight of the dogs, you see. They might be ours and then again they might not.”

“Did you not see that one as it was pushing itself through the drain-hole?” asked Vera. “Kind of a black-and-white terrier it was, and the most terrible gash—”

“Yes, but of course it was just its head that I couldn’t get to see,” replied Mr. Powell. “It was outside already, you know, by the time we opened the door.”

“They both had green collars,” said Phyllis, “and I don’t know where a dog could come by such a cut across the head as that, except by—well, by vivisection, if that’s the right word. It was a terrible sight—enough to make anyone feel really bad—”

“Oh, I don’t doubt for a moment that they had green collars,” answered Mr. Powell rather hurriedly. “What we don’t know, though, is whether these particular dogs are the ones that have been killing the sheep or whether either of them had anything to do with the fatal accident. Probably those are things we never shall know.”

There was a rather awkward pause. Everyone seemed to be expecting him to say something more. “We need to get hold of the dogs first, that’s what I mean,” he added. “Then we may learn whose they are, mayn’t we, and where they come from?”

“Oh—I thought perhaps the research station would know whether they had any dogs missing,” said Vera, putting the obvious question in the politest possible way, “and what they looked like. The other dog now—the one you didn’t see—that was altogether different to look at. It was a big, kind of a rough—”

To the sharp eye and experienced journalistic sense of Digby Driver, it was plain that Mr. Powell, young, honest, ingenuous and a trifle callow, was about to find himself in deep water—if indeed he were not already there. Obviously, the thing to do was to come to his aid: there would be nothing like so much to be gained by pressing awkward questions on him or adding to his confusion.

“Oh, that reminds me,” he said, smiling at Vera. “Sorry—not changing the subject or anything, but it was what you were saying about the one we didn’t see. There’s been a most peculiar noise coming from the engine of my car, but I can’t actually see anything at all. I’m usually rather good at seeing noises, too, and hearing smells and all that. I wonder—” he turned to Mr. Powell. “Would you be good enough, seeing you’re here, to put an ear under the bonnet and tell me what you think? I’m sure you know a lot more about these things than I do.”

As he had expected, Mr. Powell was not backward in seizing the floating spar.

“Yeah—well, sure, if I can,” he said. “I can’t claim to be an internal combustion expert, but—”

“I bet you’re more of an expert than I am,” replied Mr. Driver cordially, as he led the way across to the Triumph Toledo standing by the pumps.

He propped open the bonnet and started the engine. “Damn nuisance for you, all these people asking questions,” he went on, revving the engine with one hand to make the interior a still more fine and private place. They both leaned inward, heads close together. “I suppose you want to say as little as you can, don’t you; and hope the bloody dogs’ll go up in smoke one dark night? That’s what I’d want, I know that.”

“Well, you’ve about said it,” answered Mr. Powell, his spirits already rising in response to the stranger’s quick understanding and ready sympathy. “I mean, you know, if one’s got to spend half a day going out in a police car about three times a week, every time someone gets a sight of a stray dog anywhere in the Lake District—”

“These provincial police are so damned unimaginative,” said Digby Driver. “Anyway, why should you have to stand in a white sheet even before anybody’s proved that this dog—or these dogs, if there are two of the buggers—I didn’t know there were—come from your place? I mean, it’s like asking a bloke whether or not he’s screwed Mary Brown because she’s looking for someone to pin an affiliation order on to—why the hell should anyone expect him to answer up and put himself in the dock?”

Mr. Powell laughed; and gave every evidence of appreciating this witty, young-man-of-the-world approach.

“Well, whatever it may have been, the bloody thing seems to have stopped doing it now,” said Mr. Driver, jerking his thumb at the engine. “It would, of course, when the expert comes along. Look, I say, are you going back to Coniston now? Only I’m going that way, and unless you particularly want to go back with your policeman chum, you’d be doing me a good turn if you’d let me give you a lift. Then you could hear the noise if it develops again.”

“But are you sure I’d not be taking you out of your way?” asked Mr. Powell.

Ten minutes later, munching Phyllis’s Kendal Mint Cake (as eaten by Hillary and Tensing on the summit of Everest), Mr. Driver and his passenger passed within a few yards of the vigilant tod crouched among the hazels and continued on their way towards Ulpha and Broughton.

“I don’t know why the hell they can’t say straight out whether they’ve lost any dogs or not,” said Gerald Gray, landlord of the Manor at Broughton-in-Furness, as he drew a pint for Mr. Hutchinson the butcher (known locally as Mistroochinson) and a half for himself. “What gets me down is all this damned ca’ canny stuff. Everyone knows there’s a dog up at Seathwaite killing sheep and everyone’s virtually certain it’s escaped from Lawson Park; but the station themselves won’t even say yea or nay. Well, why the hell won’t they?”

“Ay, well, ye’ve about said it theer, Gerry,” replied Mistroochinson.

At this relatively early hour there was no one else in that finest of all pubs, the Manor Hotel at Broughton. The banded slate floor lay cool, dark and smooth as a woodland pool in autumn. The newly lit fire was burning up in the beautiful, eighteenth-century fireplace and Strafford, Gerald’s black tom-cat, sat purring on the rag rug, as well he might.

“They’re bein’ what ye might call circumspect,” added Mistroochinson sagaciously. “Not sayin’ nowt until they’ve got to, like.”

“Well, they’ll damned well have to soon, I should think,” answered Gerald. “Another sheep or two and the local peasantry’ll be storming the gates of the station with fire and sword. Heads will roll and bells will toll. Balls will fall,” he added, after a moment.

“Ay, well, but everyone’s woorried about joost his oan sheep, Gerry, tha knaws, and noan s’ mooch about anywoon else’s,” said Mistroochinson. “They say—”

“Well, talk of the devil,” interrupted Gerald, looking out of the window into the pretty, quiet little square that forms the centre of Broughton. “Here’s one of those very research buggers coming in now, unless I’m much mistaken. That’s young Stephen Powell, who works up at Lawson. Wonder what he’s doing here so early in the morning?”

It had not been particularly hard for Digby Driver to persuade Mr. Powell to stop off for a quick one in Broughton before returning to duty. A moment later he entered the bar with his companion, wished Gerald good morning and ordered two pints of bitter.

“Pints at this time of day?” demurred Mr. Powell, albeit a trifle half-heartedly.

“Oh, sorry,” replied Mr. Driver civilly. “Never mind, they’re here now and they won’t do us any harm, I’m sure.”

“O.K., but then I really must hurry back to those blinking rabbits,” said Mr. Powell. “Well, here’s mud in your eye!”

“Cheers!” responded Mr. Driver.

“Morning, Gerald,” said Mr. Powell, perhaps a shade more tardily than courtesy to a landlord requires, as he paused for breath between his first and second pull. “How’s the world treating you?”

“Oh, mustn’t grumble,” answered Gerald. “And yourself?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“And how’s Stephanie?” asked Gerald, this time with more than a touch of genuine solicitude in his voice.

“She’s—well, she’s about the same, you know,” replied Mr. Powell. His noticeable, if controlled, clouding of manner did not escape Digby Driver. A sick child? he wondered. An invalid sister-in-law? An expert in observing and exploiting personal grief and suffering, he stored the little incident away for future use.

“You were just telling me that the dogs went from room to room through the animal block, but nobody knows how they finally succeeded in escaping?” he asked.

“Well, I’m blest if I know how they did,” answered Mr. Powell, “unless they dissolved themselves in smoke and blew away up the chimney. But to tell you the truth, I don’t really want to spend any more of this pleasant morning talking about the sods. They’ve made enough trouble for me already.”

“What a damn shame!” said Digby Driver. “Why the hell should you be blamed? It’s like the old lady and the parrot in the public lavatory—d’you know that one?”

Nobody knew it, and Mr. Driver obligingly related it to an appreciative audience. It reminded Gerald of one about two miners and a cow, which assisted Mr. Powell to the conclusion that, since nobody at Lawson Park could possibly tell how long he might need to investigate the Dunnerdale dogs and return, it would be a pity to hurry away. He set up three more pints, including one for Mistroochinson; and then insisted on buying a fourth, for Gerald. Nobody ever wants to leave the bar of the Manor.

The sense of loss and desolation lay over Snitter’s awareness like hill-mist. Rising, here and there, out of this separating mirk, he could discern three or four peaks of certain knowledge, as that his master was dead, that he himself was mad, that men had destroyed the natural world and substituted a wilderness and that although he had now lost again the head which he had briefly found, he still carried in himself the involuntary power to deal death. But from what viewpoint he was regarding these; what the mist-covered land connecting them looked like; their relationship to each other beneath the miasma of confusion and ignorance from which they protruded—in short, where he was—these things remained dark to him. He lay still among the bare hazel branches and leafless elder, but from time to time raised his head to the sky with a howl, cut short as often as Rowf turned upon him, cursing.

“You can’t expect any sense,” said Snitter petulantly, “from a dog that’s just been dragged outside his own head. If only you’d left me where I was!”

“Ye’d nivver be here noo, ye’d be in th’ Dark, hinny, ne bother. Them cheps wudda gi’n ye ne chance at aall. Noo bide easy, an’ sort yersel’ oot.” The tod turned to Rowf. “We got te get th’ wee fella back hyem afore neet. He’s bad i’ th’ heed aall reet, ne doot.”

“But we’ll be seen for sure at this time of day. Isn’t that what you’ve been teaching me all this time? We’ll have to wait till dark.”

“An’ hoo ye gan te keep his gob shut, marrer?” enquired the tod sardonically. “He’ll be yammerin’ his heed off, an’ fetchin’ aall th’ farmers fer five miles roond. It’s howway wi’ us te Broon Haw, an’ sharp as w’ can shift an’ aall.”

“In broad daylight?” asked Rowf again.

“Ah shud say so—unless yer gan te leave him here. We got to get him underground an’ well in-bye an’ aall, where nebody’ll hear him. Howway noo! He’ll manage sure eneuf.”

“But the river?”

“Nowt else for’t but swimmin’. There’s ne bridge atween Ulpha an’ yon hoose we wor at.”

They swam the Duddon under High Kiln Bank, Rowf setting his teeth to the horrible business and sweeping down twenty yards with the swift, bitter current before his paws gripped stones and pulled him out on the further side. They thought themselves unseen, but they were mistaken. Bob Taylor, the most skilful fisherman in the valley, working his way with a wet fly up the reach between Ulpha Church and Hall Dunnerdale Bridge after the running sea trout, caught sight, a hundred and fifty yards upstream, of Snitter’s black-and-white back as he plunged across behind the tod. A minute afterwards, Bob hooked a three-quarter-pounder and thought no more about what he had seen; but it was to recur to him later.

“But, Stephen, old boy, surely the dogs weren’t in any physical condition to kill sheep and give rise to all this bother?” asked Digby Driver, gripping the handrail and looking back at Mr. Powell over his shoulder as they pussyfooted their way down the breakneck flight of steps that leads into the yard behind the Manor, on their way to the netty, Gents or loo.

“Well, I don’t know so much about that,” replied Mr. Powell. “One of them was an absolute bastard of a dog—mind you, it’d had enough to make it, poor sod—but there was nobody cared to touch it, not even old Tyson—”

“Tyson? He’s the man about the place?”

“Yeah—feeds them, cleans them out an’ all that. I always say he knows more about the work at Lawson Park than anyone else. He deals with all the animals, you see, and it’s his business to know what each one’s being used for and by whom. The rest of us, except for the Director, only know about the projects we’re doing ourselves. No, but that seven-three-two, it really was a dangerous animal—it was always muzzled before it was brought out for tests—”

“What were the tests?” asked Driver.

“Well, they were something like the tests carried out by Curt Richter at the Johns Hopkins medical school in America—what’s his thing called?—The Phenomenon of Sudden Death in Animals and Man.’ D’you know that?”

Like a good many young people immersed in specialized work, Mr. Powell tended to forget that others were likely to be unfamiliar with his background material.

“‘Fraid I don’t—not up my street really.”

They came back into the yard and Mr. Powell, hands in pockets, stopped and leaned against the netty wall.

“Well, Richter put wild rats and domesticated rats into tanks of water to swim until they drowned; and he found that some of them died very rapidly for no apparent reason. A bloke called Cannon had already suggested that it might be psychogenic—you know, fear, with consequent over-stimulation of the sympathicoadrenal system; accelerated heartbeat, contraction in systole—all that jazz. What Richter established was that it wasn’t fear but hopelessness—over-stimulation of the parasympathetic system, not the sympathicoadrenal. This seven-three-two dog of ours at Lawson Park had been given all sorts of drugs—you know, atropine and the colingerics, and adrenalectomy and thyroidectomy—you name it. But the real thing was that it had been continually immersed, drowned and revived, so that it had built up a terrific resistance, based on the conditioned expectation that it was going to be removed again. It didn’t succumb to the usual psychogenic factors; on the contrary, it was doing fantastic endurance times, very very interesting. They’re funny things, you know, hope and confidence,” said Mr. Powell rather sententiously. “For instance, they’re present a good deal less strongly in dogs that haven’t been domesticated. Wild animals, and therefore by inference primitive men—creatures living in precarious situations—are more susceptible to fear and strain than domesticated animals. Strange, isn’t it?”

“What about the other dog that escaped?” asked Digby Driver.

“Well, that wasn’t mine—not involved in any of my programmes: I don’t touch surgery—probably shan’t until I’m established—but if we hadn’t had evidence to the contrary this morning I’d have thought that that dog was unlikely to be alive, let alone to be killing sheep. It had had what you might call a pretty drastic brain operation, to say the least.”

“What was the object all sublime?” asked Driver, as they made their way through the Manor into the square and got back into his car.

“Well, that was a sort of psychological thing, too, as I understand it,” replied Mr. Powell. “That was why they needed an adult, thoroughly domesticated dog—they paid quite a bit for it, I believe, to some woman in Dalton.”

“Why did she part with it, d’you know?”

“Well, it wasn’t originally hers. Apparently it had belonged to her brother in Barrow, but it had somehow or other brought about his—I’m not sure, but his death, I believe I heard—in an accident with a lorry, so naturally she wasn’t keen on keeping it. That’s an exceptional situation, of course. In the normal way domesticated animals-people’s pets—aren’t easy to come by for this work, as you can well believe. The operation was something quite new—a bit like a leucotomy, but that’s misleading, really. To be perfectly frank, there were innovatory complications that put it a long way beyond me. But the general purpose—and no one’ll be able to say, now, how far it was successful; not in this particular case, anyway—was to bring about a confusion of the subjective and objective in the animal’s mind.”

“How would that work in practice, then?” asked Digby Driver, accelerating out of the square and up the hill towards the Coniston road.

“Well, as I understand it—whoops!” Mr. Powell belched beerily, leaned forward and frowned, seeking an illustrative example. “Er—well, did you ever read a book called Pincher Martin, by a man named Golding? You know, the Lord of the Flies bloke?”

“I’ve read Lord of the Flies, but I don’t think I know this other book.”

“Well, the chap in it’s supposed to be dead—drowned at sea; and in the next world, which is a sort of hellish limbo, one of the things he does is to confuse subjective and objective. He thinks he’s still alive and that he’s been washed up on a rock in the Atlantic, but actually it’s an illusion and the rock is only a mental projection—it’s the shape of a back tooth in his own head. The dog that had this operation might have illusions something like that. Suppose it had come to associate—well, let’s say cats with eau de cologne, for instance—then it might be observed to treat some inanimate object—a cardboard box, say—as a cat when it was subjected to the smell of eau de cologne: or conversely, it might see something objective and act as though it was nothing but the equivalent of some thought in its mind—I can’t think what, but you get the general idea.”

“It must be a fascinating job, yours,” said Driver. “Straight on, do we go here? All the way?”

“All the way to Coniston. It’s really very good of you.”

“No, not at all—I’ve got to go there myself, as I said. No, I mean, a fascinating job you have with all these experimental discoveries.”

“A lot of it’s routine, actually—you know, Fifty L.D. and all that.”

“Fifty L.D.?”

“Fifty lethal dose. Say you—or anyone—wants to market a new lipstick or a food additive or something, then we have to forcibly feed quantities of it to a group of animals until we’ve ascertained at what dosage level half of them die within fourteen days.”

“Whatever for? I mean, suppose the stuff’s not toxic anyway?”

“Doesn’t matter. You still have to continue forcible feeding until you’ve ascertained Fifty L.D. They may die of internal rupture-osmotic or pH effects—anything. It’s a bore, actually, but that’s partly what we’re there for. All in a good cause, you know. Cosmetics have to be safe, or no one’d buy ‘em.”

“I suppose there are compensations—not for them but for you, I mean—defence projects and secret stuff—breaking new ground. No, O.K.” added Digby Driver, smiling broadly. “Don’t answer that, as the judges say. I don’t want you to give me anything to pass on to two square-jawed blokes in raincoats on Hampstead Heath.”

“Oh, Goodner’s the chap for that. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised to learn that he’d been one of those very blokes in his time. He’s German by birth. He was working in Germany at the end of the war—for the Germans, I mean. He’s on secret work of some kind right now, that I do know. Something to do with lethal disease, for the Ministry of Defence. They practically lock him up at night—they lock up all his stuff, anyway. And there’s no talking shop to him. I bet he gets paid three times what I do,” added Mr. Powell, in a candid non sequitur.

“And what sort of leave do they give you?” enquired Digby Driver, who knew exactly how far to go and when to stop. “Where’s this? Oh, Torver, is it? Does it get a bit lonelier before Coniston? Good—I could do with another piss, couldn’t you?”

“‘Accidental death,’” said Robert Lindsay. “Ay, well, that’s all he could have found—couldn’t have found owt else, Dennis, could he?”

“Could have found suicide if he’d had a mind,” said Dennis.

“Never on the evidence. There were nothing to suggest it. If yon Ephraim chap’s alone and he dies wi’ shot-gun when he’s standing beside his car, he’s entitled to benefit of all the doubt there may be; and there were no evidence at all that he were of suicidal disposition. Nay, Coroner were reet enoof—on available evidence that were accident, Dennis, plain as day.”

“He never said nowt about dog, though, did he?” said Dennis. “But it were yon bluidy dog browt it about, for all that. It were dog as shot him, tha knaws.”

“Y’ reckon dog set off gun an’ killed him?”

“Ay, I do that. It were seen booggerin’ off oop fell like th’ clappers, tha knaws, Bob.”

“Coroner couldn’t bring that in on evidence either. An’ if he had, it would still be accidental death, wouldn’t it? Dog’s an accident as mooch as light trigger or owt else.”

“Ay, happen it would, Bob, but if he’d pinned blame fair an’ square on dog, like, then happen police or soomone’d be instroocted to find it at once and shoot it. Way it’s been left now, you an’ me’s no better off than we were at start. You could lose a coople more sheep tonight an’ Ah could lose three next week, and no boogger but us give a damn. Research Station weren’t at inquest—no bluidy fear. Nowt to do wi’ them—and they’ll do nowt, an’ all, without they’re made to, Bob, tha knaws.”

There was a pause while Robert sucked the top of his stick and considered his next words. Dennis lit a cigarette and pitched the spent match over his dog’s head into the long grass below the wall.

“Theer’s joost woon lot o’ chaps as could make them stand an’ annser, Dennis,” said Robert at length. “Compel them to answer, like.”

“Member of Parliament?” asked Dennis. “He’ll do nowt—”

“Nay, not him. Woon lot o’ chaps; an’ that’s press chaps. Did y’see Loondon Orator yesterday?”

“Nay, Ah niver did. Ah were back late from Preston—”

“Well, they’re sending reporter chap oop from Loondon—special reporter, they said, to coover t’ whole story, like, an’ get to t’bottom of it. It were Ephraim’s death started them off. Chap called Driver-ay. Real smart chap, be all accounts—real ‘andy fella.”

“Ay, but wheer’s he at? No good to us without he’s here, is he?”

“Coniston police were over to Dawson girls this morning, tha knaws,” said Robert.

“Git awaay?”

“Ay, they were that—an’ fella from Research Station were wi’ them. Two dogs with green collars were into Dawson girls’ doostbins int’ early morning. Phyllis got one on ‘em shut int’ shed an’ she phoned police, but dog were awaay owt of back-eend draain before this yoong research fella could grab it. Ay, weel, if police are that mooch interested, Dennis, tha knaws, and tha tells ‘em tha’s got soomthing tha wants t’ say to yon Driver chap, they’ll tell thee wheer he’s at.”

“Ah’ve got a whole bluidy lot Ah’m gann’t to say to him,” said Dennis.

The morning turned still and fine, with high-sailing, diaphanous clouds barely masking the sun’s warmth in their swift passage across its face. The heather was snug as a dog-blanket. Rowf lay basking on the summit of Caw, warming his shaggy coat until the last moisture of Duddon had dried out of it. A few yards below, among a tumble of rocks, Snitter and the tod were playing and tussling like puppies over a bone long picked clean, the tod pausing every now and then to scent the wind and look east and west down the empty slopes below.

“What’s up wi’ ye noo, marrer?” it remarked, as Snitter suddenly dropped the bone and remained gazing westward with cocked ears and head lifted to the wind. “Ye’re not hevvin’ one o’ yer bad torns agen? Aall this aboot ‘inside yer head’—where else wad ye be, ye fond wee fyeul?”

“No, I’m all right, tod. Rowf! I say, Rowf!”

“Aargh! He’ll take ne notice, he’s still dryin’ hissel’ oot. What’s gan on, then? Can ye see owt doon belaa?”

“Far off, tod. Look—the dark blue. It’s not the sky. It’s like a great gash between the sky and the land. They’ve cut the top of the hills open, I suppose, but why does the blood spill out blue?”

“Mebbies yer still a bit aglee wi’ yon shed carry-on. Which way ye lukkin’?”

“Out there, between the hills.”

Ten miles away, through the clear, sunny air, between and beyond the distant tops of Hesk Fell and Whitfell to the west, a still, indigo line lay all along the horizon.

“Yon? Yon’s th’ sea. Did ye not knaa?” As Snitter stared, the tod added, “Well, it’s ne pig’s arse, fer a start.”

“No, I suppose not. What is the sea? Is it a place? Is that what we can smell licking the wind like a wet tongue?”

“Ay—th’ salt an’ th’ weeds. It’s aall watter there—watter, an’ forbye a sea-mist noo an’ agen.”

“Then we couldn’t live there? It looks—it looks—I don’t know-peaceful. Could we go and live there?”

“Wad ye seek feathers on a goat?” replied the tod shortly, and forthwith crept up through the rocks to where Rowf had woken and begun snapping at flies in the sun.

Snitter remained staring at the patch of far-off blue. Water-could it really be water, that tranquil stain along the foot of the sky? Firm it seemed, smooth and unmoving between the crests of the hills on either side; but further off than they, deeper, deep within the cleft, a long way beyond and within.

It could be put back, I suppose, thought Snitter, musingly. It shouldn’t have been cut open like that, but it’s all still there—funny, I thought it wasn’t. It could be closed up again and then I’d be all right, I suppose. Only it’s such an awfully long way off. If only I could have stayed inside my head this morning, I might have been able to decide how to get there—how to reach it. But whoever would have thought it was all still there?

He closed his eyes and the salty wind, fitful and mischievous, tugged at the grass and whispered in a half-heard song, while faint scents, breaking like waves, came and went between his nostrils and ears.

“If I could just get all these thoughts up together,” murmured Snitter. “But I’m sleepy now. It’s been a long day—long night— something or other, anyway. How smoothly that grass moves against the sky—like mouse-tails.”

Soothed and finally oblivious, Snitter fell asleep in the November sunshine.

Lakeland shopkeeper Phyllis Dawson got a shock yesterday, tapped Digby Driver on his typewriter. (Except when signing his name, Digby Driver had seldom had a pen in his hand for several years past.) The reason? She found her dustbins the target of a new-style commando raid by the two mysterious dogs which have recently been playing a game of hide-and-seek for real with farmers up and down the traditional old-world valley of Dunnerdale, Lancashire, in the heart of poet Wordsworth’s Lakeland. The mystery death of tailoring manager David Ephraim, found shot beside his car at lonely Cockley Beck, near the head of the valley, took place while farmers were combing the fells nearby for the four-footed smash-and-grab intruders, and is believed to form another link in the chain lying behind efforts to pinpoint the cause of the enigma. Where have the unknown dogs come from and where are they hiding? Shopkeeper Phyllis’s contribution was doomed to disappointment yesterday when scientist Stephen Powell, hastening eighteen miles to the scene of the crime from Lawson Park Animal Research Station, arrived too late to forestall the dogs’ escape from the shed where they had been immured pending identification and removal. Are these canine Robin Hoods indeed a public danger, as local farmers hotly maintain, or are they wrongly accused of undeserved guilt? They may have an alibi, but if so the term is more than usually apt, for where indeed are they? This is the question Lakeland is asking itself as I pursue enquiries in the little grey town of Coniston, one-time home of famous Victorian John Ruskin.

Well, thought Digby Driver, that’ll do for the guts of the first article. If they want it longer they can pep it up on the editorial desk. Better to keep the actual connection of the dogs with Lawson Park to blow tomorrow. Yeah, great—that can burst upon an astonished world as an accusation. “Why have the public not been told?” and all that. The thing is, what come-back have the station got? We know two dogs escaped from Lawson Park; and thanks to dear old Master Stephen, bless him, we know what they were being used for and what they looked like. And we can be certain—or as good as—that they were the same dogs as those that were raiding Miss Dawson’s dustbins. But that’s no good to the news-reading public. The thing is, have they been killing sheep and, above all, did they cause the death of Ephraim? What we want is evidence of gross negligence by public servants. “Gross negligence, gross negligence, let nothing you dismay,” sang Mr. Driver happily. “Remember good Sir Ivor Stone’s the bloke who doth you pay, To make the public buy the rag and read it every day, O-oh tidings of co-omfort and joy—”

He broke off, glancing at his watch. “Ten minutes to opening time. Well, mustn’t grumble. I confess I never expected to fall on my feet right from the start like this. Drive down Dunnerdale and walk straight into the dogs and then into Master Powell looking for them. All the same, it still doesn’t grab the reader by the throat and rivet the front page—and that’s what it’s got to do, boy, somehow or other. Tyson—and Goodner—ho, hum! Wonder who that there Goodner used to be—might ask Simpson to look into that.”

He strolled down the road in the direction of The Crown. The mild winter dusk had fallen with a very light rain and smell of autumn woods drifting from the hills above. The far-off lake, visible at street-corners and between the houses as a faintly shining, grey expanse, lay smooth yet lithe as eel-skin, and somehow suggestive of multiplicity, as though composed of the innumerable, uneventful lives spent near its shores—long-ago lives now fallen, like autumn berries and leaves, into the peaceful oblivion of time past, there to exert their fecund, silent influence upon the heedless living. There were bronze chrysanthemums in gardens, lights behind red-curtained windows and drifts of wood-smoke blowing from cowled chimneys. A van passed, changing gear on the slope, and as its engine receded the unceasing, gentle sound of babbling water resumed its place in the silence, uprising like heather when horse-hooves have gone by, A clock struck six, a dog barked, the breeze tussled a paper bag along the gravel and a blackbird, tuck-tucking away to roost, flew ten yards from one stone wall to another.

This is a right dump, thought Digby Driver as he crossed the bridge over Church Beck. I wonder how many Orator readers there are here? Well, there’ll be some more soon, if I’ve got anything to do with it.

He entered the saloon bar of The Crown, ordered a pint and fell into conversation with the barman.

“I suppose you’re not sorry to have a bit less to do during winter months?” he asked. “There must be a lot of work at a place like this during the holiday season?”

“Oh, ay,” returned the barman. “It’s downright murder at times. July and August we get fair rooshed off our feet. Still, it’s good business as long as y’ can stand oop to it.”

“I suppose in winter it becomes mainly a matter of looking after the regulars?” pursued Driver. “D’you de-escalate your involvement with catering for visitors at this time of year?”

“Well, there’s always a few cooms by,” replied the barman. “We keep on a bit of hot food at mid-day, but not sooch a wide raange, like. There’s no Americans in winter, for woon thing, y’ see.”

“No, that’s true,” said Driver. “How about the people up at Lawson Park? They bring you a bit of trade, I suppose?”

“Not really so as ye’d noatice,” replied the barman. “Theer’s soom o’ them looks in for a drink now and then, but they’re not what ye’d call a source o’ regular coostom, aren’t those scientific gentlemen. Ah reckon theer’s a few o’ them thinks alcohol’s what’s used for preserving specimens,” he added humorously.

“Ha ha, that’s a good one—I dare say they do,” said Digby Driver. “I suppose they get up to all sorts of new research projects up there. D’you think there’s much in the way of secret weapons they go in for—germ warfare and all that sort of thing? Makes you feel nervous, doesn’t it? You know, if anything were to get out and come down here—hell’s bells, eh?”

“Ay, well, that were woon thing as coom oop at pooblic inquiry before they built t’plaace,” answered the barman. “Them as objected said there’d be element o’ daanger from infection an’ sooch like. Not that anything in that way’s ever happened so far. But Ah’ve heerd as theer’s parts of t’plaace kept secret, like, an’ no one to go in but those that have to do wi’ it.”

“That reminds me,” said Driver, “d’you know a chap called Tyson?”

“‘Bout forty,” answered the barman with a chuckle. “Two thirds of t’folk int’ Laakes is called Tyson, an’ hafe the rest’s called Birkett.”

“Well, I meant a particular chap who works up at Lawson Park.”

“Oh, old ‘Arry? Ay, Ah knows him reet enoof. He cleans out animals oop there—feeds ‘em an’ that. He’ll likely be in a bit later—cooms in for ‘is pint most evenings. Did you want to speak to him?”

“Well, I’m a newspaper man, you see, and I’m doing an article on English research stations from the point of view of ordinary people like you and me. So a real, live chap like Tyson’d be more use than those scientists—they’d be too technical for the newspaper-reading public anyway.”

“Oh, ay,” said the barman, unconsciously flattered as Driver had intended. “Well, if ye’ere going to be here for a while I’ll tell you if he cooms in, like. He’ll be through int’ pooblic yonder, but I’ll let y’ know.”

“Thanks,” said Driver. “He certainly won’t be a loser by it.”

“Mr. Tyson, I’m a man of business like yourself. I believe in being perfectly straight and plain. I want information for my paper about this business of the dogs escaping and I’m ready to pay for it. It’s not a question of bargaining—there’s the money. Count it. I shan’t say you told me anything—I shan’t even mention your name. Tell me everything you know about the dogs and that money goes into your pocket and I’ve forgotten I ever had it.”

The two had left The Crown for Tyson’s cottage, where they were sitting before the fire in the living room. Mrs. Tyson was busy in the kitchen and the door between was shut.

Digby Driver listened closely to Tyson’s account of the escape of seven-three-two and eight-one-five, which corroborated and in certain particulars added to what he had already heard from Mr. Powell that morning.

“You’re sure they went right through the entire animal block from end to end?” he asked.

“Good as sure,” answered Tyson. “How?”

“Weel, they’d knocked ower caage o’ mice int’ pregnancy unit and one moosta cut it paw ont’ glass. Theer were spots o’ blood reet through to t’guinea-pig plaace at t’oother end. Ah cleaned ‘em oop.”

“But you still don’t know how they got out of the block?”

“Nay.”

Digby Driver chewed his pencil. This was maddening. The vital piece of information, if it existed and whatever it might be, was still eluding him.

“How much d’you know about the work of Dr. Goodner?” he asked suddenly.

“Nowt,” replied Tyson promptly. “Theer’s noon knaws owt about it but ‘isself, without it’s Director. He works in special plaace, like, an’ it’s kept locked, is yon. Ah doan’t have nowt to do wi’t”

“Why d’you suppose that is?”

Tyson said nothing for some time. He lit his pipe, raked through the fire with the poker and put on some more coal. Digby Driver remained silent, gazing at the floor. Tyson got up, picked up his cap from the table and hung it on a peg behind the door. Digby Driver did not even follow him with his eyes.

“It’s Ministry o’ Defence, is that,” said Tyson at last.

“How do you know?”

“Yon Goodner were talking to me one day about disposal o’ beeästs’ bodies, an’ Ah seen letter in’s ’and. It were Ministry-headed paaper, like, marked ‘Secret’ in red.”

“Is that all you saw of it?”

“Ay.”

There was another pause, while the hounds of Digby Driver’s questing mind cast back and forth on the scent.

“Where is Dr. Goodner’s special laboratory?” he asked.

“Int’ cancer research block,” answered Tyson. “Separate part, like, with it oan door.”

“Could the dogs have gone through it?”

“Nay, th’ couldn’t—not in theer; but they went through cancer block reet enoof.”

“Why’s Goodner’s place there, d’you suppose? Any special reason?”

“Ah cann’t saay, unless happen it’s rats. Aall’t rats are kept int’ one place while they’re to be used. Joost black separate from brown, ootherwise all int’ one plaace, tha knaws.”

Digby Driver started. Then, instantly recovering himself, he bent down to scratch his ankle; straightened up, looked at his watch, lit a cigarette and returned the pack to his pocket. Negligently, he picked up the ashtray and pretended to study its design.

“Does Goodner use many black rats?” he asked carelessly.

“Black and brown. Black moastly.”

“No other animals?”

“Soomtimes moonkeys. And a reet nuisance it is, is that.”

“Oh-why?”

“Every time he wants moonkey it has t’ave full disinfectant treatment—theer’s noan to be owt on it, he says. Doosn’t matter how clean it is already, if he wants it, it has t’oondergo total disinfestation process and remain in sterile condition while he taakes it over.”

“But that doesn’t apply to the rats?”

“Nay.”

“I see,” said Digby Driver. “Well, thank you, Mr. Tyson. I shan’t mention this talk of ours to anyone, and you needn’t either. But it’s been most helpful. Good night.”