The Plague Dogs

Sunday the 21st November

(From the Sunday Orator)

AT LAST! THESE ARE THE PLAGUE DOGS! ASTONISHING PHOTOGRAPHS BY BELEAGUERED MOTORIST

Windermere bank executive Geoffrey Westcott and his landlady, Mrs. Rose Green, returning home by car through snow which for the past twenty-four hours has held Lakeland in its icy grip, got a terrifying shock yesterday. The reason? You can see it here, for bankman Geoffrey possesses not only courage and presence of mind, but a camera in whose use he is expert, for which the public have much cause to be grateful to him.

“You could have knocked me down with a feather,” said Geoffrey, depicted here recovering yesterday from his ordeal at his comfortable flat in Mrs. Green’s Windermere home, where he is a lodger. “I’d driven Mrs. Green over to Keswick to do some shopping and pay a visit to a friend, and on the way back we’d just got out of the car for a moment, about five miles north of Dunmail Raise, when all of a sudden I saw these mad dogs—and that’s what they were, make no mistake—rushing down on us. There were two of them, both as wild and ferocious as wolves on the Russian steppes. I don’t know if plague sends its victims mad, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it does—not after what I’ve seen. They tore every scrap of Mrs. Green’s shopping out of the car—meat, butter, biscuits, the lot—and ate it in about three minutes flat. In fact, they were so busy that I risked getting close enough to take some photographs. The car? Oh, it just about breaks my heart—my super-tuned Volvo sports—but I’ll just have to write it off. I could never bring myself to risk sitting in it again, whatever tests the local authority may carry out and whatever assurances they may see fit to give me. I mean, you never know, do you—bubonic plague?”

“Yeah, well, all right,” said Digby Driver, throwing down his copy of the Sunday Orator with satisfaction. “And the photographs look first-rate. Lucky the bigger dog’s in front—it looks a lot fiercer than the little one. Tom’s touched out that cleft in the head quite a bit, too: good idea—some readers might have started feeling sorry for it. O.K., let’s get on the blower to old Simp, the agony king.”

Digby Driver made his way to the hotel call-box and reversed the charges to the Orator.

“Desmond? Yeah. Yeah, I’ve seen it. Glad you’re pleased. Oh, fine, thanks. What now? Well, I thought Westcott might be good for a bit more, properly shoved and guided from behind, you know. What? Yeah, he’s stimulatable all right. Sure. A yibbedy yobbedy, ought to be clobberdy, up in the courts young man. What? Patience, Desmond. No, I said Patience. No, not patience, Patience. Oh, skip it! Oh, you don’t think he’ll do? You want it stronger? Stronger than that? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I see—force their hand, eh? But that’s a bit of a tall order, isn’t it? Well, dammit all, Desmond, I just got you the photographs, didn’t I? O.K., O.K., never mind. You say Sir Ivor wants a disaster? Something the Government can’t duck out of? Well, that is a tall order, Desmond, but I’ll do my level best. Yeah, that’s about it—pray for something to turn up. Never know what the dogs themselves might get up to, of course, specially if this snow goes on. Father forgive them for they know not what they bloody do, eh? O.K. Desmond, do my best. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.”

Having rung off, Digby Driver remained musing in the call-box for fully half a minute, tapping his front teeth with his pencil. At length he once more, and resolutely, grasped the receiver.

“The time has come the walrus said,” he remarked, and proceeded to put a call through to Animal Research.

“Lawson Park? Yes, that’s right, duty officer, I said. London Orator here. Yes, of course I know it’s Sunday. Look, can you give me the home phone number of the young fellow I talked to at Broughton last week? No, not Boycott, no, his name’s—er—yeah, that’s it, Powell, Stephen Powell. What? You say he’s sick? Oh, is he? Sick, eh? What’s he sick with? You don’t know? I seel And you won’t give me his number? Right, thank you. Thank you very much. Good-bye.”

“What is the mysterious illness afflicting young research scientist Stephen Powell?” muttered Digby Driver to himself. “‘Animal Station Preserves Suspicious Secrecy.’ Well, we’ll play it for what it’s worth, but it’s not really what Desmond’s after—not for a body-blow. It’s got to be bigger than that. What we ought to be praying for is something nasty, nasty—really nasty, oh yuck! Come on, Driver, get with it! But what, what, what?”

Mr. Driver, smiting his forehead with an open palm, proceeded to seek inspiration in the bar.

“I don’t think we shall ever be able to find the tod now,” said Snitter. “If I were a mouse I couldn’t even run as far as the gully in the floor.”

He sat up, looking round uneasily at the sky. “I suppose the buzzards will come, but I hope we’re properly dead first. Tug tug, munch munch, I say, Beakrip, old chap, which d’you like best, Snitter or Rowf?”

“Shut up.”

“Have you ever thought, though, Rowf, we shan’t need food or even names when we’re dead? No names—like the tod—just the wind making those little whistling noises along the ribs, like that yow’s bones last night that had nothing left on them. Nothing—not even maggots. That’ll be us. Thank goodness we’re out of the wind here. It’s enough to blow a cat over the hill into the tarn. Here I come help miaow oh splash how did that happen?”

Rowf said nothing, licked Snitter’s ear for a few moments and then let his head fall back between his numbed paws.

“Rowf, do you—”

“I can still smell that stuff you said the whitecoats put into the hole in your head.”

“You weren’t cut open. All the dogs who were cut open smelt of it. If you’d been cut open you’d have it too and you wouldn’t notice. Rowf, d’you really think it’s because of us that the dustbins had been taken indoors last night?”

“Probably. They’re all afraid of us, aren’t they?”

“So they all know—every one of them—about me killing people?”

A few moments later Rowf was asleep again—a light, wary sleep, in which exhaustion barely turned the scale against hunger and the fighting animal’s fear of being surprised and killed without the chance of a struggle. Snitter pressed himself deeper into the cleft between Rowf’s shaggy coat and the base of the crag and lay gazing out over the fell and the dark tarn below. The sun, which had been shining from a clear sky during the early afternoon, was now hidden behind a bank of clouds like an arctic sea. From height to height, across the bitter waste, the snow lay austere and silent, knowing neither hate nor pity for whatever creatures it would kill during the darkness of the coming fourteen-hour night.

“I’m a whitecoat,” murmured Snitter drowsily, looking down at the slate-coloured surface of Levers Water, like an eye-socket in a skull, surrounded by its white, still shores. “I need to find out how and in what way you two dogs are going to die under this particular crag. You’ll have noticed that I smell very smooth and clean, which is just as it should be: and that I cover everything up. You must understand that I’m not insensitive to the situation of my charges. My experiments have taught me great respect for all creatures. Your life certainly won’t be wasted. Even your bones will have a use—you should feel proud and interested. Let me explain. There’s a kind of buzzard that looks like a maggot—flying, of course—”

A flock of gulls drifted into sight over the crag, sailing up into an aureate beam, high and remote above the deepening twilight below. Not a wing moved as they glided silently against the darkening blue, their out-stretched pinions and white plumage tinged with gold as often as they circled towards the west.

“Whatever have I been dreaming about?” said Snitter. “That mouse has been chattering nonsense in my head again. It’s not surprising, really—I feel quite light-headed. We’ve come such a long way since the car yesterday morning, and not a mouthful, not even the lick of a dustbin lid. We’ll never be able to pull down a sheep again—never.” He dozed off once more, but started up almost immediately at the cry of a passing buzzard. “No more wading down becks for me. I spilt my brains into that beck, I believe; anyway, I could feel them running down inside my head, so there you are.” He looked upward. “Those birds—they’re beautiful, soaring round up there. They look just like this cold stuff the men have put down—silent and needing nothing. The birds lie on the sky and the white stuff lies on the ground. I used to lie on a rug, once. I wonder where they come from? Perhaps we could get there, Rowf and I. Perhaps that’s where Kiff is. If we don’t find the tod—and we never shall, now—we’ll starve all to pieces. Well, we’re starving now, come to that. Poor old Rowf—it’s worse for him.”

All day they had been hoping against hope to come upon tracks of the tod. After the raid on the car the previous morning they had crossed the main road, rounded the northern end of Thirlmere and then wandered south-westward, up the forested slopes of Raven Crag, and so by way of the moor south of High Seat, to the lonely hamlet of Watendlath beside its little tarn. Here, although they had waited for darkness and gone most stealthily about their business, they had had no success and fled away empty, with the barking of angry dogs behind them. The sound of Digby Driver had gone out into all lands, so that here, as at many dwellings throughout the Lakes, even the dustbins had been taken indoors. The ducks and hens, naturally, were no less securely out of harm’s way.

That they were both weaker and more exhausted than on that warmer morning, more than seven days before, when Rowf had killed at dawn above Bull Crag—pads sorer, courage and hope lower, energy much diminished and bodies more quickly fatigued—these things they felt continually. Later that night, at moonrise, they had searched the dismal, snowy fell, but found not a single sheep, save for a skeleton, long picked clean, lying among sodden hanks of old wool. Giving up all hope of a kill, they went on southward, crossing Greenup Gill among crumbles of snow and thin splinters of ice which dissolved even as they dropped into the biting water. It was when they realized that they were once more near Bull Crag that the thought of the tod had returned to Rowf. Impelled partly, perhaps, by that abused but still dog-like sense of loyalty and duty which had so often made him feel ashamed of his flight from Lawson Park and the drowning-tank, he had begun by blaming himself once more for the quarrel and then insisted that, somehow or other, the tod must be found and persuaded to rejoin them: it was possible that he might have returned, by himself, to the old lair. So they had set out, towards moonset, to retrace the way by which they had come from Caw and Brown Haw. By noon of the following day their hunger had become desperate. Above Levers Water they had lain down to rest and Snitter, in a kind of foolish, light-headed gaiety of privation, had spent the afternoon chattering about anything that came into his head, while Rowf slept and shivered in the lee of a tall crag.

“Shall we be ghosts, Rowf, d’you think?” asked Snitter, wriggling like a puppy. “I say, Rowf, shall we be ghosts? I don’t want to be a ghost and frighten other dogs. Look, there’s a pink cloud drifting over now, right above those white birds. I’ll bet Kiff’s on it. I wish we could go wherever those birds have come from. It must be warmer there, and I expect their tobacco man gives them—I say, Rowf, I can pee backwards on a rock, look—” He tumbled head over heels and got up crowned with a helmet of freezing snow. In the act of shaking it off, he suddenly stopped and looked about him in surprise.

“Rowf, listen, I’ve just realized where we are! Rowf! D’you remember that day—the first day after we escaped—when we chased the sheep—that shepherd man came—and those dogs got so angry with us? It’s the same place—remember, the water and these rocks, and look, that’s the beck over there? I wonder what made me realize it just now and not sooner? And come to that, I wonder where all the sheep have gone? Up in the sky, d’you suppose?”

As he spoke, the sun shone for a moment through a rift in the clouds, glinting stilly on the distant water. There was the smell of a cigarette and a sound of crunching boots. A blue, moving shadow appeared and the next moment a man—surely, the very man of whom Snitter had been speaking—came striding round the end of the crag and stood still, his back toward them, looking intently out across the tarn. At his heels was following one of the two dogs who had so fiercely resented their chasing of the sheep. Seeing them, it stopped, with a low growl, and at once the man turned his head and saw them also.

Rowf rose slowly and stiffly from the depression which his body had made in the snow, hobbled out of range of the man’s stick and stood uncertainly on the defensive. Snitter, almost as though at play with some chance-met stranger in a park, took a few gambolling steps towards the man, wagging his tail. At this the man immediately backed away, flinging down his cigarette, which quenched, in the silence, with a quick hiss like a tiny utterance of alarm. Then, as Snitter hesitated, he swung his stick, shouting, “Git out, y’boogger!”, turned quickly on his heel and disappeared at a run. Evidently he was too much startled and frightened even to remember his own dog, for he did not call it and it remained where it was, facing Rowf in the chilly shadow. At length, in a guarded but not altogether unfriendly manner, and looking at the depression in the snow, it said, “Tha’s bin layin’ there a guidish while, then. Art tha noan cold?”

Rowf made no reply but Snitter, having cautiously approached the dog, stood still while it sniffed him over.

“By, tha smells queer,” said the dog at length. “Where art goin’?”

“Nowhere,” answered Rowf.

The dog looked puzzled. “How doosta mean? Tha’lt noan be bidin ont’ fell the neet?”

“We’ve nowhere to go,” said Snitter.

The dog, plainly at a loss, looked from one to the other.

“Wheer’s thy farm at? Tha’rt noan tourists’ dogs, Ah’m varra sure—tha’rt nowt but skin and bone. What art doin’ here?”

There was a pause.

“We live in a shed,” said Snitter suddenly. “There are pink clouds like rhododendrons. I know it sounds silly, but I’m going to clean the cobwebs off my eyes and then you’ll be able to see what I mean. Just for the time being I have to leave it to the mouse. Can you tell us why your man was afraid of us? Why did he run away? He did run away, didn’t he?”

“Ay, he did that. Ah’ve nobbut seen t’ like once afore, an’ that were when he reckoned dog were sick wi’ rabies, like. It were yoong pooppy, an’ he reckoned it were in convoolsions—it were foamin’ an’ that.”

“Rabies?” said Snitter. “What’s that?”

“Doosta not knaw? A sickness—kind of plague, like—that kills dogs; but it’s noan common. Happen he thinks tha’s got it—tha smells queer enoof, an’ that head on thee like rat split oop belly.”

“But you’re not afraid of us, are you?”

“Nay. Ah’d knaw reet enoof if tha had plague or sickness like, but that’s whit t’ gaffer thinks, for sure. Else he’d not ‘a run.”

“Where have all the sheep gone?” asked Rowf.

The dog looked surprised. “Sheep? We doan’t leave sheep ont’ fell in snaw. Sheep were browt down yesterday, an’ damn’ cold work it were an’ all. That’s what we’re on with now—lookin’ for any more as might ‘a coom down off tops lasst neet.”

“I see,” said Snitter. “So we shan’t be able to—yes, I see.”

“So ye’re livin’ oop an’ down ont’ fell?” said the dog. “By, ye’re thin wi’t, poor booggers. An’ ye’re noan reet int’ head an’ all,” it added to Snitter. “Happen ye’ll die ont’ fell. Nay, cheer oop, poor lyle fella, it’s gan to thaw bi morning, canst tha not feel it?”

A sudden shouting—” ‘Ere Wag, ’ere Wag—” sounded in the distance and the dog, without another word, vanished like a trout upstream. In the view from the crag, the white fell stretched bare as a roof down to the tarn.

“He didn’t recognize us,” said Snitter after a little, “and he obviously thought we couldn’t do any harm.”

“We can’t.”

“My feet are cold.”

“They’ll be colder if we stay here. We’ve got to find some sort of shelter. It may thaw by morning, as he said, but it’s cold enough to freeze your eyes out under this rock.”

“What a sad sight that would be,” said Snitter. “I couldn’t see anything, could I? Not a maggot not a mouse not a dustbin round the house. Cheer up, old Rowf. We might find the tod yet, and perhaps there’s a bit of the world somewhere that nobody wants. Anyway, wouldn’t you rather die here than in the whitecoats’ tank? I would. It’s little enough dignity we’ve got left. Of all the things the whitecoats stole, that’s what I feel worst about, I think. I hope we die alone, like decent animals.”

Sunday the 21st November to Monday the 22nd November

Digby Driver’s assessment of Mr. Geoffrey Westcott, though characteristically flippant, exaggerated and uncharitable, had nevertheless been—also characteristically—by no means entirely inaccurate. While Mr. Westcott had never, in fact, seen the inside of a police court, either in a defendant or any other capacity, there was, notwithstanding, a certain unscrupulousness in his make-up, together with a kind of self-centred, insensitive roughness. He lived largely by his own rules and sometimes stretched even them. Humanity in general he did not care for, preferring objects, especially artefacts; and he was not, as a rule, concerned to conceal this preference. When it came to getting the best out of fine or delicate mechanism, he had penetration and unlimited patience; for people, little or none. He possessed an above-average intellect and strong powers of concentration, but together with his solitary single-mindedness there went a potential (and at times something rather more than a potential) for intolerance and even fanaticism.

He had been the second of six children of a railway linesman, and in the cramped, overcrowded home had, in sheer self-defence, grown up tough and impervious. He had developed a preference for his own company, and a passion for acquiring and mastering technological instruments, so much more satisfying and solacing, in their smooth, controllable predictability, than the emotional inconsistencies of human relationships. During adolescence he grew still further apart both from his indigent parents and his rough-and-tumble brothers and sisters; and met with no opposition—rather the reverse—when, as soon as he had taken his A-levels, he left home and set up for himself. His family, in effect, forgot him.

He secured a good starting job at a bank in Windermere, yet it was not long before he came to be generally regarded as a misfit. Dour and quick to take offence, he tended to get on the wrong side of his colleagues and on more than one occasion displayed a total inability to appreciate the client’s point of view.

Westcott did not need people or want to get on with them. Living alone and without luxury, his income was already sufficient for more self-indulgence and private enjoyment than as a boy he had dared to hope for. His life-style took the form of a fairly rigorous régime of self-denial, directed towards the acquisition of a planned succession of fine technological durables. It would, perhaps, be tedious to catalogue his possessions—the prismatic compass, the Zeiss binoculars, the wrist-watch which could play “Annie Laurie” under water while displaying in fluorescent script the date and operative sign of the zodiac (or something like that), the quadraphonic gramophone which made the sound of a piano seem to come from four directions instead of one (which might have seemed strange even to poor Westcott if he had ever been able to stop fiddling with the controls long enough to listen with any concentration), the three electric shavers, and so on. Not his least source of pride and joy, however, was his small collection of guns and pistols. These were, of course, illegal, but sometimes, taking out one or another, he would risk a few rounds’ fire in suitably lonely and secluded places. He had a good eye and was no bad shot. With the only rifle he possessed—a Winchester .22—he reckoned himself particularly handy, and was fond of shooting match-sticks at twenty-five or thirty yards.

Some of his money had not been honestly come by. He had certain shady acquaintances and had more than once allowed himself, his car or his rooms to be made use of by these people.

Mr. Westcott possessed at any rate one friend and that was his landlady, Mrs. Rose Green, a middle-aged widow. In time an odd relationship grew up between these two, who had both experienced so little of what most people regard as affection. In winter, Mrs. Green would after a fashion reassure Mr. Westcott by pooh-poohing his fears of infection—for in this regard he was inclined to indulge a mild neurosis. When he was setting off for a long day on the Pillar or the Scafell range, she would make him sandwiches and admonish him to be sure to return punctually in the evening for oxtail stew. When she had a mind to spend a Saturday morning shopping in Keswick, Kendal or even Preston, Mr. Westcott, if he were not bound for the tops, would drive her there and back in the Volvo. They had little conversation—Mrs. Green was not a warm or talkative woman—but that in itself rather increased than diminished their mutual respect. For chat and laughter they felt, by and large, contempt.

The indignity, inconvenience and loss which Mrs. Green and he had suffered from the Plague Dogs aroused in Mr. Westcott all the brooding resentment of which he was capable (which was quite some), and this his dealings with Digby Driver had done nothing to allay. It was true that Driver had paid him quite well for the photographs, but while interviewing him Driver had—like many others before him—found himself disliking Mr. Westcott, who counted and pocketed the money without a word of thanks and tended to answer questions with a glowering and defensive “What? Well, for the simple reason that …” Driver had therefore begun to needle him, lightly but deftly, in his best Fleet Street manner, in his own mind comparing Westcott’s reactions to those of a bull pierced by banderillas. Mr. Westcott had parted from Driver with the surly feeling—which he had been meant to have—that some of these smart London fellows thought they were too damned clever by half. Although on the following day the police had succeeded in persuading him that he could with safety resume the use of his car, they had not, of course, cleaned up the mess of eggs, butter and mud which had soaked well into the back seat, while the germicidal fumigator used by the local authority had had a noticeable effect on the upholstery (already torn in two places by Rowf’s claws). Moreover the delicate valve-tuning, over which he had taken such pains, had been impaired by whoever had driven the car back to Windermere. Among his final questions to Digby Driver, before they parted, had been, “Why don’t you go out and settle the damn dogs yourself, instead of writing newspaper articles about them?” To which Driver, perhaps a trifle stung, after all, by the thrust, had managed to reply only “Oh, we’re content to leave that to burly dalesmen like you.”

The following night—the Sunday—Mr. Westcott was sitting alone in his room, morosely watching colour television and wrapping himself in two blankets when the gas fire (greedier in cold weather, like all lodging-house metered fires) had consumed the last shilling earmarked for its consumption until next day. (He was not going to raid the sinking fund intended for the purchase of a wet suit and scuba equipment.) The image of the pestilential dogs, macabre in appearance and lethal in effect, came stalking across his peace of mind as the Red Death through the irregular apartments of Prince Prospero’s castellated abbey. In his mind’s eye he saw himself relentlessly pursuing them over the Scafell range, tracking them across Helvellyn’s snowy wastes, following them from the larch copses of Eskdale to the plunging falls of Low Door. In his imagination their bodies, each neatly bullet-pierced through heart or brain, lay warm and still at last upon the fell. To hell with the Orator, with photographs, interviews or public acclaim. This ought properly to be an austere, individual vendetta, hunter against hunted, the putting of a salubrious and necessary stop to the dirty brutes who had had the audacity to spoil his car and gobble up three or four pounds’ worth of meat and groceries. Having shot them, he would not even bother himself to go up to the bodies. He would simply walk away and go home.

By eleven o’clock his mind was made up. Monday and Tuesday were both, of course, working days, but under employment regulations he was entitled to take up to not more than two days’ sick leave of absence without a medical certificate, and after his known ordeal and at this wintry time of year no awkward questions were likely to be asked. True, if enquired for he would not in fact be at home, but in all probability he would not be enquired for, and in any case Mrs. Green would if necessary cover up for him. He would need to brief her to that effect before he set out. As for the chance of being seen on the hills by anyone who might tell the bank, it seemed too remote to take into account.

Methodically he checked and laid out his fell boots, clothing and equipment—thin and thick socks, mackintosh overtrousers, scarf, gloves, anorak, Balaclava helmet, vacuum flask, map, whistle, prismatic compass, binoculars and light pack, together with the four-foot-long, waterproof rope-and-alpenstock bag which had never housed an alpenstock but which he used to carry in concealment his Winchester .22, together with its telescopic backsight (in padded bag) and the screwdriver for mounting it. The tobacco man himself could not have been more deliberate in his preparations. When all was ready he undressed, washed briefly in tepid water, set his alarm clock for the usual time and went to bed wearing his socks, with his overcoat piled on top of his eiderdown.

At breakfast Mrs. Green clicked her tongue and shook her head, but made no effort to dissuade him. It never occurred to either of them to go in for anything so articulate or demonstrative as the discussion of opinions or the rational influencing of each other’s point of view. One might say, “Pass the salt,” or “I’m not leaving until this afternoon,” but one did not say, “I see this matter in rather a different light from you and will try to explain why.” Nor did it occur to them that if Mr. Westcott were to succeed in killing one or both of the dogs he might not, in the current state of publicity, be able to return as obscurely as he had set out. Neither was that kind of person. There had had to be sausages for Sunday dinner—of that Mrs. Green was still fully conscious—and apparently Mr. Westcott was not going to take it lying down. Good for him. She was also conscious of the need, in Mr. Westcott’s interest, for a well-buttoned lip. By twenty to ten he was on his way in the Volvo.

Mr. Westcott commenced by returning to the scene of the attack. He parked the car in the same place and waited to see whether the dogs would reappear. After half an hour they had not done so and he began considering his next step. On that morning two days ago, he reflected, they had apparently come down the fell from the east—probably more or less down the line of Fisher Gill. He had read in the paper of the panic caused by their appearance at a Glenridding farm a few days before. So it seemed most likely that they had some sort of lair in or under the Helvellyn range, somewhere between Thirlmere and southern Ullswater.

Mr. Westcott got out of the car, locked it, shouldered his pack and set off up Fisher Gill, in and out of the grass tussocks, over the soaking, spongey peat and moss and the last of the almost-melted snow. He was glad that he was going to have to make a search. He even hoped that it might turn out to be a long, hard one. He was determined to find and kill the dogs. It was an entirely personal conflict between himself and them, the spoilers of his possessions, the wreckers of scientific order. It ought not to be unduly easy, for he meant to prove to himself—or to someone—what he was worth in defence of his little realm. The dogs might have proved too much for everyone from Keswick to Hawkshead. They were not going to prove too much for him.

In the course of the next five and a half hours, until the fall of early darkness, Mr. Westcott covered thirteen miles. He was lucky enough to have no mist. Having climbed Sticks Gill up to the pass, where he saw but, since the snow was almost gone, could not follow for more than a few yards the vestigial tracks of two dogs, he spent some little time in searching with his binoculars the area between Stang and the reservoir. It was devoid of everything but curlews and buzzards, and at length he turned south and strode easily up to the summit of Raise. From there he made his way along the whole ridge—White Side and Low Man to Helvellyn itself—continually stopping to observe the slopes below. He paid particular attention to the sheltered Red Tarn basin between Striding Edge and Catstycam, where once, long ago, a terrier bitch had kept herself alive for three months, guarding the body of her master fallen from a precipitous height above. Someone had told him that the place was haunted, though neither Wordsworth’s nor Scott’s poems on the incident—both of which he had once taken the trouble to get hold of and read—told what had finally become of the dog.

Still bootless, he continued for two miles south to Dollywaggon Pike and, having stopped for about fifteen minutes to eat, began the rather tricky descent to the east, down the narrow, still-frosty Tongue. In these conditions of part-frost, part-thaw, the Tongue was more than a little dangerous, which was why Mr. Westcott chose it. He would have attempted the north face of Scafell if he had thought that to do so would give him a shot at the dogs. No course, whether involving fatigue, discomfort or actual danger, was going to remain unpursued, provided it held out the promise of success. More than once he slipped on the rocks of the Tongue but, undeterred, pressed on into the gully and so to the cascades of Ruthwaite Beck.

He returned northward across the valleys and ridges east of the Helvellyn heights; straight over peat and ling, rock and grass, stones and moss; Grisedale Forest, Nethermost Cove Beck, Birkhouse Moor and Stang End. There was no least sign of the dogs; and he met no one all day. He regained the car by way of Sticks Pass, wondering whether his best course would be to spend the following day on the Dodds to the north. He was still wondering when he got back to Windermere, to hear from Mrs. Green the news that on Sunday afternoon the dogs had been encountered in the high valley of Levers Water by a Coniston farmer looking for odd sheep to bring down out of the snow. He had recognized them at once and taken to his heels, but not before observing that they appeared thin and fair shrammed with the cold.

Digby Driver, hastening back to Coniston to learn nothing different from what he had already heard from other eye-witnesses on previous occasions, left this farmer after no more than fifteen minutes and, back in his room, fairly cursed with frustration.

“The bloody brutes—they’re just going to fizzle out—die up there—the whole thing’ll collapse without one more story, yucky or otherwise! Simpson’ll be livid! What a load of crap! Come on, Driver, you’re not beat yet! What to do? What to do? Well, we’ll just have to try the Research Station and hope for some sort of indiscretion. Any port in a storm!”

He rang up Lawson Park and this time, by some curious turn of the wheel, found himself talking to Dr. Boycott, who offered to see him by appointment forty-eight hours later, on the afternoon of Wednesday the 24th.

As has been said, Digby Driver had little time for set-piece, formal press interviews with official representatives. In his view—a not altogether inaccurate one—such interviews were often designed to soft-pedal or even to conceal things likely to provide material for news copy. It was usually more profitable to talk to the boot-boy or the cleaning-woman, but in this case he already had an even better contact, if only he could get at him.

“Look, Mr. Boycott,” he said, “it’s good of you to offer to see me, but the man I’d really like to talk to is Stephen Powell. Is he still off sick?”

“I’m afraid he is,” answered Dr. Boycott. “Why do you want to talk to Mr. Powell so particularly?”

“Because he was so darned helpful when I met him before, the day I drove him back from Dunnerdale. It was him that—oh, well, never mind. But I don’t want to waste your time unnecessarily, and it’ll suit me perfectly well just to have a word with Powell. Could you give me his address, perhaps?”

“Well, he’ll be back tomorrow or the next day, I understand,” said Dr. Boycott, “so if you like we’ll both see you on Wednesday afternoon. Will three o’clock suit you? Excellent. Well, until then, good-bye.”

Tuesday the 23rd November

The following morning was more than a little misty on the tops, but nevertheless Mr. Westcott set out even earlier than before. Having reached Little Langdale, he was able to see that the northern end of the Coniston range was considerably less obscured by mist than the Old Man itself. Accordingly he ran up to the Wreynus Pass, left the Volvo and climbed the Grey Friar by way of Wetside Edge. The weather had become warmer and damp, with a light west wind, and he sweated in his anorak as he stood swinging his binoculars this way and that across the slopes above Seathwaite Tarn and Cockley Beck. There were no dogs to be seen. He crossed the saddle to Carrs, ate an early lunch and tramped southward to Swirral, Great How Crags and the Levers Hause. Here the mist was troublesome, and Westcott, knowing himself to be immediately above Levers Water and the very place where the dogs had last been seen two days before, went down as far as Cove Beck and covered that area very thoroughly indeed. He found nothing and climbed back to the Hause. His tenacious and obsessive nature was not yet dispirited but, like a fisherman who has not had a rise all day, he now made a deliberate demand on his concentration, persistence and staying-power to play the game out to the end and finish the day in style, win or lose. Who could tell? Mist or no mist, he might even now run slap into the dogs sheltering in a peat-rift or under a thorn. This, apparently, was what the farmer had done. Making use of his prismatic compass in the mist, he set off for Brim Fell, Goat’s Hause and the Dow Crag.

“I’m very glad you’ve felt well enough to come back today, Stephen,” said Dr. Boycott. “There are several important things. I trust you’re quite recovered, by the way?”

“Yeah, more or less, I think,” replied Mr. Powell. “A bit post-influenzal, you know, but it’ll pass off, I dare say.” In point of fact he felt dizzy and off colour.

“Well, work’s often a good thing to put you back on your feet, as long as you don’t overdo it,” said Dr. Boycott. “You should certainly go home early tonight, but I’d like you to be familiarizing yourself today with the details of this new project that we’ve been asked to set up. I shall want you to take entire charge of it in due course.”

“What’s the present position with those dogs, chief, by the way? Are they still at large?”

“Oh, yes, the dogs—I’m glad you mentioned that. Yes, they’re still very much at large, I’m afraid; they seem to keep turning up all over the place. On Saturday, apparently, they actually robbed a car of a load of groceries. There’ve been a lot of phone calls, and I dare say you may very well get some more today. Mind you, we’re still not admitting that those dogs are ours. Ours may be dead long ago.”

“What about Whitehall?”

“Oh, they’re still blathering away. There’s going to be some sort of debate in Parliament, I gather. That Michael What’s-His-Name was up here last Friday, as you know. He wanted to see Goodner’s laboratory and then he was pressing me to give an assurance that the dogs couldn’t have been in contact with any plague-infected fleas.”

Mr. Powell made an effort to show interest. “Did you give it?”

“Certainly not. How could I? How could anyone? Anyway, we’re scientists here—we don’t get mixed up in politics. We’ve got work to do, and we’re not to be run from Westminster or Whitehall or anywhere else.”

“That’s where the money comes from, I suppose.”

Dr. Boycott waved the triviality away with one hand.

“That’s quite incidental. This work’s got to be done, so the money’s got to be found. You might just as well say the money for water-borne sewage comes from Westminster and Whitehall.”

“It does—some of it, anyway.”

Dr. Boycott looked sharply at Mr. Powell for a moment, but then continued.

“Well—well. No, I think the principal thing that’s bothering the Ministry is having to admit that bubonic plague’s being studied here at all—as a Ministry of Defence project, that is. It was secret, of course. No one was supposed to know—even you weren’t supposed to know.”

“I didn’t know-well, hardly.”

“I still can’t imagine how it got out,” said Dr. Boycott. “But I suppose the press will continue to make all they can of it. And talking of the press, that reminds me. I’ve agreed to see this Orator man, Driver, tomorrow afternoon at three. I’d like you to join me. If I’m going to talk to a fellow like that, there ought to be a witness, in case he misrepresents us later.”

“O.K. chief, I’ll be there.”

“Now, this new project I was starting to tell you about,” said Dr. Boycott. “It’s a pretty big one, with American money behind it—another defence thing, of course. We’re going to construct a specially large refrigeration unit, the interior of which will simulate tundra; or steppe-like conditions, anyway. There’ll be a wind tunnel, too, and some means of precipitating blizzard. These will be near-arctic conditions, you understand. There’ll be food and some kind of shelter situated in one place, and a built-in escalator whose effect will be that the subject animals have to cover the equivalent of anything from thirty to sixty miles to reach it. We may install certain deterrents—fear-precipitants and so on. Actually, we’re not quite agreed yet on that aspect of the work, but—”

“What subject animals, chief?”

“Dogs, almost certainly. Much the most suitable. Now as to timing—”

Mr. Powell closed his eyes. He had come over faint and his head was swimming. He began to realize that he was more post-influenzal than he had thought. As he made an effort to concentrate once more on what Dr. Boycott was saying, there came from outside a sudden burst of tommy-gun fire. He started, sat up quickly and looked out of the window. Tyson’s boy Tom, emerging with a pail of bran mash from the shed across the way, was idly running the mixing-stick along a sheet of corrugated iron which had been used to patch the wall.

“—As to timing, Stephen, I was saying—”

Mr. Powell hesitated. “I—I—it’s kind of—I wonder, chief—only, you see—look, do you think you could possibly put someone else on this? The thing is—”

“Put someone else on it?” asked Dr. Boycott, puzzled. “How d’you mean?”

“Well, I can’t explain exactly, but—” Mr. Powell buried his face in his hands for a moment. When he looked up he said, “Perhaps I’m not quite back to normal yet. I only meant—well, you see—”

To his horror, Dr. Boycott saw—or thought he saw—tears standing in Mr. Powell’s eyes. Hurriedly he said, “Well, we needn’t go into that any more just now. We’ll come back to it another time. You’ll want to be having a look at your other stuff. By the way, Avril finally finished off that hairspray thing while you were away yesterday. The stuff was absolutely hopeless—the second lot of rabbits all had to be destroyed. I can’t imagine how anyone ever supposed he could get away with marketing a product like that to the public. Just wasting our time and everybody else’s. We shall charge him for the rabbits, naturally. Anyway, if I don’t see you again before, we’ll meet at three tomorrow afternoon.”

In a confused fantasy of mist and hunger, Snitter was hunting for the tod across the hills and rocks of dream. A bitter rain was falling and twice, as he topped a slope, he glimpsed momentarily but never winded, disappearing over the next, the familiar, grey-haired figure with yellow scarf and walking-stick.

“Ah ha!” said Snitter to the vanishing figure, “I know better than to run after you! You look real, but you’re not real. I’ve got to find the tod, or else we’re going to die in this horrible place.”

He knew now where he was; on the long, heathery slope that led down to the road winding up out of the green dale—the empty road that crossed the pass by the square stone post set upright in the turf. He remembered the post: he had lifted his leg against it for luck when the tod had led them across the pass on their way to Helvellyn. The wind was tugging in uneven gusts over the ling and up from below wavered the falling of the becks. A curlew cried, “Whaup, whaup,” in the hills and as he came down to the road a blackcock went rocketing away from almost under his paws. It was all just as he remembered.

He paused, looking about him and sniffing the wet ground for some trace of the tod. Suddenly he saw, below him, a blue car ascending the pass, threading in and out of sight, steadily climbing the steep edge of the hillside, crossing the bridge and coming on towards the stone where he stood watching. As it reached level ground and drew to a halt on the short grass of the verge, he saw that the driver was a merry-looking, pretty girl, who smiled at him, calling and beckoning.

Snitter ran up eagerly and jumped into the car by the near-side door which she leant across to hold open. She smelt deliciously of soap, scent, leather and femininity. He put his muddy paws in her lap and licked her face and she laughed, scratching his ears.

“You’re a friendly chap, aren’t you?” she said. “Poor doggie, you’ve hurt your head, haven’t you? And where have you sprung from, mmh? I bet your master’s worried to death about you.” His old, original collar had apparently come back and she read it, twisting round the little brass plaque with two slim, cool fingers pressed against his neck, “Would you like me to take you home? D’you suppose there’s a reward, mmh?”

Head close to hers, Snitter wagged his tail, smelling her hairspray and the trace of wax in one small, dainty ear. “I’ll give you a reward,” she said, and popped a toffee into his mouth. He bit it. It had no taste at all and he shook his head, teeth squelching in the sticky gluten.

“It’s dream toffee,” she said, laughing and kissing him. “This is all just a dream, you know. Are you hungry? Poor old chap, then—it’s no good looking in the back of this car. There’s nothing there—only my bag.”

She started the engine and backed to the road, leaving the still-unclosed passenger door to swing back and forth as she did so. “You can help me if you like,” she said. “D’you know what I’m looking for? I need a mouse—a live one.”

Snitter found speech. “I’ve got a mouse; he’s in my head.”

“Could he be injected? Only, you see, I’m overdue and of course my boy-friend and I want to know as quick as we can.” She looked at her watch. “Oo, gosh, I’d better be getting on. He’ll be home soon. We’re living together, you know.” She laughed. “Living in sin, as they used to say.”

“Sin?” said Snitter. “I don’t understand, but then I’m only a dog, of course. A kind of house you live in, is it? The men have taken all the houses away, you know. I don’t believe there’s a house for miles.”

She patted him, leaning across, about to close the door.

“Why,” she said, “we both believe the very same. There’s no such thing as sin, is there? No such thing any more.”

Suddenly Snitter realized that they were not alone in the car. The shining fur coat pressed against them began to writhe and hunch into folds, which resolved themselves into odorous, furry, fox-like creatures leaping past him into the back seat. On the instant there started up among them a great, brown lizard, with burnished neck of verdant gold, smooth, supple scales and forked tongue flickering in and out between its eyes. From the girl’s feet, pressed to the controls, two tawny snakes came writhing.

The girl drew a knife from the top of her skirt.

“You don’t mind blood, do you?” she said. “I was explaining, wasn’t I, it’s what I hope I’m going to see quite soon.”

Snitter flung up his head, howling in terror.

“What’s the matter now?” growled Rowf, startled out of sleep beside him. “Why on earth can’t you keep quiet?”

“Oh, thank goodness! A dream! I’m sorry, Rowf—I suppose it’s the hunger. It’s more than three days now since we’ve eaten anything—not a beetle, not a caterpillar—”

“I know that as well as you do. Well, then. Three days, four days. Go to sleep. I deserve it even if you don’t.”

“I’d eat anything—anything, Rowf; if only there was—”

The lethargy of starvation, returning, flowed over Snitter, pressing him down like a soft, heavy paw. He slept, dreamed of the dog shed and the tobacco man, and woke to find himself half under Rowf’s shaggy flank.

“Lodo,” murmured Snitter. “I thought—yes, it was Lodo—”

“The bitch, you mean—that spaniel-eared one? Always smelt of burning?”

“Yes, she—was telling me—”

“What?”

“She told us—d’you remember?—the whitecoats made her breathe some kind of smoke, same as the tobacco man does. They put a thing over her face so that she had to breathe this smoke.”

“Well?”

“Well, she said she hated it to begin with, but then later on, when they didn’t give her the smoke, she wanted it.”

Rowf turned his head, biting at a flea in his rump.

“We’ll be like that, won’t we?” said Snitter. “When we aren’t here any longer, when we’re not hungry or cold, we’ll miss it. We’ll wish we were.”

“When d’you mean?”

“When we’re dead.”

“When you’re dead you’re dead. Ask the tod.”

From the misty gully above came a faint rattling of stones and the scramble of a sheep’s hooves. Two or three pebbles, pattering down the precipice, came to rest not far away.

“Flies on the window-pane,” murmured Snitter drowsily. “There’s nothing to be seen, but they can’t get through it. Nothing’s very strong, of course—much too strong for us. Like black milk.”

“Black milk? Where?”

“It was in a lighted bowl, kept upside down on the ceiling. Very strong stuff. You couldn’t look at it for long or it boiled. Well, after all, rain, you know—that just stays up there in the sky, I suppose until the men want it to come down. If rain can stay up there, why not milk? Or Kiff. I mean, Kiff’s not dead, is he? There’s nothing at all strange, really, about black milk.”

“I never thought of it like that.”

For many hours past they had been dozing and waking, sheltered from the wind at the foot of the Dow Crag. Below them, beyond the tumbled screes, lay the narrow expanse of Goat’s Water, treeless, grassless, weedless—cold water and stones.

After the dog Wag had left them, two days before, they had wandered aimlessly southward, up over Grey Crag, down into Boulder Valley and so round, below the eastern precipices of the Old Man, into this dreary vale, remote and sequestered, an open mouthful of tooth-stumps, a stone-grey muzzle asleep by a dead fire on a winter’s night: a place where appetite and energy—almost life itself—seemed futile, as though among the craters of the moon. Only the clouds and gulls, far overhead, maintained their effortless sailing; a moving sky above a still land.

“The tobacco man will be round,” said Snitter, looking about him in the gathering dusk.

“Not here.”

“No, but it’s like that here, too, isn’t it? Whatever we were there for—you know, in the tobacco man’s shed—it was nothing to do with us—with dogs—no good to dogs. And this—whatever it’s for—this is nothing to do with us, either.”

“We’ve been here before, Snitter, do you know that? With the tod. I chased the yow until it fell over and then we came down here and ate it—remember?”

“It seems a long time ago. The tod won’t come back now.”

“Snitter, there’s a cave up there, among those boulders. I remember seeing it that night. We’ll lie up there for now and find a sheep tomorrow. I’ll kill it somehow.”

During the night it thawed, as the sheep-dog had said it would, and by first light almost all the snow had gone. Rowf, however, woke surly and listless, biting at his staring ribs and falling asleep again, head on paws. There was not a sheep to be seen and he could not be persuaded to hunt for one.

During the afternoon Snitter limped down to the water, drank and returned. He woke Rowf and together they went to look for the remains of the sheep which they had driven over the precipice, but found only wool and bones at the foot of a sheer gully. They returned to the cave and passed a third night without food.

It was on the following afternoon that Snitter suffered the dream of the girl in the car.

“Nothing strange about it really,” repeated Snitter in the solitude. “Nothing strange about black milk. I dare say men might make black bread, or even black sheep if they wanted, come to that. They sometimes make black clouds when they want it to rain—I’ve seen them.” Then, with sudden determination, “Rowf, I’m going to look for the tod: and if I can’t find him, I’m going down to some farm or other and give myself up to the men. Anything’s better than starving to death—”

Rowf, battered and hollow as an old kettle discarded among the stones, grinned up at him from his refuge of despair.

“Your dignity! ‘I hope we die alone!’”

“Oh, Rowf—”

“Go on, then, off you go! I’m damned if I’m going to be taken back to the whitecoats’ tank. I’d rather starve here—it’ll be less trouble. And as for finding the tod, I tell you, Snitter, if you can do that, I’ll make some food drop down to us off the tops. There you are, that’s a bargain. One’s as likely as the other.”

“Now the snow’s gone the men may have brought some sheep back up here. Couldn’t we try to find one?”

Without replying, Rowf put his head back on his paws and shut his eyes.

Snitter, wandering away through the stones and loose shale, came down to the northern end of Goat’s Water and splashed through the infall turbid with melted snow. The little tarn lay still, unruffled by any wind, grey water reflecting clouds and grey gulls sailing.

I suppose there are fish in there, thought Snitter, like the ones in the river where my master used to take me for walks: and I suppose they think they can swim anywhere they like. The gulls, too—those gulls up there must think they’ve decided to glide round and round. I wonder whether I’ve really decided of my own accord to go this way? If I have, I’m sure I don’t know why. I remember hearing that dogs often go away by themselves to die. Jimjam said he wanted to go away but of course he couldn’t get out of the pen, poor chap.

He was climbing the south-west slope of Brim Fell and, as he came to the lower level of the mist, paused a moment before heading on into the thicker mirk above. The sighing, moving air, the gloom and solitude about him appeared more sinister and hostile than ever before. Both the sky above and the tarn below were hidden and now—or so it seemed—even his ears had begun to deceive him, for from somewhere below and beyond—somewhere distant—he thought he could hear the barking of dogs. Urgent and excited they sounded, as though the tobacco man had come among them with his pails.

That must be it, thought Snitter. I keep on remembering feeding-time—not surprising—and now it even sounds real. Of course it isn’t really, any more than my poor master when I see him. I wonder where I’m going? And—and who—what sort of man is this coming? I don’t like the smell of him, somehow.

He was thick in the mist now, high up on the starved, sheep-cropped turf of Brim Fell. He could hear a soft, rhythmic thud-thud-thud of approaching boots, sounds of creaking leather and steady breathing. Quickly he hid himself, crouching flat in a peat-rift as a dark, burly young man came looming through the mist, striding purposefully towards him—a young man all hung about with jolting tubes on straps and discs of glass and leather; with a long, narrow bag on his back, a scarf round his neck and a coloured paper clutched in the fingers of one hand. For one fleeting moment he turned his head in Snitter’s direction and Snitter, though he could not tell why, cowered close and let him go past. As he remained lying still, with closed eyes, the distant dog-sounds from below seemed muted, in his ears, to a kind of lullaby.

“I suppose not,” said Snitter, torpid with starvation and half-asleep on the spongey peat. “One ought to try not to mind too much, I suppose. We’re only dogs, and it’s a bad world for animals, as Rowf’s always saying. After all—why, it’s getting positively crowded up here! Who’s this coming now? Oh, no—it can’t—it can’t be—”

The mist swirled, the wet grass tugged in the wind, and now Snitter felt sure that he must indeed be mad and, as so often in the past, the victim of delusion, for up through the mist and wind came the tod. Limping it was, its breath coming in great, steaming gasps, brush trailing, eyes staring, belly caked with mud. Its teeth were bared above and below its lolling tongue and it turned its head this way and that, continually listening and sniffing the air. As Snitter jumped up, it snapped at him and made as if to run away, but he had no difficulty in overtaking it.

“Tod! Tod! It’s me, it’s Snitter! Tod, don’t you know me?”

The tod halted, staring round at him with a kind of slow, glazed recognition. It reeked of a deadly fear.

“Oh, ay, it’s th’ wee fella. Ye’d best boogger off sharp, hinny, unless ye fancy th’ Dark wi’ me.” As he made no answer it added more urgently, “Go on, kidder, haddaway!”

It sank down on the turf, panting convulsively, rubbing its spattered mask on the grass.

“Tod, what—oh, what is it? What’s happened?”

“Can ye not hear them bastards ahint? A puff o’ wind into yon mist an’ ye’ll sharp see them forbye; ay, an’ they’ll see ye. Shift yersel’, marrer, haddaway hyem!”

“Tod, come back with me! Come on, run! Rowf’s down there-whatever it is, we’ll save you! Quickly, tod!”

The many-mouthed barking and yelping broke out again, louder and nearer, and now could be heard also a man’s voice hollering and other, more distant human voices answering from further off. The tod grinned mirthlessly.

“Can ye not hear what the bastards is yammerin’ on aboot, one to t’other—’Ah’ll have first bite at his belly’? Ah’ve browt them siven mile, but Ah’ll nivver lose them noo. Ah thowt last neet th’ frost wad cum doon an’ they’d not be oot th’ morn. Ah wez wrong. A tod only hez to be wrong once, ye knaw.”

“Oh, tod, tod! There must be something we can do—”

“Divven’t fash yersel’, hinny! Ah ken weel where Ah’m goin’. It’s akward eneuf noo, but there’ll be ne akwardness i’ th’ Dark. It’s not th’ Dark that frightens me, it’s their rivin’, bloody teeth. Have ye nivver hord say, ‘Ne deeth over bad fer a tod’? Mebbies it’ll soon be done. Ah’m not whinjin’—Ah’d rather go te th’ Dark like a tod than in yon whitecoat dump o’ yours. Tell th’ big fella taa taa from me. He wez a grand lad—reet mazer wi’ yows, tell him.”

It was gone like smoke into the mist, down over the edge, down the north-western slope of Brim Fell, making for Tarn Head Moss and Blake Rigg Crag beyond. Snitter ran after it a few yards, then pulled up and lay shivering in the gloom. Some overwhelming thing was taking place—something old and dreadful, something which he remembered to have happened before in this very spot. About him was flowing a rank, feral scent, savage, and blood-seeking. Big, shadowy creatures were approaching, voracious and intent, running swiftly up out of the mist, lemon and white, black and tawny, noses to ground, sterns feathering, long ears swinging as they came loping over the top; some running mute, others giving tongue in fierce excitement. Hounds they were, great hounds shouldering past him where he crouched on the verge of the steep, heedless of him, paying him no attention in the heat and concentration of their pursuit. Behind them, on foot, ran the lean-faced huntsman, red-coated, horn clutched in one hand, almost spent with the long chase but still finding voice to urge them on. Over, the edge they went, tumbling and jostling, each eager for his share, and were lost to view among the boulders. Yet still from a thousand feet below rose up their excited notes, one under another like the sound of a river in flood upon the unseen valley floor.

Snitter pattered in their wake. The wet turf and stones bore their clean, sharp smell—the smell of hunting, meat-eating animals in perfect health. It was as though a band of demi-gods had swept past him in fulfilment of their appointed function of pursuit and death; a ghastly, apocalyptic duty for ever carried out in some timeless region beyond, now—on this occasion—superimposed and enacted upon the bare hillside where he found himself, as in a dream, running alone through the clouds of swirling vapour.

Suddenly the wind freshened, carrying a far-off smell of seaweed, the heavy-sweet odour of cows in a shed and, laid atop of these, an instant’s scent of the tod. The curtain of mist broke up into streamers eddying away across the fell, and now he could see clearly enough all that lay below him—could see the peat-hags and moss above Seathwaite Tarn, the sullen, black stream winding through them, the mouth of the cavern beyond; and the tod running, running, staggering over the moss, its brush a sopping weight dragged behind it. After it came the hounds, spread out, clamouring in frenzy to crush, conclude and quell, to dust the varmint and be done. Even as he watched, the foremost hound, on the very verge of the beck, reached the tod’s shoulder and, turning quickly inward, butted and rolled it over on the stones.

He shut his eyes then, and scrabbled head-downward at the turf, for he did not want to see the pack close in, did not want to see the tod leaping, snapping and biting, outnumbered thirty to one, the blood spurting, the tearing, thrashing and worrying, the huntsman whipping his way into the turmoil and the tod’s body snatched, lifted high and knife-hacked for brush and mask before being tossed back-on, so merrily—among the baying, tussling foxhounds.

Mr. Westcott pressed on up the northern ridge of Brim Fell. The mist was moderately thick, but he had known it worse and furthermore he had an intuitive feeling, born of wide experience of Lakeland weather, that it was likely to lift, possibly very soon and certainly before sunset. He came to the cairn on the summit, sat down on it and, having examined his map, took a compass bearing into the mist of 225 degrees. Then he made allowance for the magnetic variation, selected a rock on the bearing as far ahead as he could see and set off downhill to cover the six or seven hundred yards to Goat’s Hause.

It was silent in the mist, and his solitude gave him a satisfying sense of power, integrity and self-sufficiency. Alone with his instruments, his fell experience and his health and stamina he, like a well-found ship in the Atlantic, was a match for his surroundings in all their wildness and adversity. In his mind’s eye he saw himself, purposeful, grim, intent, well-equipped and organized, moving through the fog like avenging Nemesis, deliberate and irresistible. The dogs, wherever they were, might as well give up now, for he, equal to all contingencies and possessed of the will and endurance of Spencer-Chapman himself, would get them in the end, if not today then later. He was retribution, timor mortis and the two-handed engine at the door.

Once he thought he noticed some kind of furtive movement a short distance off in the grass, and turned his head to look. He caught a glimpse of something off-white apparently skulking in a peat-rift, but then concluded that it was nothing but a sodden paper bag blown there by the wind. As he strode on he could hear behind him, coming up from somewhere below Levers Hause, the cry of hounds and the hollering of the huntsman. It sounded as though they were approaching, and in full cry. However, that was nothing to do with him and his mission. Indeed it was, if anything, a nuisance, for, if the Plague Dogs were anywhere close by, it might alarm them and cause them to be off. By all that he had heard, they were as cunning as foxes and more like wild animals than dogs.

Five minutes later his boots squelched across the muddy, snow-patched wet of the saddle and began to climb the slope of Dow Crag. It was at this moment that the mist began to lift. He could hear hounds pouring down into the valley above Seathwaite Tarn, and went so far as to stop, focus his binoculars and look down at the Moss before calling himself sharply to order. There were only about two hours of daylight left and tomorrow he must be back at work. Since Seathwaite Tarn valley would now be an unlikely place in which to find the dogs, he would make the most of the remaining light by going along the tops as far as Walna Scar, descending into Goat’s Water valley (a remote place and as likely a hide-out as anywhere), up to the Hause again and so back to Wreynus by the way he had come. There was time enough for that, and he could safely come down Wetside Edge in the late twilight.

He was well up on Dow Crag now and approaching the head of North Gully. Except for a patch on the summit the mist had cleared and it would, he reflected, be possible to see down to the valley floor on his left. With this purpose he left the path and struck off over the rocks, intending to find a place near the top of Easter Gully from which he could command a view of Goat’s Water and the screes at the foot of the Dow precipices.

Suddenly he stopped dead, with a heave in his belly like that felt by an angler when a big trout rises to the fly. For an instant, through a cleft between two projecting rocks about thirty feet down in the gully, he had caught sight of a dog—a large, black, rough-haired dog—lying, apparently asleep, beside a heap of stones at the foot of the pitch. The field of view between the two rocks was so narrow that by the time he had taken it in he had walked past the line of vision which had shown him the dog. He hastened back, dodging about with his head like a man spying, from the street, through a chink in somebody else’s curtains.

The dog came into view again and he got the binoculars on it. Yes: it was, unmistakably, one of the two dogs which had set upon his car near Thirlmere. The collar was half-buried in the rough, staring coat at the nape of its neck, but the dog was emaciated and beneath the chin, where it hung loose, the green plastic showed up as plainly as a necklace.

“Steady, now, steady,” muttered Mr. Westcott. Clasping his hands to stop their trembling, he drew a deep breath and considered. The quicker he shot the better. To go down below would take the best part of an hour and the dog might well be gone. His very approach, which he could not conceal, would be enough to alarm it. The trouble was that his view down the precipitous gully was so awkward and so much restricted that probably he could get only a standing shot. He checked this. He was right. Lying down or on one knee, he could not see the dog. And he would have only one chance-that was virtually certain. If his first shot missed, the dog would be off into dead ground under the Crag. Considering that what he had was a rifle, not a shot-gun, and that he could not get a lying shot, he ought to try to find some sort of steady rest.

He took the Winchester out of its bag and mounted the telescopic backsight. Then he removed the binoculars and compass from his neck and laid them on the ground. Scanning the top of the gully, he could see a way down to the cleft that was certainly feasible, if only he could get there without dislodging scree or pebbles and so alarming the dog.

The Winchester had no sling and, gripping it in his left hand, he began the descent. It was a distinctly nerve-racking business and at each step he bit his lip, moving from one hand-hold to another and wondering how the hell he was going to get back. He would think about that later, when the dog was dead.

Slowly, Snitter’s head cleared and he recognized once more his bleak surroundings. The tod—the hounds—the dreadful squealing of the tod—the huntsman and his knife—he himself must not stay here. The mist was almost gone. He would be in view. He began running back along the edge of Brim Fell, in the opposite direction from the terrible thing he had tried not to see.

Soon he came round as far as Goat’s Hause. Here, on the track, he at once picked up the smell of a man, very fresh; a man who could, indeed, only just have gone by. A moment’s nose-reflection told him that this must be none other than the dark, burly young man from whom he had hid before meeting the tod; the man of whom he had felt so distinct a distrust and fear.

But the man was alone and a long way from the hunt. Perhaps he was carrying food. Indeed, it was extremely likely that he was and to approach him would not really be much to risk. A sensible dog could keep at a distance and give the man no chance to put him on a lead; and the man might very well throw him some food, even if it was only a mouthful. Looking up and ahead, he could now actually see the man striding away towards the summit, not very far off.

Snitter set off in pursuit, watching closely in case the man should turn round. Then there came a sudden swirl of mist and when it had blown aside the man had vanished.

Puzzled, Snitter ran cautiously on. Could the man have hidden and now be lying in wait for him? But there seemed to be nowhere for him to hide. Nearing the top he went still more slowly, following the man by scent. The scent left the path and led away across the rocks. It seemed to be leading towards a steep gully, very like the one into which he, Rowf and the tod had hunted the yow by night.

He came hesitantly up to the mouth of the gully and looked in. Sure enough, there below him, quite close, stood the man, peering down through a cleft between two rocks. It would be safe enough to attract his attention—in a place like that no human could possibly grab a dog. Furthermore, he was carrying food. Snitter could smell it. Yapping eagerly, he made a quick leap down to a convenient ledge below.

Mr. Westcott’s bowels were loose and his breath was coming short with fear and excitement. The black dog had not moved and from moment to moment, as he clambered, he continued to catch glimpses of it. He estimated that it must be about three hundred feet below him—-a sure shot if only he could find the right point of vantage.

He reached the cleft between the two projecting rocks. It was a frightening place, much less secure than it had appeared from above, with an almost sheer drop below and the smooth surfaces glistening with icy moisture. He had planned to lean against the left-hand rock and rest the rifle on its outer edge, near the centre of the gully. But now, at close quarters, this idea proved impracticable, for the rock was too tall and in any case projected downward, at considerably more than a right angle to the side of the gully. The opposite rock was better, its height diminishing to about four feet at the outer edge, but to use this for a support would, of course, involve a left-handed, left-eyed shot.

However, thought Mr. Westcott, with the telescopic sight and at such short range a left-handed shot offered a good chance of success. Anyway, it was the only chance that was being offered. In spite of his determination he was growing increasingly nervous. The drop below alarmed him and a glance over his shoulder confirmed that, unless he was prepared to jettison his rifle, the climb back was going to be horribly precarious.

With a thrust against the rock wall, he pushed himself across the breadth of the gully to the opposite side, leant forward, resting his weight against the right-hand rock, laid the barrel of the Winchester over its upper edge and eased himself into position. He was able to lean out towards the centre just far enough for the shot and no more.

There was his quarry and no mistake. The dog showed up in the back-sight like a black haystack. He slipped the safety-catch, aligned the fore-sight on the dog’s ear and—awkwardly, with his left index finger—took the first trigger-pressure.

At this moment, not twenty feet above him in the gully, there broke out a sharp, excited yapping. Mr. Westcott started and simultaneously fired. The shot severed the dog’s collar and as it leapt up he saw the blood spurt from its neck. In the same instant he lost his balance, clutching frantically at the icy top of the rock. The rifle slipped from his grasp, a stone turned under his foot, he grabbed at the rock again, found a slippery hold, retained it for one appalling, nightmare moment—time enough to recognize the dog looking down at him—and then pitched headlong.

When Snitter had left him, Rowf tried to return once more to his dreary sleep on the stones. Yet despite the feeling of exhaustion which seemed to permeate his whole body as the wind the hawthorn, he remained awake, gnawing on his misery like an old, meatless bone. Snitter had said that in the last resort he meant to go down into the valley and give himself up to the men. And it was this to which Rowf knew that he himself was not equal. This was the fear of which he was ashamed—the fear of which he had always been too much ashamed to tell even Snitter. In the instant after the electric light had filled the Glenridding farmyard, he had thought: What if they don’t shoot? What if they send for the whitecoats and take me back to the drowning-tank? The drowning-tank, he knew, was his and his alone. No other dog in the shed had ever been put into the drowning-tank. So it was a fair assumption that the whitecoats wanted him back to go on putting him in the tank. His fear of the tank knew no bounds and of that fear he was ashamed. The whitecoats, whom he could not help but think of as his masters, wanted him to go on drowning in the tank, and he could not do it. Once, long ago, he reflected, the poor terrier bitch whom Snitter had seen—the bitch that was now a ghost—must, to remain by her master and guard him, have faced protracted death from hunger. Yet the drowning-tank was the true reason why, after the Glenridding escape, he, Rowf, had refused to attempt another farm raid; and the reason why, though he shared Snitter’s despair, he had now let him set out alone.

He remembered a dog called Licker, who had told him how the whitecoats sometimes killed animals instantaneously. “This other dog and I,” Licker had said, “were being restrained in metal harnesses. It was horribly painful, and suddenly this other dog stopped yelping and went unconscious. The whitecoats took him out of the harness and looked at him, and then one of them nodded to the other and just struck him dead on the spot. I tell you, I envied him.”

And I envy him too, thought Rowf. Why couldn’t there be just a quick shot, now, and that would be that? The tod was right; you’d wonder why we take so much trouble to stay alive. The reason is that no creature can endure being hungry—as the tod very well knew. The bitch—how did she do it?

Indeed, his hunger had now become an unendurable torment. His instincts were cloudy with hunger; he smelt the scree and the tarn as though through a drifting smoke of hunger, saw them as though through a sheet of hunger-coloured glass. He took a paw between his teeth and for a moment seriously wondered whether he could eat it. The pain of biting answered him.

He tried to gnaw a stone, then laid his head back on his paws and began to think of all the enemies he would have been ready to fight, if only fighting could have saved Snitter’s life and his own. If nothing else, he had always been a fighter. Might it not be possible, in some way or other, to go down fighting? To bite, to bite, to sink the teeth in, aarrgh!—if only I hadn’t driven the tod away, perhaps we might have learned at last how to be wild animals. Men—how I hate men! I wish I’d killed one, like Snitter. Oh, I’d rip his throat out, tear open his stomach and eat it, shloop, shloop!

Suddenly he felt a stinging pain in his neck, like the bite of a horse-fly but sharper, fiercer. As he leapt up, the sound of the shot reached him, magnified in the gully walls. Tearing over the loose stones, he could hear Snitter yapping somewhere far above and then a shriek—a human shriek—of fear. He stopped, confused. Where was Snitter? Pebbles were falling, yes and something else, something much heavier than pebbles. He could hear it, whatever it was, slithering, bumping, thudding to rest behind him in the gully. Holding himself ready to run, he watched to see what would emerge, but now there was complete stillness. He waited some time. Nothing moved. Not a sound. He could hear his own blood dripping on the stones.

He returned cautiously round the buttress to the foot of the gully. A little way off, sprawled on the scree, lay a man’s body, the head bent grotesquely sideways, one outstretched arm ending in a gashed and bleeding hand. The smell of blood was warm and strong. Rowf began to salivate. Slowly he moved nearer, drooling, licking his chops, urinating over the stones. The body smelt of sweat and fresh, meaty flesh. The smell obliterated the sky, the tarn, the stones, the wind, Rowf’s own fear. There was nothing else in the world—only toothy, doggy Rowf and the meaty smell of the body. He went nearer still.

Snitter could not make out where the man had gone. Beyond doubt, however, he had disappeared, and further than round the rock too, for even the smell of his presence—his fear and his sweat and breath-had vanished. For a little while Snitter pattered ineffectively about in the top of the gully, but then gave up and climbed out. As he was doing so, he heard Rowf barking below him—an excited, exciting sound. Something must have happened; something had changed.

Poor old Rowf! thought Snitter. I can’t really leave him, just to go down to a farm and get myself killed. Killed! Oh, good heavens, oh, the tod! That settles it! I shall have to go back and tell Rowf about the poor tod. What was it he said I was to say? “Reet mazer wi’ yows”—I can’t just ignore the poor tod’s last message to Rowf.

Still bemused with shock and hunger, he made his way back to the Hause and so down to Goat’s Water. Stopping to bark as he crossed the infall beck, he heard a curiously muffled reply from Rowf, coming, apparently, from deep in one of the gullies. It was not until he got nearer that he heard also the sounds of dragging and worrying, smelt blood and began to salivate in his turn. Yet upon entering the gully itself, he was altogether unprepared for what he saw.

Wednesday the 24th November

Punctually at five minutes to three on the afternoon of the following day, Digby Driver presented himself at the front door of Animal Research. It was warmer, pleasant weather, with a pale-blue, windy sky, the becks running brown and strong with the thaw and a smell of resinous larch trees in the air. Down on Coniston Water a flock of Canada geese had come in and the big, brown-breasted, black-necked birds could be seen and heard, trumpeting and honking as they hustled across the surface of the lake. They were, one would have thought, worth a glance; but if they had been anhingas and black-browed albatrosses, Digby Driver would not have taken a single step aside, since he would not have been aware of anything unusual. He stubbed out his cigarette on the porch wall, threw it down on the step, rang the bell and shortly found himself in a stuffy interview room, facing Dr. Boycott, Mr. Powell and a cup of thin tea.

Digby Driver had, in a manner of speaking, his back to the wall, and was beginning to realize that the Research Station’s policy of sitting tight and saying as little as possible was proving, from their point of view, more effective than he had originally supposed that it would. A press campaign, like a drama, has got to be dynamic. It has to be kept moving. It is vital that it should go on finding fresh grist to its mill. The wretch who on Monday was helping the police with their inquiries must be arrested on Tuesday, tried on Wednesday, sentenced on Thursday and finally kicked when he is down with a calumnious and slanted biography on Friday. Otherwise the newspaper is slipping as a democratic organ and readership is likely to fall off. Ever since the death of Mr. Ephraim, Digby Driver, in accordance with his masters’ instructions, had trailed his coat in front of Animal Research as resourcefully as he knew how. Being a clever, energetic journalist, he had managed to keep the story of the dogs very much alive. Nevertheless, none of his ploys had succeeded in provoking the scientists. Those within the castle had declined to come out and fight, reckoning, accurately enough, that in time the public were likely to lose interest in a pair of stray dogs who did no more than raid farms and kill a few sheep and of whom—whatever might be bawled to the contrary—it would ultimately have to be admitted that they were not in fact carrying bubonic plague. Some other topic would eventuate elsewhere, as it always does, and the newspaper would detach itself from the dogs and cease from troubling. As a matter of fact Driver, from his telephone calls to the London office, had already begun to have an unpleasant inkling that the inception of the said detachment might, indeed, be only just around the corner. Yet he himself, from the point of view of his own profit and career, had a strong interest in keeping the dogs’ story going, if he could. Should he be recalled now and the story allowed to fizzle out, the whole thing would not have concluded with that feather in his cap which his employers, relying on his journalistic acumen to boost circulation and further their own political ends, had sent him up to the Lakes to acquire. The plain truth was that Digby Driver did not know what the hell to do next. By this time the dogs ought to have been dramatically shot, after a colourful and exciting hunt spontaneously organized by enraged farmers. Or better still, the countryside should have risen up in public protest and terror of the pestilence. These things had not happened. People had merely taken in their dustbins at night and hoped that the dogs would be found dead elsewhere. Unless Animal Research could be provoked into some kind of indiscretion on the eve of the forthcoming House of Commons’ Supply Day debate on the cost of research establishments, the whole thing was likely to come to a lame conclusion for lack of a Pelion to pile on Ossa. Digby Driver, if not yet up a tree, was beyond argument gripping a lower branch with one hand.

Dr. Boycott, who was perfectly well aware of all this, greeted him with appropriately courteous urbanity.

“I’m very glad,” said Dr. Boycott, offering Driver a cigarette, “that you’ve at last come along to see us this afternoon. Better late than never, you know. Now do tell us how you think we can help you. I’m sure well be delighted to do so if we can.”

It took a lot more than this sort of thing to put Digby Driver off his stroke. As a professional bastard, he would not have been unduly troubled by the most adroit manipulation of chairs, ashtrays and lights within the capacity of Mr. Michael Korda himself. Like the great image in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, his belly and thighs were as of brass and his legs as of iron.

“Well, I’d like to ask you to tell me a little more about these dogs,” he began.

“Now, let me see, which particular dogs are we talking about?” asked Dr. Boycott with a warm smile.

“Come, Mr.—er—Boycott,” said Driver (and now, indeed, they were both smiling away like a couple of hyenas), “I can’t help feeling that that’s just a shade lacking in—well, in frankness and honesty, if you don’t mind my saying so. You know quite well which dogs.”

“Well, I think I do,” replied Dr. Boycott, “but what I’m trying to get at is how and in what terms you identify them: your attributions, if one may use the term. So can I, once again, begin as the idiot boy and ask you, ‘Which dogs?”

“The dogs that escaped from here and have been causing all this trouble locally.”

“Ah,” said Dr. Boycott triumphantly, with the air of a Q.C. who has now in very sooth extracted from a witness for the other side the fundamental piece of disingenuous bilge which he intended to extract. “Now that’s precisely the point. What locality and what trouble?”

Deliberately, Driver knocked the ash off his cigarette and sipped some of his foul tea.

“Well, O.K., let’s start from scratch, then, if that’s the way you want it. You’re not denying that some time ago two dogs got out of this place and that they’ve been running wild on the fells?”

“We’re certainly not denying that two dogs got out. As I think you know, we said as much in an early press statement we issued. What happened to them after that I’m afraid I can’t tell you. They may very well have been dead for some time.”

“And it can’t be denied that these dogs may quite likely have been in contact with bubonic plague?”

“It’s improbable in the last degree that they were” said Dr. Boycott.

“But you can’t give a definite assurance that they weren’t?”

“When we say something here” answered Dr. Boycott, with radiant cordiality, “it’s always one hundred per cent reliable. That’s why we haven’t given any such assurance. But I repeat, for all practical purposes it’s improbable in the last degree that—”

“Would you like to amplify that a little? Explain why?”

It did not escape Dr. Boycott that Digby Driver had been stung into interrupting him.

“No, I—er—don’t think I—er—would” he said reflectively and with a musing frown, as though giving a lunatic suggestion every possible benefit of fair consideration, “because, you see, that’s really a matter between the local health authority and the responsible Government Department. We have, of course, been in close touch with those bodies and complied with the appropriate statutory requirements. And if they’re not bothered, then I think it follows—”

“You say they’re not bothered? That you let two dogs escape?”

“I say they’re not bothered about any public health risk of bubonic plague. If you want to know more than that, I should ask them. They’re the statutorily appointed custodians of public health, after all.”

Digby Driver, fuming inwardly, decided to come in on another beam.

“What experiments were these dogs being used for?” he asked.

Oddly enough, this took Dr. Boycott unawares. It was plain that he had not expected the question and was unable to decide, all in a moment, whether or not there was likely to be any harm in answering it.

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t know that” he replied at length, thereby inadvertently suggesting that there were things which he thought Digby Driver should not know. “One was taking part in certain tests connected with physiological and psychological reactions to stress; and the other was a brain surgery subject.”

“What specific benefits were expected to result from these tests-experiments—whatever you call them?”

“I think the best way I can answer that,” replied Dr. Boycott, “is to refer you to paragraph—er—270, I think—yes, here it is—of the 1965 Report of the Littlewood Committee, the Home Office Departmental Committee on Experiments on Animals. ‘From our study of the evidence about unnecessary experiments and the complexity of biological science, we conclude that it is impossible to tell what practical applications any new discovery in biological knowledge may have later for the benefit of man or animal. Accordingly, we recommend that there should be no general barrier to the use of animal experimentation in seeking new biological knowledge, even if it cannot be shown to be of immediate or foreseeable value.’”

“In other words there wasn’t any specific purpose. You just do these things to animals to see what’s going to happen?”

“The specific purpose of a test,” said Dr. Boycott, with an air of grave responsibility, “is always the advancement of knowledge with a view to the ultimate benefit both of man and of animals.”

“Such as forcing animals to smoke to see how safely humans can?”

Like George Orwell’s inquisitor O’Brien, when Winston Smith burst out that he must have tortured his mistress, Dr. Boycott shrugged this irrelevant remark aside. In any case Driver did not want to pursue it.

“So anyway, these dogs get out,” he said, “and you do nothing about it—”

“We haven’t got people to spare to go chasing all over the countryside looking for dogs on spec,” replied Dr. Boycott crisply. “We’ve complied with the law. We told the police and the local authorities. For the matter of that, dogs round here sometimes run away from farmers who own them, and those farmers sometimes lose track of them altogether. We’ve done the same as a farmer does.”

“But these dogs—first they kill sheep: then they actually cause the death of a man; then they begin attacking shops and farmyards—”

“Ah,” said Dr. Boycott again, “I thought you might be going to say something like that. Do they? I need convincing. With regard to the death of poor Ephraim, it’s the merest conjecture that any dog was involved—ours or anybody else’s. A dog—no one knows what dog—was seen running away in the distance; and that’s all. Put two and two together and make five. Again, no one’s ever actually identified these particular dogs in the act of worrying sheep—”

“The Miss Dawsons at Seathwaite saw their green collars—”

“Certainly. That is almost the only occasion on which dogs wearing green collars have been indisputably identified. Tipping over a dustbin is not the same thing as sheep-worrying. And on that occasion we had an officer at the premises within two hours,” added Dr. Boycott, conveniently forgetting that he had originally blamed Mr. Powell for going on his own initiative.

“What about the farmer at Glenridding and the attack on Westcott’s car near Dunmail Raise? Have you forgotten that this matter is going to be raised in a Parliamentary debate in the House tomorrow night? If I may say so, Mr. Boycott, you’re being grossly irresponsible!”

“If anyone is being irresponsible,” replied Dr. Boycott gravely, “it is popular newspapers who alarm the public with totally unfounded tales about bubonic plague—”

“Yes,” said Mr. Powell, weighing in for the first time, “and with regard to that, I think we’d like to ask by what unauthorized means you obtained information about work being done here on bubonic plague which you later twisted and used all wrong for sensational purposes—”

“Why, you told me yourself!” answered Driver instantly, with raised eyebrows and an air of surprise.

“I told you?” cried Mr. Powell, with a great deal too much indignation in his voice. Dr. Boycott turned and looked at him. “I most certainly did not!”

“Come, come, Mr. Powell, you won’t have forgotten that I gave you a lift back from Seathwaite on the morning you went over to see the Miss Dawsons, and that on the way we went to the bar of the Manor Hotel in Broughton and met your friend Mr. Gray over a few pints of beer. And then later, you told me all about Dr. Goodner and his secret defence work.”

Dr. Boycott was frowning, his face expressing surprise and perplexity. As Mr. Powell drew fresh breath to struggle and splash, the telephone rang. Dr. Boycott nodded to him and he picked it up.

“Hallo? Yes. Yes, I’m an officer at Animal Research. O.K., carry on, then.” There was a pause as he listened. “Under the Dow Crag? He’s dead? I see. The dogs—you—you say they’d what? They’d—oh, my God! A green collar? You’re sure? You’ve got it down at the station now? Oh, my God! Yes, all right—oh, God, how awful!—Yes, I’ll ring you back—anyway, someone will—very quickly. Yes, very quickly indeed. Yes, I’m sure someone will come straight down. Good-bye.”

Mr. Powell, staring and open-mouthed, put down the receiver.

“Chief,” he said, half-whispering, “I think you and I had better have a word outside.”

Five minutes later Digby Driver was belting on his way to the police station.