The Plague Dogs

Friday the 15th October

The water in the metal tank slopped sideways and a treacly ripple ran along the edge, reached the corner and died away. Under the electric lights the broken surface was faceted as a cracked mirror, a watery harlequin’s coat of tilting planes and lozenges in movement, one moment dull as stone and the next glittering like scalpels. Here and there, where during the past two hours the water had been fouled, gilded streaks of urine and floating, spawn-like bubbles of saliva rocked more turgidly, in a way suggestive—if anyone present had been receptive to such suggestion—of an illusion that this was not water, but perhaps some thicker fluid, such as those concoctions of jam and stale beer which are hung up in glass jars to drown wasps, or the dark puddles splashed through by hooves and gum-boots on the concrete floors of Lakeland cattle sheds.

Mr. Powell, his note-pad ready in hand, leant across the flanged and overhanging edge of the tank, wiped his glasses on his sleeve and looked down the two or three feet to the contents below.

“I think it’s packing in, chief,” he said. “Oh, no, wait a jiffy.” He paused, drew back the cuff of his white coat to avoid another, though weak, splash and then bent over the water once more. “No, I was right first time—it is going. D’you want it out now?”

“When it definitely sinks and stops moving,” answered Dr. Boycott, without looking up from the papers on the table. Although there was in the room no draught or air movement whatever, he had placed the two graphs and the log sheet on top of one another and was using the heavy stop-watch as a paperweight to ensure that they remained where he intended them to remain. “I thought I’d made it clear the other day,” he added, in a level, polite tone, “what the precise moment of removal should be.”

“But you don’t want it to drown, do you?” asked Mr. Powell, a shade of anxiety creeping into his voice. “If it—”

“No!” interjected Dr. Boycott quickly, as though to check him before he could say more. “It’s nothing to do with want,” he went on after a moment. “It’s not intended to drown—not this time anyway; and I think probably not the next time either—depending on results, of course.”

There were further sounds of splashing from inside the tank, but faint, like metallic echoes, rather as though a ghost were trying, but failing, to come down and trouble the waters (and indeed, as far as the occupant was concerned, any sort of miracle, being unscientific, was entirely out of the question). Then a choking, bubbling sound was followed by silence, in which the rasping call of a carrion crow came clearly from the fell outside.

Mr. Powell stood up, walked across the concrete floor and took down a shepherd’s crook which was hanging on a peg. Sitting down once more on the edge of the tank, he began unthinkingly to tap with the butt of the crook the rhythm of a current popular song.

“Er—please, Stephen,” said Dr. Boycott, with a faint smile.

“Oh, sorry.”

The large mongrel dog in the tank was continuing to struggle with its front paws, but so feebly now that its body, from neck to rump, hung almost vertically in the water. The spaniel-like ears were outspread, floating on either side of the head like wings, but the eyes were submerged and only the black, delicately lyrated nose broke the surface. As Mr. Powell watched, this too went under, rose again for an instant and then sank. The body, foreshortened by refraction as it descended, seemed to move sideways from its former floating position, finally appearing on the bottom of the tank as an almost flattened mass and disturbing round its sides, as it settled, little clouds of dirty silt. Dr. Boycott clicked the stop-watch. Mr. Powell, looking quickly back to see whether he had noticed the silt (for his chief was particular about the cleanliness of equipment), made a mental note to insist to Tyson, the caretaker and head-keeper, that the tank should be emptied and cleaned tomorrow. Then, allowing for the refraction with the skill of a certain amount of practice, he plunged in the crook, engaged the dog’s collar and began to drag it to the surface. After a moment, however, he faltered, dropped the crook and stood up, wincing, while the body subsided once more to the floor of the tank.

“Christ, it’s heavy,” he said. “Oh, no, chief, I don’t mean it’s any heavier than usual, of course, only I pulled a muscle in my wrist last night and it’s been giving me a spot of gyppo. Never mind, never say die, here goes.”

“I’m sorry,” said Dr. Boycott. “Let me help you. I wouldn’t want you to suffer avoidably.”

Together they pulled on the crook, raised the heavy, pelt-sodden body head-first, broke the surface tension with a concerted heave and laid the inert dog on a foam-rubber mattress beside the tank. Here it resembled an enormous, drowned fly—very black, with a compressed shape something like that of a raindrop; and smaller than life, on account of a kind of collapse of the limbs and other excrescences into the central mass of the trunk. Mr. Powell began resuscitation; and after a little the dog vomited water and commenced to gasp, though its eyes remained closed.

“Right, that’ll do,” said Dr. Boycott briskly. “Now the usual tests, please, Stephen—pulse, blood sample, body temperature, reflexes—the various things we’ve been working on—and then plot the graphs. I’ll be back in about twenty minutes. I’m just going over to the Christiaan Barnard block to learn what I can about this afternoon’s brain surgery work. And please don’t smoke while I’m gone,” he added, mildly but firmly. “You’ll appreciate that that could have an effect on results.”

“All right to put its muzzle on, chief?” asked Mr. Powell. “Only this one, seven-three-two, ’s been known to be a right sod at times and it might come round enough to start in on me—sudden-like, you know.”

“Yes, there’s no objection to that,” replied Dr. Boycott, picking up the stop-watch.

“And the time, chief?” enquired Mr. Powell in a rather sycophantic tone, as though the time were likely to be something to Dr. Boycott’s personal credit.

“Two hours, twenty minutes, fifty-three and two fifths seconds,” answered Dr. Boycott. “Without looking at the papers, I think that’s about six and a half minutes longer than Wednesday’s test and about twelve minutes longer than the test before that. It’s rather remarkable how regular the increase appears to be. At this rate the graph will work out as a straight incline, although obviously we must reach a diminution somewhere. There must come a point where the additional endurance induced by the dog’s expectation of removal is counterbalanced by the limits of its physical capacity.”

He paused for a moment and then said, “Now, there’s another thing I’d like you to see to, please. I forgot to mention it this morning, but Cambridge are anxious for us to go ahead at once with the social deprivation experiment. We have a monkey set aside for that, haven’t we?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty certain we have,” replied Mr. Powell.

“I thought you told me we definitely had?” Dr. Boycott’s voice was a shade sharper.

“Yes, that’s right,” said Mr. Powell hastily. “We have.”

“Good. Well, it can go into the cylinder this evening. Now you’re sure that that cylinder excludes all light?”

“Yep. No light, restricted movement, adequate ventilation, wire mesh floor, faeces and urine fall through. It’s all checked.”

“Right, well, start it off, keep it under twice daily observation and, of course, mark the particulars up in a log. The total number of days should be kept up to date day by day, on a slate beside the cylinder. That’s a matter of courtesy to the Director. He’ll probably want to see it.”

“Where’s it to be kept, chief?” asked Mr. Powell.

“It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s somewhere where you can readily keep an eye on it,” answered Dr. Boycott. “I suggest, near where you normally work, as long as it’s not anywhere near any other animals. There should be silence, as far as possible, and no organic smells, of course. That’s part of the deprivation, you understand.”

“How about the balance-cupboard in Lab. 4, chief?” asked Mr. Powell. “Plenty of space in there at the moment and quiet as the grave.”

“Yes, that’ll do,” said Dr. Boycott. “Don’t forget to tell Tyson about feeding, and keep me informed how it goes on. We’ll aim at—well, say—er—forty-five days.”

“Is that the lot, chief?”

“Yes,” said Dr. Boycott, with his hand on the door. “But since it seems necessary to mention it, you’d better see that this tank’s cleaned out. There’s silt on the bottom which shouldn’t be there.”

It was only after a considerable administrative and political battle that the site for Animal Research, Surgical and Experimental (A.R.S.E.), had been approved at Lawson Park, a former fell farm on the east side of Coniston Water. As a Departmental project the scheme had, of course, attracted deemed planning permission, but following Circular 100 consultation both the County Council and the Lakeland National Park Planning Board had objected to it so strongly that the responsible Under Secretary at the Department of the Environment (having, no doubt, a vivid mental picture of himself in the chair at any confrontation discussions that might be arranged to try to resolve the matter in Whitehall) had taken very little time to decide that in all the circumstances a public local inquiry would be the most appropriate course. The inquiry had lasted for two weeks and at various times during the proceedings the Inspector (who in his private hours indulged a taste for seventeenth-century English history) had found himself wishing that, like that Mr. Bradshaw who presided at the so-called trial of King Charles I, he had been provided with a bullet-proof hat. The deputy county clerk had cross-examined the Ministry experts with brilliant penetration on the precise extent of the urgency and need to site yet another Government project in a national park. The Secretary of the Countryside Commission, subpoenaed by the Planning Board, had been virtually compelled to give evidence against the Department into which he was hoping to be promoted to Under Secretary. The Council for the Protection of Rural England had greatly assisted the case in favour of the project by testifying with passionate emotion that nobody ought to be allowed to build anything anywhere any more. A Mr. Finward, a retired merchant naval officer, who occupied a cottage on the fell not far from the site, had threatened the Inspector with bodily injury unless he undertook to report against the proposal. And a Mr. Prancebody, who testified amongst other things that he had discovered the truth of the British Israelite theory while exploring the Derbyshire caves, had read in evidence most of a sixty-three-page submission, before the long-suffering Inspector had ruled it to be irrelevant and inadmissible and Mr. Prancebody, violently objecting, had been somewhat eponymously removed by the police. There was, in fact, scarcely a dull moment throughout the proceedings. Of particular interest had been the evidence of the R.S.P.C.A., who were emphatic that they favoured the scheme, on the grounds that the experiments and surgery would redound to the benefit of animals in general.

After the inquiry the Inspector, pressed by the Deputy Secretary of the Department to complete his publishable report as quickly as possible (regardless of whatever length of time he might need to make a good job of it), had recommended against planning approval for the site at Lawson Park and consequently against the compulsory purchase order on the property. The Secretary of State, the Right Hon. William Harbottle (known to his Departmental civil servants as “Hot Bottle Bill” on account of his chronically cold feet), had succeeded in getting the matter up to Cabinet Committee, following which a decision to approve against the Inspector’s recommendation had been traded with the Home Secretary and the Minister of Labour, sub rosa, for agreement to a new open prison in Worcestershire, the head of the Chief Alkali Inspector on a charger and the tail of a young lady named Miss Mandy Pryce-Morgan, who was currently dispensing her favours to certain of the Front Bench.

Upon the announcement of the Secretary of State’s decision, public reaction had been generally adverse. Under fire, Hot Bottle Bill had stood his ground like a good ’un, manfully ensuring that the Parliamentary attacks were invariably answered by one of his junior colleagues, Mr. Basil Forbes (otherwise known as Errol the Peril, on account of his unpredictable imprudence). Eventually brought to bay by Mr. Bernard Bugwash, Q.C., the Member for Lakeland Central, he had, on the night, brilliantly contrived to be unavoidably absent and Errol the Peril had spoken for six minutes flat. The next morning a much better stick with which to beat the Government had appeared in the form of the report of the Sablon Committee, which recommended that more public money ought to be spent on medical research. Since the Government, keen to reduce public expenditure, were reluctant to accept this recommendation, the Opposition had naturally supported it: and since support for Sablon was virtually incompatible with any further attack on the Lawson Park decision, it was generally conceded that Hot Bottle Bill had contrived to survive yet another cliff-hanging instalment of his career. Lawson Park passed into Government hands; and the celebrated firm of architects, Sir Conham Goode, Son and Howe, were commissioned to design the buildings.

It was generally agreed that these blended very well into their surroundings—the open hillside and oak copses, the darker patches of pine and larch, the dry stone walls, small green fields and knife-bright, cloud-reflecting lake below. Sir Conham had retained the old farmhouse and outbuildings, converting them into a luncheon room, common room and offices for the resident staff. Local stone and slate had been used to face and roof the laboratories, the Christiaan Barnard surgical wing and the stables, while for the livestock block Lord Plynlimmon, the well-known photographer and aviary expert, had been co-opted to design a single, large building, comprising under one roof more than twenty various sheds and rooms equipped with cages. The establishment had been opened on midsummer day, in pouring Lakeland rain, by Baroness Hilary Blunt, the former all-time high in Permanent Secretaries, and the flow of letters to The Times had trickled, faltered and finally ceased.

“And now,” said the newly appointed Director to Dr. Boycott, as the first consignments of dogs, guinea-pigs, rats and rabbits came rolling up the smooth, steeply gradiented tarmac in the station’s three distinctively painted blue vans, “now let’s hope we’ll be left in peace to get on with some useful work. There’s been a lot too much emotion spent on this place so far, and not enough scientific detachment.”

The black mongrel, its coat almost dried, the muzzle removed and a flexible rubber oxygen pipe fixed close to its half-open mouth, was lying on a pile of straw in one corner of a wire pen at the far end of the canine shed. A label on the pen door bore the same number—732—as that stamped on the dog’s green plastic collar, while below this was typed: SURVIVAL EXPECTATION CONDITIONING: (WATER IMMERSION): DR. J. R. BOYCOTT.

The shed comprised, in all, forty pens, arranged in two double rows. Most of these contained dogs, though one or two were empty. With the majority of the pens, all four sides consisted of stout wire netting, so that for the occupants of these there were three party walls and three canine neighbours, except where an adjacent cage happened to be empty. The pen of seven-three-two, however, being at the end of Row 4 and also at the end of the block, had one brick wall, which was, in fact, part of the periphery wall of the building itself. Since the adjacent pen in Row 4 happened to be empty, seven-three-two had only one neighbour—the dog in the back-to-back cage in Row 3, also situated against the brick wall. This dog was not at the moment to be seen, and was evidently in its kennel (for each pen contained a kennel), though there were signs of occupation—a well-gnawed rubber ball in one corner, a yellowing blade-bone with no meat remaining on it, several fresh scratches along the brickwork, some ordure, a half-empty water-bowl and, of course, a label on the door: 815. BRAIN SURGERY, GROUP D. MR. S. W. C. FORTESCUE.

Over the whole interior of the shed lay a pervading smell of dog, together with the sharp smells of clean straw and of concrete brushed down with water and Jeyes fluid. Through the high-placed, bottom-hung hoppers, however, most of which were open, other smells came blowing, borne on a fresh wind—bracken and bog myrtle, sheep shit and cow dung, oak leaves, nettles and the lake at damp nightfall. The evening was growing dark and the few electric bulbs—one at each end of each row—seemed, as the twilight deepened, less to take the place of the declining day than to form isolated patches of yellow light, too hard to be melted by the gentle dusk, from which the nearest dogs turned their eyes away. It was surprisingly silent in the block. Here and there a dog scuffled in its straw. One, a brown retriever with a great scar across its throat, whined from time to time in sleep, while a mongrel whippet with three legs and a bandaged stump stumbled clumsily round and against the sides of its pen with a soft, wiry sound not unlike that produced by a jazz drummer with brushes. No dog, however, of the thirty-seven in the block, seemed lively enough or sufficiently disturbed or stimulated to give tongue, so that the quiet noises of evening flickered plainly in their ears, as sunlight twinkling through silver-birch leaves flickers back and forth in the eyes of a baby lying in its cot: the distant call of a shepherd, “Coom bye, coom bye ’ere!”; a passing cart down on the Coniston road; the lapping (just perceptible to dogs’ hearing) of the lake water on the stones; the tug of the wind in rough grass tussocks; and the quick, croaking “Go back, go back, go back” of a grouse somewhere in the heather.

After a while, when the October night had almost completely fallen outside, there came a sharp clawing and scratching of straw from inside the kennel of eight-one-five. This continued for some time, with a sound rather as though the occupant, whoever he might be, were trying to burrow through his kennel floor. Finally, indeed, there were distinct noises of gnawing and splintering, followed by several minutes’ silence. Then a smooth-haired, black-and-white head—the head of a fox terrier—emerged from the door of the kennel. The ears cocked, listening, the sniffing muzzle was raised for some moments, and finally the entire dog came out, shook itself, lapped a little water from its tin bowl, raised a leg against the brickwork, and then made its way across to the party wire separating it from the next pen.

The terrier certainly presented a strange appearance, for at first sight it seemed to be wearing a kind of black cap, causing it rather to resemble one of those animals in children’s comic papers which, while the draughtsman may have given it the head of a cat, dog, bear, mouse or what you will, nevertheless wears clothes and may even go so far as to possess inappropriate anatomical features (elbow-joints, for instance, or hands). Indeed, to the extent that a cap is a head-covering, it was wearing a black cap, though this was in actual function a surgical dressing made of stout oilskin and fastened securely to the head with cross-bands of sticking-plaster in such a way as to prevent the dog from scratching and worrying at the antiseptic lint beneath. The whole appliance, lozenge-shaped, was tilted rakishly over the right eye, so that the terrier, in order to see straight in front, was obliged to incline its head to the right—a mannerism which gave it a rather knowing look. Having reached the wire, it rubbed one ear against it as though to try to loosen the dressing, but almost at once desisted, wincing, and crouched down close to where the large, black dog was lying on the other side.

“Rowf?” said the terrier. “Rowf? They’ve taken away all the rhododendrons and just left the maggots. O spin like a ball, isn’t it dark? There’s just this one star shining down my throat, that’s all. You know, my master—”

The black dog sprang to its feet, and as it did so the flow of oxygen from the pipe cut out automatically. Teeth bared, eyes glaring, ears laid flat, it backed against its kennel, crouching into the straw and barking as though beset on every side.

“Rowf! Rowf! Grrrrrr-owf!”

As it barked, its head turned quickly this way and that, seeking an assailant.

“Grrrrr-owf! Rowf! Rowf!”

All over the block other dogs took up their cues.

“I’d fight you all right, if I could only get at you!”

“Why don’t you shut up?”

“D’you think you’re the only one who hates this damned place?”

“Why can’t we have some peace?”

“Ow! Oow! That’s the damned dog that wants to be a wolf!”

“Rowf!” said the terrier quickly. “Rowf, lie down before the lorry comes—I mean, before the leaves catch fire! I’m falling as fast as I can. Be quiet and I’ll reach you.”

Rowf barked once more, stared frenziedly round, then slowly lowered his head, came up to the wire and began to sniff at the other’s black nose pressed between the mesh. A few moments more and he lay down, rubbing his big, rough-coated head backwards and forwards against one of the stanchions. Gradually the hubbub in the draughty block subsided.

“You smell of the metal water,” said the terrier. “You’ve been in the metal water again, so I tell, so I smell, well well.”

There was a long pause. At last Rowf said, “The water.”

“You smell like the water in my drinking-bowl. Is it like that? The bottom’s dirty, anyway. I can smell that, even if my head is done up in chicken-wire.”

“What?”

“My head’s done up in chicken-wire, I said. The whitecoats fastened it all round.”

“When did they? I can’t see it.”

“Oh, no,” replied the terrier, as though brushing aside some quite unreasonable objection, “of course you can’t see it!”

“The water,” said Rowf again.

“How did you get out? Do you drink it or does the sun dry it up or what?”

“I can’t remember,” answered Rowf. “Get out—” He dropped his head into the straw and began biting and licking at the pad of one fore-foot. After some time he said, “Get out—I never remember getting out. They must pull me out, I suppose. Why can’t you let me alone, Snitter?”

“Perhaps you’re not out at all. You’re drowned. We’re dead. We haven’t been born. There’s a mouse—a mouse that sings—I’m bitten to the brains and it never stops raining—not in this eye anyway.”

Rowf snarled at him. “Snitter, you’re mad! Of course I’m alive! Leave your face there if you don’t believe me—”

Snitter jerked his head back just in time.

“Yes, I’m mad, sure as a lorry, I’m terribly sorry. The road—where it happened—the road was black and white—that’s me, you know—”

He stopped as Rowf rolled over in the straw and lay once more as though exhausted.

“The water, not the water again,” muttered Rowf. “Not the water, not tomorrow—” He opened his eyes and leapt up as though stung, yelping, “The whitecoats! The whitecoats!”

This time there were no barks of protest, the cry being too frequent and common throughout the shed to attract remark.

Snitter returned to the wire and Rowf sat on his haunches and looked at him.

“When I lie down and shut my eyes the water comes suddenly. Then when I get up it isn’t there.”

“Like a rainbow,” answered Snitter. “They melt—I watched one once. My master threw a stick and I ran after it, along the river bank. That was—Oh, dear!” After a few moments he went on, “Why don’t you melt? They’d never be able to put you in the water then.”

Rowf growled.

“You’re always talking about your master. I never had a master, but I know what a dog’s business is as well as you do.”

“Rowf, listen, we must get across the road. Get across the road before—”

“A dog stands firm,” said Rowf sharply. “A dog never refuses whatever a man requires of him. That’s what a dog’s for. So if they say the water—if they say go in the water, I’ll—” He broke off, cowering. “I tell you, I can’t stand that water any more—”

“Where’s the gutter for that water, anyway?” asked Snitter. “That’s what I can’t understand. Bunged up with fallen leaves, I suppose. And the whippet’s leg—they must have eaten that. I asked him the other day in the yard, but he didn’t know. Said he was asleep when they took it away. Said he dreamt he was tied up to a stone wall and it fell on him.”

“Dogs are meant to do what men want—I can smell that, without a master. The men must have some reason, mustn’t they? It must do some sort of good. They must know best.”

“It’s a nuisance, but you can’t bury bones here,” said Snitter. “I’ve tried. The ground’s too hard. My head still aches. No wonder—there’s a garden in my ear, you know. I can hear the leaves rustling quite clearly.”

“Only I can’t bear the water again,” said Rowf, “and you can’t fight it, not water.” He began pacing up and down the wire. “The smell of the iron pond.”

“There’s always a chance they might lose it. They lost a sky full of clouds one day, you know. They were all there in the morning, but they were gone by the afternoon. Blown away—blown away like sheep’s wings.”

“Look, the wire’s loose here, along the bottom,” said Rowf suddenly. “If you come and put your nose under it, you can lift it up from your side.”

Snitter padded up to him on the other side of the wire. A length about eighteen inches long had pulled loose from the horizontal iron bar dividing the floor of the two pens.

“I must have done that,” he said, “chasing a cat—no. There used to be a cat once but they switched it off, I think.” He pushed at the wire for a few seconds, then raised his head with a cunning look. “Rowf, we’ll leave it till after the tobacco man’s been round. Otherwise he’ll only see me on your side and put me back, and that’ll be the end of that. Let it alone, old Rowf.”

“You’re sharp. Listen, Snitter, is that the tobacco man outside now?”

“I’m mad as a gutter in a thunderstorm,” said Snitter. “I fall and fall—my head falls and I fall after it. Can you smell the falling leaves? It’s going to rain. Remember rain?”

As the latch clicked on the green-painted door half-way down the block, Rowf went back to his kennel and lay still as frost. Most of the other dogs, however, reacted vigorously and volubly. From all over the shed sounded scurrying and yelps, quick whines of excitement and resonant, harp-like rataplans of claws along wire mesh. Snitter leapt three or four times in the air and ran towards the door of his pen, jaws full of slobbering tongue and breath steaming in the chilly air.

The green door, which opened inwards, tended to stick against the jamb. A shoulder-heave from outside, which succeeded only in bending the top of the door inwards, was followed by the clank of a pail being put down and then by two heavy, rubbery kicks just above the threshold. The door burst open and instantly every dog in the shed was aware of the night breeze filtered through a pungent reek of burning shag. In the doorway stood the tobacco man himself, pipe in mouth and a pail in each hand, odorous of tobacco as a pine tree of resin, redolent from cloth cap to gum-boots. The yapping increased, the movement, noise and tension throughout the block mounting in contrast with the silent deliberation with which the tobacco man carried in the two pails, set them down, returned for two more and then for a final two. This done, he went back to close the door and then, standing in the middle of the six, took out his matches, struck a light, cupped his hands round his pipe and re-lit it very thoroughly and carefully, taking no notice whatever of the barking and jumping around him.

Snitter, muttering “That pipe hasn’t got a chance—not a chance,” put his front paws on the wire and cocked his head sharply to the right in order to watch the tobacco man as he fetched a five-gallon watering-can from a corner and, with a slow, unhurried clumping of gum-boots, carried it over to the tap, placed it underneath, turned the tap on and stood beside it while it filled.

Old Tyson had once been a sailor, then a shepherd, then for several years a road man employed by the county council; but had taken the option of a job with Animal Research because, as he said, there were less weather wi’t and aall in’t woon plaace like. He was well regarded and indeed valued by the Director and senior staff, being reasonably respectful, if somewhat dour, in his behaviour, reliable, generally conscientious and no more given to sentimentality about animals than any other Lakelander. Also, being well on in middle age, he was steady and regular and not prone to ailments or to odd days off on account of family problems—which in his case had all been solved (or not solved) long ago. He understood dogs well enough, his attitude towards them being equally valid for the purposes of A.R.S.E. or for those of a Lakeland hill-farm—namely, that they were pieces of technological equipment which one needed to know how to maintain and use properly. Tourists’ and holiday-makers’ dogs annoyed him, being useless for any practical purpose, frequently disobedient and a potential danger to sheep.

In spite of what seemed to the dogs his maddening deliberation, Tyson was in fact anxious to be off as soon as he could this evening, for it was Friday, he had been paid and was due to keep an appointment in The Crown at Coniston with a friend from Torver, who had told him that he could put him in the way of a second-hand refrigerator in good condition and going cheap. He was, therefore, in as much of a hurry as was possible for him—the general effect rather resembling that produced in a tortoise when its lettuce is put down on the grass. This is not to suggest, however, that there was anything foolish or absurd in Tyson’s demeanour as he went about his task. Tortoises are dignified and self-sufficient and, though admittedly slow, considerably more reliable than—well—than—what comes to mind?—than—er—well, than distracted princes, for example, who give wild assurances about sweeping to revenge on wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love.

Tyson entered each pen in turn, emptied the metal drinking-bowls down the gullies and re-filled them from his watering can. Then he poured away what was left in the can, put it back in its place in the corner and returned to the pails. Four of these were filled with bloody messes of horse-meat and lights, appropriate portions of which (big or small according to the size of the dog) were doled out at Tyson’s discretion to all those on “normal diet.” As this part of his task progressed, the noise in the block gradually diminished. When it was complete, he set to work to distribute the contents of the other two pails. These contained a number of separate paper packages, marked individually with the numbers of those dogs for whom special rations had been prescribed on account of the experiments in which they were taking part. Tyson took his spectacle-case out of his pocket, opened it, took out the spectacles, held them up to the light, breathed on them, cleaned them on his sleeve, held them up to the light again, put them on, emptied the packets out on the concrete floor and laid them in two rows. This done, he picked up the first and held it, above his head, towards the nearest light-bulb. Once he had read the number he had no need to look about for the destination, since he knew the dogs and their pens as surely as a huntsman his hounds.

Who can describe what drugs, what charms, what conjuration and what mighty magic those packages contained? They were indeed miracles of rare device. Some included, infused with the liver and offal, stimulants able to banish sleep, or to cause the consumer to perform, on the morrow, prodigies of endurance—to fight, to fast, to tear himself, to drink up eisel, eat a crocodile. Others contained paralytics which suspended colour perception, hearing, taste, smell; analgesics destroying the power to feel pain, so that the subject stood wagging his tail while a hot iron was drawn along his ribs; hallucinogenics able to fill the eye of the beholder with more devils than vast hell can hold, to transform the strong to weaklings, the resolute to cowards, to plunge the intelligent and alert head over ears into idiocy. Some induced disease, madness, or mortification of specific parts of the body; others cured, alleviated, or failed either to cure or to alleviate, diseases already induced. Some destroyed the unborn foetus in the womb, others the power to ovulate, the power to beget, to conceive, to gestate. One might indeed believe that graves, at Dr. Boycott’s command, would wake their sleepers, ope, and let ‘em forth.

Actually that is pitching it a bit high—drawing the long bow, as they say—but at any rate no one could say of Dr. Boycott that he would not have attempted resurrection if he had thought there was a sporting chance. He was a qualified expert, initiative was expected of him, his subjects had no legal rights; and intellectual curiosity is, after all, a desire like any other. Besides, who in his senses could reasonably expect Dr. Boycott to ask himself, on behalf of the human race, not “How much knowledge can I discover?” but “How much knowledge am I justified in seeking?” Experimental science is the last flower of asceticism and Dr. Boycott was indeed an ascetic, an observer of events upon which he passed no value judgements. He represented, in fact, a most ingenious paradox, noble in reason, express and admirable in action, his undemonstrative heart committed with the utmost detachment to the benefit of humanity. Something too much of this.

As he worked, Tyson spoke a few words to each dog—”Well, that’s for thee, then. Get yon down.” “Hey oop, old lad. Layin’ on straw’ll get thee nowheer”—much unlike the common way of Lakelanders, who seldom or never speak to dogs except to summon them or to give them an order or reproof. More extraordinary still, he more than once patted a dog or actually stooped down for a moment to scratch its ears. Though he himself could not have said why he acted in this uncharacteristic way, and if asked would have shrugged his shoulders to indicate that the question was not worth serious consideration, it is, of course, beyond argument that he understood very well, on his own level, the work and general purpose of the research station and the kind of effects upon animals which that work commonly had. Not even Dr. Freud, however, armed with the longest and most symbolical shepherd’s crook in all Vienna, could have dragged from the silt to the surface any guilt which Tyson may, as an individual, unconsciously have felt; for clearly the Director and his colleagues knew more than he, both about the world’s needs and about animals’ capacity for suffering, and his orders, like his wages, came from them. If each of us insisted on stopping to weigh in every case the relative pros and cons of distress to others, whether human or animal, brought about by obeying our instructions, the world could never be run at all. Life is, as they say, too short.

This ancient saw was, at any rate, certainly true this evening as far as number four-two-seven, a mongrel cairn, was concerned, for Tyson found him dead in his kennel. Four-two-seven had been one of three dogs taking part in an experiment commissioned by a firm of aerosol manufacturers, who were trying to develop a spray harmless to dogs but lethal to their fleas and other parasites. It had been obvious for some days past that the particular preparation at present being tested, known as Formula KG2, had the undesirable property of penetrating the skin, with adverse effects on dogs’ health, but the firm’s laboratory, though informed of this, had been reluctant to accept the finding, particularly since the directors were afraid that certain of their competitors might be successful in introducing a rival product to the market ahead of them. Dr. Boycott had decided that the simplest retort to their time-wasting pertinacity would be to continue the applications to their foreseeable conclusion, and accordingly four-two-seven had been duly sprayed again on the previous day. He had certainly settled the hash of Formula KG2 and its obstinate protagonists, and had released not only himself, but also valuable working time for the station’s staff to devote to more profitable pursuits. Tyson, remarking “Ee, th’art poor lyle boogger,” removed four-two-seven’s body to the cold slab cupboard for examination by Mr. Powell in the morning and returned his food packet to the pail unopened. Before knocking off, he would be obliged to carry it back to the ration issuer and get it struck off his list—a further troublesome delay before he could be done.

He now believed himself to have only three packets left, and was so near the end of his evening chores that he actually began to whistle “The Quartermaster’s Stores” through his teeth (and without removing his pipe) as he picked them up. These packets he had deliberately left until last. Each was wrapped in bright yellow paper marked with a black skull and cross bones, to indicate that the food within contained a poison, infection or virus capable of harming human beings. The contents of these he emptied, one by one, carefully and entirely, into the specially lidded, non-spill feeding-bowls of the eager recipients, took the wrappers outside to the incinerator and made sure they burned, washed his hands under the tap with carbolic soap; and then and only then noticed a fourth, not-yellow packet lying in shadow on the floor. This, held up to the light, proved to be marked 732. He had overlooked it.

Tyson felt irritated. The oversight was of no importance, but he was as close to being in a hurry as was possible for one of his temperament and besides, he did not like seven-three-two, which had more than once tried to attack him. He had in fact suggested that it ought to be chained to its kennel, but the matter had been forgotten by the staff member he had spoken to (who did not, of course, have to enter the dogs’ pens and in any case had no direct concern with seven-three-two) and no chain had as yet been supplied. “Ah’m noan gettin’ chain mesen, tha knaws,” Tyson had said on the second occasion when he mentioned it; “any rooad, sooner they drown you bluidy thing t’ better.” And thereafter he had simply carried a stout stick whenever he had to enter seven-three-two’s pen. Now, however, he could not be bothered to go and fetch the stick from over by the tap. Picking up the packet, he placed it flat on his hand, unwrapped it, strode down the cage-line to the far end, opened the pen door, and had just tossed the whole thing inside when a voice from outside called,” ‘Any?”

Tyson raised his head. “Ay?”

“Didst tha say tha wanted lift int’ Coniston? Ah’m joost off.”

“Ay, aw reet.” He stepped back from the pen, turned and came to the side door of the block, wiping his hands on his trousers. “Packet ’ere t’and back in—dog were dead. Else for that Ah’m doon.”

“Coom on then, owd lad. I’ll roon thee round by issuer’s place, and then we’re off.”

The voices receded, and then the sound of the car engine. The returning silence gleamed gently with noises, as a night sky with stars. A drop of water fell from the tap. An owl hooted once—twice, in the oak copse five hundred yards away. The clanging thud of a body against the side of a pen was followed by diminishing vibrations of the not-quite-taut wire. Straw rustled. A mouse scuttered along the concrete, in and out of the drainage gully, pausing and listening. The wind had veered into the west and there was a distant rustle of fine rain blowing in from the Irish Sea. The sick retriever, his food untouched, muttered and stirred in his sleep.

Snitter, alert and continually moving his head under its canvas cap, could discern other, still slighter sounds—the trickling of the beck, a larch cone falling branch by branch to the ground, movements in the fern and roosting birds stirring on their boughs. After some time the rising moon began to shine through the glass of the eastern hoppers, its beams slanting first upwards to the exposed king-post roof trusses and then, as they moved transversely downwards and across, falling at length upon the nearer pens. An Alsatian began to bay the moon. Perhaps it felt it had rather be a Roman and contaminate its paws with base bribes, than such a dog. Snitter, becoming more restless, began padding up and down his pen, agile and watchful as a trout in a pool. Intuitively, he had become aware of something out of the ordinary, something commonplace but full of import, some small alteration to the familiar as slight but disturbing as the discovery of a stranger’s urine against one’s own garden fence. But what exactly could it be?

As the first beams of moonlight touched his pen he stood on his hind legs, resting his paws on the wire separating him from Rowf. Suddenly he tensed, staring and sniffing, and so remained for perhaps thirty or forty heartbeats; but nostrils, ears and eyes all continued to affirm nothing but what they had originally conveyed. First, he had perceived that the source of the tobacco smell left by Tyson’s fingers—that is to say, the door of Rowf’s pen—was in slight but unmistakable movement—stealing and giving odour, as it were. Next, his ears had caught the well-nigh inaudible, higher-than-bat’s-pitch squeaking of the concentric hinges as they pivoted a quarter of an inch back and forth in the draught. Lastly, he had made out the moonlight moving on the wire as it might on a spider’s web—a kind of irregular, minute sliding back and forth limited by the frail force of the draught that was causing the door itself to oscillate.

Snitter dropped on all fours and, after a pause to smell and listen specifically for any signs of human proximity outside the block, began scrabbling at the length of loose wire between the two pens. Soon he had pushed it high enough to get his head underneath. Points protruding from the border of the mesh pricked his shoulders and then his back, piercing here and there; but he ignored them, continuing to whine and go round and round with his head in the hole like a gimlet. Finally he succeeded in forcing his way through into Rowf’s pen with nothing worse to show than a thin but fairly deep scratch across his rump. Once inside, he pattered quickly across to the kennel.

“Rowf! Rowf, come back! The tobacco man’s left my head open! Let me explain—”

The next moment he was knocked flying as Rowf bounded out of the kennel and leapt towards the pen door. His jaws snapped at the wire, biting and worrying, and the catch which Tyson, when interrupted by his friend, had omitted to fasten properly, clicked open off the jamb. After a few moments Rowf fell back, blinking and staring like a dog awakened from a bad dream.

“What?” said Rowf. “The tobacco man? Not the whitecoats—it can’t be the whitecoats—it’s still dark, isn’t it? It’s not time for the tank yet! I’ll fight—I’ll tear them—” He stopped and looked at Snitter in surprise. “What are you doing here, Snitter?”

“Heave-ho, the loose wire. You know, there was an old lady two gardens away who had a trap-hole made for her cats at night. In and out they went, in and out; but if ever they came into my garden, what-ho!”

“You’re bleeding!”

“Rowf, the moonlight, the door, I’ve come to tell you, it’s come loose on my head. The tobacco man forgot that it’s not. How can I explain? The door’s not a wall any more! Oh, my head aches!” Snitter sat on his haunches and began scratching and grabbing with one paw at the canvas cap, which remained, as it was intended to, resistant to his claws. In the moonlight Rowf looked at him grimly, but said nothing.

“My head!” muttered Snitter. “The tobacco man lit it with his matches. Can you smell it burning?”

“When did he?”

“I was asleep. The whitecoats put me on a glass table and I went to sleep. How the flies go round today! It’s so hot, even in the garden. I think I’ll go to sleep. If the lorry comes, Rowf—” He yawned and lay down on the floor.

Rowf got up and began to sniff at Snitter and lick his face. The effect was apparently something like that of smelling salts, the odour of his friend recalling Snitter to reality.

“The wire swing!” said Snitter, sitting up suddenly. “The door, Rowf! That’s why I came! The door of your pen’s unfastened!”

The Alsatian had stopped howling and for some moments the only sound in the block was a sudden dripping from the tap, plangent on the convex edge of the overturned bucket beneath it.

“We can go through it, Rowf!”

“What for?”

“Rowf, we might be able to get out of here!”

“They’d only bring us back. Dogs are supposed to do what men want—I’ve never had a master, but I know that.”

“The suffering, Rowf, the misery you’ve endured—”

“As dogs we’re born to suffering. It’s a bad world for animals—”

“Rowf, you owe them nothing—nothing—they’re not masters—”

“Canine nature—the whole duty of Dog—”

“Oh shit in the sky, give me patience!” cried Snitter in agony. “There’s a dog with a red-hot nose sniffing me over! The lorry’s coming, the lorry’s coming!” He staggered, and fell on the straw, but picked himself up at once. “Rowf, we’re going to escape! Both of us—through that door—”

“There might be something worse through the door,” said Rowf, peering into the dismal confines of the concrete huis clos surrounding them.

Snitter’s jaws worked convulsively as with an effort he converted and brought his mutilated mind in frame.

“Rowf, the water—the metal water! What could be worse than the metal water? Hours and hours of struggling in the metal water, Rowf, and in the end they’ll drown you! Think of the whitecoats, Rowf—what you told me—peering down into the tank and watching you. They aren’t masters, believe me; I’ve had a master—I know. If we could only get out of here we might find a master—who can tell?—a proper pack leader. Isn’t it worth a try?”

Rowf stood tense and hesitant in the straw. Suddenly, from somewhere up the fell outside, there came the faintest sound of rocky splashing as a yow, or Lakeland sheep, scrambled its way across a beck. Rowf gave a short, snapping bark and pushed his way through the door. Snitter followed and together, in silence save for their clicking claws, they trotted quickly down the line of pens to the swing doors separating the canine shed from the next.

It took Snitter some time to get the hang of the doors. They were light; indeed, they were portable, constructed of thick asbestos sheets on white-painted wooden frames, for Lord Plynlimmon had thought fit, when designing the block, to provide for flexibility in the subdivisioning by enabling the various sheds to be made larger or smaller at need; and accordingly not only the doors but also the pre-constructed modules of the party walls were capable (with a little trouble) of being removed and re-fixed further up or down the building, to increase or diminish the various floor areas. The doors, however, were fitted with fairly strong return springs, of the kind that cause such doors to jump back and hit smartly on the knee or in the face a man following another who is not particularly heedful or considerate.

Rowf hurled himself at the right-hand door, which swung open about six inches and then, the spring coming into its own, threw him back across the concrete floor. Growling, he went for it again, harder this time and higher up. Once more it gave and, as he dropped to the ground with his head through the narrow opening, closed upon his neck like a trap, pinning him between the two forward edges. He struggled back in silence and was about to try to seize the frame in his teeth when Snitter stopped him.

“It’s not alive, Rowf! It’s—it’s—you scratch it to be let in; but there isn’t a man on the other side, you see—”

“There’s some creature on the other side pushing it back! We’ll have to kill it—or chase it away, anyhow—but I can’t get at it.”

“Wait, wait. Let’s have a smell round.”

Snitter pressed his wet nose to the narrow, vertical chink between the two doors. The draught coming through bore smells, certainly, but nothing more alarming than birds’ droppings, feathers, grain and bran—all strong and at close quarters. He could hear, too, no more than a few yards away, the rustling and soft movements of roosting birds.

“Unless it’s a creature that has no smell, Rowf, there’s nothing but birds in there.”

A sudden, high-pitched yapping sounded from behind them. Snitter turned to see the occupant of the nearest pen, a cross-bred Pekinese, standing wide awake in a patch of moonlight and looking at them with obvious surprise. He went quickly across to the wire.

“Don’t make a row, Flatface,” he said. “You might bring the tobacco man back here.”

“What are you doing?” asked the Pekinese, nose pressed against the wire. “Why are you loose? What’s that on your head? It smells of that stuff the whitecoats put over everything.”

“It’s to keep the frost out,” answered Snitter. “My head’s a bird-table, you know. The whitecoats cover it with bread every morning and then watch while the birds come and eat it.”

“Oh, I see.” The Pekinese looked sagacious. “But how do they keep you still?”

“With chicken-wire,” said Snitter. “I dote on it, actually. My friend here dotes on it, too. He takes over when I need a rest. We’re both bird-tables through and through. Do the whitecoats go through and through? Those doors there, I mean? How do they do it?”

The Pekinese was clearly puzzled. “They made me better,” he said. “First they made me ill and then they made me better. I’ve been ill, you know.”

“I can smell that,” said Snitter. “You smell like a dog-blanket left out in the rain. Flatface, listen—does the tobacco man ever go through that door?”

“Yes, to feed the birds. It’s all birds in there. You can smell them. Besides, I’ve seen through when he opens it.”

“Through and through,” said Snitter. “How does he do it?”

“He’s usually carrying things, and he pushes it with his shoulder or his foot and then edges through sideways. Let me tell you what happened when I was ill. First of all the whitecoats—”

Snitter went back to the doors and pressed the wedge of his muzzle gently into the central crack. The right-hand door, which had the weaker spring, gave slightly, and he slowly pushed through first his jaw and then his whole head, accustoming himself to the sensation of the counter-pressure. As soon as his head was through he turned his body sideways and began to press with the weight of his flank against the flat of the door.

“Follow me right up close, old Rowf. There’s a board loose in the fence, do you see? Don’t jump at it, just push. Why, what a cloud of flies—no, it’s birds—birds!”

He eased his entire body through the door. Rowf followed him, nose to tail, and the swing doors closed behind them, cutting off the familiar smells of dog, straw and meat and exposing them, with all the suddenness of an airliner from the north discharging passengers in the tropics, to the immediate impact of strange light, strange air and strange surroundings.

The place was full of birds. They could smell, all about them, the light, sharp odour of their droppings and hear, too, the sounds, so much quicker and softer than those made by dogs, of their stirrings in the dark. A pigeon nearby preened a wing, uttered a single, sleepy “Roo-too-roo; took!” and was silent. There must be many, many birds. Pausing and listening, both dogs had the impression of a forest in which the leaves were pigeons, spray upon spray, rustling leaves receding into an airy gloom. Here and there a wiry branch creaked; here and there a fragment from a seed-trough pattered, like a fir-cone or a beech-nut, to the floor.

They had entered the pigeon aviary, reservoir of one of the more eagerly watched, important and ambitious projects in which Animal Research was engaged. The object was nothing less than to discover how and by what means pigeons exercise their homing instinct—a Promethean undertaking indeed, since the birds themselves have always been content with ignorance in the matter. The thoroughness of the experiments, devised and conducted by Mr. Lubbock, a colleague and friend of Dr. Boycott, was impressive. Here, systematically divided into groups and caged in different compartments, lived hundreds of birds, each a grain of coral in that great reef of conscious knowledge to be built by Mr. Lubbock for the good, or the advancement, or the edification—or something or other, anyway—of the human race. Of those birds which had already been released to flight at greater or lesser distances from the station, some had had one eye or both eyes occluded by special appliances; some had been fitted with minute contact lenses, to distort their vision; others had had the sensitivity of feathers, feet, nostrils, beaks, mouths or lungs impaired or destroyed before setting out; others again had undergone carefully planned conditioning designed to confuse them when exposed to normal weather conditions. In Cage 19 it rained a continuous light drizzle twenty-four hours a day. In Cage 3, which was blacked out from the rest of the aviary, there was perpetual sunshine; in Cage 11, perpetual darkness., In Cage 8 the source of light (a simulated sun) moved anti-clockwise. Cage 21 was unusually hot, Cage 16A (so termed to differentiate it, for the avoidance of possible confusion, from Cage 16, in which all the inmates had died of cold one night, necessitating total replacement) unusually cold. In Cage 32 a light wind blew from one direction night and day. Birds born in these cages had never known any other weather conditions until their time came to be released to a homing flight. Cage 9 contained a special ceiling which reproduced the night sky, but with the various constellations disordered. At the far end of the aviary was a row of individual cages, containing birds into whose heads had been grafted magnetic particles, some attractive, others repellent. Finally, there were those pigeons who had been deafened, but left with other faculties intact.

The results of all the experiments so far had been most informative, yielding the basic information that while some of the birds succeeded in returning home, others did not. Many, in fact, in obedience to their defective stimuli, had flown straight out to sea until they perished; which was most interesting. One could draw the firm and valuable conclusions first, that birds whose faculties had been impaired were less swift and competent in getting home than birds whose faculties had not; and secondly, that in any given group, some succeeded in returning while others, who did not, presumably died. Six months ago Mr. Lubbock had taken part in a television programme on the project, when he had explained the pattern of the experiments and the system by which various possibilities were being eliminated. Since then, important evidence had been obtained in support of the theory that the birds possessed an instinct not really explicable in scientific terms. This was humorously known at Lawson Park as the “R.N.K.” theory, from a remark once made by Tyson to Mr. Lubbock—”Reckon nobody knaws.”

Snitter and Rowf made their way cautiously forward between the cages, half-expecting to meet some kind of enemy in this strange place. Or perhaps one of the whitecoats, with brisk walk and purposeful tapping of heels, might suddenly open a door and, pausing just inside in the way they did, raise his soap-smelling hand to the wall in the gesture that created light. All remained quiet, however, and they pattered on, side by side, to the further end of the aviary. Here they were once more met by double doors leading into the next block. Snitter eased his way through and Rowf followed as before.

At once, though in a place similar in form to the last and constructed of the same materials, they encountered another change, arresting as that, to humans, of red limelight to green. All was the same, all was utterly different. An intense, slavering excitement shot through them. They stiffened, sniffed the air, whined, scratched and trembled. Rowf leapt forward with two quick barks. The place was crowded with rats, rats scuttling and crouching in innumerable cages. There were dead rats, too—that was plain to be smelt; and some strange kind of rat, the smell of which seemed to come from one quarter in particular—a gritty, black smell. Filtering through all, posseting and curding the thin and wholesome odour of rats, was a vile and loathsome redolence, as of pestilence or death, so that Rowf, even as he barked about, was struck by an instant tetter of horror, and slunk back silently to where Snitter, with head uplifted and ears cocked, was standing on the shadowy floor beneath a steel table.

They were in the cancer research block, where rats, after being infected with cancer, were treated with various palliative drugs and preparations, being dissected after death so that the results of treatment could be observed and noted. There were in actual fact sixty-two separate cages, not counting the single large cage containing the control pool or reserve, from which healthy rats were taken as required for one experiment or another. Here were cancers of the ear, nose, throat, belly and bowels; malignant and less malignant cancers, sarcomata of many kinds, all living and growing, like submarine anemones, in pharyngeal, uterine or abdominal worlds of silence needing neither sun nor rain. Secret was the garden, set in the pathless awe now confronting the two bewildered dogs. The rats ran in, the rats ran out and never a rat to be seen, save for those stiff bodies lying on the glass table, the crop of the previous day’s work, neatly split across from end to end to disclose, like walnuts, the white, ridged and crinkled, kernel-like growths within.

In one corner of the block, like a private ward in a hospital, stood a separate compartment with a locked door bearing the notice, DR. W. GOODNER. KEEP OUT. AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY. This, too, contained rats—black rats of Norway—despite the fact that they were not personnel, this term being generally understood at Lawson Park (and indeed elsewhere) to connote only men and women (as in the Rights of Personnel, or the Prayer for All Sorts and Conditions of Personnel, or even

The exact nature of the project being pursued in this locked compartment was secret. Dr. Goodner never discussed it with anyone but the Director; others at the station, however (including Mr. Powell), had hazarded the surmise that it had probably, like most such work, been commissioned by the Ministry of Defence.

Rowf paused at the locked door, sniffing at the crack beneath and listening.

“What’s the matter with this place? What is that smell?”

“The leaves are rotten,” whispered Snitter. For some reason the smell made him afraid. “They fall in autumn, you know—fill the gutters. Maggots and flies, maggots and flies. Are you hungry?”

“Not yet.”

“Then come on. We’re trying to get out, Rowf. Even if we were to get in there and eat that smell, we’d be all whistle-belly-vengeance by sunrise, and the tobacco man would find us lying here sick, or worse. There’s some terrible sort of disease in there—that’s what that smell’s about. Come on, quick, before there’s time to change your nose.”

With this Snitter turned, led the way down to the further end of the block and once more pushed through the doors.

Later, the wanderings of that night merged, for both of them, into a half-remembered confusion of formaldehyde and surgical spirit, fur, feather and hair; of paint, glass and disinfectant, hay, straw and cotton-wool; of all manner of excreta and glandular secretions; carbolic and rust, dried blood and wet mucus, dust, drains and sweat; quick, low alarm calls of beasts unknown and windy suspiration of forced breath in darkness. They came to the next block, the sparrow and finch aviary, where diseases of cage-birds were investigated, together with the effect of various preparations used for dressing seed-corn before sowing. These particular sparrows had cost rather more than two farthings for five, certainly in overheads if not in purchasing price. There was a special providence in their fall; but whether they fell to the ground with or without your heavenly Father, or mine, or Dr. Boycott’s (for he had, albeit unacknowledged, the same One as you and I), there is no telling.

They ran swiftly through the small coati and mongoose block, with its rank, tropical smell of procyonidae and viverridae (Mr. Powell had been set to investigate the relatively mild effect upon these creatures of snake venom, and several were injected daily with doses of varying quantity and concentration), and so came to the pregnancy testing unit, where the urine of young women was injected into mice, so that they (the young women, not the mice) might learn (by the reactions of the mice), a little earlier than they would otherwise have learned, whether they had been impregnated as well as imprudent, and incautious as well as incontinent. The operation of a normal pregnancy-testing centre was not, of course, within the true ambit of Lawson Park, but the Director, who was a doctor of medicine and retained a certain interest in gynaecology, had recently accepted a remit for the examination of new and swifter methods of pregnancy-testing without animals—for which purpose a control group of animals was, of course, necessary, in order that the efficiency of new methods might be checked against that of the old. Here Rowf, clumsy with uneasiness and impatience, knocked over a small table and with it a box of mice, each confined in a separate, glass-fronted compartment. The glass shattered and those of the mice who were not already dead or close to death escaped, several finding their way out of the building by way of the drains. Rowf was still sniffing about the glassy floor when Snitter once more interrupted him.

“Leave it spilt, old Rowf! Let it trickle away! It’s made the floor sharp and the blood will run out of your nose. Come and push at the next door. It’s too much for me.”

They thrust their way hesitantly into the air-freight testing centre, where various methods were being examined of packing and transporting live animals by air. This work had been commissioned jointly by several airline companies, largely in order that they could reply that they had done so when faced with criticism of the deaths of various animals (such as small monkeys, lorises and aye-ayes, captured and bound not for the Carolina plantations but for zoos) which, having begun by being created, had ended by being crated, and succumbing to over-crowding, fear, thirst, neglect or to all four of these together. It was not, of course, difficult to design humane and efficient travelling crates for animals provided that cost was no object and that one could count upon a reasonable measure of responsible human care during the journey. To do the thing cheaply, however, and counting upon the prevalence of ignorance, indifference and neglect, called not only for ingenuity but also for expert knowledge of what various animals could be relied upon to endure. A principal factor was the fear and strain brought about by engine noise, sudden dropping or striking of crates, proximity of humans and alarming smells such as combustion engine exhaust, tobacco smoke and human sweat; and to these, accordingly, the control groups of animals were regularly exposed for longer or shorter periods, the results being carefully noted by Dr. Boycott, who had, in as short a time as three months, made the remarkable discovery that over-crowding, rough handling and prolonged thirst were beyond doubt the major contributors to higher-than-average death rates occurring among small mammals transported by air.

They wandered up and down the lines of hutches in the rabbitry, where experiments were being conducted to try to develop a food, similar to rat poison, which rabbits immune to myxomatosis would be eager to eat, with fatal results. Again, cost had proved a difficulty. A palatable and caustic poison, which burned through the intestines in twenty-four hours, had been tested successfully, but unfortunately its mass-production was not practicable at anything like an economic figure. A second poison, harmless to humans and cheap enough to produce, had been demonstrated by Dr. Boycott on television. On that occasion he had injected first a colleague and then a rabbit, the latter successfully dying in convulsions in less than two minutes under the cameras and the interested eyes of thousands of viewers. This poison, however, Dr. Boycott had so far not succeeded in making reasonably palatable, so that to date, injection remained the only means of administration. Of the possibilities of a certain sterility drug, however, he was more hopeful, and this was now being administered, in various forms and strengths, to both bucks and does. Rowf, having made several attempts to break into one of the hutches by leaping at the wire, and been requested by the rabbit inside to be so good as to let him die in peace, rejoined Snitter in his search for some way out other than the swing doors. They found none, and down to the next circle they went.

They searched the cat block, where cats were kept permanently in hoods covering their eyes and ears (in order to discover the effect upon cats of being kept permanently in hoods covering their eyes and ears). Here there was little noise or movement. Rowf, however, became fascinated by a single voice which kept repeating, “Oh dear, oh dear oh dear,” in a tone expressive rather of worry than of actual suffering, and spent some time trying to track it to its source before Snitter, who had again failed to find any way out of the block, could persuade him onward.

They made their way through the aquarium block, where octopi, with or without the benefit of brain surgery, received electric shocks when they approached offered food (the purpose being to examine their capacity for remembering previous shocks and therefore not responding to stimuli or inducements that would result in their receiving another). The electric plates were switched off, the tanks dark and their occupants somnolent or at least torpid; but nevertheless the low, watery sounds, the lappings and gurglings filling the room, drove Rowf almost hysterical, so that it was he who pushed on to the next pair of doors while Snitter was still searching in vain for a negotiable open window.

They came to a halt at last in the guinea-pig house, where all manner of guinea-pigs—ginger, black, white, black-and-white, ginger-and-black, long-haired, short-haired, tragical-pastoral, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral—were kept in reserve for the needs of the station. A number had had one or more of their legs amputated—the interesting thing being that they possessed no power of adaptation, but continued to attempt to behave as though they had four legs. Here Snitter, having searched the entire room, at last stopped in the furthest corner, his nostrils pressed to the crack under the door. This was no swing door, but a heavier affair altogether, a door of the normal kind, painted green and shut as fast as the Arabian trees.

“Wet mud and rain,” said Snitter. “Gutters and leaves! Smell.”

Rowf put down his nose. Both could smell a steady rain falling in the darkness outside. Rowf pushed at the unyielding door.

“No good,” said Snitter. “Postman’s door—paper boy’s door. Oh, never mind,” he added, as Rowf remained silent and uncomprehending. “We’ve eaten down to the plate, that’s all.”

“No getting out? Can’t we fight the postman?”

“Cats up a tree. Climb until the top branches bend. Then what? Hang yourself up on a cloud while you’re thinking. Hang me up on another.” As though to reassure himself, Snitter lifted his leg against the door, peed a moment and then sat back on his haunches, shivering in the damp draught and wisps of cloud-wrack blown in across the sill. “It’s cold. My feet are cold.”

“Burn,” said Rowf suddenly.

“What?”

“Burn, over there. Smell of ashes. It’ll be warmer. Come on.”

There was indeed a perceptible source of heat—not much, but some—coming from the opposite side of the block, beyond the central mass of guinea-pig hutches piled in tiers. Turning his head in the direction towards which Rowf was looking, Snitter could not only smell the ashes but see, in the dim light, minute particles, dust and motes, swirling upwards in an air current that must be warmer than the rest of the room. Following Rowf round the hutches, he found him already sniffing at a square door of iron set in a frame of brickwork and projecting from the wall a little above the level of his head. It was ajar. Peering upwards, he could glimpse, within, the roof or upper side of a kind of metal cavern, which must be deep, for not only was a warm draught coming up it and a light drift of powdery ash, but also minute sounds, tinklings and crepitations, magnified as they echoed against the iron sides of the shaft.

“What is it?” asked Rowf, bristling as though for a fight.

“No animal; so put your teeth down. Swing thing—door of some kind. Get it a bit wider open.”

Rowf made as if to push at it and Snitter quickly stopped him.

“No, no, you’ll shut it that way. You have to nose them open, or else use your paws. Let me show you.”

He stood up and rested his front paws on the projecting brickwork, thrust his muzzle into the crack of the opening and jerked his head sideways, levering the square of iron wide on its hinges. At once he backed nervously away, bristling as Rowf had done. The two dogs crouched together under the lowest tier of hutches facing the iron door.

“What is it?” repeated Rowf. “Something’s been burning, some sort of death—bones—hair—”

“These creatures in here—whatever they are—the whitecoats must burn them. It’s the same smell, you see, only burnt. Yes, of course,” said Snitter. “Of course that’s it. They burnt my head, you know, and the tobacco man keeps burning that thing he puts in his mouth. Obviously they burn these creatures in there.”

“Why?”

“Don’t be silly.” Snitter went slowly back to the open door. “It’s still warm in there. Dead things—but not cold. Hot bones, hot bones. I’ll throw my head in.” He put his paws up once more, peering into the mouth of the square, metal cavern. Suddenly he gave a whine of excitement.

“Fresh air,” cried Snitter. “Sheep, rain! Smell underneath the ashes! I tell you—”

The brick-encased, iron chute, sloping downwards through the wall of the building, led directly into a small furnace, not unlike that of a greenhouse, sited just outside. This was used for burning not only rubbish, such as old surgical dressings, fouled straw and bedding from the hutches, but also the dead bodies of guinea-pigs and any other creatures small enough to be conveniently disposed of in this way. There had been a brisk fire that afternoon, which had included the truncated remains of some twenty guinea-pigs unable to be of further help to the station, as well as a couple of kittens and a mongoose. Tom, the lad who helped Tyson about the place, had been told to go and draw the furnace at about five o’clock but, knowing that Tyson was in a hurry to get away and was unlikely to come and see what sort of a job he had made of it, had merely raked quickly through the ashes and fragmentary remains of straw, bones and hair, and decided to leave the job of clearing out until Monday morning. Tyson had not specially told him to conclude by closing the doors both of the furnace and of the chute in Block 12, and he was certainly not the sort of lad to allow such a refinement to occur to his mind spontaneously—there being, as a matter of fact, little room to spare there, what with the heavy demands made upon it by the fortunes of Manchester United, the products of Messrs. Yamaha and the charms of Miss Nana Mouskouri. After he had gone, the fire had revived for a time in the strong through-draught, filling the guinea-pig block with a light smoke and the smell of burnt guinea-pig coming up the chute; but had then died out, the furnace gradually cooling as darkness fell and the wind sifted its way through the tinkling, clicking ashes.

“Fresh air,” said Snitter again. “Yellow smell—prickles—bees-only faint—and somewhere there’s wet rhododendrons, too. Rhododendrons, Rowf!”

“What?”

“Gorse, the yellow. We could fall there! We could! We could fall there!”

Snitter gaped, showing teeth brown about the gums, the teeth of a dog recovered from distemper. He began trying to pull himself up and into the square opening of the chute, thrusting in his head and front paws and hanging a moment on the lip before falling back to the concrete floor. Rowf watched him.

“Is it hot?”

“No hotter than your dam’s belly in the basket. Remember? But I can’t get at the teat.” “Get in there?”

“The rhododendrons, don’t you see? Outside. Smell comes in, so dog can go out.”

Rowf considered. “Smells come through cracks. So do mice. Dogs don’t. Suppose there’s nothing but a crack? You’ll stick in there and die. Never get back.”

“You damned flea-bitten street-corner bitch-jumper, why do you think I’m going on like this? Once you get your head in there, you can feel the wind, wide as your arse, and smell the rain.” Snitter jumped up and again fell back, his wet muzzle grey with powdered ash. “Burn, little bones, burn! Like my head.” He wiped at his nose with a fore-paw.

Rowf, the bigger dog, stood on his hind legs, rested his front paws on the lip of the chute and looked in. For some little while he remained thus, peering and listening. Then, without a word, he hoisted his body up and into the opening. His hind paws left the floor and for some moments kicked and scrabbled in the air, trying in vain to get a purchase on the iron lip. As he jerked himself forward, inch by inch, pulling and scraping as best he could with front paws pressed against the smooth iron floor of the chute, his penis caught on the sill of the door and was forced painfully downwards. He rolled on one side and as he did so succeeded in getting the claws of one hind paw as far as the projecting hinges. Using this purchase, he thrust himself forward and slowly disappeared from Snitter’s view, his hind legs, with tail between, stretching out backwards and dragging behind him in the tunnel.

Snitter, full of frustration, remained running backwards and forwards in front of the open door. Several times more he jumped up at the opening and fell back, until at length, giving up, he lay down, panting, on the floor.

“Rowf?”

There was no answer from the tunnel.

Snitter got up and backed slowly away from the door, as though trying to get a better view inside.

“Rowf?”

There was still no answer, and beyond the lip he could see nothing.

“Hoop-la sugar lump!” barked Snitter suddenly. Running forward, he took a flying leap at the opening, like a circus dog jumping through a hoop. He felt his hind legs strike hard against the metal lip and gave a single, quick yap of pain; then, realizing that his body was more than half into the hole, he rolled on his side as Rowf had done and, being smaller, drew his rump and hind paws in without difficulty. For a few moments he lay gasping as the pain in his legs subsided, then collected himself and smelt ahead.

Rowf’s body was blocking the square tunnel in front of him. No draught was coming up it and no smell except the metal water dog-smell of Rowf. Snitter began to feel afraid. In this tunnel he could not turn round, evidently Rowf could not hear him and worst of all, Rowf’s body seemed not to be moving.

He crept forward until his head was lying upon Rowf’s trailing hind legs. Only now did he perceive that Rowf was in fact moving, but agonizingly slowly—more slowly, thought Snitter, than a slug on a wet gravel path. He could smell Rowf’s urine smeared along the metal floor. It was full of fear. Snitter began to tremble and whimper where he lay in the close, ash-powdery, cast-iron passage.

Cramped in that funnelled hole, he found himself, as he tried to stand, forced into a curious posture, half-crouching, his rump pressed tightly against the roof of the chute. He could not maintain so unnatural a stance and after a few moments fell forward, so that his head butted sharply against Rowf’s rump. At the impact he felt the body give and move the least fraction—no more, perhaps, than the length of a tooth or claw. In frenzy, he pushed again and again with his head at the black, shaggy rump, which at each impact slid almost imperceptibly forward.

He did not know whether it was possible for Rowf to force his way out of the far end of the chute. All he knew was that Rowf was still alive, for at each push he could feel his pulse and the spasmodic working of his muscles. For how long he continued in his desperate pushing and thrusting he had no idea. The air in the tunnel grew foetid and his own breath lay condensed and humid on the iron walls. He wondered whether daylight might already have come. Slowly the length of tunnel behind him grew longer, but still there was no sign that Rowf was likely to get clear of it. At last, just as Snitter felt himself exhausted and unable to do more, Rowf’s rump slid suddenly forward as smoothly as a turd from a healthy anus, and dropped out of sight. Snitter, drawing in a wonderful breath of cool air, found himself looking at a square of fragrant darkness speckled with rain—an opening in some sort of wall beyond the chute and framed in its mouth. A moment later he himself, dropping over the edge, fell two feet into a drift of powdery ash sprinkled with tiny, sharp bones on an iron grid. They had reached the furnace chamber.

Snitter scrambled up and began smelling about him. The place was scarcely bigger than a dog-kennel, so that he and Rowf, lying side by side, covered the entire area of the floor. Yet, despite the dust and powdery ash thrown up by their fall, the air seemed fresher than any he had breathed for days past. Cool currents, carrying more scents than he could recognise, were swirling all about them, not only from below but also from each side. From somewhere beneath him he could feel a draught, delightfully refreshing, flowing up and along his stomach. The sensation, after the cramped agony and fear of the chute, was so reassuring that Snitter, with closed eyes and lolling tongue, rolled over on his side, basking in the cool air stream.

The furnace box was, in fact, open on four sides. From below the griddled floor, air was flowing in through a vent which could be opened or closed from outside by means of a sliding iron cover; its function being, of course, to control the fire and make it draw more or less strongly. This vent Tom had left half-open, so that a steady stream of rainy night air was being drawn up through the grid and out through the flue above the dogs’ heads. At the same time—since Tom had also left open the larger, stoke-hole door above—another air current was passing directly across the furnace chamber and out through the door of the chute into the guinea-pig block. Since the walls of the furnace had now cooled to approximately blood-heat it was, for the two dogs, as pleasant and restful a place as could well be imagined.

Snitter, raising his head, nudged Rowf’s broad, unmoving back.

“Are you hurt, old Rowf?”

“I was afraid—never get out—until I fell down. All right now. Tired. Sleep.”

Snitter could smell a long, bleeding scratch along Rowf’s flank. He licked at it, tasting the iron and burnt-guinea-pig-flavoured soot of the hopper walls. Gradually Rowf’s breathing became slower and easier. Snitter felt the muscles of the haunch relaxing under his tongue. Soon he himself, full of warmth and relief, grew as drowsy as Rowf. He ceased licking, dropped his head and stretched out his paws to touch the warm side of the furnace. In a few moments he too was asleep.

For more than three hours the two dogs lay sleeping in the fire-box, exhausted by the strain of their escape and the terror of their passage through the chute. Outside, the rain became heavier, falling steadily from a drift of clouds so low that the higher fells were blotted out beneath it. The moon was obscured and almost total darkness covered the miles of rock and bracken, heather, moss and bilberry bushes, rowan and peat bog—a fastness little changed since the days of the moss-raiders and the invading Scots—those armies which had marched to defeat and death at Flodden, at Solway Moss, at Preston, Worcester and Derby. A wild land, familiar with the passage of fugitives and the forlorn, the lost and desperate, the shelterless and outnumbered contending against hopeless odds. Yet tonight there was none to bide the pelting of the pitiless storm. From Blawith to Esthwaite Water, from Satterthwaite and Grizedale across to Coniston, not a soul was abroad, the dismal wastes were lonely as an ocean and not Thomas Rymer of Erceldoune himself, returning to earth from fair Elfland after not seven, but seven hundred years, could have discerned, from the aspect of that dark and lonely place, what century had arrived in his absence.

At length the furnace, the bricks round the outside of which had streamed with rain half the night, cooled to the temperature of the surrounding darkness and soon afterwards the wind, veering round into the south-west and blowing up fresh rain from the Duddon estuary, began to drive keener gusts in at the stoke-hole and the control vent below. Snitter stirred in his sleep, feeling in his off-side haunch the pricking of a guinea-pig’s splintered rib-cage. A sharp point pierced his skin and he woke with a start.

“Rowf! Come back!”

There was no reply and Snitter nuzzled him urgently.

“Come out of the leaves, Rowf, come out of the water! We’ve got to get on!”

Rowf raised his head drowsily.

“Don’t want to go. Stay here.”

“No! No! The wide place, the rain, outside!”

“Stay here—warm and dry.”

“No, Rowf, no! The whitecoats, the metal water, the tobacco man! The lorry! We’ve got to get out!”

Rowf stood up and stretched as best he could in the confined space. “There isn’t any out.”

“Yes, there is. You can smell it.” Snitter was quivering with urgency.

Rowf stood still, as though considering. At last he said, “There isn’t any out—isn’t any free. There’s nothing, anywhere, except-well, it’s a bad world for animals. I know that.”

“Rowf, don’t start smelling like that. I won’t sniff it—vinegar, paraffin—worse. I’ve lived outside this place, I’ve had a master, I know you’re wrong!”

“Makes no difference.”

“Yes, it does. Out of that hole. You first.”

Rowf, pushing the stoke-hole door wider, looked out into the rainy darkness.

“You’d better go alone. The opening’s too small for me.”

“Go on, Rowf, get on! I’ll come behind you.”

Rowf, black as the darkness, drew back his head from the stoke-hole, crouched on the floor and then, springing up, thrust head and front paws together through the opening, blocking it entirely. His claws scraped and scrabbled on the metal outside.

“Rowf, get on!”

Rowf’s reply came back to Snitter grotesquely, through the control-vent, up from the grid beneath his paws.

“Too small!”

“Fight it, bite it!”

Rowf struggled helplessly, breaking wind as his belly squeezed against the iron. One hind leg, thrashing wildly, caught Snitter across the face.

“Get on, Rowf, damn you!”

Rowf began to pant and gasp. Snitter realized with horror that his struggles were becoming weaker. His body was no longer moving at all. The truth—which Snitter could not have grasped—was that, whereas at first Rowf’s front paws had been able to push strongly against the vertical side of the furnace immediately below him, the further he forced his body through the door the less effectively he was able to thrust against the brickwork. Now, two thirds of the way through, he was helplessly and agonizingly stuck, without a purchase to drag or push himself forward. In the fire-box behind him Snitter, as his desperation mounted, felt a stabbing pain in his skull and a wolf-like ferocity that seemed to consume him, throbbing in the surrounding iron, the ashes and bones.

“Damn the whitecoats!” cried Snitter, frothing at the mouth. “Damn Annie, damn the policeman and the white bell-car! Damn you all, damn you! You’ve killed my master!”

His teeth closed on Rowf’s haunch. With a howl Rowf—by what means none can ever know—convulsed his body, the iron square of the opening compressing and excoriating his loins as he did so, and fell forward into the puddled mud below the stoke-hole. Almost before he had had time to draw one gasping breath and feel the pain in his ribs, Snitter was beside him, licking his face and panting while the rain ran in streams off his back.

“Are you all right?”

“You bit me, you damned cur.”

Snitter’s astonishment was plainly unfeigned. “I bit you? Of course not!”

With some difficulty Rowf stood up and sniffed at him.

“No, I can smell, it wasn’t you. But something bit me.” He paused, then lay down in the mud. “I’m hurt.”

“Get up and come with me,” replied the voice of Snitter, an invisible dog-smell ahead of him in the hissing darkness.

Rowf limped forward on three legs, feeling under his pads unfamiliar textures of gravel, sticks and mud. These by their very nature were reassuring, assuaging his pain with kindlier sensations of reality. He tried to limp faster and broke into a clumsy run, overtaking Snitter at the corner of the building.

“Which way?”

“Any,” answered Snitter, “as long as we’re well away from here by daylight.”

A quick run past the rabbits’ execution shed, a turn round the kittens’ quicklime pit, a moment’s hesitation beyond the monkeys’ gas-chamber—and they are gone: ay, not so long ago these canines fled away into the storm. It would be pleasant to report that that night Dr. Boycott dreamt of many a woe, and all his whitecoat-men with shade and form of witch and demon and large coffin-worm were long be-nightmared. One might even have hoped to add that Tyson the old died palsy-twitched, with meagre face deform. But in fact—as will be seen—none of these things happened. Slowly the rain ceased, the grey rack blowing away and over Windermere as first light came creeping into the sky and the remaining inmates of Lawson Park awoke to another day in the care and service of humanity.