The Plague Dogs

Saturday the 16th October

Freedom—that consuming goal above doubt or criticism, desired as moths desire the candle or emigrants the distant continent waiting to parch them in its deserts or drive them to madness in its bitter winters! Freedom, that land where rogues, at every corner, cozen with lies and promises the plucky sheep who judged it time to sack the Shepherd! Unfurl your banner, Freedom, and call upon me with cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer and all kinds of music to fall down and worship you, and I will do so upon the instant, for who would wish to be cast into the fiery furnace of his neighbours’ contempt? I will come to you as the male spider to the female, as the explorer to the upper reaches of the great river upon which he knows he will die before ever he wins through to the estuary. How should I dare refuse your beckoning, queen whose discarded lovers vanish by night, princess whose unsuccessful suitors die at sunset? Would to God we had never encountered you, goddess of thrombosis, insomnia, asthma, duodenal and migraine! For we are free—free to suffer every anguish of deliberation, of decisions which must be made upon suspect information and half-knowledge, every anguish of hindsight and regret, of failure, shame and responsibility for all that we have brought upon ourselves and others: free to struggle, to starve, to demand from all one last, supreme effort to reach where we long to be and, once there, to conclude that it is not, after all, the right place. For a great price obtained I this freedom, to wish to God I had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when I sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full. The tyrant wasn’t such a bad old bugger, and even in his arbitrary rages never killed as many as died in yesterday’s glorious battle for liberty. Will you return to him, then? Ah no, sweet Freedom, I will slave for you until I have forgotten the love that once consumed my being, until I am grown old and bitter and can no longer see the wood for the starved, dirty trees. Then I will curse you and die; and will you then concede that I may be accounted your loyal follower and a true creature of this Earth? And, Freedom, was I free?

Far away, east beyond Esthwaite Water, Sawrey and Windermere, the sun, from between low streaks of cloud, shone its first, pale rays across the woodland and bleak moor of Grizedale Forest. Already the buzzards were aloft, watching for prey, ready to tempest and tear any creature too slow or weak to escape or defend itself. Before their eyes opened, under the sunrise, the immense western prospect; the hyaline expanse of Coniston Water, five miles from School Beck to High Nibthwaite, lined along its western shore with caravans-orange, white and blue; and beyond, the little town of Coniston itself, grey against surrounding fields and autumn-leaved woods. Behind stretched the Coniston fells, over which, as the sun rose higher, the cloud shadows would flow with a pace smooth and unaltering, like that of ships upon a deep sea. More than four miles away, closing the horizon, rose the Coniston range—Caw, Torver High Common, Walna Scar, Dow Crag, Old Man, Brim Fell and Swirral; highest of all, the Old Man appeared from the east as a sharp peak tilted to the right, its eastern face streaked with the broken, white thread of a falling beck.

Half a mile north of Lawson Park, Monk Coniston Moor rises, hillocked and undulant, above the oak woods below. An old, dry-stone hoggus (or hog-house—a “hog” being, in the Lakeland, the ovine equivalent of a bullock) stands, half-ruined, beside a stream, and a rowan lays its pliant branches and thirteen-leafleted sprays across the roof-slates. To one walking over the Forest from Hawkshead to Nibthwaite, or from Satterthwaite to How Head, one lonely knoll surmounted discloses another, all the way up to the watershed, and little moves but the falling becks, and grey sheep that start in alarm out of the fern and go bucketing away from intruders, whether human or animal: the proper landscape to lie drenched beneath a silver dawn, low clouds and an east wind in October.

Here, among the dripping grasses and spongy, sodden mounds of moss, Rowf and Snitter lay gazing in astonishment and dismay as first light made plain the emptiness about them.

“It can’t be the whitecoats,” said Snitter desperately. “Not a house, not. a lamp-post, not a fence—it’s not natural! Not even the whitecoats could—” He broke off and once more raised his head to the wind. “Tar—there was—yes—for a moment—but faint. And the dustbins gone—every single one—it’s not possible!”

A cock chaffinch, slate-blue-capped and rosy-breasted, fluttered across a wall with a flash of white wing feathers. Snitter turned his head for a moment, then let it fall once more upon his outstretched front paws. “And no men anywhere—so why make it?—and all that sky, how can it ever stop raining? Rowf? Rowf, come back!”

Rowf opened his eyes, his upper lip curling as though in anger. “What?”

“What’s to be done?”

“How the death should I know?”

“They’ve taken everything away, Rowf—the houses, the roads, cars, pavements, dustbins, gutters—the lot. How on earth can they have done it? I tell you it’s not possible! And where have they all gone? Why make all this—make it and then go away—why?”

“I told you,” said Rowf.

“What did you tell me?”

“The world, I said. I told you it would be the same outside the pens. There isn’t any outside. You say it’s been altered, so the whitecoats—or some men, anyway—must have altered it so that they could do something or other to some animals. That’s what animals are for, to have things done to them by men. It’s what men are for, too, come to that—to do the things, I mean.”

“But Rowf, my master—my master never used to do anything to animals. When I was at home with my master—”

“He must have, else he couldn’t have been a man.”

“But how could they have taken away the streets and houses and made all this?”

“They can do anything. Look at the sun up there. Obviously some man must once have put up his hand to light it, same as the tobacco man does in the dog-shed. But you wouldn’t believe it unless you’d actually seen the tobacco man do it, would you?”

Snitter was silent, shivering in the wind. The whole expanse of the fell was now light, heather and grass flashing with raindrops in the fitful sunlight breaking here and there through the clouds. The long call, like human laughter, of a green woodpecker sounded from the woodland below them.

“We’ve got to find some men,” resumed Snitter at length.

“Why?”

“Dogs have to have men. We need masters. Food, shelter. Come on! We can’t stay here. The whitecoats’ll be looking for us.”

He got up and began to pad away through the bracken, downhill towards the north-west. For some little time it seemed as though Rowf, still lying in the wet heather, would let him go alone, but at length, when Snitter had passed out of sight over the curve of the slope and reached the edge of the woodland two hundred yards away, he suddenly jumped up and ran after him at full speed, overtaking him under the trees.

“Do you think they’ve really gone, then?” asked Rowf. “I mean, suppose there aren’t any men left, anywhere—if there was none at all—”

“There will be. Look—there are boot marks in the ground, and not more than a day old, either. No, there are men. What I can’t understand is why they’ve changed everything. It’s confused me—it’s not what I was expecting. I was expecting streets and houses, naturally.”

They had already pushed their way between the bars of the gate into the wood and were now following the path leading down to the road beside the lake. The air was full of the scents of autumn-acorns, wet fern and newly sprouted fungi. The rowan trees were glowing with brilliant orange berries, among which, here and there, robins perched to defy one another, twittering, listening and answering across their narrow territories. Despite the strange, lonely surroundings Snitter began to take heart—from the long-forgotten sensation of damp earth between his pads, from the twinkling light, moving branches and leaves, the coloured fragments all about him in the grass—harebell and lousewort, scabious and tormentil—and the smells and rustling sounds of other, unseen creatures. A rabbit crossed the track and he dashed after it, lost it, hunted back and forth and then forgot it as he stopped to sniff at a dor-beetle under a blue-and-green-banded fungus growing between two stones. At length he ran back to Rowf, who lay gnawing on a stick.

“There are cats here, anyway. Sort of cats. Long ears, but you can chase them.”

The stick snapped and Rowf let the broken end fall from his mouth. “Nothing to eat.”

“There will be. How the wind sends the leaves running across the trees! Then where do they go? Never mind, there are always more.” Snitter raced away again. Rowf, hearing him crackling through the undergrowth on the other side of the brown, turbid beck, followed more slowly.

A mile below, they came out on the road skirting the east side of Coniston Water. The wind had died completely and all was lonely and deserted, with never a car on the road so early. The lake itself, where they glimpsed it between the trees, lay so clear and smooth that the stones, sunken leaves and brown weed within its shallow, inshore depths appeared like objects in a deserted room seen through the windows from outside. Yet at their next glimpse these had disappeared, their place being taken, under a burst of pale sunlight, by the reflections of moving clouds and autumn-coloured branches along the shore.

“Look, Rowf, look!” cried Snitter, running down towards the water. “Everything keeps still in there! I wouldn’t be mad if I was in there—things would keep still—covered over—my head would be cool—”

Rowf hung back, growling. “Don’t go down there, Snitter! Keep away if you’ve got any sense. You can’t imagine what it’s like. You couldn’t get out.”

Snitter, about to plunge, ran back up the bank but, still fascinated, went sniffing up and down along the edge, covering three times the distance of Rowf. Once the canvas dressing on his head caught in a long bramble and he wrenched himself free with a red blackberry leaf hooked into the black sticking-plaster. He ran along the shore with a shifting and rattling of loose pebbles, lapped thirstily, splashed in and out of a shallow place, shook himself and scampered back to the road, scrambling clumsily up and over the dry stone wall and dropping down into the wet grass along the verge.

“All the same, old Rowf, it’s better out here than in the pens. I’m going to make the most of it. Only the flies in my head—they keep buzzing. And I feel like smoke. My feet are cold as a gate-latch.”

Still surrounded on all sides by the early morning solitude, they came to the northern end of the lake, ran past the turning that leads to Hawkshead, crossed School Beck bridge and so on towards Coniston. Soon they found themselves approaching a little group of three houses, two on one side of the road and one on the other. The sun had risen clear of the clouds in the east and in the gardens, as they came to them, they could hear bees droning among the phlox and late-blooming antirrhinums. Rowf, coming upon an open gate, lifted a leg against the post, then made his way purposefully along the garden path and disappeared round the corner of the house.

The clang of the falling dustbin-lid and the overturning of the bin were followed by the sound of a first-floor window being flung open, then by threatening cries, the thudding of feet running downstairs and the sharp clack—one, two—of drawn bolts. Rowf’s big shape reappeared, black and bristling, backing away from a man in a brown dressing-gown and felt slippers, his face bearded white with shaving-soap. As Rowf stood his ground the man stooped, picked up a stone from the flowerbed and flung it. Rowf ran back through the gate and rejoined Snitter in the road.

“I’d have fought him—I’d have bitten his ankle—”

“Oh, go and bite a policeman!” said Snitter. “Bite a postman, go on! You would spoil it, wouldn’t you? It’s not the right way, Rowf!”

“That bin—there was food wrapped up in paper packets, like the tobacco man’s—”

“You should have put yourself in and shut the lid down. Why ever did I go to the trouble of getting you out? You’ve got to treat men properly, Rowf, if you want—Did he hit you with that stone?”

“No, or I’d have gone for him. I tell you—”

“Oh my dam, this chicken-wire round my head!” cried Snitter suddenly. “I’m blind! I’m blind!” He flung himself down on the road, clawing and grabbing at his head, which jerked back and forth horribly, like that of a clockwork toy. “The flies—the flies are going to eat me! The road’s black and white—the lorry’s coming, the lorry’s coming, Rowf!”

Rowf, pressed against the garden wall, watched helplessly as Snitter got up, staggered slowly to the other side of the road and once more fell down. He was about to follow him over when he heard the sound of an approaching car. As it came closer he slunk back into the gateway.

The car slowed down and stopped. The driver remained at the wheel while his passenger, a young man in fell boots, a blue roll-necked jersey, anorak and yellow woollen cap, got out and stood beside the car, looking down at Snitter in the road.

“Reckon it’s took badly, Jack. Bin roon over, d’ye think?”

“Nay, not roon over, it’s bin to’t vet, look, has that. Yon dressing on it head. Oughter be kept close soomwheers, bi rights, ought that. Moosta got out.”

The young man went up to Snitter who, with closed eyes, was lying limply on his side. Murmuring gently and reassuringly, he extended a closed fist towards his nose. Snitter half opened his eyes, sniffed at his knuckles and wagged his tail feebly.

“It’s got this green collar, Jack, but nowt on it—nobbut a noomber. It cann’t have coom far, it’s that bad. Let’s joost put it int’ back of car, like, to get it off rooad, and then I’ll assk at woon of t’ouses. Happen soomun’ll know whose ‘tis.”

He bent down and lifted Snitter in his arms. In the same moment Rowf hurled himself across the road and leapt for his throat. The driver gave a cry of warning and the young man, dropping Snitter just in time, flung up his left arm, which Rowf’s teeth seized below the elbow of the anorak. As the young man staggered back, the driver leapt out of the car and began beating at Rowf’s head with a pair of heavy driving-gloves. Snitter, yelping from his fall, was already twenty yards up the road when Rowf released his grip and dashed after him, leaving the driver rolling up his friend’s sleeve and searching his pockets for an iodine pencil.

“I told you, Snitter, I told you! You think you know everything about men. I told you—”

“They were all right—they were masters. It was my head—all on fire—I couldn’t see—”

“They were whitecoats—surely you know that? They were going to take you away, take you back—Snitter, are you all right?”

“I think—yes—I think so.” Snitter sat down and looked doubtfully about him. “I wish the mouse would come back. I never know what to do without him.”

“There are more houses further along this road—see them?” said Rowf. “That’s one lot the men haven’t taken away, anyhow—or not yet. Let’s go down there—you’ll feel better once we get among some houses.”

“That cairn—Clusker—he was dead, you know,” said Snitter. “I saw the tobacco man take his body out of the pen last night. He lay down, same as me—”

“When did he die?”

“You weren’t there. I think it must have been yesterday afternoon, while you were in the metal water.”

“What was wrong with what I did just now?”

“You mustn’t rootle about in dustbins, however nice they smell. Not if masters are anywhere near. It makes them angry, for some reason. The proper thing, if you want to get food out of a man, is to go and make friends with him first, and then with any luck he gives you something. Mind you, I never had to do that with my master. I was always fed regularly. I knew where I was—in those days—oh, what’s the use? But that’s how you do it. You do the man before the food—not after. I’ll show you, when we get to these houses.”

At this moment, as they were entering Coniston, they both heard the sound of another car behind them, but still some way off. At once Rowf turned and slunk away down a nearby side-lane (or “lonnin,” as the Lakelanders call them), between grey, lichened walls. After a moment Snitter followed him, in and out of the docks and goose-grass beside the track, disturbing clouds of blue-bottles and two or three tortoiseshell butterflies fluttering torpid in the autumn air. Around them grew, little by little, the smells and quiet sounds of a country town beginning the day—the soft, intermittent whirr of an electric milk-float, clinking bottles, a slammed door, a called greeting answered, smells of wood-smoke, of frying, of chickens released from the henhouse. Snitter, overtaking his friend, led the way by back gardens, yards and patches of waste land, always looking about him for some likely-looking man whom they could approach.

After some time spent in wandering, lurking, jumping garden walls unseen and dashing across open roads when there seemed no help for it, they found themselves near the left bank of Church Beck, not far from where it runs under the bridge in the centre of the town. The beck was loud, running strongly after the night’s rain, carrying down its rocky bed a brown spate from the crags of Wetherlam, from Low Water, Levers Water and the eastern heights of Old Man. Rowf, giving it one look, slunk back towards the garden wall they had just scrambled over.

“Rowf, wait!”

“I’ll be damned if I wait! That water—”

“Never mind the water. There’s a shop full of food not far off. Can’t you smell it?”

“What’s a shop?”

“Oh, you know—a shop—a shop’s a house, Rowf, where there’s meat and biscuits and things and men who want them go and get them. Actually it’s usually women, for some reason, but—oh, never mind. This one can’t be far off. You’re right, these houses are doing me a world of good. We’ll find a master before long, you see.”

Snitter, following his nose, led the way along the street and soon tracked down the shop which had wafted to him its tidings of cold meat, sausages, cheese and biscuits. It was an up-to-date grocer’s, new and smart, its separate delicatessen and cheese counters conveniently arranged across the floor from the shelves of jam, shortbread, biscuits, potted meat, tins of soup, anchovies and teas in pretty packets and tins. It was not yet open, but the doors were standing ajar and a youth in a sacking apron was cleaning the tiled floor with a mop and pushing the water out on the pavement, while a young woman in a white overall was looking over the shelves and checking and rearranging some of the stock.

Snitter came to a stop on the opposite side of the road.

“Now watch me, Rowf, and remember—men first.”

“Don’t like men.”

“Don’t be silly. Of course we’ve got to find a man to look after us. A dog has to have a master if he’s going to live properly. Poor old Rowf, you’ve just been badly treated by the wrong sort of men.”

“It’s a bad world—”

“Oh, try the other lamp-post for a change. Come on! This is going to teach you a thing or two. You’ll like it.”

Snitter ran across the road and put his head between the open doors. The young man in the sacking apron, looking up, saw his black cap, backed by the shaggy bulk of Rowf behind him. He stood staring a moment, then laid his mop aside and called over his shoulder into the recesses of the shop.

“Eh, Mr. T.!”

“What’s oop?” replied a voice.

“‘Ave y’ever seen dog owt like this? It’s got cap on! Theer’s two on ‘em tryin’ to coom in, like. Seem to know wheer theer at an’ all. Are they owt to do wi’ thee?”

At talk of dogs on his premises the proprietor, a conscientious and fastidious man, who was washing his hands with disinfectant soap as part of his normal routine before opening shop, dried them and came hurrying forward between the shelves, buttoning his clean, white, knee-length shop coat as he went. Seeing, in passing, the ham knife lying where it should not have been on the cheese counter, he picked it up and took it with him, tapping the flat of the blade against his left hand in nervous haste.

“Where, Fred, where?” he said. “Where? Oh, I see. Good gracious, no, I’ve never seen them in me life. Have you, Mary? Mary? Are they anything to do with you?”

The young woman, carrying the stock sheets clipped to her fibre-board, also approached the door.

“Whatever’s that on it head?” asked the proprietor, staring.

As he came into full view from behind the shelves and, hands on knees, bent down to look at Snitter, both dogs turned and pelted down the street like the hounds of spring on winter’s traces. Round the nearest corner they went, past the Black Bull and up the lane beyond. After two hundred yards Snitter stopped and pressed himself against the wall, panting.

“Did you see, Rowf? Did you?”

“He was a whitecoat!”

“He had a knife!”

“He smelt of that stuff!”

“Scissors sticking out of his front pocket!”

“There was a woman whitecoat too, carrying paper, one of those flat board things they have when they come to take you away!”

“Oh Rowf, how dreadful! That must be another whitecoats’ place! Perhaps the town’s all whitecoats, do you think? There seemed to be hardly anyone else about. A whole town of whitecoats!”

At the thought they began to run again.

“I’m not going back there! I bet they do throw dogs into that running water, whatever you say.”

“That man must cut them up on those glass tables in there. It isn’t a shop at all!”

“Let’s get away! Come on, we’ll go up here. It smells lonely.”

“Yes, all right. Why, these are rhododendrons, Rowf! Rhododendrons!”

“Never mind.”

“No, I mean it’s all right. I tell you, we’re bound to find some proper men some time today, before we’re done.”

“You’ll kill us, Snitter—or worse. I’d rather keep away. I never got any good from a man yet.”

They were making their way up a walled lane—almost a road-skirting the hillside above Coniston. Below them, at the foot of a steep slope covered with trees and undergrowth, they could hear the big beck shouting like a mountain torrent and from time to time caught sight of its white water foaming between the rocks of the ravine. So loud, indeed, was the noise that when a lorry came jolting towards them round a bend in the lonnin they were startled, having heard nothing.

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

“What’s the matter? I thought you said men—”

“A lorry, Rowf!—”

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

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

“What a strange beast you are, Snitter! One moment you’re—”

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

“They won’t. Let’s get on. Wherever that lorry came from there might be some more men—better ones, you say. I doubt it myself, but if that’s what you want to find so much—”

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

“It’s all right, Rowf. There aren’t any whitecoats here—”

“How do you know?”

“Smell.”

“I don’t care—I’m not going down there.”

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

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

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

Rowf scrabbled up a nearby pile of stones and disappeared. A few moments later Snitter, hearing him bark, followed. Together they looked in astonishment across the wide hollow among the hills to which they had climbed.

The entire area ahead was void of vegetation, rocked and cratered as the moon. Across it stretched a track, where rainwater glistened in deep ruts, and beside this a cloudy stream ran in a kind of trough. Brown mud lay everywhere, and in the distance a pile of shale rose like a giant’s unlighted bonfire. Far off, across the waste, a dirty lorry crept, rocking and splashing. As the two dogs watched, it backed slowly towards the pile, in obedience to a man in a yellow helmet who shouted, gesturing first with one hand and then the other. Somewhere out of sight the engine of a pump was put-putting steadily and they could see, dark against the tawny ground, the line of a thick, black hose, its spout discharging into the stream.

This was Coppermines Valley, once a mining site but now, its lodes long worked out, frequented only for small-scale winning of gravel and spoil by anyone who cared to bring a lorry; hence the activity on a Saturday morning. It was a scene of squalid desolation, of ragged spoil heaps and other debris of abandoned industry. In all directions across the disfigured landscape, channels, raw and man-made, ran like millraces, streaming down steep slopes or cutting unnaturally over patches of encroaching fell. A long way beyond, the hillsides resumed their crags and bracken, from which the breeze carried faint, mossy odours, partly occluded by the nearer smells of the workings.

The two dogs gazed for some time in silence.

“That explains it, of course,” said Snitter at length.

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

“That explains it, Rowf, don’t you see? This is the part they’re making now. They’ve just finished taking away all the streets and things and they’re starting to put in the big stones and grass. When they’ve finished here I suppose they’ll go lower down, to those houses we’ve come from; take them away and make that place into rocks too. But why? Especially if the houses belong to whitecoats? I can’t make it out at all. There’s no sense in it, and you can’t even get out of the wind.” Snitter shivered and lay down.

“Out of the wind? It’s the world we can’t get out of.”

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

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

“Eh, Jack, ’ast seen yon afore? Whose is it, d’y know?”

“Nay. No dog ’ere. Nowt to do wi’ place, like. What’s yon on it head?”

“Dunno. Git away-aym! Goo on, get off, y’ boogger!” shouted the driver, picking up a stone. Snitter turned and ran as he threw, missed and returned to his kicking of the tyre.

Rowf looked up from the anthill.

“What?”

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

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

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

“All men—”

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

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Let’s go up that hill over there. It’s in the opposite direction from the whitecoats’ town, anyway.”

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

“Better not fall asleep here.”

“Not in the open, no. Snippety-snap—don’t bother to open your eyes—you haven’t got any.” Snitter’s short legs were tiring. He lay panting on a patch of smooth turf littered with sheep’s droppings while Rowf, in curiosity, cast unsuccessfully about for traces of the buzzard’s victim.

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

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

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

“I told you, Snitter—I told you, didn’t I? It doesn’t matter where we go. The whitecoats—”

“Rowf, there’s no one there—nothing—”

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

As some honest soldier might find his straightforward, workaday warmth and staunchness no match for the onset of shell-shock in a comrade, so Snitter, his desire to reassure overwhelmed by Rowf’s vehemence, lay down without further talk, feeling against his own body his friend’s tension and fear. After some time Rowf said, “I suppose they must be waiting somewhere—the whitecoats. Where do you think they’re hiding?”

“It’s not for us—not that water—it’s too big—they must have made it for some bigger animal—” Snitter, unable to explain away the sudden and unforeseeable appearance of the tarn and almost convinced by Rowf’s terrified certainty, was nevertheless still searching for some kind of reassurance.

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

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

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

The sight of Levers Water, a much larger tarn, with men’s work clear to be seen in the concrete embankment and dam at the outfall, provoked in him, surprisingly, no further fear. As a stag or fox, having started up at the first scent of hounds or sound of the horn, will then collect its wits and begin in earnest to call upon its powers of cunning and endurance, so Rowf, having once come upon and accepted the evidence of what he had all along more than suspected—the ubiquity of the whitecoats—seemed now to have braced himself to contend with it as best he could. Within seconds of their first glimpse of the lake four or five hundred yards away at the foot of the slope, he had drawn back and crouched down behind a boulder. As soon as Snitter was in concealment beside him he wormed his way forward to a place from where, between two stones, he could look out over the water without exposing himself to view.

For nearly an hour the two dogs lay watching for any sign of human presence or approach. Once, almost a mile away, a man appeared over the shoulder of High Fell on the further side of the lake. For a few moments he remained within their view, waving one arm and shouting loudly to someone or something out of sight. His high-pitched, stylized cries carried clearly across the valley. Then he strode on and was lost to sight.

“He wasn’t—well, he didn’t look like a whitecoat,” said Rowf uncertainly.

“No. But he looked like the tobacco man, and he sounded rather like him, too.” Snitter had become devil’s advocate. “All the same, that other water back there, where we’ve come from—it wasn’t like anything you’ve ever told me about the tank—”

“It was—I tell you—just because it didn’t smell of metal—”

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

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

For a long time Rowf made no reply. At last he said, “There’s something—a smell in my mind—pitter-patter—very small—whiskers—”

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

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

“They’re bits of biscuit that get left over, you know. Make yourself a few teeth from bone splinters, pick up a tail and off you go. Well, it’s a living. Sometimes they’re fleas trying to better themselves. My dam told me. That must be why there’s one in my head, I suppose. They get everywhere.”

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

“Then they couldn’t have given him food either.”

“No, he had to find it. That was why he was there. We had food, you see. But he didn’t have anything to do with men, this mouse. He just took what food he could get and lived that way.”

“Well, but the whitecoats would kill him if they could, wouldn’t they? I remember the tobacco man once running about, trying to stamp on one he saw.”

“Ah, that’s just it. What did the mouse do?”

“Got away down one of the gully-holes in the floor.”

“Yes.” Rowf looked up as a buzzard sailed into view, hovered a few moments, evidently decided to leave them alone and disappeared.

“The whitecoats would kill him if they could catch him,” said Rowf. “But he took care they didn’t, this mouse. That was how he lived, he told me. He only came out at night, slept down a hole—”

“Danced on his tail to save wearing out his paws. Wore a very small paper bag to keep off the rain—”

Rowf turned to snap, and Snitter jumped up and ran away a few yards among the loose stones. Rowf, about to follow, saw him check and remain staring.

“What?”

Snitter did not answer and Rowf joined him.

Far off, over the further brim of the valley, the man had returned. As the sound of his cries once more reached them, they saw the grey, pendent-coated shapes of two sheep appear, running hard over the brow higher up. Behind them, a black-and-white dog came racing out from among the crags, dodging in and out of the heather-clumps as it went. They watched it run in a wide half-circle before turning to descend towards the sheep, which thereupon changed direction and began to run downhill. Meanwhile the man, striding swiftly, had almost reached the edge of the tarn. At his further cry the dog stopped dead and lay down, while a moment later another dog came into view, chasing before it a third yow who ran to join the other two.

With a whine of delight, Snitter sprang to his feet.

“Rowf! Look! Take a good look! That, Rowf, is a master—a real master of dogs! We’re home and dry, Rowf, and I was right and you were wrong! Oh, Snit’s a good dog! pass me a piece of that blue sky and I’ll chew it up! Toss me a lamp-post and I’ll carry it home! Come on, quick!”

“Where? What for? Snitter, wait—”

“We go and do what they’re doing, don’t you see, and then the man’ll take us home with him! What luck! Come on!”

Snitter was off as fast as his short legs would carry him, scraping the pads of his paws on the rough stones, tumbling in and out of peaty rifts, thrusting breast-high through sheaves of wet heather. Rowf at first remained where he was, but when Snitter was well down the slope and showing no sign of hesitation or second thoughts, he too came out from their hiding-place and followed. He overtook him splashing through Cove Beck, above the steep crags north-west of the tarn.

“Snitter, wait, I tell you! I don’t understand!”

“Neither do I, altogether. My master used to throw sticks, but it’s all the same. When you go out of doors with a master, he always likes you to run about and do things. This man must have sheep instead of sticks, that’s all.”

At this moment a yow which they had not seen got up a little distance ahead of them and began to trot quickly away. Instantly Snitter set off in pursuit, barking loudly, and after a few moments Rowf copied him. The yow broke into a sheep-gallop, covering the uneven ground with leaps and quick turns and leaving hanks of its unclipped fleece trailing as it pushed through the patches of furze. Snitter, catching the coarse, warm smells of wool and sheep-dip, became even more excited, snapping and barking in the heat of pursuit. He put up another yow and as he overtook it found Rowf at his shoulder, charging into action like a hound in full cry. His voice rang over the fell.

“Rowf! Grrrrr-owf, rowf! We’ll show ‘em! We’ll show ‘em! Rowf, rowf!”

Both yows turned suddenly and ran back by the way they had come, blundering past the dogs with a quick clitter-clatter of narrow, agile hooves. Snitter was off again, this time biting at their very heels. Away below, on the nearer shore of the tarn now, but separated from them by the sheer crags, he caught a glimpse of the man, his cloth cap pushed back on his fell of hair, waving a long thumb-stick and apparently yelling encouragement. His teeth nipped the hindmost yow just above the hock and for a moment he tasted blood before she kicked backwards and her hoof took him in the muzzle. Dazed, he sat back on his haunches, panting.

“Hey! What th’ ‘ell doost think th’art playin’ at? Art stark bluidy mad or what?”

Snitter looked up. Just above him, on a peat-bank, one of the black-and-white sheep-dogs was standing, glaring down with an expression of mingled bewilderment and blazing fury. It smelt as angry as any dog Snitter had ever encountered in his life. Frightened and confused, he said, “It’s all right—we—er—we don’t mean you any harm—you see, we need a master—we’re straying—we were just joining in—”

Rowf was beside him now, silent and waiting.

“Art out of thy minds, chasing yows oop an’ down fell, snappin’ an’ bitin’? Wheer’s thy farm at? Wheer’s thy masster? Tha’s nipped yon yow, too, tha basstard—it’s bleeding, is yon—”

The sheep-dog became inarticulate with rage and incomprehension. So overwhelming was his indignation that, like thunder or the smell of a bitch, it swept everything else from Snitter’s mind. The excitement of the chase, his confidence in the friendliness of the man down by the tarn, his hopes of adoption—these vanished as he found himself confronting—as unexpectedly as Rowf had been confronted by Low Water—the outraged, incredulous anger of the sheep-dog. There could be no question of talk or argument. It was like a bad dream. Whatever innocent fault they had committed, it must be something worse than vomiting on a carpet or biting a child; and evidently the sheep-dog was merely the sharp end of a whole world’s wedge of anger.

Snitter lay still as a stone while the dog came down and sniffed him over.

“I—I’m sorry—sir—you see—we—we didn’t know—”

“Lay off!” cried Rowf angrily to the sheep-dog. “You let him alone! You don’t own this place—”

“Doan’t oan it? Then I’d like to know who bluidy dooz. Hey, Wag,” cried the dog to his colleague, who now came running towards them, “it says we doan’t oan this fell ’ere!”

“Bluidy cheek!” The second dog bristled. He looked, thought Snitter, a most ugly customer, smelling strongly of a more-or-less permanent disposition to attack. “What they reckon theer oop to, then?”

“Cheek yourself!” Rowf, the biggest dog of the four, was on his feet, hackles up and teeth bared. “What are you doing here, if it comes to that?”

“Getherin, ye dafft sod! Seekin’ woolled sheep, a’ course. An’ then tha cooms down from top—like bluidy bulls on the loose—an’ spoils hafe an hour’s good work—”

“Ay—they’ll be tourists’ tykes, tha knaws,” said the first dog. “Thee, with yon patch on thy head, wheer’s thy masster at?” he demanded for the second time. “Is he oop fell? Hast roon away, tha feckless gowks?”

“No, we haven’t a master. We want to meet yours—we didn’t mean any harm—”

“He’ll fill thee wi’ lead, joost,” said the second dog, snapping quickly at a moth that came fluttering out of the underbrush. “Ay, he will that.”

“He hasn’t got a gun,” said Snitter.

“Happen he has,” returned the dog. “Thee bide around theer and thee’ll soon find out. Hey, Wag, remember yon dog he shot last soommer, when it were chasin’ doocks, tha knaws—”

“Ay. He were—” The first dog seemed about to enlarge on this pleasant recollection when a perfect fusillade of cries rose from somewhere out of sight beneath the sheer face below them.

“Don, lay down! Don, lay down! Wag, coom bye ’ere! Wag, coom bye ’ere! Yer Wag! Yer Wag!”

“Get off fell, tha booggers, that’s all,” said the second dog. “Goo on awaay!”

It raced off, responding, as it came into his view, to further instructions from the shepherd below. The first dog, Don, remained crouching tensely on the grass, tongue lolling and front paws outstretched, paying Snitter and Rowf no further attention whatever until, at a sudden cry of “Don, gow way! Don, gow way!” it leapt up, gave a single bark and tore uphill, climbing to get above and so turn two yows which were running before Wag. Snitter and Rowf looked at each other.

“Thee’d best watch thesen,” said Rowf bitterly. “Happen—”

“Oh, it isn’t funny.” Snitter was distraught. “I don’t understand. We were only doing the same as them—”

“They didn’t want us to join their man. Jealous.”

“Perhaps. I remember a cat that hid behind the door spit spit cuff scratch—just the same. No, but they were—oh, clouds in the sky, leaves on a tree, bark when you hear the key in the door—they belonged where they were, didn’t they; they were at home? You could smell it. No whitecoat does anything to them. But what are we going to do, Rowf?”

“We’ve got to get out of here,” said Rowf, “before they come back. Teeth rip it, yes and quick! My dam, the man’s coming, look!”

Sure enough, the man with the thumb-stick had appeared round one end of the line of crags and was hurrying towards them in silence. They could see the teeth in his face and smell his meaty sweat and manure-mucky boots. Yet even as they made off up the fell, he too turned aside and disappeared, evidently satisfied to have seen the back of them and not wishing to leave his gethered sheep any longer in the sole care of his dogs.

Higher and higher. The wind had died altogether now and the heights ahead had become invisible under a sudden mist. It seemed the very manifestation of their hopelessness and bewilderment. There was no longer any trace of destination or purpose in their wandering. Upward they went in silence—for they did not know where else to go or what to do—close together, tails drooping, unresponding even when some creature—a rat or rabbit, half-concealed in the mirk-startled and ran across their front. The grass grew sparser and then was no more. They were in a barren land, a blotted-out place of loose stones and bare rocks, steep and high up. The mist swirled about them, thickening the higher they went and smelling of dampness, of wet lichen on the rocks, of a dead sheep somewhere and faintly, beneath all else, of the salt sea. They were climbing the 2,300-foot pitch of Levers Hause, the near-precipitous band between Brim Fell and Swirral; as wild, grim and lonely a place as any in the Lakeland. Night was falling and in all the waste about them they knew of no food, no shelter, no friend.

“I’m like an apple tree in autumn,” said Snitter suddenly. “Tumbling down, full of wasps and maggots. And after that, you know, the leaves come down as well—the sooner you leave me the better for you.”

“I won’t leave you.”

“Everything I’ve tried today has gone wrong. This isn’t the world I left when I was sold to the whitecoats. It’s all changed. Perhaps I’ve changed it. Perhaps I’m mad even at the times when I don’t feel it. But surely all this smoke can’t be coming out of my head?”

“It isn’t smoke. There’s no burning. You can smell. The whitecoats are mad themselves. That’s why they cut you—to make you mad too.”

The mist was close about them now and the slope very steep. In the cold, the pockets and shallow pools of water among the rocks were already crizzling. Snitter could feel minute shards of ice splintering and vanishing under his pads. Presently he said, “Are you hungry?”

“I could eat my own paws. We’d have been fed by now, wouldn’t we?”

“Yes, if you’d survived the metal water today. You always said you were sure they meant to kill you in the end.”

The ground became level and now they could once more feel a light wind—or rather, a kind of draught—in their faces, causing the mist to stream past them, so that to themselves they seemed to be moving even when they stood still. Wet through and very cold, they lay down, both completely at a loss.

“We couldn’t even find our way back to the whitecoats now,” said Rowf at length. “I mean, supposing we wanted to.”

“Why would we want to?”

“The tobacco man’s got our food—the men we’ve seen today probably give food only to the lorries or to some other dogs—whatever animals it is that they have to hurt. Animals like us—if we’re not the particular ones they hurt we don’t get any food.”

“Do you want to go back?”

“I don’t know. We can’t starve. Why did we come up here? I shouldn’t think anyone has been up here since the men made it, whenever that was.”

“The men with the lorries made it. No one dares to come up or down it now for fear of starving. Not even their tobacco man’s used it. When he wants to come down he jumps off the top and lands in the water to keep his boots clean. He’s really the wind, you know. He keeps his animals hung on his belt. He’s dressed all in red leaves, and he gives them packets of maggots to eat. He lights his pipe with lightning and wears a cap made of cats’ fur—”

“If he comes here I’ll fight him—I’ll tear him—”

“He won’t come. He got lost in the garden and kicked my brains to bits trying to find the way out.”

It was shut of eve now, dark and very silent. A sound of mallard’s wings went whauping overhead, diminished and died, and in the cold a torpid beetle fell from a stone and lay on its back, apparently unable either to right itself or to crawl away. There was no sign of any other living creature.

After a long time Rowf rose slowly to his feet and stood with out-thrust muzzle, staring ahead of him so fixedly that Snitter turned his head and followed his gaze, trying to perceive what new enemy might be approaching: but there was nothing to be seen. Just as he was about to speak to him Rowf, without looking round and as though to someone else, barked into the darkness, “I know I’m a coward and a runaway—a dog who can’t do what men want, but I’m not going to die up here without making a fight for it. Help us! Help!”

Quickly, he turned and pressed his muzzle to Snitter’s loins. “We’ve tried your way, Snitter. Now we’ll try mine. That mouse isn’t the only one who can do without men. We can change if we want to. Do you know that? Change—into wild animals!”

He flung up his head and howled to the blotted-out, invisible sky. “Damn men! Damn all men! Change! Change!”

Nothing moved in the silence, yet Snitter, nose lifted in fear and uncertainty, could now perceive, growing about them, a rank, feral scent. An old, wild scent it seemed, drawn up, one might imagine, from the depths of the ancient ground beneath their paws; an ugly scent, a snarling, bloody scent, far away, slavering, full of brutal appetite and savagery, of brief life and briefer death, of the weakest down and the desperate slayer torn to pieces at last, either by his enemies or his own pitiless kin. As it entered and overcame him, his head swam and in terror he sprang up, giddy as he was, and fled he knew not where across the cold stones. Rowf, stock-still and waiting, made no movement and seemed unaware of his flight; and after a little he returned, timidly wagging his tail and smelling at the black, shaggy body as though at a stranger’s.

“Rowf?”

“Owl and rat, shrew and crow,” muttered Rowf thickly. “Fiercer—older—fiercer—”

“Are you an owl, Rowf; a rat? I can’t fall so far—”

Rowf lowered his muzzle to the ground.

“Long ago. Fierce sire; fierce dam. Fiercer than men. Kill or be killed-” “Rowf—”

“Wolf and crow; penned in byre sheep and lamb. Smash the pen, belly filled. Jaws grip and teeth rip—”

He snarled, tearing at the ground with his claws. “Owls, yes but fiercer. Rats, but more cunning.”

From the grinning jaws which he turned upon Snitter foam was dripping in viscous, sharp-smelling runnels. Snitter, belly pressed to the ground in subjection, felt rising from his own being the response of a tameless force, old, long-lost but now restored, innocent of mercy to any other creature, cunning and ruthless, living only to hunger, to smell out and pursue, to kill and devour. As he plunged to meet it, slobbering and urinating in the eagerness of surrender, it flowed over and engulfed him and he too tore and bit at the ground. The mist was changed to an intoxicant fume that was indeed pouring out of his own maimed head. Yet now he knew himself also the creature of the mist, that mist created by an all-wise providence expressly to conceal the hunter from the quarry; the hill-mist below which, in lonely valleys, men—not so long ago—had hidden, in their huts and caves, from the teeth of the prowling, four-footed enemy whom they could not even see before he fell upon their homes and cattle in the black night.

“Food, Rowf! Food, Rowf! Kill it! Kill it! Kill!”

“We’re going to kill it now,” answered the great, black hound, through bared teeth. “Men? Men?”

“Men or their beasts.”

“Which way? Which way, Rowf, which way?”

“The way I smell.”

Running beside him, Snitter could wind at first only the emptiness of the high fell, the grass evenly wet as though a net of fine water-drops had been cast over the whole mountain. Eyes and ears alike could tell him nothing more and his nose conveyed no sense of direction. Every smell—leaves, salt, rain, bracken, heather and rock—came from all directions and from none; was, in fact, the smell of the enveloping mist itself. If there was a beck trickling below, its sound did not penetrate the mist. If there were stars overhead, their light had no business here. This obscurity was more than darkness. It was void. Rowf, he understood dimly, had invoked to their aid a power which, although their own by ancient right, was also one of overwhelming ferocity, dreaded by men and animals from the beginning of time; cruel, furtive and slouching; a power whose servants were bound, in return for a thin measure of hazardous survival, to inflict the only law in the world, the law of Kill or Be Killed. Suddenly he understood why it was that, though he and Rowf were moving silently on, the stones, the wet grass and crags remained unchanged; why he could not tell up-wind from down-wind, mist from rain, starlight from darkness. For it was time through which they were moving; to a place where dogs knew of men only that they were enemies, to beware, to outwit, to rob and kill. Sharp flashes of pain came and went in his head. The watery air seemed to be choking him and now, as he peered about him, he perceived with fear that they were no longer two but many. Round them in the mist other animals were padding—shadowy animals with prick ears, lolling tongues and bushy tails—all silent, all voracious and intent, each knowing that his share would be nothing but what he could seize, tear, defend and devour for himself.

“Rowf,” he whispered, “who are they? Where are we?”

Without answering Rowf bounded suddenly forward, leaping between two boulders and down into the rocky, sheltered space below. Snitter heard his high-pitched growling and the plunging and kicking of a heavy body. As he himself jumped through the cleft Rowf was thrown backwards on top of him. There followed a clicking of hooves and rattling of stones as the yow vanished into the darkness. Rowf, bleeding, picked himself up and spat out a mouthful of oily wool.

“It was too quick for me. I couldn’t get it by the throat.”

“To kill it? Is this—is this—where they kill?”

“And eat,” said Rowf, “or starve. Come on.”

Again he scented, tracked and found. Again the quarry eluded him as he sprang at it, and he pursued it down the almost sheer face of the fell, so that Snitter lost him and wandered, limping and yapping until, by chance rather than by scent or hearing, he came upon Rowf lying in a stony rift, panting as he licked at one bleeding fore-paw.

“Don’t leave me, Rowf! This place frightens me. I daren’t be lost here—alone—”

“They’re too quick,” said Rowf again, “and very strong. They know their way about here, too.”

“Those—those dogs this afternoon,” said Snitter timidly.

“Damn them!”

“Yes, but—wait—I’m trying to dig it up. If one dog goes alone after a sheep, the sheep runs away—more or less wherever it wants. Those two dogs went to different places—I was watching—so that they could drive the sheep down to the man. He kept calling out to them and they did what he said.”

He could not tell whether Rowf had understood him or not. He waited in the empty darkness, rubbing his muzzle against Rowf’s sodden, shaggy side. At length Rowf answered, “Well?”

“Two different places—dogs in two places—one runs while the other waits—There was a cat once,” said Snitter, “in the street. I was chasing it and it ran round the corner straight into another dog.”

“Well?” Rowf, a grim stranger, scratched impatiently at the stones. Snitter became confused.

“The cat floated down the gutter and I blew away with the leaves. The other dog was carrying his master’s leg—that was before the lorry came—oh, my head!”

When he came to himself he was still in the remote, savage place, and Rowf was licking his face.

“Don’t bite me, Rowf! Don’t! I saw a sheep—a sheep like a cat. It turned the corner and you were there, waiting for it.”

“I understand. Come on then.”

They set off once more, at first climbing steeply and then, coming upon fresh sheep-dung on a narrow trod, creeping stealthily along it, one behind the other.

“There’s two of them ahead of us,” said Rowf suddenly. “Not too far, either.” He sniffed the air again, then moved silently off the trod to one side. “I shall be waiting behind this rock.”

There was no need for further talk. Snitter knew now what they would do and knew that Rowf knew also. Rowf had seen the cat turn the corner because they were no longer separate creatures. It was their nature, he now understood, to fuse as clouds fuse, to draw apart as the wind might impel them, to mingle again as waters mingle, obedient to the pull of the earth: to feel a single impulse, as a hundred pigeons turn together on the wing; to attack together, as common in purpose as bees driven to fury by a scent on the air; to retain nothing individual. He and Rowf were an animal—an animal that must eat, and had accordingly been given faculties to fulfil that need, including that of being in two places at once. It was this animal that he had left crouching behind the rock, this animal which was now slinking silently over the grass, climbing to get round the sheep on the trod below, creeping down beyond them, yes here was the line of the trod, turn back now in the direction from which he had come, sweet, rank smell of sheep’s wet breath, bulky shapes in the mist—

Snitter, breaking into a fierce yapping, dashed forward. The yows fled from him immediately, one bleating and plunging away down the fell. The other ran back along the trod and even as he followed it a quick warning flashed into his nose, his feet and ears, uttered by the shadowy comrades hunting round him: “The first sheep went down the fell because you dashed in too fast and panicked it. Hold back and let this one keep on along the trod.”

He stopped, uttering growls that ended in snapping barks. He heard hooves trotting, a shallow puddle stamped in, stones rattling and then, like an impact upon his own body, Rowf hurtling forward to bury his teeth in the sheep’s throat. Dragging, battering, beating against the crags: kicking and plunging; and he was running after the sound in the dark. There was blood, steaming blood, sniff lick drooling on the ground, growling breath and a heavy body struggling, staggering forward, a clot of bloody wool, a choking, rattling noise somewhere ahead. Where? This was it, this was it, Rowf underneath, blood and shit and the smell of a sheep in agony and terror. He snapped and bit at the head, at the convulsed jaws and staring eyes, then found the edge of an open wound in the throat and ripped and tore. Suddenly, as he tugged, a great spurt of hot blood poured over his face. The wool and flesh gave way in his teeth and he fell backwards, recovered himself and leapt in again, this time to feel first an inert throbbing and then stillness. Rowf, a black, hairy bulk soaked in blood, was dragging himself out from under. Snitter, beginning to lick, could taste dog’s blood mingled with sheep’s. There was a jagged scratch along Rowf’s left side and one of his fore-paws was oozing blood.

Rowf’s weight thrust him aside, gasping with excitement.

“Tear it, tear it!”

When the stomach was ripped open they dragged the steaming entrails among the rocks, gnawed at the rib cage, fought over the liver, chewed the wet heart in pieces. Rowf tore at a haunch until he had it severed, sinew, ball-joint and skin, and lay crunching the red bone in his teeth. Warmth flowed through them, and confidence—in the dark night where others were afraid, and the cold retarding the alertness of their prey. Snitter pissed over one rock after another—”That’ll show them who owns the place!”

Rowf, curled upon the bloody stones as though in a basket, opened one eye. “Show whom?”

“If those sheep-dogs came back here now, Rowf, we’d tear them, wouldn’t we? Tear them—they’d break up like biscuit! ‘What’s this, what’s this? Dear me, a piece of a dog, who can have been so careless?’ I’m careless, Rowf, not a care, very fair, very far, ha ha!”

Incrimination and heady elation, cutting capers in the misty vapours, havoc and ravage hurrah for the savage life precarious, life so various, life nefarious and temerarious, pulling faces, fierce grimaces, leaving traces in rocky places, pieces and faeces all over the fleece is that a yow’s shoulder they’ve left there to moulder stuck up on a boulder? Much to learn, Rowf, in the fern, of great concern, for this is the point of no return. Those who kill sheep should mind where they sleep, when there’s nothing to hear the shot-gun is near, the curse of the farmer is likely to harm yer, a scent in the morning is sent for a warning, at a cloud on the sun a wise dog will run, it’s the sharp and alert who avoid being hurt and a dog that’s gone feral is living in peril. Those with blood on their paws and wool in their jaws should heed these old saws.

Rowf, as yet far from adept but uneasily aware that a great change had indeed come upon them, got up and began padding up and down, nosing about, listening and throwing up his head to smell the air.

Mist in the Lakeland can fall as swiftly as rooks fill the sky on a fine evening, almost faster than the fell-walker’s hastily unlocked compass-needle can swing north to give a bearing: may swirl around the lost in icy folds until the very cairns themselves seem loosed and moving, weaving, deceiving, drifting landmarks in a muffled no-place where mountain gullies lead down into pits of air. And again, once fallen, the mist may break up as suddenly, opening as fast as a hastily ripped envelope full of bad news.

First Snitter saw the stars—bright Deneb in the zenith, Arcturus twinkling grim and very far. Thorough the fog they came and then, all on the instant as it seemed, the opaque, sound-muffling blanket vanished before a wind smelling of sea-weed and salt-drenched sand. Startled by the swiftness of the change, Rowf instinctively crept under a crag, as though knowing himself dangerously revealed beside their kill in the sudden clarity of moonlight.

It was a little below the high ridge of Levers Hause that they found themselves exposed—a watershed steep on both sides, so high and steep that yows seldom cross from one valley to the other—those that do being a mere handful, a half-dozen or so to be recognized at getherin by their marks and exchanged at shepherds’ meet on Walna Scar. They had crossed the ridge to the Dunnerdale side. To the south hung the grim, eastern face of Dow Crag, that gully-riven precipice that has killed too many climbers, including a veteran of Kashmir. North-westward rose the flat top of Grey Friar and directly below lay the hanging valley known to Seathwaite shepherds as Rough Grund—the land above and draining into Seathwaite Tarn. A light wind was ruffling the surface of the tarn with a broken, maculate gleam, from the shallow, marshy infall down to the deep water round the convex curve of the dam. Thus seen from a mile away, the place looked, at this moment, peaceful even to Rowf—Charybdis asleep, as it were, or the clashing rocks of legend stilled in their noonday trance. In all the mile-wide valley they could see no movement save that of the becks and yet, watching from this high, bare shelf among the strewn remains of their kill, both dogs, hearkening unknowingly to the whispered warnings of that cunning, bloody power whose service they had entered, felt exposed, strayed beyond safety, out of shelter, dangerously in the open.

Snitter’s high spirits flickered and died like a spent match. He sat clawing at his plastered head and looking down at the marshy floor below.

“We’re birds on a lawn, Rowf, flies on a pane. The moon will come and run us over.”

Rowf considered. “A man may come—we don’t know. Those other sheep this afternoon belonged to a man; so this one must have too. He might have a gun, as those dogs said.”

“The same man?”

“Or a different man. It doesn’t matter. We must get away.” “But where?”

“I don’t know. They’ve put tanks everywhere, you see—there’s another one down there.”

“But, Rowf, you know the whitecoats never come at night. We’ve got time to find somewhere to hide, somewhere to run before the sun, before the gun.”

Rowf blew out warm, steaming breath. “Hide? They might be watching us now.”

“How could they be?”

“Well, they might have something that makes things look close when they’re far off. They might be watching from right away over there.”

“Oh, that’s silly, Rowf. I know they can disappear and breathe fire and create light and all sorts of things, but they couldn’t possibly do that. You’re letting your imagination run away with you.”

Rowf yawned wide and licked his chops. Snitter could see fragments of sheep’s flesh and sinew hanging between his teeth. “Anyway, we may as well go down into that valley as anywhere. If I can.”

“If you can?”

“I’m bruised to pieces. I had to hang on by my teeth while that brute battered me against everything it could find. You can try it next time. I’ll have to go slowly.”

They set off down the hillside, Rowf scrambling and limping in and out of the rocks on three legs. Snitter, who could have gone twice as fast, kept running nervously from side to side, pushing his nose under stones and again turning to look out across the empty valley. The noise of the far becks came up with a wavering sound, receding and returning, and the outline of the distant, long shoulder of the Friar, too, seemed oscillating minutely to and fro, as though, poised yet not absolutely stable, it was sharing the movement of the air—or perhaps, thought Snitter, as though he himself had become a little giddy with gazing across the moonlit distance. As they came down on the wet moss the illusion left him. His paws were sinking in soft ground, boggy, full of watery rifts, and he was coaxing Rowf forward to no destination that he knew of. They could no longer see as far as the tarn and the outlines of the surrounding heights were altered, humped shapes against the night sky. Rowf stopped to drink, lapping noisily, and then lay down in a patch of rushes.

“You’d better go on, Snitter—wherever you’re going. I’ve had enough—until tomorrow anyway.”

“But if you sleep there, Rowf, in the open—”

“Might as well lie here as anywhere. Where were we going, anyway? I’ve got to rest, Snitter. My leg hurts.”

“Caught stealing up on the table—”

“Snitter, let me alone!”

He bared his teeth. Snitter, catching the smell of his pain and exhaustion, went pattering quickly away, in and out of the bents and rushes. Suddenly it seemed, at this moment, a small matter to leave Rowf. He could not help him. Not his energy, but his resources were at an end. His ignorance lay all about him like a marsh, his madness within him like stagnant water. In this artificial, man-made wilderness he had no idea what might disclose itself, what might be lying just out of sight in any direction; nor, if granted the power to see, would he have been any wiser about what he ought to do. Once, there had been a master and a home: then, after the lorry—afterwards—the canine block, the tobacco man and the knives of the whitecoats. The escape from the whitecoats—all the cunning, courage and endurance—had proved useless because there was nowhere he and Rowf could go, no life which they could live. He remembered what Rowf had said in the pen—”There might be something worse through the door.” True, there was no enemy present now, but since their escape they had not met with a single friend, animal or human, and though nothing had happened when they killed the sheep, he knew intuitively that they had committed a crime which was bound to come to light, a crime the perpetrators of which would not be forgiven. “He’ll fill thee wi’ lead, joost.” Might it not be better to put an end now to the anxiety and fear, to accept that they had no alternative but to suffer as the whitecoats required of them? Rowf had said so from the outset; had joined him, against his own conviction that they had no chance, only because he could not face the metal tank again. Where could they go, what could they do, what plan could they make in such a place as this? They would simply wander about until a farmer shot them or took them back to the whitecoats.

Put an end, then. But how? Which way back to Animal Research? Please, sir, could you direct me to the nearest whitecoat? Do you happen to have seen a street lying about anywhere—a shop, a house, a dustbin? You see, I’m lost. My head was cut open and I fell in when I wasn’t looking and now I seem to have kicked my brains to pieces trying to get out. There are leaves floating in black milk—I’m just looking for the way—no, not the way home, thought Snitter. I won’t call it that.

The stream in the middle of the Moss was wide—a good five feet at the place where he came to it, and deep on the nearer side. As he stopped, peering down from the bank into the dark water, he suddenly saw, reflected over his shoulder, the figure of a man—grey-haired, dressed in an old brown overcoat and yellow scarf, carrying a walking stick, his lips pursed to whistle. As the man nodded and bent to pat him, Snitter leapt round and jumped up at his knees, barking for joy. There was no one there, and he fell forward on the squelching peat.

I wish it would stop. I thought it had. It always takes me unawares. I never remember. I always say next time I’ll take no notice, but I never do. I mustn’t sit here thinking about it; I must do something else at once.

He plunged into the beck, pulled himself out on the further side, scuttered up the bank and shook the water off. The wet ground was no different, but about two hundred yards away, at the foot of the hillside where it rose above the bog, he could now see a kind of platform of smooth grass, a square, flat-topped, steep-sided mound jutting out from the foot of the hill. It was so plainly artificial that at first he took it for another hallucination, and sat watching it to see whether the figure in the brown tweed coat would reappear. But all remained empty and quiet, and at length, half-hoping to find a whitecoat to whom he could give himself up, he ran across the intervening distance and up the steep bank.

On top was a levelled space of turf and small stones, perhaps half the size of a lawn tennis court. It was completely empty, but on the further side, where the foot of Great Blake Rigg, the south face of the Grey Friar, rose like a wall, was a symmetrical, dark opening lined and arched with stones—a doorway without a door—as wide as a man is tall and almost twice as high, apparently leading underground into the heart of the mountain.

Snitter sat staring in astonishment. There were no signs of human use or occupation, no sounds from inside the cavern, no man-smells that he could perceive. He went cautiously closer. He could hear currents of air whispering and echoing within. “There’s a garden in its ear,” thought Snitter, “but there’s no one there, unless they’re hiding or asleep. There’s more in this than meets the nose, if I’m any judge.” The only smells were those of clean stones and subterranean moisture. Keeping close to one wall and ready to run on the instant, he crept inside.

He found himself in an empty, spacious tunnel, more or less the size of the opening itself, its high, barrel vault smoothly and regularly arched with flat stones set close together, edge outwards, its floor a clean, dry shale of similar, loose stones. Some of these rocked slightly under his paws, but otherwise the ground was even and without faults. The tunnel ran back into the heart of the mountain and from the movement of air, as well as the tiny echoes he could hear, he realized that it must be very deep.

He moved forward, looking about him. As he went on, the dim light from the cave mouth receded, but otherwise there was no change. The tunnel remained level, arched above and shaled below. He came to the mouth of a drift running in from one side, and stopped to smell and listen. It was dry, chill but not cold, and apparently not very deep. As he turned to go back to the main shaft, he saw the opening to the fell as a distant semi-circle of dark blue, with one star twinkling in the middle.

Half an hour later, Snitter found Rowf where he had left him, asleep under a patch of bog myrtle. There was a light drizzle of rain, though the moon, setting in the west, was clear of cloud.

“Rowf, come back! Listen! Listen to me!”

“Why didn’t you go? I thought you’d gone, I told you to go.”

“I have gone. The mouse-hole, Rowf, the gully in the floor—it’s real—we’re mice—”

“Oh, let me alone, you brain-sick puppy!”

“The whitecoats can’t catch the mice, Rowf! It’s safe in the rhododendrons—I mean the hole in the floor—”

“It’s a pity they didn’t cut your head off while they were about it. You couldn’t talk nonsense then. My leg feels like a door in the wind—”

Snitter made a great effort. “There’s a place, Rowf, a place-secret, dry, out of the rain. I believe we couldn’t be found there.”

“Couldn’t be found there?”

“By men—whitecoats or farmers—anyone.”

“Why not? They must have made it.”

“Yes, and come to that they made the gullies in the floor, where the mouse lived. Rowf, you’re wet through—”

“It’s clean water—”

“You’ll get fever.” Snitter nipped his fore-leg and dodged away as Rowf snarled and clambered shakily to his feet. “I’m sure I’ve found something good.”

“How can there be anything good in a place like this?”

“Come and see.”

When at last he had persuaded Rowf across the beck and up the steep bank to the grassy platform, the moon had set and they could barely make out the mouth of the cavern. Snitter led the way in, hearing behind him the clattering of the shale as Rowf limped on his painful leg. In the blackness of the first drift he lay down and waited for Rowf to join him.

For a long time they lay silently together on the dry stones. At last Snitter said, “Wouldn’t there be a chance, do you think; if only we could go on killing food? It’s deep—right down inside your head—and warm—out of the wind—and we could go a long way in if we had to—no one could find us—”

Rowf, lying stretched out on his side, raised his head sleepily. “Come over here; we might as well keep each other warm. Unless it’s some sort of trap—you know, suppose a whitecoat suddenly comes in and makes light—”

“There’s no smell of men at all.”

“I know. They made it, but they’ve gone. Or else it’s like the drains—”

“No, it isn’t like the drains,” answered Snitter. “We must always remember that, too. The whitecoats couldn’t get down the drains; not even the tobacco man could. But they could come down here all right if they wanted to; perhaps while we were asleep. So they mustn’t find out we’re here at all.”

“Unless they know now. Unless they can see us now.”

“Yes—but somehow I feel they can’t. How does it smell to you?”

Rowf made no answer for a long time. At last he said, “I believe—I’m almost afraid to believe, but yes, I do believe you’re right, Snitter. And if you are—”

“Yes?”

“It’ll prove that we were right to escape after all; and we’ll have a chance to prove—to ourselves anyway—that dogs can live without men. We’ll be wild animals; and we’ll be free.”