The Rendezvous and Other Stories Page 21

  A quarter of an hour later they were going along at a great pace, pushing in a straight determined line across the country: the reasons for this move were utterly obscure – Kirk thought he must have dozed momentarily in spite of the cold, because he had suddenly started up to the sound of urgent Welsh, and then immediately afterwards they had set off. ‘Without sleep, there is no waking,’ he said, nodding to himself. ‘That’s logic.’

  Time passed, and his hunger with it. From time to time as they traversed this stony wilderness they paused to listen, and it seemed to Kirk that they were anxious now. At last, far ahead, they heard a hound, a single deep bell-like voice. They stopped to make certain, for the wind had often made a noise like baying as it eddied in the higher crags; and indeed there it was, clear and certain, directly forward.

  ‘It’s marking in the Ceunant he is,’ said Gerallt: or rather he put out the words as a suggestion. The Master waited a moment longer and then nodded. They went on faster still and presently four or five hounds met them, young hounds, capering idly about. The pack had run their fox to earth; they had grown tired of waiting and they were scattering abroad. Unless the marking hound stayed where he was, the fox was lost.

  Gerallt called them in and ran forward, bounding like an enormous hare and bawling ‘Yo mark her then, Countess. Yo mark her then, Ranter. Ooick, Ranter, yo mark to him, boy.’

  Some of the hounds that had broken back began hunting away to the right on a frivolous line and now the Master’s voice joined in as he lifted them off it. ‘Aah, you bloody rebels. Lucifer, Lucifer, you bloody sod. God damn and blast that bloody Lucifer.’

  Kirk heard the twanging of the horn as he toiled up the slope, and all at once there he was on the edge of the Ceunant, an abrupt, unexpected cleft, a narrow gorge, a shale and grass slope running down to jagged rocks and a white stream far below: it wanted only a few more vertical degrees to be a precipice. Gerallt was already far down its face, scrambling and sliding at a breakneck rate, still roaring like a bull. He was making for an outcrop of grey rock that jutted from the slope, with three good hounds below it, marking still – Ringwood, Countess and Ranter.

  Half consciously Kirk noticed the care with which the hound in front of him launched itself over the edge: nothing much, but a horribly significant little check that made him feel sick as he too went over. It was worse than he had thought, the farthest limit of what two feet could manage; but his stick, his nailed boots and two or three providential rocks kept him from plummeting headlong to the distant stream, and with a last wild rush he reached the outcrop. Here, with the flat top firm under his feet, he found that his body was trembling all over – that the height had made him so dizzy he could hardly stand.

  The Master was there immediately after him; without a pause he passed his terriers to Kirk and slipped down to join Gerallt below. A double note of the horn brought the stragglers racing in from the far side, and now the terriers were put to. The earth was a long cleft in the base of the rock, a cleft that ran up until it became a hair-like crack. The terriers below were madly excited; they set up the wildest bawling, and before he was aware the little brutes that Kirk was holding hurled themselves at the edge and very nearly had him over. He braced himself against their pull, squatting on the rock, and he yelled at them; but they took no notice of his voice, nor of his stick, though he rapped them hard.

  From this position he could see nothing: he did not mind that at all however – the near prospect of being plucked over that edge had quite daunted him. The sheer twenty feet and the plunging slope below had woken all his latent vertigo: his stomach heaved: the landscape turned.

  Presently he heard Gerallt’s voice calling him. The terriers, who had grown resigned, instantly redoubled their fury, heaving him towards the break. He thumped them brutally and edged to a place from which he could see the huntsman.

  ‘Would you come down here just a minute, Doctor?’ he asked.

  ‘May I let the terriers go?’

  ‘Oh no indeed. You must not let the terriers go, Doctor bach.’

  It was a hellish experience. Where the rock met the shale was the only way down, and it was vertical – only a few widely-spaced and uncertain stones to give any footing at all. Without the right use of his hands and with the terriers liable to hurl him off his balance at any moment, it seemed impossible. However, this time his low, savage, earnest cursing impressed the dogs: he dangling them ruthlessly by their collars, dragged them over rock; and, gravity and good luck helping, it was done. He came into the comparative safety of the slope under the outcrop: Gerallt handed him those terriers that were not already underground and recommended his going back to the top, as the best place for watching for the fox to bolt. Kirk faced the return with a kind of desperation; in fact it was far easier than the descent. The terriers pulled eagerly, and he clawed up after them.

  With all these dogs milling about it was hard to find a firm place to sit: but with brutal dragooning he did clear a good recess, a recess with a grip for his heels, some way back from the hideous edge; and there he sat. He could not tell what was happening below without peering over – an impossibility until this vertigo could be mastered – so there he stayed, feeling his bruises, reflecting upon giddiness and its unreasonable panic, and staring vacantly at the terriers until the Master’s voice called for more by name. Kirk did not know any of their names, but he slipped those who seemed most eager to go. He seemed to have done right, for there was no sound of reproach, and some minutes later the Master called for another couple, adding ‘That Tory had a grip on him now’. Kirk was left with the two quietest: old bald-faced bitches with few teeth between them, who had been brought only because it broke their hearts to be left.

  He felt the dizziness recede, and the illogical dread; and to test the effect of height again he stood up. He had taken two paces towards the edge when he saw the fox on the shale twenty yards below the earth, running hard and fast in a bunched-up long-legged gallop, its tail held up in a curve.

  Instantly he bawled ‘Gone away’, and there again was the Jack Russell with another terrier by her, flying over the rocks. But every hound had been idling on the far side, and although they were laid on with might and main they were slow away, and with intense relief Kirk saw the fox racing between the boulders right down towards the stream before they began to run on his line.

  This time the terriers were all out directly, all but one, and they did not wait for him. The fox had run straight up the Ceunant for a quarter of a mile, then up the side where it was very bare and rocky, and so over the ridge behind. They talked a little as they followed – the atmosphere was different, now that there were only the three of them left – and the Master said that until this last minute he had supposed they had changed foxes, had put up a fresh fox by Llys Dafydd; but now he saw that it was the same. Gerallt said that Countess had marked very well, and the Master agreed – she was a nice little bitch.

  The wind met them again at the top of the ridge with even greater force: they saw hounds on the other side of the valley, working slowly up the far slope: far more slowly now.

  ‘It’s this damned cold wind spoiling the scent,’ said the Master.

  They went down, across the marshy bottom and up the other side. Up and up the other side: it seemed unending, and the muscles on the front of Kirk’s thighs hurt so much that he thought they must refuse their duty. He poled himself up with his stick, working out each step ahead: and there was the top, the strain gone as though he had dropped a heavy load. He paused a moment to look at his meaningless watch and breathe deep, staring round the grey, indeterminate landscape. The others were twenty yards ahead now, and he broke into a shambling run to catch up. Down the hill, then up another. How he wished they could stop, if only for a minute. To sit in the shelter of a rock long enough to smoke a small pipe out…

  How interminably the upward slope climbed on! How he hated the steadily marching backs in front of him. Now a wall, a stone wall with a strand of old barbe
d wire on top of it; and the terriers had to be helped over. Kirk went last, and by the time he had leapt down, jarring every fibre of his being, the others were well beyond it, going fast. Again the stumbling run, the trip and fall, before he joined them.

  Another wall – this mountainside was checkered with them, great unsteady dry-stone barriers – another slope. But at least this slope was down and for a few hundred yards it changed the strain, until the long fore-reaching jolt made a climb almost welcome again. Now the hounds were at a check in the wet dead ground at the bottom and the men paused to let them work. With Bellman and Ranter and the cleverer hounds leading they cast round and about on the far side, but it was some time before they could hit off the line again. Kirk was happy to see the others sit on stones as willingly as he did himself and show evident signs of fatigue: he had begun to think them immortal. As the ghost-like hounds wafted to and fro he felt a hint of strength coming back into his legs: he might, if pushed, manage to get up again. Now Ranter hit the line; Countess owned it too, and some other hounds; and although they were no longer speaking with that old passionate conviction, they ran straight, all together, and up the other side.

  It was not until he was half-way up the next slope, climbing a wall again, that Kirk recognized the familiarity of the darkening countryside. They were mounting towards the Craig Llyn Du, going painfully up the way they had come down so very long ago. Here the scent was patchy; the hounds had to puzzle out the line almost yard by yard, and now they hardly spoke at all. Slowly they carried it up and up, right to the great curtain of rock; and as their white forms zigzagged up the steepest part Kirk fell behind. His lungs and heart seemed to be bursting, and although he was climbing still it was only because of a check that he was able to come up with them. Up up and beyond to the edge of the bitterly cold lake from which the water fell so far to Llyn Du. Up here the ice was forming, and the crust tinkled underfoot.

  From the high lake the hounds came back along the stream to the falls, and now it seemed that they had certainly lost their fox. It took them twenty minutes to work over the bare rock in the howling wind, but at last Countess, casting ahead as far as the heather, spoke on the true strong line – the fox must be failing, his scent growing fatally strong – and the others came to her. They ran fast down the length of the fall, checked for a short while at the bottom and then while the men sat and watched them they ran with a fine cry along the shores of Llyn Du and over the lower edge of the valley that enclosed the lake, down to the broken country out of sight.

  They must be very near him, thought Kirk as they began to go down. Down, from rock to rock with here and there a patch of heather; they dropped fast, ten times faster than the weary road up, and when they reached the bottom Kirk reflected that he might as well have stayed below all the time. More usefully too, for then he could have gone along to see which way they had taken in the difficult country beyond: his heavy mind was obstinately fixed on the notion of the chase.

  They splashed along – it was marshy here – and both the Master and Gerallt were listening – they were uneasy – the hounds had fallen mute too suddenly. Had they run into their fox? He was sure they had not.

  The lake was far longer this time; there were waves on it and a yellow foam on the leeward shore. It took a long time to reach the place where the sloping ground began; and there they were met by several hounds coming slowly back, quite at a loss and dispirited. No sound of any marking, and indeed Ranter, the most steadfast hound in the pack, joined them a moment later, with Countess and Bellman. It was clear that the unceasing bitter wind had been too much at last – the failing scent would not lie; and when they came to a little ravine with a path running through it the Master said, ‘Well, I think I shall go home now, Doctor. Where did you leave your car?’

  ‘At the end of the road,’ said Kirk. He was standing with his back to the wind, facing one of the many sudden upthrusts of rock that lined the hillside: on the face of it, seven or eight feet up, were three ledges, two bare and one with heather growing. On the heather-covered ledge there lay the fox. Dead-beat, wet, matted, flattened. Kirk closed his mouth suddenly with an audible intake of breath: he peered furtively at the Master’s tired, drawn face and turned away from the ledge in case it should be obvious where he was looking. The Master bent to his horn and blew a lovely note, long and true; then another: the fox did not stir.

  At last they were moving down the path, the huntsman in front, then a long string of hounds with more joining them from either side, then a bunch of sober terriers, many of them carrying a leg, then the Master with his old black dog moving stiffly, then Kirk; they went down the rocky defile with their heads bowed against the wind, down to the long road home.

  On the Bog

  ‘IT IS TIME to be moving,’ said Boyle.

  ‘What? What?’ cried Meagher, starting wildly out of his sleep – a cry of alarm.

  Boyle made no reply, but flashed his lighter to look for the leg of the tall thigh-boots beside him; indeed there was no need for a reply, since the momentary gleam showed the whole scene at once, the interior of a reed-walled butt, guns, a game-bag, duck-boarded floor, the wooden bench. The flame also lit Boyle’s handsome face, exaggerating its high arrogant nose and the morning beard; and in this brief flash Meagher’s being fell back into its present context.

  They had lain out on the bog all night, so that they could get out to the far end for the geese, for the dawn-flighting, well before daybreak and well before any keepers were moving.

  Of course it had been Boyle’s idea entirely. In Jammet’s a man was prating about geese, great skeins of greylags brought down by the hard weather, and turning to Meagher Boyle said, ‘How should you like to have a shot in the morning? I know a capital place, and you are the great wildfowler, I believe.’

  Meagher was pleased, flattered with the notice and the preference – particularly the preference, because toad-eating Clancy was there, eager for any invitation that might be going; and although he had been up at a party all night before he said he would be very happy indeed – ‘wildfowling is meat and drink to me’. They left at once, walked over the river to Boyle’s place – Meagher was one of the few who had been there – and loaded gun-cases, cartridge-bags and tarpaulin into the car.

  ‘It is the devil we have no dog,’ said Boyle. ‘Clancy spoke of a labrador.’

  ‘Oh, that was only his froth and pride; he has never owned so much as a cat in all his life. I’ll act as the dog,’ said Meagher, laughing.

  Boyle sent him for cartridges with a five-pound note and as soon as he came back they drove straight out of the town. A long drive, too fast for conversation with the hood off, fast along winding lanes and boreens, and Meagher was excited with the rushing air, pleased to be sitting there next to Boyle: then the stop in the lee of a turf-stack and the walk out, a great way across rough pasture as far as a dyke. ‘We are not going in there, are we?’ asked Meagher, reading a notice in the fading light. It was one of many posted all along the near bank forbidding trespassers, warning of mantraps, stating that dogs should be shot on sight.

  ‘That is the general idea,’ said Boyle. He felt for a plank in the rushes, laid it across, lifted the wire the far side, slipped through and stood waiting.

  ‘I don’t mind a bit of poaching,’ said Meagher, ‘but …’ He could not find an acceptable way of putting ‘but only when it is fairly safe’, so he said no more. This was certainly far from safe: he did not know which county they were in even, but they had run along two miles of park wall with an enormous house inside it before stopping, and now they stood in flat open country without a bush or a hedge for miles. The notices were fresh and trim; this was obviously a strictly preserved estate.

  ‘Never worry about them,’ said Boyle. ‘You are only an honorary dog; and in any case geese and duck are not game. They are ferae naturae – they have no animus revertendi.’

  Meagher could hardly reply to that. He walked on over the tussocky forbidden ground, lookin
g as unconscious and confident as he could. They had not gone a hundred yards before a single partridge got up in front of them, a little to the right. Boyle’s gun leapt to his shoulder; he fired, and the bird hit the ground so hard it bounced twice. He said, ‘I beg pardon, Meagher. That was really your bird. Just pick it up, will you, there’s a good fellow.’

  Meagher picked it up, glancing round in every direction; and he picked up two rabbits and a snipe as well before they reached downright bog with redshanks in the cuttings and curlews crying high overhead. Looking ahead in the twilight he could see tall reeds, dense cover that would hide their nakedness; but between them and the reeds lay an intricate series of channels, many of them newly dredged. Boyle led the way through, walking casual and easy like a tenant for life and a man who knows his way well.

  ‘You seem to know your way well,’ said Meagher.

  ‘I used to come here in the old duke’s time,’ said Boyle. And some time later, pushing through the innermost reeds, he said, ‘The old boy always did himself proud. Just look at this butt, will you? Now that’s what I call a truly ducal butt. Benches, duck-boarding. There will be straw in that barrel; but suppose you cut some rushes as well – here is a knife. I will keep an eye lifted in case the duck start to move.’

  Meagher could have sworn he had not slept at all that night. Certainly with his prickling eyes and general weariness he felt he had not. The greater part of it (all but the last twenty minutes in fact) he had lain listening to Boyle snoring on his back, listening to the desolate call of marsh-birds he could not put a name to, weird shrieks and groanings, and to the stir of the reeds as ice formed on them. He was not very cold as he lay there in his nest of rushes and straw under a piece of tarpaulin, but he was wet from below and hungry, and as the hours wore by he smoked until he had no more in his packet. He was a heavy smoker, deeply addicted to cigarettes.