The Plague Dogs

He took the Winchester out of its bag and mounted the telescopic backsight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He reached the cleft between the two projecting rocks. It was a frightening place, much less secure than it had appeared from above, with an almost sheer drop below and the smooth surfaces glistening with icy moisture. He had planned to lean against the left-hand rock and rest the rifle on its outer edge, near the centre of the gully. But now, at close quarters, this idea proved impracticable, for the rock was too tall and in any case projected downward, at considerably more than a right angle to the side of the gully. The opposite rock was better, its height diminishing to about four feet at the outer edge, but to use this for a support would, of course, involve a left-handed, left-eyed shot. However, thought Mr. Westcott, with the telescopic sight and at such short range a left-handed shot pffered a good chance of success. Anyway, it was the only'chance that was being offered. In spite of his determination he was growing increasingly nervous. The drop below alarmed him and a glance over his shoulder confirmed that, unless he was prepared to jettison his rifle", the climb back was going to be horribly precarious.

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

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

At this moment, not twenty feet above him in the gully, there broke out a sharp, excited yapping. Mr. Westcott started and simultaneously fired. The shot severed the dog's collar and as it leapt up he saw the blood spurt from its neck. In the same instant he lost his balance, clutching frantically at the icy top of the rock. The rifle slipped from his grasp, a stone turned under his fodt, he grabbed at the rock again, found a slippery hold, retained it for one appalling, nightmare moment--time enough to recognise the dog looking down at him--and then pitched headlong. When Snitter had left him, Rowf tried to return once more to his dreary sleep on the stones. Yet despite the feeling of exhaustion which seemed to permeate his whole body as the wind the hawthorn, he remained awake, gnawing on his misery like an old, meatless bone. Snitter had said that in the last resort he meant to go down into the valley and give himself up to the men. And it was this to which Rowf knew that he himself was not equal. This was the fear of which he was ashamed--the fear of which he had always been too much ashamed to tell even Sn'tter. In the instant after the electric light had filled the Glen-ridding farmyard, he had thought: What if they don't shoot? What if they send for the whitecoats and take me back to the drowning-tank? The drowning-tank, he knew, was his and his alone. No other dog in the shed had ever been put into the drowning-tank. So it was a fair assumption that the whitecoats wanted him back to go on putting him in the tank. His fear of the tank knew no bounds and of that fear he was ashamed. The whitecoats, whom he could not help but think of as his masters, wanted him to go on drowning in the tank, and he could not do it. Once, long ago, he reflected, the poor terrier bitch whom Snitter had seen--the bitch that was now a ghost--must, to remain by her master and guard him, have faced protracted death from hunger. Yet the drowning-tank was the true reason why, after the Glenridding escape, he, Rowf, had refused to attempt another farm raid; and the reason why, though he shared Snitter's despair, he had now let him set out alone.

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

And I envy him too, thought Rowf. Why couldn't there be just a quick shot, now, and that would be that? The tod was right; you'd wonder why we take so much trouble to stay alive. The reason is that no creature can endure being hungry--as the tod very well knew. The bitch--how did she do it? Indeed, his hunger had now become an unendurable torment. His instincts were cloudy with hunger; he smelt the scree and the tarn as though through a drifting smoke of hunger, saw them as though through a sheet of hunger-coloured glass. He took a paw between his teeth and for a moment seriously wondered whether he could eat it. The pain of biting answered him. He tried to gnaw a stone, then laid his head back on his paws and began to think of all the enemies he would have been ready to fight, if only fighting could have saved Snitter's life and his own. If nothing else, he had always been a fighter. Might it not be possible, in some way or other, to go down fighting? To bite, to bite, to sink the teeth in, aarrgh!--if only I hadn't driven the tod away, perhaps we might have learned at last how to be wild animals. Men--how I hate men! I wish I'd killed one, like Snitter. Oh, I'd rip his throat out, tear open his stomach and eat it, shloop, shloop! Suddenly he felt a stinging pain in his neck, like the bite of a horse-fly but sharper, fiercer. As he leapt up, the sound of the shot reached him, magnified in the gully walls. Tearing over the loose stones, he could hear Snitter yapping somewhere far above and then a shriek--a human shriek--of fear. He stopped, confused. Where was Snitter? Pebbles were falling, yes and something else, something much heavier than pebbles. He could hear it, whatever it was, slithering, bumping, thudding to rest behind him in the gully. Holding himself ready to run, he watched to see what would emerge, but now there was complete stillness. He waited some time. Nothing moved. Not a sound. He could hear his own blood dripping on the stones.

He returned cautiously round the buttress to the foot of the gully. A little way off, sprawled on the scree, lay a man's body, the head bent grotesquely sideways, one outstretched arm ending in a gashed and bleeding hand.

The smell of blood was warm and strong. Rowf began to salivate. Slowly he moved nearer, drooling, licking his chops, urinating over the stones. The body smelt of sweat and fresh, meaty flesh. The smell obliterated the sky, the tarn, the stones, the wind, Rowf's own fear. There was nothing else in the world--only toothy, doggy Rowf and the meaty smell of the body. He went nearer still.

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

Poor old Rowf! thought Snitter. I can't really leave him, just to go down to a farm and get myself killed. Killed! Oh, good heavens, oh, the tod! That settles it! I shall have to go back and tell Rowf about the poor tod. What was it he said I was to say? "Reet mazer wi' yows"--I can't just ignore the poor tod's last message to Rowf. Still bemused with shock and hunger, he made his way back to the Hause and so down to Goat's Water. Stopping to bark as he crossed the tnfall beck, he heard a curiously muffled reply from Rowf, coming, apparently, from deep in one of the gullies. It was not until he got nearer that he heard also the sounds of dragging and worrying, smelt blood and began to salivate in his turn. Yet upon entering the gully itself, he was altogether unprepared for what he saw. Wednesday the 24th November Punctually at five minutes to three on the afternoon of the following day, Digby Driver presented himself at the ( 382.) front door of Animal Research. It was warmer, pleasant weather, with a pale-blue, windy sky, the becks running brown and strong with the thaw and a smell of resinous larch trees in the air. Down on Coniston Water a flock of Canada geese had come in and the big, brown-breasted, black-necked birds could be seen and heard, trumpeting and honking as they hustled across the surface of the lake. They were, one would have thought, worth a glance; but if they had been anhingas and black-browed albatrosses, Digby Driver would not have taken a single step aside, since he would not have been aware of anything unusual. He stubbed out his cigarette on the porch wall, threw it down on the step, rang the bell and shortly found himself in a stuffy interview room, facing Dr. Boycott, Mr. Powell and a cup of thin tea.

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

Supply Day debate on the cost of research establishments, the whole thing was likely to come to a lame conclusion for lack of a Pelion to pile on Ossa.

Digby Driver, if not yet up a tree, was beyond argument gripping a lower branch with one hand.

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

"I'm very glad," said Dr. Boycott, offering Driver a cigarette, "that you've at last come along to see us this afternoon. Better late than never, you know.

Now do tell us how you think we can help you. I'm sure we'll be delighted to do so if we can."

It took a lot more than this sort of thing to put Digby Driver off his stroke.

As a professional bastard, he would not have been unduly troubled by the most adroit manipulation of chairs, ashtrays and lights within the capacity of Mr.

Michael Korda himself. Like the great image in Nebuchadnezzar's dream, his belly and thighs were as of brass and his legs as of iron.

"Well, I'd like to ask you to tell me a little more about these dogs," he began.

"Now, let me see, which particular dogs are we talking about?" asked Dr.

Boycott with a warm smile.

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

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

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

"Ah," said Dr. Boycott triumphantly, with the air of a Q. C. who has now in very sooth extracted from a witness ffor the other side the fundamental piece of disingenuous bilge which he intended to extract. "Now that's precisely the point. What locality and what trouble?", Deliberately, Driver knocked the ash off his cigarette | and sipped some of his foul tea.

"Well, O.K., let's start from scratch, then, if that's the lway you want it.

You're not denying that some time ago f'lwo dogs got out of this place and that they've been: running wild on the fells?"

"We're certainly not denying that two dogs got out. As think you know, we said as much in an early press latement we issued. What happened to them after that v: Pm afraid I can't tell you. They may very well have been i dead for some time." y' "And it can't be denied that these dogs may quite I likely have been in contact with bubonic plague?" |! "It's improbable in the last degree that they were," fsaid Dr. Boycott.

; K; "But you can't give a definite assurance that they •|-weren't?" |l "When we say something here?' answered Dr. Boycott, '& ( 385) with radiant cordiality, "it's always one hundred per cent reliable. That's why we haven't given any such assurance. But I repeat, for all practical purposes it's improbable in the last degree that--"

"Would you like to amplify that a little? Explain why?"

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

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

"You say they're not bothered? That you let two dogs escape?"

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

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

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

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

"I don't see why you shouldn't know that'

' he replied at length, thereby inadvertently suggesting that there were things which he thought Digby Driver should not know. "One was taking part in certain tests connected with physiological and psychological reactions to stress; and the other was a brain surgery subject."

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

"I think the best way I can answer that," replied Dr. Boycott, "is to refer you to paragraph--er--270, I think--yes, here it is--of the 1965 Report of the Littlewood Committee, the Home Office Departmental Committee on Experiments on Animals.

'From our study of the evidence; about unnecessary experiments and the complexity of biological science, we conclude that it is impossible to tell what practical applications any new discovery in biological - knowledge may have later for the benefit of man or animal. Accordingly, we recommend that there should be no general barrier to the use of animal experimentation in seeking new biological knowledge, even if it cannot be shown to be of immediate or foreseeable value.' "

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

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

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

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

"So anyway, these dogs get out," he said, "and you do nothing about it--"

"We haven't got people to spare to go chasing all over the countryside looking for dogs on spec," replied Dr. Boycott crisply. "We've complied with the law.

We told the police and the local authorities. For the matter of that, dogs round here sometimes run away from farmers [who own them, and those farmers sometimes lose track of •them altogether. We've done the same as a farmer does.", "But these dogs-- first they kill sheep: then they actually cause the death of a man; then they begin attacking shops and farmyards--"

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

"The Miss Dawsons at Seathwaite saw their green collars--"

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

"What about the farmer at Glenridding and the attack on Westcott's car near Dunmail Raise? Have you forgotten that this matter is going to be raised in a Parliamentary debate in the House tomorrow night? If I may say so, Mr.

Boycott, you're being grossly irresponsible!"

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Boycott was frowning, his face expressing surprise and perplexity. As Mr.

Powell drew fresh breath to struggle and splash, the telephone rang. Dr.