by Dave Wallis
“Steady girl,” said Ernie. “It’s all over now.” He threw her a scrap of meat and, as she lowered her head to sniff, he shot her neatly with a single through the skull. She twitched and then stretched out against her mate.
“What did you do that for?” said Kathy when he got back.
“She’d’ve stayed there by the body until she starved,” said Ernie. “I knew a fellow once worked at the White City Greyhound track. He told me a lot about dogs. They team up for life if they get a chance, it’s only that they’ve been around us too long that makes them like they are in the streets.” They started to walk towards a farmhouse which had come into view as they climbed the slope. “Don’t look now but we’re being followed,” said Ernie. The two dogs were trotting behind them and when anyone glanced at them they stopped and slowly wagged their tails.
The farmhouse was deserted but had obviously been raided before. The raiders must have been well supplied because they had left a few tins rusting in the back of the larder. They heated tomato soup on an old coal-burning range. Among some almanacs and next to a huge family bible Charlie and Robert found a musty volume entitled, “The Stock-keeper’s Guide and Shepherd’s Friend”. There were three candles in a tin in a cupboard safe from rats and mice and they lit these later and sat around the huge bare table while Charlie read out bits and they discussed the meaning of certain words such as “lactation” and “gestation”.
“It’s all rather disgusting,” said Estelle.
“We got to learn, though,” said Ernie. He got up and crossed to the door and opened it. Outside there was no moon, only the soot-blackness of a country night. Ernie called, “Patch, Wag, Patch, Wag!” and whistled. The two dogs trotted out of the shadows, hesitated and then walked in over the threshold and sat in the pool of light near the table. Everyone spoke to them, except Julia, and they thumped their tails on the floor. Kathy poured them a pan of well water.
“Look up if it says anything about how to train dogs, Charlie,” said Ernie.
12
They had the luck of a mild winter. Slowly they gathered sheep and cattle and moved northward stopping wherever there was hay stored. They acquired more dogs and trained them to hunt hares and wild sheep across the moors. Their stock-keeping improved until births were slightly ahead of deaths.
The towns were still full of plague and the remaining supplies were held by fierce gangs who shot on sight. Packs of wild dogs always seemed to threaten from the South, never from the North and so the drift up through Lincolnshire to the old East Riding went on until spring. They had to ford the river Ouse, for all bridges were held by large local gangs who levied heavy tolls or even captured travellers for slaves and stole their stock.
The long days herding and walking and hunting over the hills toughened them. Both boys and girls grew thinner and harder and their lips cracked and then healed dry again, but scarred, and their lean cheeks turned sun-browned and wind-reddened.
Some of the gang dropped away and joined up with sheep stealers from the towns. One of the girls met a solitary herdsman and left her own Seely boy to mope and to be the butt of jokes; until Julia took it upon herself to cheer him up, “temporarily” as she put it.
Kathy and Estelle had been studying the household section of the “Stock-keeper’s Guide and Shepherd’s Friend”. The gang were now in an abandoned cottage high in the Wolds. The small herd and flock cropped at the scant pasture. Kathy set out to find some things needed by herself and Estelle.
She asked Ernie if she could safely go down to Malton now that the grazing had brought them so near. He nodded and whistled up Patch and Wag who stood wagging their tails and ready to bound off with him on hunting or sheep capture. “Go with Kathy,” he said. They started to leap around her, ready for the off. “There’s a few sheep-stealers or gipsies camped out in the Green Man in the market place, but as far as Charlie and I could see nobody else. The dogs’ll look after you.” Kathy said, “Good boys! Patch! Wag!” They ran off a few yards and turned and barked practically beckoning her on.
“So long,” said Kathy. “I want to look for something special in the town.”
“Not much left,” said Ernie.
She walked down the gentler slopes towards the outskirts of the empty twin towns of Malton and Norton. Cloud shadows slid over the grass and the dogs chased between them and then came bounding back protectively to her side. She sang to herself, old dance tunes from years ago. And then the first quiet streets of the empty town closed around her. A group of wild sheep dashed in terror across her path and she had to snap at the dogs quickly to stop them giving chase. The fool flock split and half of them rushed up the deserted street. The scampering of their hooves made the only sound. She walked down the middle of the street and the dogs’ nails pattered on the unfamiliar paved ground. She came to a small provision shop and entered. The shelves were empty of tins. A few bags of rotting currants or raisins had burst and spilled out their swollen fruit, and the sweetly decaying stench filled the air. A clean white deep-freeze stood near the doorway and a faint humming noise came from it. She couldn’t believe her ears, all the boys had said it was impossible. Even handymen’s battery-operated gadgets of all kinds must have stopped by this time. She walked over to the white enamel tank, and peered in. The bottom half was full of a swampy black swill of decaying meat and chicken cartons. The humming came from a million fly maggots, hatching and creeping and stewing on the crusty surface.
Years ago, before Windsor, she might have run out of the shop; but now she only wrinkled her nose and snapped her fingers to the sniffing dogs and went to the store-shed at the back of the shop. A stack of plastic detergent containers had weathered and split open, spilling out a treacle which gummed the white mound and all but obliterated the slogan, “FREE! FREE! FREE! SPECIAL OFFER! DAINTY DENTY-FORM TOOTHBRUSH THIS WEEK.” The toothbrushes spiked the crumpled pile like broken trees after an avalanche. In a corner stood sacks of flour. A rotted neck string gave at a tug and she thrust her hand and arm into the yellowing powder, set in a crumbling damp shell like old plaster. The dogs sat either side, thumping their tails and watching her with bright eyes. From the core of the sack she brought up a handful of white flour. It was dry and had no musty smell. She touched it with the tip of her tongue. There was the right taste as when she had put a finger on her mother’s pastry board years ago. She found a canister and filled it from the dry core of each of the sacks.
In a chemist’s shop she mined some dried yeast and then set off up the hills to the cottage again.
Estelle met her at the doorway, “I’ve got that old range going,” she said. “The wood burns so quickly, though, that the oven gets too hot and then cools off again. We’ll never do it. In the Domestic Science room there was the gas stoves with heat controls. Did you get the flour?” Kathy showed her. The two began their great experiment.
Nine miles off, high on the moors, the boys hunted wild sheep in the Howardian Hills. The game was scarce. All the gangs and tribes of the whole Vale of Pickering had hunted the slopes before such small southern mobs had ever fought their way north. The silly woolly things had learnt, in two of their own generations, how to scamper and split and run for it and even how to lie still, hearts thumping the turf, in hollows by the drinking points in the Hodge becks, or among the outlying scrub and trees of the neglected government aforestation plantations. They had learnt to jump fences like a kangaroo, and of all these black-faced, bleating, judges’-wig – mud-bedraggled creatures only the toughest and most un-sheep-like had survived. Bred for docility for two thousand years they now needed daring once more.
Ernie caught a glimpse of a clay-coloured, mud-streaked sheep’s back and ran panting to the highest point of a long ridge. Three of the dogs trotted, trained at his heels. He beckoned to Charlie, Robert and the three others and they broke into a run and spread out to the flanks. One of the dogs barked. “Shut up!” snapped Ernie. The wind lifted his jacket as he swung down the slope and he felt it s
trike cool on his damp chest and armpits. He raised both arms as he ran, half-stooping, down the slope, and the dogs tacked off to left and right, panting and turning their intelligent faces up towards Charlie and Robert as if to report that they were now detached and under the orders of the deputy pack-leaders. Boys and dogs together swooped down silently. Ernie’s legs ached and his lungs sucked in the clean air, wine-heavy with the smell of sun on grassland and heath. A triangular black face lifted for a second above a small clump of gorse and a ram’s curled horns jerked up. The dogs yelped and bayed. From a hundred yards away to either side the boys shouted. The aim was to panic the quarry so that he would lose his sense of surroundings and become incapable of escape. The head of the ram and his broad back could now be glimpsed bouncing away through the springy turf. In three minutes they had him. The dogs leaped and yelped and the old ram put down his head and back bravely. Finding Charlie behind him and Ernie with the knife in front he gave one bleat of despair and they grabbed him and slit his throat. The dogs whined, hinting that the beast should be chopped up and everyone eat their share raw there and then. “We’ll have a rest and then start back,” said Ernie. For some reason they first dragged the carcase some yards away from the killing spot where lay a trampled pool of blood and wisps of curled wool around which the dogs sniffed intently.
They all stretched their tired limbs on the turf and talked. “We’ll have to watch the time for getting back,” said Ernie. “How’s the moon going to be, Bob?” Robert raised himself on one elbow and felt inside the pocket of his rag-thin jacket and brought out a piece of cardboard ruled into squares. “Either we leave in about half an hour or else we’ll have to wait two hours till it rises.”
“We’ll get away then when we’ve had a breather.” They relaxed and felt lazy. The next two or three meals were now safe and they would be able to go back to the girls with a sheep to roast.
West-wind-blown clouds rolled down like smoke towards the hills. The dogs lay, chins pressed to the ground and shifted their eyes watchfully from the sheep corpse to the boys and back, waiting.
Ernie kicked the woolly, stiffening sack of meat with his toe. “See the way he put his head down? In a minute he’d’ve reared up and butted down on them. He was a good one.” He paused. “I’ll bet he eats tough,” he said in a different tone.
“In the old comics they used to show you rams coiled up like a watch-spring and charging along to butt. They don’t do that at all,” said Charlie.
“Was there anything the oldies told us that was right?” said Ernie. They were silent and the high northern sun warmed them where they lay, out of the worst of the wind.
“What would be nice now,” grunted Charlie lazily, “would be not to have to move and the girls come out here instead and skin and cook the ram.”
“Yes, and say they’d found some tins of beer buried somewhere, still drinkable. . . .” They all took up the fantasy and added to it.
“Some posh house quite near to here with a proper water system still working and you could have a hot shower. . . .”
“And there’d be a lot of tinned stuff nobody had ever found hidden away somewhere, tinned bacon, real sausages, tinned chicken.”
“More beer . . .”
“And then take the girls and poke them in real beds, with sheets. . . .”
“Have a swop round,” chimed in one of the younger boys and all at once the fairy-story building stopped sharp. “You know, an orgy sort of, like the old days,” said the boy.
There was still silence. “Better get going,” said Ernie. “The sheep’s real anyway.”
“Too bloody real,” said Charlie. “It’ll weigh a ton by the time we’ve carried it back.”
“Never mind,” said Ernie. “We’ll eat it and then have ‘a orgy’.” Robert, Charlie and the other older gang-founders laughed. They all stood up and started the long walk to the cottage through the slowly gathering dusk. It was a good nine miles and most of that over the hills and boulders of the ancient jurassic scarps. At first they took it in turns to stumble along with the carcase on their shoulders, but when they tired they took a leg each and stumbled on through the coarse grass. They stretched out the time with singing old pop numbers and rude songs. The stiffening ram bumped their knees. The more tired they became the more pornographic the songs. It was nearly dark when they picked up the River Rye just below the junction with the Severn. They put down the dead weight of mutton and found a gravelly shallows, trodden by sheep and the wild dog packs. They drank from a tin cup Charlie carried on his belt. The cold hill water hurt the teeth. The dogs lay in the mud and lapped their fill. It was a big effort to start lugging the carcase along once more and there was no breath left for singing. It was nearly dark.
After a time the water made them even more hungry. “We’ll sleep well tonight, Ernie,” grunted Charlie.
“If the girls’ll let us.”
“That’s a point. What was Kathy doing, going down to that town today?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I just thought for some girl’s stuff. You know, thread or needles or to see if there were some monthly thingummies still lying around the town chemist’s.”
“I just wondered if she’d gone for all the girls to try and find some f.l.’s or anything like that.”
“We’ve still got some.”
“Mighty few.”
“Enough. Besides . . .”
“Besides, what?”
“Well, Kath and I have chanced it dozens of times and nothing’s happened yet.”
“There’s always a first time.”
“I can’t talk and put it in words like you do, Charlie. Look, I think it’s sort of psychological. All the oldies have done it. We’re left. There’s no one before us and so there’ll be no one after either.”
“Don’t talk daft, Ernie. There’s been hundreds of kids born and most of them croaked of the plague or because nobody knows what to do anymore. The only reason our gang has not had more is luck and using the things we got, that’s all.”
“You’re not worried then?”
“I got enough worries.”
When it seemed that they could heave the kill along no longer the faint spot of light from the cottage flickered across a valley. The weight lightened and the last twenty minutes of stumbling and tugging passed more slowly than all the rest but faded from the memory more quickly as well. When they dumped the carcase in the yard Kathy and the girls pressed into the lighted doorway and said, “Oh good, they’ve got one.”
Ernie led the way. Only now, in the shadow of home and rest, did he feel the full bone-ache and empty-belly taste of real tiredness and hunger. He shrugged this sensation aside as he had learnt to do in the long months since the start of the trek north. Kathy was standing in the doorway with Estelle looking over her shoulder. From behind them came the smell of wood-smoke and of something else. The girls drew back. The smell filled his throat and his copper-wire, electric-spark tasting dry mouth gushed with saliva. His belly rumbled and even his guts seemed to give a twitch like a python in its sleep. The scent was heady and age-old memories rose with the fumes to his head. He became almost dizzy with hunger and tripped on the doorstep. The girls were looking at him anxiously and yet seemed pleased. He turned to Charlie and the others. “Bread!” he shouted. “It’s bread.”
All the girls gathered round. Only Julia sat sunk in a pile of sacks and sheepskins doping herself with one of her oak leaf cigarettes, and even she was watching closely.
Kathy opened the door of the warming space next to the oven of the old iron range. Everyone crowded round the bare table. She put out three round farmhouse loaves, swelling and firm like the buttocks of women.
“Bread, it’s real bread,” the boys shouted. The girls stood back and Estelle wiped her hands on her sacking apron.
“We didn’t know how it’d turn out,” said Kathy. “The yeast was so old and the flour all damp. It was Estelle who remembered the recipe from her D.S. lessons.”
“It was Kathy’s idea, though,” said Estelle. “What a job to get that range going. Easy to guess what made the oldie woman in this place do it.” They giggled. “What’s it like? The bit we tasted seemed O.K. but . . .”
There was no answer. The boys were hunched over the table gobbling at great chunks and torn wedges of bread and munching with wind-reddened, unshaven jaws. Crust crumbs dribbled down on to the board. With his mouth full Ernie cupped his left hand under the table edge and husbanded a sweeping of them along with his right hand edge. Then he pressed his left palm against his mouth and licked away clean every last fragment. All the boys did the same while the girls stood and watched and grinned in a show of unconcern. “We should’ve made you all wait and eat it properly with the meat,” said Kathy.
