Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot

by Horatio Clare

  ‘Your mother’s a straight-shooting sort of bird isn’t she? She’d do it, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘Right,’ said Aubrey, making a sudden decision. ‘I’ll do it. It’s OK to kill things if you’re going to eat them. Isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know about OK,’ said the heron, ‘Vegetarians would disagree. But a top predator like me doesn’t get that menu. I find killing fish rather beats starving to death. Different for you of course. You have to make a moral choice.’

  Ardea left. Jim returned. Aubrey showed him the new occupant of the pond.

  ‘Oh Aubrey! Where did you get that?’ Jim demanded, dizzily.

  ‘A heron dropped it,’ Aubrey said. ‘It’s a rainbow trout!’

  ‘It is – and so beautiful!’

  ‘Yes,’ Aubrey agreed, with a pang of conscience, ‘But won’t it taste delicious?’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Jim, ‘It would. With some new potatoes and lightly fried courgettes it would be scrumptious!’

  ‘Shall we catch it, Dad?’

  ‘Well, yes, I guess.’ Jim looked worried now. ‘I’ll have to kill it, you realise? I’ll try to make sure it doesn’t suffer, but I think you’d better not watch.’

  ‘Sure,’ Aubrey said, humbly grateful. ‘I’ll get you the hammer.’

  And off he zipped, followed by a surprised look from his father, who was not to know that Aubrey had thought this fish death through.

  Aubrey returned with the tool. It was a lumpen, heavy and serious hammer. You could put an elephant down with it if you tapped him in the right place.

  Jim had been staring at the trout. Now he turned to his son and swallowed.

  Oh dear, Aubrey thought.

  ‘I can’t do it,’ Jim said. ‘It’s too beautiful. We should put it in a bucket of water and take it down to the beck.’

  ‘But Dad, don’t you need to eat oily fish?’

  ‘I – I think I am supposed to, yes. But I don’t want to kill it! The poor thing.’

  ‘But you eat meat. And fish!’

  ‘I do – but – it’s different when it – when you…’

  ‘No problem,’ Aubrey said, briskly. ‘I’ve got this.’

  Before he had time to change his mind, before Jim had time to say anything, and, crucially, before the fish had time to protest, Aubrey lunged forward, grabbed the trout, hoiked it out and dealt it a solid whack with the hammer. The trout did not even have time to think anything – at least, not out loud. Aubrey thought he might have heard it say, ‘Oy!’ but that was that. He gave it another whack to be sure, and looked up at his father.

  Jim seemed impressed.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s call your mum and tell her to pick up some courgettes. We’re really going to eat!’

  CHAPTER 9

  Exercise is Good For You

  Supper that night was excellent.

  Afterwards, Jim felt brave enough to take a cup of coffee into the garden. He stood admiring the autumn stars, and the planets in their gold and twinkling red. Mr Ferraby happened to be putting out his compost. He bid Jim good evening without mentioning the heron, the fish, the conversations Jim’s son had seemed to have with the bird, or the surprising way in which the child had dispatched the trout.

  ‘Lovely evening, Mr Ferraby,’ Jim remarked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Mr Ferraby said. ‘Lovely day.’

  ‘It was,’ Jim said, and thought to himself It actually was! Perhaps I’m getting better… But then another voice inside him, a voice which was also his, but which was controlled by the Terrible Yoot, began to hiss insidiously in a corner of his mind…

  ‘Silly weak man, skulking at home, letting your little child use extreme violence against innocent fish - and why weren’t you at work earning your living and providing for your family?’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Ferraby, ‘Goodnight then.’

  ‘Good night! Mr Ferraby – ah – goodnight…’ Jim trailed off.

  ‘Are you planning to rely on herons delivering fish to feed your wife and child while you hide in bed and whimper?’ Jim’s Yoot-prompted, cruel and spiteful thoughts continued.

  ‘AH!’ Jim cried. He downed the rest of his coffee and stumbled inside.

  Mr Ferraby watched him go.

  ‘Jim seems troubled,’ he told Mrs Ferraby later. ‘I hope Aubrey’s not wearing him down with all this animal magic.’

  Mr Ferraby had not mentioned the heron and fish business to his wife. She gave him a thoughtful look.

  ‘Jim!’ Suzanne exclaimed, the next morning, ‘A heron just dropped a huge fish in the garden!’

  Sure enough, there was another trout in the pond. This time Jim did the necessary piscicide and brought the trout in. They had it for supper that night.

  The same thing happened the next day, too. Aubrey had to have a word with Ardea.

  ‘We aren’t herons! We can’t eat fish every day.’

  ‘You would if you were smart,’ the heron said, loftily. ‘Or if you wanted to be smart – you’d all become piscivores right now. But of course you’re only humans.’

  ‘It’s very kind of you, Ardea. But isn’t it a risk? Who owns the fish farm? Aren’t they going to get cross?’

  ‘They had a go at me with a shotgun the other day,’ Ardea said, mildly. ‘Something must have upset them – I can’t imagine what. As a Grey Heron I am protected at all times by the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, making it illegal to kill, catch or hold me in captivity. Perhaps they meant to miss, to scare me off.’

  ‘Please be careful! And – well – I think we can manage on three fish a week for now.’

  ‘Would you like me to clean the house while I’m here? Take out the rubbish? Do the shopping? Fetch the paper? Pick crumbs out of the car?’

  ‘The fish will be fine, Ardea! Thank you!’

  ‘We fly to serve,’ Ardea said, like an actor pretending to be tired. Then he bellowed: ‘Now clear the runway – CLEAR!’ and took off with a jump, a huge flapping, and a cackle.

  Jim decided that having heron-delivered fresh trout three times a week was so strange that the best thing he could do was accept it, and not make too much fuss. Suzanne mentioned the first two incidents to her friends at work, but then she left it. Aubrey never even thought of telling his friend Harrison: Harrison was not really into herons. Mr Ferraby thought about telling the newspapers, or starting a Remarkable Heron blog, but he did not. Something was going on next door and he wanted to know what would happen next, so he kept quiet, and kept watch.

  The business with the raven began when Jim was taking his daily walk. Jim knew he needed regular exercise but he panicked a bit at being seen out in the world, wandering around, when all his friends and colleagues were hard at work. Aubrey overheard him telling Suzanne he was ashamed of being ‘signed off sick’.

  ‘I should hide in the house until I’m better,’ he said, guiltily.

  Suzanne said hiding in the house was no way to get better.

  So Jim took little walks up and down the lane. They barely counted as exercise, Suzanne and Aubrey thought, but they seemed to make him happy, and he paused every few metres to study plants and birds and the sights of the valley – which was an improvement on staring at his feet. He took his precious binoculars with him and birdwatched. These binoculars were incredibly light and wonderfully powerful. Jim said they gave him the eyes of a falcon.

  As he wandered down the lane with his binoculars, falcon-eyeing the woods, the skyline and the birds moving through the trees along the stream, Jim failed to spot that he was being followed. He would have made a lousy falcon.

  He was leaning on a low stone wall, staring at the meadow below, his binoculars dangling idly from one hand, when his stalker struck. There was a sudden jerk – a mighty tug at his left hand – and his binoculars were gone: snatched!

  ‘Hey!’ he cried, spinning round.

  Jim’s binoculars were hanging in mid-air.

  ‘Hey!’

  His binoculars, his precious binoculars, were dang
ling from their strap. The strap was held tight in the claws of a huge black bird, bigger than any crow, with a hackle of feathers like a beard at its throat, a beak like a fat curved dagger and a look of dark amusement in its eye – a raven!

  The raven flew off down the road, gathering up the binocular strap and looping it over its neck. Now the bird landed on a wall forty yards away.

  ‘Give them back!’ shouted Jim.

  ‘PRRUUK!’ shouted the raven.

  Jim ran at it.

  The raven waited until Jim was almost within reach, flapped off, landed forty more yards away, bobbed his head and shouted ‘PRRUUK!’ again.

  Jim covered these yards even faster.

  ‘HAARR!’ called the raven, as Jim closed with it, and set off again. By stopping and starting, by landing and taking off again, by swooping and teasing, the raven made Jim run nearly a mile, right down to the edge of town, before flying over his head and making him run nearly a mile back the other way. Not for a moment did Jim consider giving up.

  Laying the binoculars gently on Jim’s doorstep the raven looked him in the eye, croaked something that sounded like ‘Thaar yaa aaar!’ and flew away. Jim put his hands on his knees, bent double and panted like a hot dog. He was shattered. The muscles in his legs felt as though someone had set fire to them. His lungs burned, his vision wavered and he thought he might be sick. But he had surely taken some vigorous exercise – and exercise, as everyone knows, is very good for you.

  ‘Corax,’ the raven said, ‘Corax Corax.’

  ‘Your parents named you twice?’ Aubrey asked. He was not exactly scared of the bird but he was wary of it. Anyone would be. It was huge, with a loud throaty voice and an accent that sounded as if it came from somewhere near the Tower of London. They were in the attic, the raven gripping the edge of the skylight, its fearsome claws digging into the wooden frame. With its great sharp bill and spiky beard Aubrey thought it was like talking to a pirate king.

  ‘We’re all Corax. My brother is Corax Corax Corax. My sister is Corax Corax Corax Corax. My nephew is…’

  ‘I see,’ said Aubrey. ‘So, er, what are you into?’

  ‘Death and acrobatics!’ crowed Corax. ‘You know the secret of ’appiness? Death! The Grim Reaper, the Lady in Brown, the Final Trumpet, the End! Good old graveyards – cheer anyone up! Anywhere you can guarantee a lot of death, that’s the place to go. Dead people, dead animals, squashed hedgehogs, bloated bodies, rotten sheep, splattered things – find some of them. Have a good gawp. Now, don’t you feel better?

  That’s not you is it? Under a gravestone, whitening down to a set of bones? That’s not you with the tyre track tattoo, squished flat, eyes popped and a belly full of maggots! No. You’re alive. And dead things are your friends. They fertilise the soil and fill the stomach. You eat dead plants, dead animals. Maybe you don’t pick ’em up when they’re rotting, but it’s the same thing – I just like the stronger flavours. What do you like?’

  ‘I like chocolate,’ Aubrey said.

  ‘Dead cocoa beans!’ Corax croaked. ‘Lovely! ’Course it’s harder being a raven now than it used to be. They don’t ’ang people like they did in my great-great-great grandfather’s time. They used to leave ’em swinging on the gallows to get pecked.

  People went to look at the bodies, even while Grandad was eating ’em, because it cheered them up – they felt alive! And gibbets, where gamekeepers used to ’ang the animals they shot, they’ve gone. There’s so much clearing up these days you ’ardly get more than a couple of pecks at a roadkill before someone pinches it. Tell your dad to go and get an eyeful of death, and a good strong sniff of it. Tell ’im from your uncle Corax – in a century or so the grubs that ate him will have been eaten by moles which will have died of old age and been eaten by grubs and all that’s left of ’im will be grub poo, and that’s all that’ll be left of most of us, grub poo! That’s the future, tell ’im. He will feel fantastic. We’re only here for a few decades if we’re lucky. Makes it a lot easier to enjoy life when you think of it like that – makes you want to do some acrobatics! Pity you can’t fly, I could teach you to loop the loop.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ said Aubrey.

  ‘By the time I’ve finished exercising ’im, your father will be turning somersaults!’

  ‘That’s good,’ Aubrey said, ‘But I’m not sure about all this death stuff.’

  ‘No one is!’ cackled Corax, ‘You might not be sure of death, but you can be sure Death’s sure of you! Ca-ha-ha!’

  ‘I can see it works for you, Corax,’ said Aubrey. ‘But it might make some people feel a bit gloomy.’

  ‘That’s because I am a joyful pessimist, which is someone who sees the gloomy side of things and laughs. ’Ave you met Mr Velvet ’Umps?’

  ‘Mr Velvet Humps? Who is he?’

  ‘Mr Velvet ’Umps is a mole. What you might call a Measured Optimist.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Someone who sees the bright side of things but likes to keep it calm. He lives in the field. Why don’t you go and ’ave a word? See what he thinks your old man should do.’ Corax flew away. Aubrey went to the end of the garden, climbed over the fence and made his way along the edge of the wood to the field. He sat down next to a molehill and waited. Soon the earth crumbled and shifted and a small snout poked out, with whiskers on the end, followed by a sleek black nose and two tiny eyes, blinking.

  ‘Mr Humps?’

  ‘Aubrey Rambunctious Wolf?’ The mole’s voice was soft. He spoke gently. ‘Did you want a word?’

  ‘I was talking to Corax Corax about gloom and death,’ Aubrey explained. ‘He said I should speak to you. It’s about my father.’

  ‘Yes, I heard about poor Jim. When I’m feeling a bit low,’ said the mole, thoughtfully, ‘I dig. Get down under some thick warm clods, then get down deeper. Did you know it gets warmer the deeper you go? Not many problems in this life can’t be solved by a bit of digging. Dig down until it gets warm and sleep there. Sleep as much as possible. If you stay down long enough, when you come back up, things look a bit different. You know, old world turns a bit, light looks different, trees look different, the season’s moved, the air smells good. And you’re hungry. So you eat a worm, and you think by heck that’s a good worm. This is a good morning. Maybe you eat another, and you think, it might even turn out to be a good day. And when you’ve got one of them behind you, there’s twice the chance the one in front will be good, too.’

  Aubrey thought this sounded very sensible advice. He talked with Velvet Humps for a while, watching the last of the sun making long shadows out of the molehills.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Attack

  Autumn darkened towards winter and tall rains fell hard and long. The trees of Rushing Wood were stark sentinels now, like cold old men with nowhere to go. They groaned in the wind. Sleet and hail swept in across the moors. The mornings were dim and noons were dull. The nights fell hungrily on the days. Despite the efforts of the squirrels to make Jim feel strong, and the raven’s campaign to make him fit (Jim had been forced to chase his hat, his scarf, his bag, his keys and his wallet, which Corax Corax pinched from his pocket) and despite his fish-rich diet, the coming of winter drove Jim down to a desperate place.

  Suzanne and Aubrey could see that he was sinking. He never laughed. He could barely eat half his trout. The doctors gave him pills to take but they only seemed to make him numb. They gave him pills to help him sleep, and pills to wake him up, and pills which were supposed to make him happier. Nothing helped.

  Aubrey knew that the Yoot had Jim in its grip, but Aubrey did not know how badly his father was suffering. Every day now, from the moment he woke up, Jim had to listen to the Yoot.

  ‘You have failed, Jim,’ it whispered to him. ‘Your life is a wreck. You are making Aubrey and Suzanne very unhappy. Why don’t you leave them to get on with their lives without being weighed down by a sad, selfish sack like you? Have you thought of going away?’ the Yoot hissed.
r />   The most cunning and deadly part of the Yoot’s attack on Jim was that Jim did not know where it came from. He had no concept of the Yoot: he thought the Yoot’s voice was just his thoughts, in his head. Because the rest of his mind was in such a turmoil of misery the Yoot’s voice was becoming the only thing he could hear clearly.

  ‘Have you thought of getting out of this mess you’re making?’ said the Yoot, disguised as Jim’s thoughts. ‘There is a way out, you know - yes, yes, you do! There are so many ways out, after all…’

  Now the Yoot’s voice in Jim’s head became soft. Its words were as sticky and sweet as golden syrup.

  ‘Why don’t you come for a little walk on the moors? We could find a sheltered spot. I’ll show you one, the perfect place to curl up. You can just fall asleep. I’ll keep you warm. I will hold you tight as you drop off, and you won’t have to suffer any more. Wouldn’t that be better than this?

  ‘Imagine - peace at last! A lovely deep sleep - aren’t you dying for that, Jim? Oh how you are! And then perhaps Suzanne will meet a good strong man, the kind who laughs a lot. She will meet a man Aubrey will admire, someone who will bring him up to be happy, with lots of opportunities. Someone successful, a champion - that’s what your little boy needs, not a slug like you! Think of Aubrey! Doesn’t he deserve the greatest man in the world? And that’s not you, is it Jim? Aren’t you being rather selfish, lying about like a corpse refusing to rot? Aren’t you sick of making everyone miserable? Stop being so selfish. Come, Jim, come away with me to the moors…’

  Every day Jim fought that voice. He tried not to listen to it. He tried not to believe it, but the Yoot’s whispers never stopped. On the first night of the school Christmas holidays, when everyone else in the country seemed so excited and joyful, and carols played everywhere and the town was strung with twinkling lights, Jim realised he could take no more.