Читать книгу Great Northern? - Arthur Ransome - Страница 13

THAT FAR AWAY skirl of bagpipes had come to an end.

With little in their knapsacks but their empty lemonade bottles and all solid rations except chocolate stowed inside them for easy carrying, the three explorers looked out from the top of the old Pict-house and searched the skyline of the ridge before them. The gap in its rocky outline, and glimpses of a cart track winding up to it through the heather, told them where the house was that had been seen from far away when the Sea Bear had been sailing towards the coast the day before.

“I’d like to see what sort of a house it is,” said Dorothea. “I’m sure it ought to be a castle.”

“I bet it’s where that biscuit box comes from,” said Roger.

“We ought to know the worst,” said Titty. “And if we go carefully up to that gap, we ought to be able to see without being seen.”

Watching the skyline, they dropped down from the hill-top and then began to climb again.

“It doesn’t look much used,” said Roger when they came to the cart track.

“We could pretend it isn’t there,” said Titty.

“But why?” said Dorothea. “At dead of night, with the hoofs of their horses muffled to make no noise, the smugglers come this way over the hills. A light blinks out at sea. Boats land and are gone again before the morning and when the sun comes up the smugglers are far away and everything is like it is now.”

“Anyway,” said Roger, “it’s a lot easier walking on it. Come on.”

“We oughtn’t to turn back without knowing what’s there,” said Titty, as much to herself as to the others.

They knew almost at once. As soon as they were in the gap, with heather slopes to right and left, they could see down into the country on the further side of the ridge.

“Native settlement,” said Titty at once.

“I told you it must be a castle,” said Dorothea.

“Don’t let them see you,” said Roger.

They were looking at a group of low thatched buildings, cottages, barns and sheds. Just beyond these was the “conspicuous house” of the chart and, though it was hardly big enough to be a castle, Roger and Titty were not inclined to quarrel with Dorothea about it. It was built into the steep side of the hill and looked down on a bay of the sea. In front of it was a stone terrace, level with the ground at one side but with a ten or twelve foot drop below it to the rocky face of the hill. It was a two-storey house, but was turned into something as good as any castle by a turret with a battlemented top that rose high above its steeply sloping roofs.

“Get down,” said Roger, and dropped to the ground.

But Titty and Dorothea were still standing, looking through the gap at a world very different from the desolate valley they had left. It was different because it was inhabited. Far away on the slopes of the hills that fell away towards the sea there were more of the queer low cottages, like those only a hundred yards or so in front of them, with their rough thatched roofs, the thatching held down by ropes weighted with big stones. Here and there on the dark slopes were little groups of men and women cutting peat.

“Let me have your telescope,” said Dorothea. “There’s a watcher on the tower.”

“Sister Anne,” said Titty. “It’s just the place for a Bluebeard.”

“It’s a girl,” said Roger, lying at their feet, elbows on the ground and telescope to his eye. “Flop, or she’ll see you. She’s looking straight at us.”

They flopped, but not quite quick enough. They heard the sudden, threatening barking of a dog somewhere among the cottages.

“Now you’ve done it,” said Roger, working hurriedly backwards along the ground. “Even if that girl didn’t see us, that beastly dog’ll stir everybody up. They’ll come pouring out to see what it’s barking at and our valley won’t be uninhabited any more. It’ll be a mass of people asking questions, and we’ll have to go back to the ship.”

“It wasn’t a girl,” said Dorothea, as soon as she had wriggled back far enough to be able to lift her head without being seen from the top of the tower. “It was a boy in a kilt. The young chief of his clan looking far and wide from the battlements.”

“Not far and wide,” said Roger. “He was looking straight at us.”

“But what a place for a story,” said Dorothea. “Smugglers or Jacobites … or just villains with a prisoner in the tower. They might easily have a dungeon cut in the solid rock.”

“Natives anyway,” said Titty. “We must get away from here as quick as we can.”

“That dog’s stopped barking,” said Roger.

As quickly as they could they were retreating out of the gap and down the cart track by which they had come. Already they could see down the steep slopes past the hill with the Pict-house to the creek, where the mast of the Sea Bear showed where all the older members of the crew were at work.

“Let’s go back to my Pict-house,” said Roger. “And then, if we see natives pouring out of the gap, we can just slip down the hill, and get away.”

“But we’re going to explore up the valley,” said Titty.

“We’ll never find anything as good as the Pict-house,” said Roger.

“Stop a minute and listen,” said Dorothea.

There were no sounds of pursuit.

“Well, if you won’t come back to my Pict-house,” said Roger, “what about creeping up to the gap again to have another look? I don’t believe that was a boy on the tower. It looked much more like a girl.”

For a moment the others hesitated. Perhaps, if they had not known that they would be sailing next day, they would have waited and then crept up again to have another look at the native settlement beyond the ridge. But they knew that they had to be back at the ship before evening and that they would never see the place again.

“Oh look here,” said Titty. “We can’t just give up exploring. We shan’t have another chance, not here anyway.”

“And there’s Dick,” said Dorothea. “We said we’d pick him up on the way home.”

So, though Roger looked regretfully up at the gap and back at that green mound on the top of the little hill, they presently turned west along the cart track leading towards the head of the valley. To the left, below them, they could see the two lochs, but no sign of Dick.

“He’s made himself as invisible as he could,” said Dorothea. “He always does when he’s looking at birds.”

Far ahead of them blue hills rose like a jagged wall, and above them to the right was the skyline of the Northern Rockies. Not one other human being was in sight.

They walked on, following the cart track at first, but presently leaving it, because it kept on reminding them that they were not the first to discover the valley, and later coming back to the track again because they found it much slower work walking through heather and rocks and squashy patches of moss and peat. And anyhow, as Roger pointed out, the people who had built his Pict-house had discovered the valley pretty near the beginning of the world. Also, later inhabitants, cutting peats for winter fuel, had left deep trenches, some of them too wide to be jumped across. Good places to hide in, they agreed, but wasting a lot of time when you had to walk round them instead of going straight ahead.

They had been walking for a long time. Deer, moving on the flats below them, had made them forget the native settlement on the other side of the ridge. Roger was leading the way. Dorothea was close behind him. Roger had said something about exploration being wasted on Dick, and Dorothea was explaining that there were more kinds of exploration than one and that birds, for Dick, were a part of exploration that really mattered, and that anyway Dick was as good an explorer as Roger. “Who got first to the North Pole?” Titty heard her say, and then, though Dorothea went on talking, and Roger too. Titty did not hear a word. She had suddenly got the queerest feeling that they were not alone.

Down in the bottom, well behind them now, she knew that Dick was somewhere by the lochs. Further away still, she knew that Captain Flint and the four scrubbers were hard at work scraping and painting the Sea Bear before the tide could come up once more and float her off. So far as she could see there was no one else in the valley and the three explorers had the hillside to themselves. Yet, suddenly, she had the feeling that they were being watched, and watched from close at hand. She looked all round her, but could see nothing but rocky slopes and patches of heather and moss. There were no trees, no bushes. She shook herself, hurried on and tried to hear the end of Dot’s argument about different kinds of explorers. Of course there was nobody there, nobody but the three of them, walking the hillside in sunshine under a wide blue sky.

A little later she had that feeling again. It was as if she were reading a book and someone had come up unseen and were reading it over her shoulder.

“Dot!” she said.

“Hullo,” said Dorothea. “Want a rest?”

“Oh, not just yet,” said Roger.

“What is it?” said Dorothea.

“Nothing. Sorry,” said Titty. It was clear that neither of the others had felt what she had felt. And now, with the two of them stopping and looking back at her, she did not feel it herself.

“More deer,” said Roger. “Dot, you’ve got my telescope.”

Down below them on the wide flats in the bottom of the valley a herd of hinds were grazing like cattle.

“They look as tame as anything,” said Roger.

“They wouldn’t let us get near them,” said Dorothea.

“Let’s try,” said Roger, “stalking …”

“No, no,” said Titty. “We haven’t got half as far as we meant to do. If we go down now we won’t see anything. Let’s keep on and not go down till it’s time to start home.”

“I’ve never seen them before except at the Zoo,” said Dorothea.

“I expect they belong to those natives,” said Titty.

“In winter,” said Dorothea, “the natives harness them like reindeer and fly in sledges over the snow.”

“Bet they don’t,” said Roger. “Hullo!”

From a patch of heather only a hundred yards ahead of them, a huge stag rose to his feet and was gone, in great leaps, down the slopes towards the head of the valley. All the deer grazing below stopped feeding and began to move.

“Keep still,” said Titty.

“I’m glad he didn’t charge this way,” said Roger. “But I didn’t think much of his horns. Did you?”

“Perhaps they’ll grow,” said Dorothea.

Presently the deer below stopped moving and began to graze once more.

“Come on,” said Roger, and the explorers set out again.

“They’ve seen us,” said Dorothea. “They’ll be off again in a minute.”

“We can’t help it,” said Titty. “Let’s just keep going and then they’ll see we’re not trying to stalk them.”

“Pretty hard to stalk,” said Roger. “I expect they’re accustomed to it and know just what to do.”

It was clear that the deer in the valley knew very well that there were explorers moving along the hillside above them. They kept lifting their heads, and shifting a few hundred yards, stopping and then once more walking on.

“They won’t let us get anywhere near them,” said Dorothea. “They probably don’t approve of being stalked. I wouldn’t like it myself.”

Again Titty had that queer feeling. She turned suddenly towards the top of the ridge. Just for a second she thought she saw something move beside a rock close under the skyline, but she stared at the place and could see nothing but the rock itself.

“Dot,” she said, “look up there, where there’s a big rock sticking right up out of the heather.”

“What is it? Another stag?”

“No,” said Titty. “I believe we’re being stalked ourselves.”

“Not really?” said Dorothea.

“Yes, really,” said Titty. “I’m sure we are.”

“Keep still,” said Roger, “and listen. And throw up your heads. We ought to sniff the wind like the deer. And the wind’s just right. It’s coming from up there.”

For a minute or two the three explorers stood still as rabbits that have scented danger but do not yet know where it is. Their eyes searched this way and that along the ridge. Not a thing was moving.

“There’s no harm in pretending,” said Dorothea. “We could be prisoners escaped from the castle, with the villain hunting us for our lives.”

“I wasn’t pretending,” said Titty.

Roger looked at her, and so did Dorothea. No. She was not pretending. Titty really did believe that on that wild hillside above them somebody was watching them and keeping hid.

“I thought so before,” said Titty, “but I wasn’t sure.”

“If we are being stalked,” said Dorothea, “the thing to do is to pretend we don’t know. We must just go on, pretending we don’t know we’re being stalked, and all the time getting further and further away.”

“And then the stalker will get a bit careless and let himself be seen,” said Roger. “And then, when we know who it is and where he is, we’ll know what to do next.”

“It’s a pity we stopped,” said Dorothea.

“We could be picking flowers,” said Titty, looking about her and, as it happened, not finding any.

“Fossils,” said Dorothea. “Plenty of stones. It’s just the sort of place Dick finds them in.”

The three explorers groveled, picked up stones and earnestly showed them to each other.

“Come on,” said Roger loudly, to be heard by any stalker within a hundred yards. “There’ll be lots more fossils further on … ammonites.” He finished in a shout.

“Belemnites,” shouted Dorothea, and explained in her ordinary quiet voice, “they’re the straight ones with pointed ends. That’s it. We’re geologists. We ought to be tapping the stones with a hammer.”

“We can make the noise all right,” said Roger, picking up a stone. “Bang one stone on another and the stalker’ll never know the difference.”

Roger and Dorothea moved on. Titty followed. She knew that though they were ready to pretend to be looking at stones both Roger and Dorothea believed she was mistaken. She could not be sure herself. But whether they were right or wrong, whether there was a stalker or not, Dorothea’s plan was a good one. If there were no stalkers, it would do no harm, and if there were, it was the best thing they could do. All the same, they had come a long way up the valley. She glanced back. Dick’s lochs were far behind them. The Sea Bear, out of sight behind the Hump, was further still, and she wished they had turned and were going the other way.

The three explorers, now geologists for anyone who might be watching them, walked on with bent heads, staring at the ground. Roger, who had found a very good stone for a hammer, beat it loudly on every rock he passed. Down below them, the deer, now really worried, were restlessly on the move, but the geologists hardly noticed them. Whenever they stooped, they took the chance of looking up sideways towards the skyline, hoping to catch the stalker (if there was a stalker) unawares.

“What about eating our chocolate?” said Roger at last.

“All right,” said Titty. “We can sit on these rocks and watch. If there’s anybody there, we’re bound to see him move.”

“I wonder if Dick’ll remember to eat his?” said Dorothea.

“We ought to be turning back and looking for him soon,” said Titty.

They rested pleasantly, sitting on rocks, eating their chocolate, and looking at the hillside on which nothing was moving whatever. Even Titty lost faith in her stalkers, and she could see that Roger and Dorothea were no longer much interested in something they could not believe.

Dorothea was the first of the other two to change her mind. She and Roger both knew that Titty had not been pretending but had really believed they were being watched from a distance by someone hiding in the heather. But they both thought she was wrong, though they were quite ready to get as much fun out of that idea as they could. They had eaten their chocolate and had just started again on their way up the valley. Suddenly Dorothea sniffed the air. She stopped. Titty, close behind, almost walked into her. “What is it?” she said.

“Tobacco smoke,” said Dorothea. “I smelt it. There it is again.”

“I knew there was someone,” said Titty. “But I can’t smell anything.”

“Sniff again,” said Dorothea. “Sniff harder. It’s rather faint. But there can’t be anything growing here to smell like a railway carriage.”

“I can smell it too,” said Roger. “Try blowing your nose.”

“I can’t smell it,” said Titty. “But if you can, it must be coming down wind. And the wind’s blowing straight down on us. If there’s someone smoking, he must be pretty nearly straight up the hill from here. But I can’t see any smoke.”

“I’m going to charge straight up,” said Roger, and was off.

“Much better not,” said Titty. “If there is somebody, we can’t frighten him off. Hey, Roger! Come back.”

“There’s no one,” shouted Roger. “Come on and see.”

“We’d better make sure,” said Dorothea.

They left the track and scrambled up the steep slope after Roger. It was very hard work, climbing through heather and over rock and loose stones. Roger, struggling uphill, shifted a biggish stone, that rolled down past Titty and Dorothea. It rolled, jumped, gathered speed and went bounding down into the valley.

He stopped to watch it, taking longer and longer leaps until at last far below them it disappeared with a splash into what must have been boggy ground.

“It might have hit a deer,” said Titty, climbing up beside him.

“I didn’t send it down on purpose,” panted Roger. “Anyway, there’s nobody here.”

“There isn’t,” said Dorothea. “Funny. I’m sure I smelt that smell.”

“What about going down and starting home?” said Titty.

“Why should we?” said Roger.

“Time’s getting on,” said Titty. “Look where the sun’s got to.”

“Let’s go a little bit further,” said Roger, “just so that if there is a stalker anywhere, he’ll see we don’t care.”

They went on, working sideways down the slope, no longer bothering about being geologists. That false alarm of the tobacco smoke, and that rush up the hillside, that had seemed as empty as any hillside could be, had made the geology seem less worth while.

A startled grouse, high up on the hillside, made them think of geology again.

“There must be somebody,” said Titty. “That grouse wasn’t startled by us.”

Roger picked up a stone and began tapping with it on a rock. He grinned at Dorothea, and Titty knew that his geology was for her more than for stalkers who were not there.

A moment later a shrill whistle sounded above and behind them. The smile left Roger’s face.

“There’s no doubt about that anyhow,” said Titty. “We all heard it.”

“But where is it?” said Roger.

A whistle sounded again. They stared up towards the top of the ridge.

“That wasn’t in the same place,” said Dorothea. “The first one was over there.”

“Different whistle, too,” said Roger.

Titty looked back down the valley. They had come a long way from the cove where the Sea Bear was being scrubbed by the rest of her crew, who could do nothing to help the explorers, supposing help were needed. “We’re going back now,” she said.

“We must make them show themselves,” said Roger. “I’m going on.” He beat a tattoo on a rock and took a few steps forward.

Titty and Dorothea followed him. After all, those whistles had not sounded very near. They might have been over the skyline, on the other side of the ridge.

Dorothea squeaked. Something was moving on the hillside at last. Two dogs were leaping through the heather. Clear of it, they came racing down the rocky slope.

Roger looked back rather doubtfully. Titty plunged forward past Dorothea to join Roger. The dogs were coming at a terrific pelt.

“What do we do?” gasped Dorothea.

“We’d better stand quite still,” said Titty. “It’s the only way.”

“You have to look them straight in the eye,” said Roger.

“But there are two of them,” said Dorothea.

Again there was a shrill whistle on the hillside. The explorers heard it gratefully. At that moment they would have welcomed any stalkers. The dogs stopped as if unwillingly. They crouched on the ground, but kept edging forward a foot or two at a time. One of them stood up and growled.

“That one’s coming on,” said Roger, and looked at the stone he had picked up for use as a geological hammer.

“Put that stone down,” said Titty. “He may think you are going to throw it.”

Roger dropped the stone. The dog that had stood up looked back over its shoulder. It dashed forward once more. The other jumped up and came racing after it.

The whistle shrilled again, twice. Both dogs stopped dead, turned as if unwillingly, and went, slowly at first, and then faster, up the hillside towards the heather they had left.

“Gosh!” said Roger. “We couldn’t have done much anyway. It was like Christians waiting for the lions.”

“But who called them back?” said Dorothea. “I can’t see anybody.”

Then, for the first time, they saw someone on the ridge above them.

“It’s a boy,” said Titty, “in a kilt. It’s that boy we saw on the tower.”

“A savage Gael,” said Dorothea.

“What a beast,” said Roger, “sending those dogs after us.”

“He called them back,” said Titty.

Without more talk, the three of them turned off the track straight down into the valley. There was no point in getting into rows with natives.

Worse was to come. They dropped over a steep brow to the flats and disturbed yet another lot of hinds that had been quietly feeding out of sight from above. The hinds set off up the valley at full gallop.

There was a furious yell from the ridge behind the explorers. Somebody was shouting at them or at somebody else in a language they did not know. Somebody else was shouting back.

“Gaels,” said Dorothea, “talking Gaelic at each other.”

“They’re shouting at us,” said Titty.

There was another burst of angry shouting. They could not see the boy but, looking back, they saw a man coming down from the ridge further up the valley. He shouted again, shook his fist, turned as if he meant to get ahead of the moving deer, changed his mind and came leaping towards the explorers.

That was enough. The explorers turned and ran, and at that moment, far away, they heard the long drawn hoot of the Sea Bear’s foghorn.

“She’s afloat,” said Titty. “We ought to have turned back long ago.”

“We’re done,” said Dorothea. “We’ll never get there before that Gael catches us. I do hope Dick’s gone back already.”

“He’ll have heard the foghorn,” said Titty.

“Not if he’s looking at birds,” panted Dorothea.

“That man’s stopped running,” said Roger.

They paused and looked back. The man had indeed stopped running, but he was shouting his Gaelic and someone they could not see was answering him.

“He’s shaking his fist at us,” said Roger.

“Don’t stop,” said Titty, “he’ll only come after us again.”

“And we’ve got to find Dick,” said Dorothea.

The three explorers hurried on down the valley to the lochs and were presently looking for Dick along the rocky shores.

“What would have happened if they’d caught us?” said Roger.

“Native trouble,” said Titty. “Just what we’ve got to keep out of. But anyhow we’ve been beautifully stalked.”