Fraser's Voices (3 page)

The only person Fraser tried to tell about his gifts and his adventures was Jim Douglas, a boy a year older than himself who lived in Kilrasken Farm. They got on well, but when Fraser tried to explain about animal speech Jim just thought he was kidding.

“You talk to the birds! Aye, that'll be right. Listen, mate, I've lived on a farm all my life and I know all about the beasts. Don't try to take the mickey.”

At first Fraser had been hurt, but Jim hadn't been unkind and had simply taken Fraser's confidences as a kind of joke. Besides, Jim was an interesting character; he really did know the ways of the animals, from the rats in the barn right up to the bad-tempered bull, who, he told Fraser, would charge and trample to death any stranger in his field but allowed himself to be driven like a tame sheep by Jim because Jim understood the ways of beasts.

So Fraser gave up.

That was just as well. Jim had been taught to disapprove of animals like foxes and badgers who sometimes took lambs and young birds, and the very idea of letting one of them out of a trap would have seemed to him like treachery to the human race, or at least to all farmers and gamekeepers.

The boys enjoyed exploring together and as Fraser's recovery progressed he would go up to the farm for days on end. Jim, the expert, delighted in showing the boy from the city all the secrets of the place.

The main attraction was the disused barn. There was an old tractor there, quietly rusting with a steering wheel that could still turn and a gear lever and pedals that moved. The dark corners of the barn were a wonder house for a pair of boys to play in; the sacks of poultry feed and piles of assorted rubbish – old tyres, parts of a plough, rusty horse shoes, a grinning gin for trapping foxes and birds of prey, (“You're not allowed to use that now,” Jim explained), bits of bedsteads and bicycles, a ram's skull with the giant circling horns still attached.

Most exciting of all, when they came on a still evening and rushed in quickly, throwing everything about and shouting their personal war cries, they would hear scufflings and sometimes see the whiplash of a long grey tail as its owner dived for cover.

Rats,” explained Jim. “All over the place. That's what we keep the dogs for.” But Misty and Tess were always away in the fields working the sheep with Jim's dad, and Fraser had to take Jim's word for the prodigious rat killing powers of the two collies.

They got closer to the rats when they tiptoed quietly into the barn; then they would see them, with twitching noses and watchful eyes furtively poking among the rubbish. More often, even when they couldn't see them, they could hear the rats' squeaking calls.

Fraser, of course, could understand them;

“What moves?”

“Two humans. Be careful.”

“No dogs?”

“Sssh! Keep still. The humans will call the dogs if they see us.”

But there would have been no point in translating for Jim.

On other days they went further afield; Jim showed Fraser the lambing shed, built the year before within sight of the house so that his dad could bring sick ewes there to have their lambs where he could look after them more easily than if they had been born out in the fields where One-eye or Eye of the Wind might steal them. There were no ewes there now, but two lambs, whose mother had rejected them and who were being reared by hand, lay curled up against each other, like balls of creamy fluff in a bed of warm straw.

Then there was the dunghill where the manure of ages was slowly breaking down into compost, alive with worms. The boys weren't officially allowed to play there – they never could understand why – but as it was behind the lambing shed and the hen houses and out of sight of the farm house, they would sometimes go there and count how many worms they could catch. Then they would take their haul round to the duck pond to see if the ducks would eat them. But either the ducks were nervous, for they had half-grown ducklings with them, or they just didn't like worms, for they kept their distance. So the boys would squat by the edge of the pool and drop the worms in one by one to see if they could swim.

Here, however, they
could
be seen from the house and Jim's mum seemed to know where they got the worms from; so that adventure always ended with her calling, “Right boys. In you come and get cleaned up,” in a voice that had to be obeyed.

* * *

Fraser was not the only newcomer to the area to discover Kilrasken.

One-eye and Barook knew better than to come near the place, but someone else with the courage of a badger, the cunning of a fox and a hatred of man had discovered a trail that ran out of the wood, along a hedgerow and up to the farm buildings. On its first foray it discovered the barn and for several nights feasted on rats.

But it hunted, not for food nor even for pleasure, but for revenge and so, on the fourth night, moonless and black as pitch, it pressed on, in full sight of the house, and found the lambing shed.

There were lights in the windows of the house but the curtains were drawn and the dogs were dozing by the fire.

The two lambs heard a soft scratching and were awake at once, scrambling onto wobbly legs. There, unseen in the darkness but its stink shaking the shed, was the demon nightmare of every small animal's imagination. Then the rattle of claws on the floor, the pant of hot breath, the clash of teeth and it was on them.

Perhaps Misty, the younger dog heard the brief, terrified bleat. Suddenly her ears were erect, the hair on her neck lifted and from deep in her throat came a low growl. Seconds later the ducks and hens took up the warning and the henhouse shook with a frenzied beating of wings, crowing and quacking.

Jim's dad threw a switch and the courtyard was flooded with light. Jim swept back the curtains and saw, leaving the lambing shed and vanishing into the shadows behind the barn, an animal like nothing he had seen before.

“It sort of looped,” he said later, trying to recall for the benefit of his dad and the gamekeeper what he had seen only for a fraction of a second and out of the corner of his eye.

Naturally Jim added a little to the story when he told Fraser – the animal had got bigger – “like a wolf” – and he had to stick to this version when the man from the
Kilmore Gazette
came to get the story.

“Mystery killer at Kilrasken” the headline read and the paper went on to wonder what kind of monster had torn out the throats of the two young lambs.

Readers' letters in the following issue offered some suggestions:

One reader thought that “a giant flesh eating lizard of the monitor type, which can grow up to six feet in length,” might have escaped from a private zoo. An elderly lady was sure it was the ghost of a witch who had been drowned in the loch three hundred years before; and a sixth former from the High School proposed that it was an alien from space connected with recent sightings of unidentified flying objects.

Fraser found most of this impossible to translate into the language of his friends. The birds had quickly brought the news from Kilrasken, but no one had any idea who the killer could be.

So Fraser decided to go back into the wood and find out for himself.

He was nearing the edge of the wood and the mist of branches was thinning out. The clouds broke and a dazzling low sun threw shafts of slanting light between the trees. Light and dark; light and dark; Fraser's mind began to beat to a rhythm as his eyes crossed and re-crossed the lines of light and shade, up and down, up and down. He remembered the last time in the car, at Easter in France – poplars – lines of tall trees like sentries and the brightest sun he had ever seen – light and dark flashing – flick, flick, flick, flick as the car raced on – flick, flick, flick, flick like a shutter clicking in his mind – then blackness – hospital and the bird language.

He was falling…

“Dead boy,” remarked an old rook perched on a high branch directly above Fraser.

“Probably just sleeping,” said another argumentatively with a clatter of his dirty beak.

“Think so?” said the first. “Well I saw the way he fell. He's dead all right.”

“So what?” quarrelled the second, a younger bird who had not lived long enough to be quite sure of himself but felt he ought to appear knowledgeable. “We can't eat him till he's rotted a bit.”

“Ever tried their eyes?” went on the first. “Don't even have to be right dead, so long as they can't move. Like picking beetles from a rose bed. And tastier! Tastiest bite I've had, come to think of it.”

“You've picked out dead men's eyes?” cawed the younger bird in admiration.

“Not quite,” admitted the older rook. “Not actually men. Done it often enough with sheep on their backs; they can't do a thing. Once with a young calf. Anyway, fancy this one? One each, eh?”

Like most rooks this veteran liked to boast and the pleasure of showing the youngster how to do it would be worth the other eye. Besides, the old boy knew it wasn't quite as easy as he had suggested and he wanted moral support.

The two flapped down to a low branch and then to the ground. There they walked – rooks are too conceited to hop – backwards and forwards as if interested in anything but the boy lying a few yards in front of them. They had to work up their courage. Anyway, the older one now realised that he had made a mistake; the boy was still breathing. Not that that made a lot of difference – but you had to look sharp – might only get one eye. If he had been alone he would have abandoned the plan and flown off, but with an admiring youngster watching and a reputation to keep up… so he strutted about ceremoniously trying to gather up his courage for the final rush, stab and quick take-off.

By now all the birds in the wood had realised what was going on. Few of them liked the rooks, who stole their eggs and chicks, and, although none of them would have taken any risks to help a human being, their sympathies were with the boy. Besides, it was now clear that the older rook was unsure of himself and that gave some of the cheekier birds the chance to make mischief.

“Scared! Scared! Scared! Scared!” shrieked a magpie, swooping low over the path.

“Want me to show you how?” chattered a jackdaw, who might, if the moment had been right, have been as good as his word.

“Chicken killer,” moaned a pigeon who had lost two of her brood and suspected the rooks.

Immediately the smaller birds took up the cry. “Chick-en kill-er, chick-en kill-er,” they chanted and flew in circles above the two rooks.

This only made the older bird more determined – the younger had retreated a few yards to a low branch – and he stepped purposefully towards the boy, beak darting forward and back at each stride.

In the fox's earth, just outside the wood, One-eye was sleeping lightly after the custom of his family. He turned in his sleep, awoke and scratched himself. It was midday and no time for hunting, but some sixth sense, to which foxes often owe their lives, made him amble up to the mouth of the den instead of simply curling up again and going back to sleep. There he heard the commotion in the trees.

“What moves?” he growled.

A confusion of a hundred voices answered him, “Boy dead! Rooks… eyes.”

It made no sense, but foxes are curious and there is always a little empty space inside them for an unexpected tit-bit, so One-eye decided to investigate and stepped out of the tunnel. As soon as he saw the situation he realised that this was no hunting for him. Then he saw that the unconscious boy was Barook's rescuer. With a couple of sharp barks that put the two rooks to flight for the moment, he turned back to the lair.

Badgers do not wake up, let alone venture above ground by daylight, but when Barook was rooted out of a beautiful sleep by One-eye's wet black nose and told what was happening, he remembered his promise and, rumbling his warcry, “Barook, Ya-Barook, Ya-Barook,” galloped out, blinking, into the hostile strange sunshine to honour his pledge.

Half an hour later Bob Paterson, who lived across the road from Fraser, was walking his labrador in the woods. He too heard the commotion of the birds and the dog ran on ahead. Moments later it was back, whining, tail between its legs, and, as Bob walked on, fell, uncharacteristically, behind his heel. Bob told his story that night.

“I saw the lad lying on the path and beside him, in broad daylight, a badger, every hair on its back bristling and every tooth bared.”

Only when he had put his dog on the lead and gone over to look at the boy had the animal turned and vanished into the undergrowth.

Fraser's adventure in the wood had one good result, from his point of view. It postponed for a time the day when he would be pronounced recovered and sent back to school in Glasgow. In fact it put him into the local hospital for a week for observation. As he didn't feel anything wrong he would have been bored out of his mind if it had not been for his conversations with the birds, and, although these were, as usual, surprised and suspicious at first, they soon got used to him and would even fly off and bring him news of what was happening beyond what he could see from the window of his ward.

Most of this didn't really interest him – a rook's story of a dead hedgehog in the hospital car park – the tale told by a big black-backed gull of a delivery of fish left unattended for a minute by the kitchen staff – the warnings of smaller birds of kestrels in the hospital gardens.

But he did hear something more interesting from a wild drake, a mallard who settled for the night in an ornamental pond in the grounds just outside the window.

The drake was exhausted and had clearly flown some distance.

“Decided to shift my quarters,” he quacked. “Big party of men and dogs came through the woods just before dark. We weren't worried, my mate and I. We just got into the water. But then, from the other side, came more men with the tame lightning.” (The mallard meant guns, but, as all birds and animals fear guns and none understands them, they make up all sorts of ways of describing them.)

“They were shooting at everything. The small animals went underground, so they shot the birds. My mate was killed; I was lucky.”

“Why did they do that?” asked Fraser, who had never seen a shoot.

“Don't know. Some of the tree birds say there's been farm animals killed. The gamekeepers set a trap and it was raided. The bait was taken but nothing caught. That's the second reason I came away. My friends, the coots and moorhens, tell me there has been something coming out of the water by night. It attacks them in their nests. A lot of them have been killed. ‘No place for me,' I said. ‘Dogs and guns by day; something from the water by night; my mate dead; time to go.'”

Fraser's other important conversation was with someone called “the consultant” the day his dad came to take him back to the cottage.

This time the hospital people
did
seem to know what his trouble was. The consultant produced a flat cardboard box with “Keep out of reach of children” printed prominently on the side. He opened one end and slid out a strip of silver paper with the days of the week printed on it and below each day a large, round, brown pill stuck under cellophane.

“You'll remember to take one every day. You musn't ever miss a day.”

Fraser nodded.

The consultant replaced the strip and handed the box to Fraser's dad.

“He should be all right now. He's stable, provided he takes one every day.”

They went back to the cottage and in a week Fraser's parents said he was so much better that he could go to stay for a few days with Jim Douglas on the farm.

When he arrived Jim was there to meet him and the two dogs, Misty and Tess, came bounding out, barking a welcome. On his previous visits the dogs had always been out working the sheep with Jim's dad and this was the first time he had heard them talk.

By now Fraser was so used to understanding all the animal chatter that went on around him that he was surprised to discover that he could make out only a little of what the dogs were saying, as if he was listening on a crackly telephone line to someone with a foreign accent.

“That's funny,” he thought. “Perhaps tame animals speak a different language.”