Fraser's Voices (4 page)

In the heart of the wood lay a tiny lochan threaded like a bead on the Ballagan Burn as it tumbled and splashed from the moors down through the wood and at last pushed its way through marshes and mudflats to enter the loch.

Once the lochan had held trout, and mallard and moorhen had nested by its edges, but it was empty now. Twenty yards from the bank, buried in ferns and brambles, sat the ruins of a cottage. The walls still stood shoulder-high, but long ago the roof and the higher parts of the gables had collapsed into a pile of stones and slates and rotten timbers, under which a hundred rats might have nested in safety. But there were none there now.

Slowly, from a crevice between two of the fallen stones, there emerged, first the muzzle, then the silky seal-like head and finally the sleek body of a full-grown mink.

He was not a native to these parts, having recently escaped from a farm in which he and his kind were bred and killed for their fur. His family came from Canada where he was proud to be cousin to the wolverine who could drive wolves from a kill.

He slipped into the pool and swam across, wasting no time, for long ago the other inhabitants had been killed by this cleverest and boldest of hunters. On the far side trails led off in two directions. One led to the farms and the village where the mink had been hunting for the last few nights, but here the scent was heavy with men and dogs for they had at last tracked him as far as this.

Tonight, therefore, he turned in the other direction and headed up towards the moor. This was a different world from the woods and farmlands. Here tracks of big blue mountain hare, of grouse, and of adders wound in the black peat among rocks and clumps of heather and fern and the droppings of sheep and red deer.

The smells were strong and exciting, and, after pausing for a moment to drink them in, he set off up the trail. He had not gone far when he was stopped by a new sound; a wild, unearthly cry from something higher up on the moor. The mink stiffened. The creature was down wind, so he got no whiff of its scent. By its call it was a predator like himself. If it was his size or smaller he would kill it. If it was larger he would still kill it. If it was so large as to be beyond his power he would find it easy to escape in this bristly country.

But his own strong scent rode ahead of him on the light wind and told the other hunter that a rival was intruding on his territory. The other animal took up the challenge, bounded down the trail and then froze, crouched on stiff legs, back arched, tail lashing; the mink found himself face to face with Cruach, the wild cat.

The two killers eyed each other.

“Get off my ground,” spat the cat.

“Your ground? You will have to prove that. I hunt where I please.” The mink's jaws shut like a trap on the words.

The cat hissed, “You're a stranger here. You've no right on my ground. Get off it or prepare to pay the price.” His back was arching dangerously and, as he spoke, his lips curled back to show long, needle-like fangs bared back to the pink gums.

More dangerous still, as he raised a front paw to strike, it was suddenly armed with five curved scimitars, unblunted by the wear and tear of walking and running, for the cat alone can sheath and unsheath his claws like a forest of swords.

The mink was not intimidated.

“I did not choose to live in your wretched land,” he replied. “My tribe comes from a better country far away, a country of rivers full of fish and woods full of game. But we were trapped and killed by man,” he went on savagely. “So I was born in a cage and lived in a cage till one day I saw the wire loose in the wood, and I tore it away, remembering that I am Kwarutta, the hunter, and no pretty flower to dress a painted lady.

“And so I came here killing as I needed, killing as I wished. But most of all I kill to take my revenge on man and his slaves, his fat farmyard hens, his grouse on the moor, his cats and his dogs.” The voice had risen to a hissing scream, “and, one day, when they are unguarded, even his young. Then will I kill and kill and kill until at last the blood debt of my tribe has been repaid.”

This kind of talk was new to the cat. He could appreciate a slow careful stalk through thick grass, the sudden explosive charge and the satisfaction of teeth meeting in the throat of a victim, but this single-minded vendetta against the whole human race sent shivers down his spine.

“I have no liking for men,” he replied, “but I have nothing to do with your war. Fight it in the farmyards and the gardens, but keep off my ground.”

Neither animal now wished matters to come to a clash of teeth and claws. Like boys in a school playground who have squared up to each other and each stood his ground, they now respected each other and wanted to withdraw with honour.

“Between two such hunters as ourselves let there be peace,” said Kwarutta. “I will hunt here no more. But when the gamekeeper has poisoned your litter and shot your mate for the sake of his grouse, join me one moonless night and together we will repay him in his henhouses.”

He turned, and with the looping gait of his family, headed for the farms.

Jim took the greatest pleasure in telling Fraser about the mysterious killings that had led to the great shoot-out in the wood which the mallard had described: more hens; a pet rabbit in a garden hutch; young, hand-reared partridges in a gamekeeper's yard. Whoever it was, the killer seemed to take special pleasure in boldly entering sheds and coops and hutches close to human houses and killing, but rarely eating animals that were close to people.

It had been tracked with dogs but the trails had always led to water and the dogs had stopped, baffled by a burn or a pool in the woods. It had even – so Jim had heard – lifted bait from a trap which it had somehow sprung without being caught.

Fraser was anxious to ask the birds or even the cattle and sheep on the farm if they had heard anything more, but it was difficult with Jim around and somehow their voices seemed confused and far away. There was also the distraction of the barn – the tractor, the tyres, the bicycles and bedsteads, and the two boys made enough noise to frighten away the bird life for acres around, not to mention the rats.

Bedtime came and they slept by an attic window overlooking the farmhouse courtyard. Before he settled to sleep that long, bright May evening, Fraser took a last look at the lambing shed, now empty, the henhouses melting into the dusk and, away to his right, the dark surface of the duck pond with the white shapes of the farmyard ducks settling, heads twisted back, bills buried under the soft down of their backs, for the night.

When he wakened it was again half light and the dawn chorus of the birds was just beginning.

He looked out of the window and saw the same peaceful scene as the previous evening. Then he saw something else: like a hump-backed snake with short, clawed legs, chocolate brown in the grey brown of the dawn.

“Jim,” he hissed.

The two boys' heads crammed the attic window.

The mink looped across the courtyard, its eyes on the ducks.

The boys watched, hypnotised.

Then the dawn exploded. A drake unburied its bill and quacked an alarm. The cry was taken up by the other ducks and by the hens in the coop.

The door of the house flew open, floodlight drenched the courtyard and Misty and Tess bounded out to seek and destroy. Kwarutta, full of hate, turned on the dogs and, leaping for Misty's muzzle, jumped almost into the jaws of Tess. Fraser heard the crack as the mink's skull collapsed under the vice of the collie's back teeth.

There were no more killings.

Fraser came back to the cottage, stayed there for another week and remembered to take his pills every day. The consultant said he was better and certainly he did not feel any of those frightening tumblings of the mind which had so disturbed him after he had first gone to hospital. And he had no more blackouts. So they said he had to go back to school in Glasgow.

Fraser didn't mind.

For when he went into the garden teeming with birds all he heard were whistles and chirrups, and in the wood the quarrelsome cawing of the rooks was – only cawing. Even the eloquent alarm cry of the blackbird, “Take care! Take care! Take care!” was only a trill.

At night, as he watched in sadness from his window, Nephesh the owl, who could, he knew, have told him where every vole and shrew was crouching in the long grass, said only “Whooo—oh.”

Fraser tried the old call, “What moves?” but all that came was a sigh. And when he heard in the distance One-eye give the call that must have meant “What moves, Nephesh?” and all he could hear was “Aaargh!” he knew that it was over.

“Nothing moves,” he said to himself in human speech. “Tomorrow I must listen to different voices.”

Tears streamed down his cheeks.

The otter died.

Fraser had nursed it for a week. “Did everything he could,” everybody said. Cathy, the vet, had said it might have swallowed some kind of poison, but, as she told Fraser, “Otters can't speak; so we don't really know what was wrong with it.”

She had treated it with antibiotics, but hadn't held out much hope, and a few days later it had died.

Fraser was inconsolable. This was the first time he had thrown himself into caring for a sick animal, and it had died.

“You did all you could,” repeated his mum.

But he was not convinced. So he asked Rona, the vet nurse, Cathy's assistant, “If Cathy had known what kind of poison the otter had eaten, could she have cured him?”

Rona was sixteen and had just started a college course about how to be a vet nurse, so Fraser was sure she would know. She was kind and gentle with sick and frightened animals. She could hold a struggling guinea pig till Cathy gave it an injection; she could persuade a big, silly labrador to stand still and have his temperature taken. She was kind with people too; she had understood how upset Fraser had been when the otter died.

“You musn't blame yourself,” she insisted.

Then she told him her secret; how once she had been to blame for an animal's death.

“I had just got a new puppy. I took him for a walk in the woods. I let him off the lead – I shouldn't – and he slipped into a deep pool.” Her eyes filled. “Something caught him and pulled him under the water.”

Doggedly Fraser persisted with his question.

“Could Cathy have cured the otter?”

“Perhaps she could, but that's what it's always like with animals; they can't tell us what's wrong with them.”

It was then that Fraser knew that he had let the otter down.

It was over a year since he had been ill and had first come to the cottage to recover. He was well and strong now and the year had been spent at school in Glasgow, playing football, watching television and playing computer games till his eyes almost popped out of their sockets, like a frog's.

But sometimes, in the quiet of his bedroom, he remembered his friends from the cottage; One-eye the fox; Nephesh the owl; the frightening eagle, Eye of the Wind.

There were animals and birds in Glasgow; street cats, dirty looking pigeons and thousands of starlings, but Fraser had lost the power to speak with them.

But there was always the football. So One-eye and the others got a passing thought from time to time, like old well-loved toys, now lost, while the main priority was football; training and tactics, and the chance to go to a big match on Saturday afternoons.

Then came the summer holidays and at the end of a hot, dry June he found himself back at the cottage; and the old memories returned. Still the world of animals was lost to him, almost like something he had read in a book or dreamed – till the otter died.

* * *

Jim Douglas was not sentimental about animals. How he had danced a triumphal dance and what a war song he had shrieked when his dog Tess had killed Kwarutta, the mink, the year before. During the past year Jim's dad had taken him fishing and shooting so that he now prided himself on how many animals he had killed. He kept a running tally of the number of rats the collies had killed in the barn and those that he had personally chased from their hiding places into the dogs' jaws he counted as his own kills.

Fraser found that he liked Jim less this year, but the farm was still a good place to play and Jim, for all his outward contempt for the animals, was still full of interesting stories about them and their ways.

It was from Jim that Fraser learned about the dead fish in the Ballagan Burn. Rona contributed some more information about wild ducks sick and unable to fly. She agreed with Fraser that there might be some mystery disease about, though Cathy thought not. But then Cathy spent most of her time looking after big animals like horses and cows and sheep and pigs, or toy animals like poodles or Siamese cats that were never allowed out.

Fraser decided that Cathy didn't really understand the situation and that he would have to help Rona to get to the bottom of the mystery. So, one night, before going to bed, he crept to the bathroom and, deliberately and ceremoniously, slid a strip of silver paper from a flat cardboard box, removed a round, brown pill – and dropped it into the toilet.

He stared guiltily as the flushing, gurgling water swept away his medicine. The consultant had said that he must
always
take one
every
day. He remembered the flashing lights and the tumblings of his mind. But, in his imagination, he also heard, across the still night air, the old call, “What moves?” and, more than anything else in the world, he longed to hear it again.

The Range Rover's engine screamed as Archie thrust it into reverse gear and the four tyres spun and kicked up clods of brown clay, mixed with gravel as they clawed for purchase on the new track that sliced like an open wound, across the slope of the moor.

But Archie knew his job and, inch by inch, he backed the caravan into the narrow slot, little more than a ledge, which had been carved from the hillside to take it.

“OK. She'll do,” shouted Dyer, and Archie slid the gear lever into neutral and put on the handbrake.

“That suit you then?”

“
Yeah
.
Fine.”

“Boss says you're to empty the toilet over there, in the peat. You'll have no bother burying it.”

They uncoupled the van from the towing hook and put chocks against the wheels.

“Mind you,” went on Archie, “if you get a real downpour that slope'll be awash and the whole site'll get swept away. Your van'll go over that crag and it won't stop till it hits the trees down there.”

“No chance,” said Dyer. “But anyway, I'll anchor the van and make sure it won't shift.”

“Trust me, the site's not safe. Slope above's too steep, the way you've left it. The whole thing'll move if you get a bad spell of wet weather.”

“Thanks for the tip,” said Dyer and Archie put the vehicle into first gear and churned down the track the way he had come.

Peace.

Dyer surveyed his new home. For an artist he could hardly have chosen a more impressive spot. Behind him the black crags of Sgurr Mor reared menacingly and its peak almost seemed to overhang the caravan site, like a dinosaur frozen in stone, waiting, perhaps, to come alive and strike.

With just the hint of a shudder he turned away and looked straight ahead, down the hill. In front of him the moor tumbled steeply downwards for about two hundred feet till an ancient dry stone dyke stopped it like a dam, and beyond this lay the woods, and farmlands with the buildings of the clachan* of Dunadd huddled together like dolls' houses, and beyond that the loch shining, with the golden path of the setting sun burning across it.

On the far side of the loch three sharp blue peaks were silhouetted against the fiery red sky. “One of the islands,” he thought. “Must check it out on the map.”

There was such a lacework of lochs and islands, and lochs on islands, and islands in lochs that Dyer found the geography pretty confusing, and the fact that they all had quite unpronounceable Gaelic names didn't help. But he was sure he would learn enough of the language to make sense of it all – after all he'd had the same sort of problem with Aborigine names in the outback down under.

What he hadn't had to contend with was the West Highland weather, though at first that treated him so kindly that he simply couldn't believe the tales he had heard of torrential downpours and week after week of rain.

He turned to look at his nearer surroundings. The Range Rover Track had recently been cut by the new owner of the moor to replace an old pony trail so that the carcasses of stags could be taken down more easily in the stalking season. It forded the Ballagan Burn and stopped at the caravan site, beyond which the ground rose steeply for about fifty feet and then the moor levelled off in a soggy morass of peat too treacherous even for ponies to negotiate. That was where he would have to bury the contents of the chemical toilet,

Even here there was a trail of
sorts.
It began low down in the bracken above the woods and crossed the new Range Rover Track at the very spot where the ledge had been cut in the hillside to take the caravan. But it continued beyond that, winding up the slope until it disappeared from sight on the moor. Along this trail and all round the caravan were the prints of cloven hooves, as if hundreds of animals had tracked backwards and forwards over the spot for centuries.

“Sheep? Deer? Haggis?” Dyer laughed at his own joke. “Have they really got legs on one side longer than the other?”

Dyer painted landscapes; sunsets and sunrises; coral islands drowsing in the heat. Animals didn't interest him.

Ayers Rock at sunrise had been breathtaking, but now he needed cloud effects; fleeces of mist half veiling the mountains; thunder clouds brooding over empty moors; sudden shafts of sunlight reflected from lonely lochans; the kind of lighting that could make you imagine ancient ghosts; kelpies – milk white horses peacefully grazing by the shore of a loch who would seize the unwary traveller and carry him down into the peaty brown depths; the wee folk chattering behind a waterfall so that you could easily hear their voices, laughing like girls, but you never saw them, or if you did, things would go ill with you. Dyer, for all his hard-bitten Australian exterior, was superstitious. He had felt strange sensations in lonely places in the outback, and later discovered they were Aborigine burial grounds or corroboree sites.

His mother had been Highland, which was why he had come here, and perhaps that was why he felt slightly uneasy now that he was alone with the powers of this ancient land; the Sgurr behind him – it really did seem to be almost leaning over him, the Ballagan Burn to his right chattering harmlessly among the rocks and mini-waterfalls. Burns and rivers were supposed to have spirits of their own and some of them demanded human sacrifices. He remembered a rhyme his mother had read to him years ago out of a long lost story book:

“Bloodthirsty Dee

Each year needs three.”

It was late now and there was a chill in the air – an un-Australian chill. The sun had set in cotton wool behind the three blue peaks and the sky to the west was turning from red to dark purple-grey.

“The clouds have spirits too,” he had heard his mother say.

It was exactly a month later that Fraser found the dying otter.

*hamlet