Fraser's Voices (5 page)

For a week Fraser flushed his medicine, day by day, down the toilet. For a week he waited uneasily for the tumblings of the mind to return. For a week he heard only chirrups and squeaks and barks from his former friends.

Then one night, at dead of night, he woke. It was hot and still and a shaft of moonlight slanted across his bed. He sat up. What had wakened him? He went to the window and opened it.

Then he heard it. “A kill! A mole.” It was Nephesh the owl calling to his mate.

Fraser tried his own voice, “Nephesh!” and to his delight the word came out in the dialect of the birds of prey. “Nephesh, what moves?”

“Nothing moves,” Nephesh replied automatically through half closed beak as he carried the mole back to his mate on the nest. Then, as an afterthought, “Who asks?”

“The boy with the bird's tongue.” Fraser had never got round to giving himself a name in the language of the animals.

“Ooh! We thought you had gone away. The geese said you must have migrated. Do you migrate?”

“I suppose so.” Fraser hadn't thought about it like that before. “Yes
,
of course I do. But I'm back now. Tell One-eye. Tell Barook.”

Fraser realised that Nephesh would know nothing about the illnesses which might affect an otter, but the two animals might and he wanted to ask them.

Nephesh wheeled away into the night calling, “I will tell them.”

Fraser thought that he would never get back to sleep in his excitement, but the next thing he knew it was bright hard morning and a pair of jackdaws were quarrelling over some bacon rind they had found somewhere.

“Leave it; it's mine.”

“No! Mine! Mine! Mine!”

This sort of argument was common enough, but Fraser listened in delight for he hadn't heard anything like it for a year and he felt like a traveller come home after a long exile in a country where he couldn't speak the language.

“Hey boys!” he called. “What moves?”

The two stopped, startled.

Then one began again, as if expecting that Fraser would settle the argument. “I found it first. He's a thief, thief, thief!”

Fraser left them to it, simply rejoicing in having rediscovered his secret language. He spent the rest of that day discussing worms with a group of starlings and the garden blackbird, passing the time of day with a pair of yellowhammers and trying to persuade a rabbit that he was really harmless and only wanted to talk to him.

“Can't be too careful,” quivered the rabbit. “Stoats and weasels can turn on the charm too, you know; talk as if they were offering you buttercups, and then, when you're off your guard…“ He shook all over at the thought of what had happened to a kinsman of his who had not been on his guard.

That evening, in the gloaming, Fraser stole into the woods following the path by which One-eye had led him on the morning he had released Barook from the trap.

As he wound along the trail far into the deep woods he tried the call. “One-eye, Barook, what moves? It is the boy with the beast's tongue who asks.”

For a long time there was no answer and Fraser was almost ready to give up when, from some dense cover in the shadows, came the reply:

“Boy with our tongue, it is One-eye who answers.” The old fox slunk forward and stared at the boy with his one eye. “So you've come back. The birds said you had migrated, but I know that men do not migrate. I thought you were dead. Barook howled the death howl for you.”

“How is Barook?” asked Fraser.

“Poor Barook,” snorted One-eye. “He's well enough, eating worms and slugs. Thinks he's got a tit-bit if he catches a frog. He'll be glad to hear you're still alive. He hoped you were only hibernating, but he thought that by now you must be dead.”

“One-eye,” confided Fraser now that his relationship with the animal and the old familiarity had been re-established, “a week ago an otter died. He was poisoned. I couldn't speak his language. Do you know what happened to him?”

“So the otter died,” repeated One-eye thoughtfully. “He came up from the pools below the woods. Decided to change his hunting grounds and fish Kwarutta's pool. I told him that would be bad luck. Kwarutta killed all that was in it and then was killed himself. Now the fish are dying and the frogs and toads and newts are leaving. The water birds are going too, those that came back after Kwarutta was killed. Nothing lives there any more.”

“Why are they dying?” Fraser whispered.

“The water smells bad,” said the fox. “I wouldn't drink it or eat anything that came out of it. Some of the birds say it's Kwarutta's curse. Or perhaps it's some new trick of your people to kill off the wood folk.”

Fraser had no answer to that.

Dyer crouched in his caravan. The yellow calor gas light let him read and write. There were noises in the night all around; the howl of the wind; the rushing and gurgling of the burn outside.

The wind came and went, like a sick man gasping for breath. In the strongest gusts the caravan shook and Dyer decided that he would have to anchor it more securely in the morning. Then he heard another sound, above the wind and the chattering of the burn; an unearthly yell like nothing he had ever heard before.

For a moment his mother's Highland blood spoke to him of kelpies, but his brash Australian common sense soon reasserted itself and he turned over and went to sleep.

The next morning was clear, the sky washed clean of cloud and the three blue peaks looking so close Dyer felt that he could reach out and touch them. This was a scene he had to paint, and to get the foreground he wanted he decided to take his easel down the Range Rover Track for several hundred yards, out of sight of the caravan, till the reflection of the peaks was mirrored exactly on the still surface of the loch and the houses of Dunadd crouched like brightly painted toys.

He was there all day. When he returned in the early evening he saw at once that something was wrong.

The caravan had moved.

The wheels were no longer in line with the chockstones he had so carefully placed to keep them in position, and there were scratches in the paintwork he was sure had not been there in the morning. All around were the prints of cloven hooves as if a flock of sheep or a herd of deer – or devils – had danced around the caravan.

And so a pattern was set; by night that unearthly howling; by day, whenever Dyer left the van, scratches and signs that it had been moved slightly; sometimes at night grey ghosts of mist would rise from nowhere and crawl and swirl over the moor so that everything was veiled and muffled and a rock would suddenly loom as if it were alive, like a… kelpie?

But there wasn't a lot of mist about that summer. The June heatwave lasted through July and local people told Dyer that he didn't realise how lucky he had been. The burn grumbled quietly to itself among its rocks and pools and Dyer couldn't imagine the slope above his site turning into the waterfall that Archie had predicted and sweeping his van away.

“Locals are always like that,” he thought. “Like to exaggerate the dangers of where they live, just to impress tourists.”

In fact Dyer now found himself with the opposite problem – how to collect enough water. But this was something he knew about from his expeditions in the Nullarbor Plain in South Australia, and he soon had sunk jerry cans in the burn and the bogs in places where they would collect all he needed.

The dry weather did not suit everyone.

Hobdax the hedgehog had a lean time of it because slugs and other soft creatures that need to stay moist, burrowed deep and kept well out of the way so that he had difficulty in finding them; Barook had to use his claws and dig deeper than he could ever remember.

Klamath the heron fared better. He patrolled the wetlands below Sebek's pool and, although frogs were hard to find, there were always enough fish to keep him going. Sebek himself ignored the hot weather; his pool would never dry out.

Those who liked to hunt dry footed were in their element. One-eye prowled the trails of the wood, nose to the ground, for scents lie long when there is no rain to wash them away. Cruach the cat was out on the moor every night. Happiest of all was Eye of the Wind soaring endlessly and effortlessly in the rising currents of hot air.

In the middle of the month the real drought set in. The wind settled in the east and brought a brown haze down on the land. The sky burned blue-hot day after day. The smaller burns shrivelled to the tiniest of trickles and even the fat peat bogs on the moor began to dry out, leaving cracked and caked crusts where there was usually soft mud.

Only the Ballagan Burn still carried a little water and only the two biggest pools, Sebek's and Kwarutta's, remained deep enough for the bigger fish. There they bellied down into the mud and showed scarcely enough energy to rise for the water boatmen skating over the surface or the midges dancing in clouds just above it.

It was during this time that Fraser set out to discover what had poisoned the otter. From what One-eye had told him he realised that whatever it was had come from Kwarutta's pool. This was the highest pool in the wood. Beyond it the Ballagan Burn crawled through a gap in the boundary wall which separated the wood from the moor. Kwarutta had killed or driven away everything that had lived in or around the pool, but after he had died they had quickly re-colonised the place, for there were plenty of insects and plants and the feeding was good.

Here Fraser came on his mission. Water creatures were, he knew, difficult to talk to. A shiver still ran down his spine when he remembered his meeting with Sebek the pike in the lower pool.

“Perhaps,” he thought, “the best thing would be to settle down and listen and try to understand whatever I hear.

So he squatted down on a big square stone which had fallen from the ruined cottage that stood beside the water, tried to shut out the silly chattering of the birds, and listened for the noises from the depths of the pool.

There was a whirring of insect wings as big blue dragonflies hunted like hawks across the surface and wild bees droned round flowers in the patches of sunlight between the trees.

There were plops and splashes as stickleback and perch came up and gulped for air and the rustle of reeds as larger fish nosed among their roots. All this was unintelligible to Fraser, so he settled down sleepily to wait for something more.

Then he saw the stain. Like a big snake lying in wait, it meandered lazily, green and brown, from the inlet burn across the far end of the pool.

There was also the smell. The pool was already beginning to dry out and the caking mud at the edges gave off a sharp-sour smell. Perhaps that was what One-eye, whose nose was a hundred times keener than any human's, had meant when he said that the water smelled bad.

It was hot and still and stuffy and smelly. The droning and the buzzing drummed a dreamy sort of sleep upon Fraser and he began to feel again that tumbling of the mind…

When he wakened he was lying by the side of the pool, almost at eye level with the water. He could see the water boatmen on the surface and below them a diving beetle with its bright silver bubble of air under its tail and tiny leeches twisting like wires on the bottom.

With one ear to the ground he could hear the shaking of moles in their tunnels and with the other the lapping of the water and the soft voices of the creatures in it. He lay still, trying to breathe short and shallow so as not to disturb their talk.

“What's the matter with the water? I can't breathe.” An elderly trout flipped his tail weakly and gulped air in desperation.

A newt under a stone on the bank turned a goggle eye in the direction of the fish. “I don't know. I've had to come out.”

The newt could, of course, live on land but he always felt uncomfortable there and it was reluctantly that he had crawled out of the pool, his skin burning and his eyes nipping.

“All right for you,” gasped the trout, ”but I'm stuck here.”

“Not really,” said the newt. “The water seems to be better downstream, as far as I can see. I'm going to try it once I've got my breath back. Why don't you get out of here and take your chance in the burn?”

“Looks too shallow, with the water as low as this.”

“Well, its worth a try. Anything's better than suffocating here. Give your tail a flip and get moving.”

Fraser understood most of this, although the dialect was strange to someone used to the talk of birds and small animals and the voices were very soft. He wondered if they would be able to understand him, or would speak to him, since most of their enemies came from the world outside the water.

“What moves?” he called, trying to imitate the accent of the fish.

“This moves,” grunted the trout, obviously unaware of who had actually spoken to him. “This scum moves, and it stinks, and it suffocates. Who asks?”

“Just someone on the bank,” replied Fraser, hoping the fish could not see how big he was.

However, the trout was not alarmed. He probably thought that Fraser was some kind of wading bird for he went on, “Can't you see
for yourself? This dark stain is taking away our breath. Those who have legs or wings have gone long ago. Some of the smaller fish, minnows and sticklebacks have taken their chance in the shallows and got out of the pool, but I'm a fair size and I can't do that easily.”

Gasping with the exertion of this speech, the big fish settled belly deep in the mud like an elderly invalid taking to bed for good.

Gently Fraser reached down and touched him. “Do what the newt said. There's better water down stream. Go for it. Don't let yourself be trapped in this poisonous place.”

In desperation the trout summoned the energy to lash with his tail until he surged through the weeds and over the bar at the bottom end of the pool. Here the water was just deep enough for him, and he half swam, half wriggled until he reached a stretch where he could settle comfortably below the surface. Here the water seemed to be fresher for almost at once the fish livened up and Fraser saw him rise to take an insect from the surface.

Until now Fraser had not dared to move. Now he stood up unsteadily, his head throbbing so that he had to hold on to the branch of a willow that overhung the pool. He knew what he must do. As One-eye had said, the water was poisoned. The fish and the frogs couldn't be expected to know where the poison had come from
,
but one creature surely would. The only one who knew about all the burns and pools in the district was Klamath the heron. Fraser had to find him.