The Incredible Journey (12 page)

P
IECES
of a jigsaw puzzle were gradually joining together, and the picture was taking shape. In eastern Canada a liner was steaming up the St. Lawrence River, the heights of Quebec receding in the distance as she made her way to Montreal. Leaning against the railings on the upper deck, watching the panorama of the river, were the Hunters, returning from their long stay in England.

The children, Peter and Elizabeth, were wildly excited, and had hardly left the deck since the liner had entered the Gulf. Ever since they had wakened that morning, they had been counting the hours until their arrival home. There was all the joy and excitement of seeing their own homeland again, and soon their friends, their home and possessions—and above all they could not wait to see their pets. Over and over again Elizabeth had discussed their first meeting, for she was secretly longing
to be reassured that Tao would not have forgotten her. She had bought him a red leather collar as a present.

Peter was perfectly happy and not in any way doubtful about his reunion; ever since he had been old enough to think at all he had known that, just as surely as Bodger belonged to him and was always there, so did he belong to the bull terrier—and his homecoming would be all the present that his dog would need.

And their father, seeing the endless arrowheads of mallards in the Canadian dawn, knew that soon he and the eager Luath would see them again, over the Delta marshlands and the stubble fields in the west.…

A thousand miles westward of the liner, John Longridge sat at his desk, a letter from his goddaughter in his hand, his thoughts as bleak as the empty, unresponsive house to which he had returned only a short while ago. He read the excited plans for her reunion with Tao—and of course the dogs—with a sinking heart, then laid the letter down unfinished, his despair deepening as he looked at the calendar: if the Hunters caught an early plane they would be home tomorrow night; in twenty-four hours’ time he must give them his heartbreaking news—his charges were gone; and he had no idea where, or what had befallen them.

Mrs. Oakes was equally miserable. Between them
they had pieced together the fate of his charred note, and the course of confusion which had enabled three disparate animals to disappear without trace, and with perfect timing and perception. It was this perfection which had convinced him that his charges had not run away—if they had been unhappy, they could have gone at any time during the months of their stay.

He had already considered every possible catastrophe that could have overtaken them—death on the road, poison, traps, theft, disused wells—but not by the wildest stretch of imagination could he make any one of them account for three animals of such different temperaments. Nor could he understand how such a distinctive trio could pass unremarked in this small community: he had already spoken to some of Bodger’s friends at the school, and not one sharp-eyed child had seen them that last morning, or any strange car, or in fact anything out of the ordinary; and Longridge knew that the area covered by rural school children was immense. The vast network of the Provincial Police could report nothing, either.

And yet he must have something more concrete than this to offer the Hunters tomorrow—if not a hope, at least a clear-cut finality.

He pressed his aching head into his hands and forced himself to set his thoughts out rationally: animals just did not vanish into thin air, so there must be some reasonable explanation for their disappearance,
some clue as obvious and simple as the day-today pattern of their lives. A half-buried recollection stirred uneasily in his memory, but he could not identify it.

It was growing dark, and he switched on a lamp and moved over to light the fire. The silence in the room was oppressive. As he put a match to the kindling and watched the flames leap up, he thought of the last time he had sat by it: saw again a pair of dreaming sapphire eyes in their proud masked setting; tenanted his armchair with a luxuriously sprawling white form; and returned to the shadowy corner its listening, grieving ghost.…

Again the half-submerged memory distracted him: Luath’s eyes … some difference in the pattern of his behavior … Luath’s behavior on the last morning, the gesture of his unexpected paw … With a sudden flash of insight, he understood at last.

The door opened and he turned to Mrs. Oakes. “I know now—I know where they have gone,” he said slowly. “Luath has taken them home—he has taken them all back to his own home!”

Mrs. Oakes looked at him in incredulous silence for a moment, then “No!” she burst out impulsively. “No—they couldn’t do that! It’s not possible—why, it must be nearly three hundred miles! And someone would have seen them—someone would have told us …” She broke off, dismayed, remembering that neither dog wore a collar. The terrier
would carry no identifying marks, either, as he had been registered in England.

“They wouldn’t be where anyone would see them,” said Longridge thoughtfully. “Traveling by instinct, they would simply go west by the most direct route—straight across country, over the Ironmouth Range.”

“Over the Ironmouth?” echoed Mrs. Oakes in horror. “Then there’s no use hoping any more, if you’re right,” she said flatly. “There’s bears and wolves and all manner of things, and if they weren’t eaten up the first day they’d starve to death.”

She looked so stricken and forlorn that Longridge suggested there was a good chance that they had been befriended by some remote prospector or hunter; perhaps, he enlarged, even now making his way to a telephone.…

But Mrs. Oakes was inconsolable.

“Don’t let’s fool ourselves any more, Mr. Longridge,” she broke in. “I daresay a
young
dog could cross that country, and possibly even a cat—for there’s nothing like a cat to look after itself—but you know as well as I do that old Bodger couldn’t last ten miles! He used to be tired out after I’d walked him to my sister’s and back. Oh, I know that half of it was put on to get something out of me,” she admitted with a watery smile, catching Longridge’s eye, “but it’s a fact. No dog as old as that could go gallivanting across a wilderness and live for more than a day or two.”

Her words fell away into a silence and they both looked out at the ominous dusk.

“You’re right, Mrs. Oakes,” said Longridge wearily at last. “We’ll just have to face it—the old fellow is almost certainly dead. After all, it’s been nearly four weeks. And I wouldn’t give a candle for Tao’s chances either,” he added, “if we’re going to be honest. Siamese can’t stand the cold. But if they
did
make for their own home there’s a chance at least that a big powerful
dog
like Luath would get there.”

“That Luath!” said Mrs. Oakes darkly. “Leading that gentle old lamb to his death! And that unnatural cat egging him on, no doubt. Not that I ever had any favorites, but …”

The door shut, and Longridge knew that behind it she wept for them all.

Now that Longridge had his conviction to work on he wasted no time.

He called the Chief Ranger of Lands and Forests, and received assurance that word would be circulated throughout the department, and the game wardens and foresters contacted—tomorrow.

The Chief Ranger suggested calling a local bush pilot, who flew hunters into the remoter parts of the bush and knew most of the Indian guides.

The pilot was out on a trip and would not return until tomorrow; his wife suggested the editor of the rural section of the local newspaper.

The editor was still not back from covering a plowing match; his mother said that the hydro maintenance crew covered a large area of the country.…

The Line Superintendent said that he would be able to get in touch with the crews in the morning; he suggested the rural telephone supervisor, who was a clearinghouse of information for miles around.…

Everyone was sympathetic and helpful—but he was no farther on. He postponed the probable frustration of hearing that the supervisor would not be back from visiting her niece across the river until tomorrow, or that a storm had swept all the rural lines down, and searched for a map of the area.

He round a large-scale one, then drew a connecting line between his own small township and the university town where the Hunters lived, marking down the place names through which it passed. He found to his dismay that there were few of these, the line passing mostly through uninhabited regions of lakes and hills. The last forty or fifty miles seemed particularly grim and forbidding, most of it being in the Strellon Game Reserve. His hopes sank lower and lower, and he felt utterly despondent, bitterly regretting his offer to take the animals in the first place. If only he had kept quiet and minded his own business, they would all be alive now; for he was convinced, after looking at the map, that death through exposure, exhaustion, or starvation must have been inevitable.

And tomorrow the Hunters would be home again.… Dejectedly he picked up the phone and asked for the rural supervisor.…

Late that night the telephone rang. The telephone
operator at Lintola—Longridge glanced at the map to find Lintola a good many miles south of his line—had some information: the schoolteacher had mentioned that the little Nurmi girl had rescued a half-drowned Siamese cat from the flooded River Keg, about two weeks ago, but it had disappeared again a few days afterwards. If Mr. Longridge would call Lintola 29 ring 4 tomorrow at noon she would try and have the child there and he could talk to her himself. The supervisor had one other piece of information which she offered rather diffidently for what it was worth—old Jeremy Aubyn, who lived up at the Doranda mine, had talked about “visitors” when he came in for his monthly mail collection, whereas everybody knew that the last visitor who had made the twelve-mile walk through the bush to the mine had been his brother, who had been dead for the last three years—poor old man. His only elaboration had been that they were “delightful people.” … Old Mr. Aubyn had lived so long with only wild animals for company that he might easily be confused, she added delicately.

Longridge thanked her warmly, and put the receiver back, picking up the map. He discounted the information about the old recluse at the Doranda mine—who had probably met some prospectors or Indians—and concentrated on Lintola. It looked as though he had been right, then—they were indeed making for their own home. Two weeks ago, he puzzled, the cat had been alive, and, according to Longridge’s map, must have traveled over a hundred
miles. But what had happened to the other two? Must he now face the probability that Luath, too, was dead? Drowned possibly, as the cat would surely have been except for a little girl.…

Lying awake in the dark that night, unable to sleep, he thought that he would have given anything to feel the heavy thud on the bed that used to announce the old dog’s arrival. How extremely unloving and intolerant he had felt so often, waking in the middle of the night to the relentless shoving and pushing of his undesirable and selfish bedfellow.

“Tonight,” he reflected wryly, “I’d give him the whole bed! I’d even sleep in the basket myself—if only he would come back!”

L
ONGRIDGE’S
hours of telephoning the night he returned had brought results; and in the following week he and the Hunters spent many hours patiently tracking down evidence which was sometimes so conflicting and confusing that it was useless, and sometimes so coincidental that it was difficult to believe. Sometimes they felt wearily that every man, woman or child who had seen a cat or a dog walking along a road in the last five years had called to tell them so. But on the whole everyone had been extraordinarily helpful and kind, and they had evidence of several genuine encounters. When the results had been sifted down, they bore out Longridge’s original guess as to the line of travel—the dogs (nothing further had been heard of the cat) had taken an almost perfect compass course due west, and the line he had drawn on the map had been remarkably accurate.

The brother of one of the bush pilot’s Indian
guides had met a cousin recently returned from rice harvesting who had some wild story of a cat and dog appearing out of the night and casting a spell over the rice crop so that it multiplied a thousand-fold; and the little girl called Helvi Nurmi, her voice distressed and tearful, had described in detail the beautiful Siamese cat who had stayed for so short a time with her. Somewhere in the Ironmouth Range a forester had reported seeing two dogs; and a surly farmer had been overheard in Joe Woods’s General Store (Public Telephone), Philipville, saying that if he could lay hands on a certain white dog (“Ugly as sin he was—a great vicious powerful beast!”) who had killed a flock of prize-winning chickens and savagely beaten up his poor peace-loving collie, he would break every bone in his body!

Peter had smiled for the first time on hearing this: it had conjured up for him a vivid picture of Bodger in his aggressive element, thoroughly enjoying himself in a fight, cheerfully wicked and unrepentant as ever. He would rather have heard this than anything, for he knew that his unquenchable, wayward old clown was not made for sadness or uncertainty. His deep grief he kept to himself, and would not undermine it now with this softening hope: Bodger was dead; Luath almost certainly so; and his conviction was steady and unalterable.