With the rifle comfortably under one crooked arm, he made his promenade. He could see across to the other side of the clearing; it was deserted, apart from two men walking distantly among cattle, and a stooped figure in the cabbage patch. He had the world almost to himself: and year by year he would have it more to himself.
He snapped down the shutter of his mind on that thought, and began to concentrate on what Sam Bulstow had reported. It was probably an invention to gain him twenty minutes off patrol duty. The rumour about the Scots sounded unlikely — though no less likely than other tales that travellers had brought them, that a Chinese army was marching on London, or that gnomes and elves and men with badger faces had been seen dancing in the woods. Scope for error and ignorance seemed to grow season by season. It would be good to know what was really happening…
Less unlikely than the legend of marching Scots was Sam’s tale of a strange packman. Densely though the thickets grew, there were ways through them, and men who travelled those ways, though the isolated village of Sparcot saw little but the traffic that moved painfully up and down the Thames. Well, they must maintain their watch. Even in these more peaceful days — “the apathy that bringeth perfect peace”, thought Greybeard, wondering what he was quoting — villages that kept no guard could be raided and ruined for the sake of their food stocks, or just for madness. So they believed.
Now he walked among tethered cows, grazing individually round the ragged radius of their halters. They were the new strain, small, sturdy, plump, and full of peace. And young! Tender creatures, surveying Greybeard from moist eyes, creatures that belonged to man but had no share of his decrepitude, creatures that kept the grass short right up to the scrawny bramble bushes.
He saw that one of the animals near the brambles was pulling at its tether. It tossed its head, rolled its eyes, and lowed. Greybeard quickened his pace.
There seemed to be nothing to disturb the cow except a dead rabbit lying by the brambles. As he drew nearer, Greybeard surveyed the rabbit. It was freshly killed. And though it was completely dead, he thought it had moved. He stood almost over it, alert for something wrong, a faint prickle of unease creeping up his backbone.
Certainly the rabbit was dead, killed neatly by the back of the neck. Its neck and anus were bloody, its purple eye glazed.
Yet it moved. Its side heaved.
Shock — an involuntary superstitious dread — coursed through Greybeard. He took a step backwards, sliding the rifle down into his hands. At the same time, the rabbit heaved again and its killer exposed itself to view.
Backing swiftly out of the rabbit’s carcass came a stoat, doubling up its body in its haste to be clear. Its brown coat was enriched with rabbit blood, the tiny savage muzzle it lifted to Greybeard smeared with crimson. He shot it dead before it could move.
The cows plunged and kicked. Like clockwork toys, the figures among the brussels sprout stumps straightened their backs. Birds wheeled up from the rooftops. The gong sounded from the guardroom, as Greybeard had instructed it should. A knot of people congregated outside the barns, hobbling together as if they might pool their rheumy eyesight.
“Blast their eyes, there’s nothing to panic about,” Greybeard growled. But he knew the involuntary shot had been a mistake; he should have clubbed the stoat to death with the butt of his rifle. The sound of firing always woke alarm.
A party of active sixty-year-olds were assembling, and began to march towards him, swinging cudgels of various descriptions. Through his irritation, he had to admit that it was a prompt stand-to. There was plenty of life about the place yet.
“It’s all right!” he called, waving his arms above his head as he went to meet them. “All right! I was attacked by a solitary stoat, that’s all. You can go back.”
Charley Samuels was there, a big man with a sallow colour; he had his tame fox, Isaac, with him on a leash. Charley lived next door to the Timberlanes, and had been increasingly dependent on them since his wife died in the previous spring.
He came in front of the other men and aligned himself with Greybeard. “Next spring, we’ll have a drive to collect more fox cubs and tame them,” he said. “They’ll help keep down any stoats that venture on to our land. We’re getting more rats, too, sheltered in the old buildings. I reckon the stoats are driving ’em to seek shelter in human habitation. The foxes will take care of the rats too, won’t they, Isaac, boy?”
Still angry with himself, Greybeard made off along the perimeter again. Charley fell in beside him, sympathetically saying nothing. The fox walked between them, dainty with its brush held low.
The rest of the party stood about indecisively in mid-field. Some quieted the cattle or stared at the scattered pieces of stoat; some went back towards the houses, whence others came out to join them in gossip. Their dark figures with white polls stood out against the background of fractured brick.
“They’re half-disappointed there was not some sort of excitement brewing,” Charley said. A peak of his springy hair stood out over his forehead. Once it had been the colour of wheat; it had achieved whiteness so many seasons ago that its owner had come to look on white as its proper and predestined hue, and the wheaty tint had passed into his skin.
Charley’s hair never dangled into his eyes, although it looked as if it would after a vigorous shake of the head. Vigorous shaking was not Charley’s habit; his quality was of stone rather than fire; and in his bearing was evidence of how the years had tested his endurance. It was precisely this air of having withstood so much that these two sturdy elders — in superficial appearance so unlike — had in common.
“Though people don’t like trouble, they enjoy a distraction,” Charley said. “Funny — that shot you fired started my gums aching.”
“It deafened me,” Greybeard admitted. “I wonder if it roused the old men of the mill?” He noticed that Charley glanced towards the mill to see if Mole or his henchman, “Major” Trouter, was coming to investigate.
Catching Greybeard’s glance, Charley grinned rather foolishly and said, by way of something to say, “Here comes old Jeff Pitt to see what all the fuss is.”
They had reached a small stream that wound its way across the cleared land. On its banks stood the stumps of some beeches that the villagers had cut down. From among these, the shaggy old figure of Pitt came. Over one shoulder he carried a stick from which hung the body of an animal. Though several of the villagers ventured some distance afield, Pitt was the only one who roved the wilds on his own. Sparcot was no prison for him. He was a morose and solitary man; he had no friends; and even in the society of the slightly mad, his reputation was for being mad. Certainly his face, as full of whorls as willow bark, was no reassurance of sanity; and his little eyes moved restlessly about, like a pair of fish trapped inside his skull.
“Did someone get shot then?” he asked. When Greybeard told him what happened, Pitt grunted, as if convinced the truth was being concealed from him.
“With you firing away, you’ll have the gnomes and wild things paying us attention,” he said.
“I’ll deal with them when they appear.”
“The gnomes are coming, aren’t they?” Pitt muttered; Greybeard’s words had scarcely registered on him.
He turned to gaze at the cold and leafless woods. “They’ll be here before so long, to take the place of children, you mark my words.”
“There are no gnomes round here, Jeff, or they’d have caught you long ago,” Charley said. “What have you got on your stick?”
Eyeing Charley to judge his reaction, Pitt lowered the stick from his shoulder and displayed a fine dog otter, its body two feet long.