On they walked throughout the remainder of the spring; then summer came, and the hot sun beat down on them, making their throats dry and parching their mouths so that they walked from stream to stream, but as the days wore on and rain refused to fall the ponds and streams got low and the water that was left in them was brackish and musty. They were still making for the far mountains, which appeared hazy and bluish in the distance, but they had dropped down again now into the lowlands where there was little if any breeze to relieve the unrelenting heat which poured down from the blue sky into the lanes and between the hedges along which they cautiously made their way. They slept only in the afternoons now for Nab was anxious that they should move as quickly as possible and he and Beth each carried a share of her winter clothes: the brown cape and the jerseys which had helped her to survive the cold. Nab had wanted her to bury them under a hedge somewhere but she had been adamant in her refusal.
‘They’re all I have left of my old life,’ she had said, ‘and of my home. I could no more part with these than you could throw away your bark from Silver Wood.’
So, because he loved her, he reluctantly agreed and had ended up carrying her heavy cape and two jerseys while she took the remaining one and thanked him for being so thoughtful and kind.
It was in the height of summer, one hot morning when they were trudging along a dry dusty cattle track through a field, that they saw for the first time a thick black column of smoke rising in the distance. It went straight up in the humid windless air and the animals could smell the acrid stench of its fumes from where they were standing. They stopped still and looked at it; they had all seen smoke before from the chimneys of the Urkku but this was somehow different. The smoke was blacker, thicker and more dense, and the smell was sickly-sweet and nauseating; it reminded Beth of the smell caused when people put chicken carcasses on fires to burn them after the Sunday dinner.
‘Look, there’s another,’ Brock said, and he pointed to a thicker column round to their right and as they looked around they saw more and more until there must have been a dozen fires, all with their black plumes drifting up into the sky. There was something ominous and evil about them and Nab felt a chill go down his back as he watched.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘we can't stay here all day.’
‘What are they, Nab?’ said Beth.
‘I don’t know but there’s something about them which makes me afraid. We must move on.’
‘It’s almost Sun-High,’ said Perryfoot. ‘Couldn’t we stay here for the afternoon by the hedge? It seems as good a place as any.’
Nab looked at Warrigal and the owl spoke.
‘It may be our last opportunity to rest for quite some time. I think we should stay here and move on in the early evening.’
So the animals walked over the field towards a thick hedge which ran along one side. Growing in the hedge were a number of large oak trees and they settled down in the shade of one of these, huddled around the trunk with Warrigal perching on one of the high branches to keep a watch for any signs of danger. It was beautifully cool in the green shade of the oak and they were soon asleep.
When evening came and the dusk began to fall they awoke and moved on. In the darkness they could not see the black smoke fromthe fires but they could smell them and occasionally they caught sight of red flickering flames in the distance and heard noises of shouting and crying coming from the direction of the fires.
As dawn arose they were walking along a little grassy ridge with wooded heathland on one side and meadows on the other. The ground was blackened and scorched so that there was very little grass left in the field and all that remained of the heath was an expanse of charred black scrub and bushes. The smell of burnt wood was everywhere and their feet became sooty as they walked. They could see now that the countryside all about was the same and the air was full of black smuts.
It was mid-morning when they saw the Urkku. They had been making their way up the scorched slope of a little hill when suddenly they froze at the sound of two shots from the far side followed by ferocious guttural shouts as if an argument was going on. They crawled through the blackened grass until they could just see over the top. There was quite a deep valley the other side and halfway up the far slope stood a number of Urkku, all with guns, yelling at one another. On the ground were some dead rabbits and the Urkku seemed to be in two groups, one on each side. Beth looked in amazement at the men, for she had never before seen any like them. Their clothes, if that is what they had once been, hung off them like strips of dirty rag and their bodies were so emaciated that the ribs stuck through their puny barrel chests and the skin hung in loose folds. They were wearing what appeared to be trousers and out of the bottom of these protruded thin bony ankles like matchsticks, and bare feet. She looked in mounting horror at their faces and was transfixed by what she saw. The hair was long, dirty and matted so that it hung down in tangled knots or else stuck out in greasy spikes, and beneath this filthy thatch, deep-set sunken eyes stared out of a face so covered in grime and dirt that as they shouted their teeth seemed to flash silver in the sunlight. Their cheeks were sunken and hollow and the cheekbones appeared to be all that held the covering of skin from falling away. Beth held her nose and had to stop herself from retching when the stench from their bodies, exaggerated by the heat, was carried over in the breeze.
The cause of the argument seemed to be the rabbits for each group was pointing at them and then gesticulating wildly and shouting. Suddenly an Urkku from one group ran forward and, flinging himself on one of his adversaries, began wrestling with him on the ground. They rolled around spitting and biting and kicking and a cloud of dust rose up around them. The others transferred their attention from the rabbits to their mauling companions, each side yelling encouragement to its own until finally one of them, whose hair under the grime was a ginger colour and who looked the bigger and stronger of the two, grabbed hold of a rock on the ground and brought it smashing down on his opponent’s head. There was silence while the one who had been hit went still and rolled back on to the grass with blood pouring from his head. The ginger one was just disentangling himself from his grip when one of the other group shouted at him and, raising his gun to his shoulder, shot the victor in the chest and sent him flying back to end up lying on top of his opponent. The friends then looked on in amazement as the two groups began blasting away at each other from where they were standing. It was over in seconds and the crashing noise of the guns seemed to have only just started when it had already finished, the echoes dying away in the still silent air and the smell of gunpowder clogging up their nostrils for a fleeting instant before it blew away in a little cloud of light brown smoke. Eight Urkku lay dead on the grass and the survivors from the winning group were running away across the field carrying the rabbits by the back legs so that as they ran the heads jerked crazily up and down as if they were rag dolls. They were laughing in a high-pitched, hysterical way.
The animals remained where they were for a long time, in silence. The sun beat down on their backs and the smell of burning was heavy in the air. Finally Warrigal broke the silence.
‘Most odd. Most peculiar, ’ he said. ‘Something is happening in the world of the Urkku. I’ve never seen them look or behave like that before. Beth, what do you think?’