From inside, the bellow came again, filling the whole square with its power.
Hubert hesitated no longer. There was a small gap in the wooden railing patched with canvas, and beside it a pile of rubble where a new water pipe went underground. A perfect Hubert Hole. And putting down his battered head, the little yak began to dig.
The bull they called El Magnifico stood alone in the center of the ring. Sweat gleamed on the huge hump of muscle that ran down his back; his eyes were wide with terror; blood streamed from a wound in his flank.
A few days ago he had roamed free on the range, feeling the wind between his horns, the good grass beneath his feet. Then men had come and carted him away and kept him for two days in a darkened pen. And now he’d been pushed, half-blinded, into this place where men rushed at him on horses and others leaped at him with arrows, and everywhere there were flickering red cloths, and the screams of the crowd, and pain and fear.
But El Magnifico was a great bull. He did not understand why these things were being done to him, but he would fight to the end. And he lowered his head and pawed the ground, and when the prancing men came with their arrows, he charged.
“Olé!” yelled the crowd. And “Aah!” as a banderillero vaulted to safety over the barrier.
But the bull was growing tired. One of the banderillero’s arrows had pierced the muscles of his throat. Soon Pedro the Passionate would provoke him to the charge that would be his last.
“Kill!” roared the crowd to Pedro the Passionate. “Kill the bull! Kill! Kill! Kill!”
Wretched, exhausted, scenting his own death, the great bull lifted his head in a last bellow of misery and pain.
The bellow was answered. Not by an answering roar exactly. By a small but very happy bleat. And then the yak called Hubert tottered on his spindly legs into the ring.
He was covered in sawdust and rubble, his left horn looked like a toy corkscrew, and a piece of water pipe, dislodged by his tunneling, had caught in his tail.
Ignoring the murmurs of the crowd, not even seeing the picadors on their skinny horses or the prancing banderilleros with their arrows or Pedro the Passionate standing openmouthed, his cape in his hand, Hubert tottered forward. Only one thing existed for him: El Magnifico the bull.
“Father!” said Hubert in yak language. “Daddy! It’s your son. It’s me!”
El Magnifico was completely taken by surprise. He stopped bellowing and pawing and charging and bent his head to look at whatever it was that was blissfully butting him from underneath. He didn’t think he had a calf like that. His calves, as far as he remembered, were larger and smoother and had a different smell. But with fifty wives, one could never be sure. And slowly El Magnifico put out his huge, rough tongue and carefully, painstakingly, began to lick Hubert into shape.
Hubert had never been so happy. No one had licked him since he’d left Nanvi Dar. He trembled with joy, he squeaked with pleasure, he rolled over on his back …
“Aah! The sweet little one,” sighed the women in the crowd.
Pedro the Passionate was furious. There are rules about bullfighting like there are rules about boxing. You can’t just go up to the back end of a bull and stick him in the behind. To earn his money, Pedro had to make him charge.
So he flicked his fingers, and the picadors on their poor skinny horses tried to ride up to El Magnifico again and jab him with their spears and make him fight.
But they had reckoned without the horses. A pawing, stamping bull was their enemy — but a father licking his son was a different matter. They, too, had had foals in distant and happy days before they were sold off to be ripped to pieces in the ring. At first they just wouldn’t budge, however much the picadors jabbed them with their spears. And then, to show they meant business — the horses sat down.
After that the audience went mad. The men rolled about in their seats laughing. The women took out their handkerchiefs and began to sob, because it was all so touching and beautiful.
But Pedro the Passionate nearly exploded with rage. He was being turned into a laughingstock. He had to kill the bull. He had to show them.
So angry was he that he felt no fear, but pranced right up to the bull and flicked him with his cape. Anything to make him charge.
El Magnifico didn’t even notice. He was working on a particularly difficult place behind Hubert’s right ear. But Hubert had seen the cape: a nasty, swirling thing it was, and it made him nervous. With a worried bleat he rushed forward — right between Pedro the Passionate’s velvet trouser legs.
And the last bullfight of the season ended with the mightiest matador in Spain lying flat on his back in the sawdust, a pram-sized yak nibbling the bobbles of his embroidered waistcoat — and the fiercest bull ever bred in Pamplona licking them both.
Chapter 10
Farley Towers
ULLS WHO HAVE NOT BEEN KILLED IN THE RING are never used again for fights. So the next day, El Magnifico was sent back by special train to the ranch from which he had come: a beautiful place with fresh green grass, chestnut groves, and cool breezes from the mountains of Navarre. And with him traveled his adopted son, an animal that had become famous throughout Spain — the yak called Hubert.
It was this ranch, in the hills above Pamplona, to which, on a moonlit night a couple of days later, the yellow lorry traveled. Perry had found out where the bull had been taken and they had broken their journey to the coast to say good-bye.
When the yetis had woken up to find Hubert gone, their distress had been terrible.
“I didn’t look after him properly,” Ambrose had wailed over and over again. “I didn’t deserve to have a yak of my own.”
“Do you remember his little hooves?” Lucy sobbed. “Just like mother-of-pearl, they were.”
“And the clatter of his knees knocking together. I can hear it now,” Grandma had moaned.
But now they were trying to be brave.
“After all, every growing person needs a father,” said sensible Uncle Otto.
“Look how we miss ours,” said Lucy, choking back a burst of tears.
“That El Magnifico animal will be the making of him, I daresay,” said Grandma.
But Ambrose didn’t say anything. Being brave was beyond him as he faced a yakless world.
About a mile from the ranch, Perry parked the lorry and while Con went ahead to see that the coast was clear, the yetis crept silently across the fields toward the paddock that housed El Magnifico and his new son.
There had been clouds over the moon, but as they came up to the railings, the clouds rolled past and in a shaft of silver light they saw their yak, lying like a shaggy mop-head against the vast flanks of the sleeping bull.
“Hubert!” said Ambrose in a deep and tragic voice. “Are you happy, Hubert? Is this what you wanted?”
Hubert scrambled to his feet and ran to the railings. His boot face quivered with excitement; his knock-knees clattered together like castanets. Here was Ambrose the Abominable! Here were his old friends! He began to butt the railings, making little slivers of sawdust with his crumpled horn.
El Magnifico didn’t move. He just lifted his great head, with the wide and curving horns, and waited.
It was a terrible moment. The yetis could have picked Hubert up with one hand and lifted him over the fence and that would have been that. But Lady Agatha had brought them up well. They knew that people — even very young ones like Hubert — have to make their own choices.