I’d stopped and was crouching right down, my ear almost to the ground, in the middle of a thick clump of old elder bushes. I’d learnt to walk the leaf mould, along hidden paths, almost soundlessly in my bare feet 1uring the past weeks. Surely the man, in his heavy boots, would be unable to move as quietly? I listened to all the natural sounds of early morning that I’d become accustomed to: a blackbird chirruped suddenly and ran away somewhere behind me. Something else moved high above me, scratching the bark of a tree in a small flurry: a squirrel was going up into the light. But the rest was silence.
I was just turning, about to move away, when I saw him. He was standing, absolutely still, hardly more than twenty yards away, just his head visible, as if disembodied, poking out above a patch of mist. He stared at me — straight at me, it seemed — with his deep-set eyes like holes in a Halloween turnip. He must have seen me, I thought. Or had he? He had the air of a dreamer, of something malign and unreal just emerged from the dying mist. It was Ross, I saw then — the grave-faced dirty tricks man from the Special Branch, sometimes attached to our section: doubtful-eyed, the lids rarely blinking, someone I’d known vaguely in London years before, when I was in Mid-East Intelligence and he’d looked at me over a desk, as he seemed to do now out of the white air, with the same fathomless expression, waiting for you to make the error: the slight lantern jaw, swarthy, the permanent five o’clock shadow: it was certainly Ross, like some more skilled animal, who had caught up with me — Ross, playing the countryman, the man who never gave up. Ross, the hit-man now, who must have been the immediate cause of all my anguish a fortnight before. I’d have tried to kill him there and then except that I’d more to do before I left these woods, a lot more. Besides it was Marcus — his and my old boss — that I really wanted: it was Marcus, after all, who must have sent Ross out into my life to ruin it.
But where was his stupid dog — a police dog, obviously? It must have lagged somewhere behind him for Ross turned and called softly, disappearing back into the cotton wool. I took the chance of moving off as quickly as I could in the opposite direction.
For quite a few minutes then I thought I’d lost him again. I heard the dog whimper, but its excited cries seemed to be disappearing in the distance behind me. What on earth was it doing? My scent must have been clear enough on the ground. I didn’t wait to find out, moving onwards, skirting a clearing, making for the end of the lake.
It was on the far side of this open glade, when I’d gone back into the undergrowth of fern and bramble and thought myself safe, that I heard the sounds of some mild stampede on the still air behind me: bushes crackled, dry sticks broke. The Alsatian was whimpering as it ran, and the hungry sounds were coming towards me this time. The dog had found my trail securely at last and was closing on me quickly.
I ran through the bushes now, my skin thorned as I ran fleetfoot, regardless of noise, intent only on putting as much distance as possible between us. But it would never be enough. The dog had four legs and, despite its earlier tracking errors, its training would tell in the end, I knew.
It gained on me as I ran headlong up the valley. And I thought — it must soon be over: the beast will leap on my back in a moment, or tear at my arm, its dark jaws sinking deep into my flesh.
And it was imagining this bloody hurt, and my subsequent death (for that, of course, had been their intention from the start) that made a charge of anger flood up in me, a tingling, like an electric current that brought the muscles tight together, all over my body in a sense of wild supremacy.
A hunted animal, yes, I’d become just that: naked, earth-grimed, bleeding. But such an animal, at the last, can turn and kill too. There was an arrow for both of them, after all, a chance, at least, before they got me.
I ran up the side of the valley, unstrapping the two arrow shafts as I went, and when I thought I was high enough to command the ground beneath, I turned, stringing the first arrow and waited for the dog.
As soon as it saw me, emerging from some laurel at the bottom of the dell, it left the scent and bounded straight up the slope towards me, head high, going very fast, without any whimpering. Now that it was finally confirmed in its purpose, the animal was like a guided missile that would explode viciously in my face within moments. Ross was nowhere to be seen: the dog had run well ahead of him.
The dacron cord came quickly taut against my cheek. I steadied the sharpened arrow-tip on the animal’s chest. And since it was coming straight up the slope towards me, without any lateral movement, the dog formed an ever-larger target on the same axis. I thought I could make it.
I let it get to within about twenty feet of me — and just before the arrow sang, cutting the air like a whip for an instant, I knew it was going to strike home. There was that sixth sense that sometimes comes in any physical skill when you know you’ve got it right just before you do it, when there is a magic certainty of success.
The arrow, without barbs, drove deep into the dog’s chest, partly transfixing it like a spit through a pig. It came on another yard or so up the hill. But it was only momentum. It wasn’t dead when I picked it up, but there was no bite in it, nor any sound. Only its eyes remained angry. The arrow must have pierced its windpipe or found its heart. I got it out of the open in a moment, cradling it in my arms towards some cover higher up, and when I laid the animal down on the leaf mould, all my shoulder, where the dog’s muzzle had been, ran with foaming blood.
Of course Ross would miss the dog, I knew that. He would look high and low for it now and would surely come back later, with fresh help, to continue the search. But I knew already where I could dispose of the animal, when I had the chance, where it would not betray my presence in the wood and would appear simply to have met with a natural accident. There was a covered well I’d discovered a week before among some bushes, just behind the old pumping shed, with two metal shutters at ground level which opened up, displaying dark water six feet beneath. I would dump the animal there, leaving one of the covers off, so that, if discovered at all, it would be seen as a bloated victim of some woodland error, a town dog fatally unused to country matters.
But I wondered then why Ross hadn’t kept the animal on a lead in the first place? Surely that was how they tracked murderers on the nine o’clock news? Perhaps it was his own dog, a pet, not police trained at all? Ross was just the kind to keep such a dog in London. There was a lot of cruelty in him, in his face at the very least; something of the frustrated hunter there, of someone who’d keep just such a big killer dog in his flat or suburban semi, as a constant reminder of vicious life. Or perhaps, simply, no one else had agreed with him at HQ that I could possibly be anywhere in these woods, which they had so thoroughly combed two weeks before, and he’d had to come down from London on his own, unaided, so that with his shotgun to carry, the dog had to be let run free. But whatever the reason, Ross himself was still there to contend with.
He came into the glade beneath me a moment later, his shotgun at the ready now, perplexed but wary. He called for the dog, a soft call on the morning air that I barely heard.