Lord Morgan's Cannon (12 page)

Bear raised his long snout from the grass. Swallowing a whole nut, he pushed his spectacles down over his eyes. He examined the dog and his words.

“Where has he taken Edward?” he asked simply.

Bear had begun to learn how to think, how to reason. Without any further information, he had worked out that Tony was talking about Lord Morgan, and that the great scientist, this maker of this most important cannon, had found the monkey and kidnapped him.

“Where have they gone?”

Tony didn’t reply. He didn’t know how to. Not because he was unaware of Lord Morgan’s destination, but because he was aware that Lord Morgan was his master.

He felt a conflict building; of instinct versus conditioning. He immediately wanted to tell Bear that Lord Morgan was transporting Edward in a locked puzzle box, and he was heading for the city. In the city they would arrive at the college. He wanted to describe Lord Morgan’s office there, and all the machines he had to challenge and test the animals he kept.

But he didn’t say any of these things. He had been trained to be loyal. To serve his human protector, the man who fed and watered him, and who occasionally allowed him to rest on his warm but knobbly knees. The man who had named him Tony and who had watched over him since he was a pup. The man who’d studied him as he worked out how to open the garden gate, and who once gave him a fresh sausage for it.

“Where have they gone?” Bear asked again, as Doris and Bessie discussed whether the rain made the raisins on the bird-box more palatable.

Tony whined, unsure of himself.

So Bear thought some more. He realised he must convince the dog that he was an animal and sometimes it was better for the animals to stick together.

Bear tucked his legs under his hairy bulk, bringing him closer to Tony’s eye-line. He started to tell the dog about their life at the circus. He described how, although the animals were often kept apart, they were actually together. How, even though Edward liked to think of himself as above the other animals, and even as a tiny human, they were all the same. How when they had been whipped or were tired, they could rely on each other to understand, and to cheer each other up. How, when no one else in the world had thought to give him a name, a little insignificant bird, a specially bred ball of blue and white feathers, with black and white barbs for cheeks, had thought to name him Bear, giving him an inner strength he didn’t know he had. How they even missed the old leopard, who was the most ruthless and selfish animal any of them had ever met. And how they now missed Edward and wanted to be with him again.

Tony cocked his head left then right as Bear said these things. He recalled the friends he had made in the pack of fox-hounds and how he wished to be allowed to run with them more often. He looked up at the elephant and at the anteater. Though he didn’t really understand what sort of animals they were, or where they had come from, he had started to like them. Already it had been more fun helping hide these circus creatures than it was opening a gate by himself and running down the lane for no good reason.

So he relented. He told the giant anteater that Lord Morgan was travelling by horse and carriage to the next hill, where the college looked down upon the city folk in their blackened houses and the port with its dirty ships. That he was carrying Edward, and that Edward didn’t know how to get out of a padlocked cage.

“Can you take us there?” asked Bear.

Tony nodded and wagged his tail. He’d never travelled to the college without his master, he explained. But he often marked the telegraph poles and gates en route, and was sure he could find the way.

The animals gathered themselves and moved past the apple tree to the gate. Bessie tiptoed through the wet, behind her Tony the terrier. Behind him stood the anteater, two feet taller, and behind the giant anteater Doris, who at that time was the largest animal in southwest England.

Bessie heard the front door opening first, her ears attuned to sounds arriving from front and back. Then Bear smelled an aroma of garden strawberry, a sweeter scent than the coastal strawberries of his home. Doris felt the vibrations through her feet and finally Tony realised that Lord Morgan’s maid was leaving the house, her morning work done.

The woman, an old lady of sixty plus years, carefully closed the heavy door and turned a large iron key to lock it. She put the key in a linen bag and rubbed a little more strawberry cream in to her hands to mask the smell of cleaning fluid. She touched up her hair, looked to the gate and stared straight at a giant grey bottom, two huge thighs split by a tasselled tail waving away midges dancing in the wet air.

She stood impassive. Then Bessie flapped and Tony turned, causing Bear to back into Doris, who retreated a step, pushed her tongue into the roof of her mouth, raised her trunk and blew a geyser of saliva and rain. The maid dropped her bag. Doris felt the wind on her tail. She blew an enormous fart that scared them all. Everyone started to scatter. Bessie flew up into the rain while Tony ran off the path on to the grass. Bear turned and faced the maid, who now screamed an old lady’s scream, weak and shrill but using all her lungs and stomach. The old lady collapsed in shock. Doris approached her, lowering her big head over the old lady’s, who feared she was about to die. Doris extended her trunk and lipped the maid’s hair, trying to reassure her that she was a gentle and friendly elephant, one used to people.

Tony gathered himself. He ran to the maid. Placing his forepaws on her chest, he licked her face. As Doris retreated, he then spun himself, barking with the excitement.

Bessie was the first to realise their predicament. She had been listening to the terrier all along.

“We have to hide. We have to hide,” she pleaded from ten feet up in the air. “She’ll tell the humans and they’ll come for us. They’ll take us like they took Edward.”

“She’s right,” said Bear. “We can’t use the gate. We have to find another way.”

“Where can we go?” asked Doris.

She wanted to stay and pick up the old maid in her trunk, to hold and comfort her.

“There’s a way out through the back of the garden,” said Tony.

He left the maid and scampered across the lawn, round the side of the house and towards the maze. Bear followed and Bessie, braver than she’d been since the herring gull attacked, flew up and over the house, buoyed by the warm air rising from a stack of chimney pots. Doris took one last look at the maid’s ashen face, her crumpled wrinkles and her wide eyes. The elephant thundered across the grass, slipping as she went, until she reached Tony standing next to a hole in the hedge.

“Through here,” he said, tail wagging.

The hole was no wider than Tony’s shoulders, just big enough for a dog or badger. Doris didn’t stop. She charged the hedge, breaking its bones, splitting decades old hawthorn as if it was straw. She took some branches with her and a line of rusting barbed wire too, which spiked her skin, causing little drops of blood to run down her chest. Bear and Tony jumped through the breach. As Bessie soared over the hedge, a brown rabbit appeared. It hopped along and through the gap, pleased to have a way to pass between the garden and neighbouring field.

Doris found herself running through a meadow. She trampled the dark green grass, as taller stalks, with bushy heads, waved themselves aside. Bear followed in the channel created by Doris’s footsteps and Tony skipped along the flattened blades showing their light undersides to the sky.

Tony trotted, paced then broke into a canter to pass Bear. He started the gallop to catch the elephant, who had stubbornly refused to slow. He got ahead of her and veered to his right, guiding her like a pilot fish. The terrier didn’t know how to reach the college this way, but he knew the meadows stretched out to Leigh Woods, and the woods met the gorge. And he knew that across the gorge was the city with its tanning factories and cider presses, its gas lamps and electric trams, its smells of sewage and human urine dried upon its old stone walls. And somewhere within the city, up on a hill, was the college and Lord Morgan’s laboratory, where he liked to experiment on his animals.

Bessie by now had learned to fly low and true. She had put aside her twirls and twists and let her heritage take over, the one that told all parrots to fly straight and to think about where they were flying to. As she settled above the shoulders of the running dog, skimming the heads of grass, she noticed a flock of black-headed gulls had alighted in the far corner of the meadow. They had come for the flies and were making short, fast parabolic sorties, twisting their necks and snapping their beaks as they grazed on the insects in mid-air. Bessie decided to be brave. She took a hoverfly and gulped it down, then proudly banked to snatch a midge. She flew on, like a swallow in summer, ignoring the gulls as her wings flicked off the rain as quick as it could soak her feathers.

As the terrier and bird led the elephant, they didn’t notice the giant anteater falling further behind. Bear didn’t have the size of Doris or the stamina of Tony. When forced to run for too long, he became envious of those who had the right tendons and ligaments, who had their muscles arranged in such a way that they could maintain the same pace for minutes on end.

He began to slow and pushed out his tongue, to catch some water to cool his throat. He was grateful for the wet grass, feeling it between the pads of his feet. His spectacles steamed up and he finally stopped, to push them higher up his head. He watched as his friends cut a path through the meadow and into the next, heading for a line of trees that he hoped marked the boundary to somewhere safe.

He felt tired again. But unlike his last day in the circus, he wasn’t tired of life. He was tired because he hadn’t yet learned how to eat in the wild. He had rekindled his taste for insects, but he couldn’t find enough to satiate his stomach. He needed to dine a thousand times a day, digesting tiny meal after tiny meal. And all he could see about him were the midges and flies, which he knew he’d struggle to catch with his thin jaws and toothless gums.

He let the others go and lowered his head. He put his nose to the ground and determined to once again learn how to hunt. He used his snout to part the grass and he sniffed at the soil. He searched left and right and scratched at the dirt. He moved on and repeated himself until his motion became natural. He dropped his tail and arched his back and his long black hair fell straight in the rain, waiting for his nose to remember. For it to recall the unmistakable molecules and chemistry shed by a colony of ants. Their pheromones and stink that told a million others which way was home. For his nose and brain to register once more that he was an anteater, a giant one, and that eating ants was what he was born to do.

He flicked his tongue more than a foot ahead. His little eyes opened wide as his tongue danced. He’d found them! They were red rather than black ants, smaller and scrawnier than he’d have liked for his first true meal in years. But he sighed as he began to eat up a convoy, plucking them one by one from their labours, swallowing them whole. They tasted exquisite. He experimented, sucking some ants straight down, letting others dissolve on his acidic tongue. He compared three single ants to three ants eaten at once and intentionally sucked up an earwig running with the ants, to see if it tasted nuttier. He then watched as the ants scattered from their line, having collectively decided to run for their lives. His paws picked up tremors, which vibrated up his thick forearms, resonating within his long skull. His tiny ears then heard a rumbling. A deep, bass-like sound, building and building.

He lifted his head out of the wet grass and saw a chestnut thoroughbred horse running straight at him. Upon the horse’s back stood a young human, a lithe male with empty cheeks wearing a shirt that had turned black in the rain. The man’s tight trousers rubbed the horse’s shoulders as his black boots sat upon silver stirrups that dug into the horse’s belly as it lunged forward with each gallop.

The anteater didn’t move. The horse’s nostrils flared as it stretched its legs, veins and sinew rising beneath a foam of sweat on its neck. The man released a hand from the horse’s mane, revealing a thin leather stick that he raised next to the horse’s eye. As they closed the space, beating down upon him, Bear witnessed the fear in the horse’s bulging eyes, as the man smacked the whip down and across the horse’s hip.

Bear froze. It was all he could do to flick his tongue across the pink scar on his face. The horse kept coming and Bear stood his ground. He heard the cries of more humans, further back, somewhere behind the horse, whooping and cheering as the tremors within the soil intensified. Suddenly Bear realised the horse had seen him, this strange black creature hiding among the wild grass and flowers. But it couldn’t stop. The horse tried to adjust its gait and pull back its head. But the human whipped it again, forcing the horse’s head down and onwards. Bear flinched as the horse ran upon him. He tried to duck and the horse tried to vault him.

Both the horse and rider almost made it, except for a fetlock that caught the arch of Bear’s back, knocking the anteater on to his side. The horse landed upon three feet, a lost hoof catching at the soil, dragging back its knee then shoulder until the human was catapulted over the horse’s neck as his ride collapsed beneath him. The blow dazed the anteater and he lost the human and horse among the grass.

Then Bear heard a second horse galloping on by, and a third swiftly followed by a fourth. He stood to see the chestnut horse flailing some twenty feet away in the meadow, kicking out a broken leg that had snapped half way between knee and ankle. The horse snorted and tossed its neck, not understanding why it could not right itself. The human climbed out of the grass, his face covered in sweat and mud. He grabbed at the horse’s mane, and shouted, as if that would calm his broken beast.

More humans appeared in the meadow, running down a hill towards the rider, his horse and the giant anteater. Some were dressed in labourers’ clothes, others in suits, waving their hats about their heads as they tried to hop across the pasture, planting their feet into the unknown.

Bear gathered his senses. He sucked in his belly and made himself thin. He slowly weaved through the wafting heads of grass, moving so his black hulk wouldn’t break their lines. He felt a pain in his shoulder and edged away, putting distance between the bellowing men descending on the fallen horse.

The men gathered around the gelding, which had quietened, occasionally tossing its head, its ears appearing above the flowers. Some stood, hands in their pockets, while one ran his hand along the horse’s body, with slow deliberate strokes. The rider cursed at his charge and worked at the leather straps, trying to free his saddle and stirrups. He pulled at the horse, which winced and whimpered, and yanked his tack away, falling back with it on to his rear. Embarrassed he stood and ran a finger across his throat. An older gentleman, who had just joined the party, nodded. He took a handkerchief from his breast pocket and threw it across the horse’s wild eye. A third man raised a broken shotgun, inserted a slug, snapped it shut and triangulated between the horse’s eyes and ears. He pulled the trigger.

The sound of the discharging gun crashed like a wave upon Bear’s ear drums, forcing him to blink as the man ended the life of an animal that moments earlier had been running as fast as it had ever run in its life. The anteater froze again, immediately recalling the sight of the horse’s legs involuntarily kicking into the air at the final moment. He slowly lowered his body into the ground, all joy leaving him, as he curled his tail across his eyes. He listened as some of the men consoled the older gentleman, while others took out banknotes from their pockets, exchanging them for crumpled chits. After a few minutes, the men started to break away. Some turned, walking back through the grass in the direction they had come, cursing their wet trousers and bad luck. The rest jogged on, tracing the line taken by the other horses through the meadow and over a short fence, followed by the rider carrying his saddle, which he held tight as if it were his only possession.