The Golden Flight (5 page)

Marguerite wondered briefly what a dugong was, but suppressed the thought. She was having a little difficulty in understanding, but wanted to know more.

‘Why can’t you just know what they are thinking, like you do with me?’ she asked.

‘You have an open mind,’ Lundy replied. ‘Humans try to keep their thoughts in a shell as though each was hiding some terrible secret. Only when they are alone on the beach do they relax and then their taut-lines convey their thoughts down into the sea like a trickle of water down a pipe.’

‘What else do they think about?’ Marguerite asked.

Malin’s thoughts washed in, ‘One was excited about things he was studying called ‘computers’. You may know that humans in this part of the world do something called ‘work’ which most don’t like, for five days out of every seven and then they have two days for doing other things they do like, such as fishing. Then they do five days more of work.’

‘What is a computer?’ Marguerite asked.

‘It was hard to read that. I could only get a picture of a box, but it used numbers inside to find out all manner of things. That human was convinced that within a few years the computers would be doing much of the work the humans have to do now, and then they would spend only four days doing work and have
three
days for fishing.’

Overhead Marguerite heard the W-wow, W-wow sound of a swan’s wing-beats and looked up as the great bird flew over. Finisterre’s thoughts reached her. ‘I wish I could fly,’ he was thinking.

Malin said, ‘There will be humans about soon. We must go now.’

‘Are you going back out to sea?’ Marguerite asked.

‘I’ve a friend I would like you to meet. Like me, he is interested in numbers.’

‘We plan to show Finisterre around Poole Harbour today – we could come back at dusk.’

‘I would like that,’ Marguerite said, and the dolphins wriggled backwards into deeper water and swam away up the harbour on the rising tide.

It was to be a long day for Marguerite. First she sought out Chip and tried to explain all that she had heard from the dolphins. She had told him before how she could communicate with them without actually speaking. Now she reminded him.

‘I seem to be the only squirrel who can do it,’ she said.

‘Not so,’ said Chip. ‘You remember when we were in that boat last year? I knew all that the dolphins were saying to you, but I couldn’t hear what
you
were saying to them. Your mouth was shut all the time.’

‘You never told me this before,’ said Marguerite.

‘I was always a bit scared of you then. You know – Tagger and all that.’ He smiled at her. ‘Now I know that you are just an ordinary squirrel like the rest of us … ordinary, but special,’ he added.

Marguerite smiled back. ‘I often wish I could be
ordinary
– it’s just that extra-ordinary things seem to keep happening to me.’

Chip hung the latest version of the Bark-rush on a twig and sat back to listen to Marguerite’s tale.

She told him, not only about the human’s computer-box but also about Chestnut and Heather’s plantation of Woodstocks and the tree being made into a huge squirrel shape. ‘Sun knows what’s going on in other parts of Ourland. We never get together as we used to, there are just too many of us. And since there’s no danger now, it doesn’t seem so important.’

Chip looked grave. ‘I’ve done some more calculations,’ he told here. ‘In a few years time there will be more squirrels on this island than it can possibly support. I’ve tried to see what would happen if we increased the Sun’s tithe and, even if we left
half
of the buried nuts to grow, there wouldn’t be enough room on the island for all those trees. We’re going to have to slow down our breeding rate, or get the extra squirrels to the Mainland.’

‘As far as we know, the Mainland is all Grey territory now. I don’t know how they would react to us coming back,’ Marguerite said. ‘I often wonder how my brother Rowan and his party are doing. Only a squirrel as bold as he is would have dared to stay on and try to teach them
our
ideals. I worry about him a lot.’

‘He’s got Meadowsweet, Spindle and Wood Anemone and all their youngsters with him.  He’s probably all right,’ Chip comforted her, but he knew from his own experiences that the Greys were unpredictable. Their morals and actions seemed to depend on who the Great Lord Silver was at their Woburn Base, and what the Great Lord believed was right, or expedient, at the time.

Marguerite’s thoughts had moved on. ‘If we’re going to get over to the South Shore in time to meet the dolphins, we’d better leave,’ she said.

Chip hid the Bark-rush and together they rushed through the treetops in the gathering dusk, enjoying the activity and forgetting their worries in the pleasure of judging and executing graceful leaps between the trees.

The dolphins were waiting just off the beach.

‘I’m sorry we’re late,’ Marguerite panted, speaking the words out loud so that Chip could hear them as well as the dolphins. ‘I know that time is important to you. I remember you saying,
Lost
minutes sink forever.’

‘We have only just come ourselves,’ Lundy told her.

‘We waited until we could be sure that there were no humans about. They make such a fuss if they see us too close. Is that the friend you told us about?’

‘Yes, like me he can understand your thoughts. I told him what you told me this morning. We both wish to hear more.’

Marguerite and Chip settled in a tree near the shore. From there they could just see the shapes of the three dolphins in the water as the evening light faded and the tide started to ebb.

‘We will have to move further out as the tide falls,’ Lundy told them, ‘but darkness makes no difference to our conversation. Was there something you especially wanted us to tell you?’

‘It’s about the human’s computer. Does it have rings of bark that move backwards and forwards on rush stems?’

‘Not as far as we could tell. But the human only pictured the box that covered it. There might have been fish swimming backwards and forwards inside it for all we could tell.’

Chip looked disappointed. ‘Do you think it will do what the humans want it to do?’ he asked.

Malin appeared to be discussing something intimately with Lundy, shutting the squirrels out of their thoughts. Then he came back to them. ‘I once told you that dolphins can sometimes Look Forward but we don’t often do it. I looked forward
/2 years to see if the human’s predictions were correct.’

Marguerite interrupted, I’m sorry, but how long is
/2?’

‘It is I who must apologise, I forgot that you count differently to us.
 is our symbol for what the humans would call sixty, so it would be one half of that. Thirty years to them.’

Marguerite was about to interrupt again to point out that squirrels counted in eights, not tens as humans did, but suppressed the thought. She was far more interested in the dolphins’ ability to Look Forward. Was this what Wally had been able to do?

‘Was the man right about only four days for work and three for fishing?’

‘Sadly, no. He was right about computers taking over much of the work but the humans had
not
shared out what was left. Most were still working for five days out of seven and others were able to fish on all seven days. Our fishing man was one of these, but he was not happy about it. Odd creatures, humans!’

‘I’m hungry,’ Finisterre’s thoughts reached the squirrels. Marguerite smiled. All young males must be the same.

‘Thank you, my friends, she said. ‘This has all been most interesting. I think your youngster wants to forage. Farewell and thank you again.’

The dolphins turned in the darkness and swam for the open sea. Marguerite was glad that Chip was with her and the two of them climbed higher into the tree and settled down in a fork to discuss what they had learned, before drifting off to sleep, each enjoying the warm comfort of the other’s body next to theirs.

CHAPTER SIX

Marguerite had been glad of Chip’s warmth. The night had been cold for sleeping alone in the open, and the sun was hidden behind low clouds when they woke and foraged together in a chill breeze from the sea.

They moved through the screen of trees, finding morsels of food here and there and, by the time they reached the old meadow they were comfortably full. Only occasionally did they sit up and look round, an unnecessary but still instinctive action, as they knew there were no predators to harm them. At the edge of the meadow they stopped.

‘Look at all those rabbits,’ said Chip. ‘There must be a thousand.’

The whole of the greensward was covered with hopping and nibbling animals. Some were sitting up, scratching at their long ears with their back feet. Others were brushing their whiskers back with their forepaws and a few were biting at the bark of young trees on the edge of the Screen.

Marguerite was angry. Grass was for rabbits – trees were the squirrels’ charge. What the rabbits were doing would kill the saplings.

She ran at the ones nearest to her, chattering her anger but, as soon as she turned away, they started nibbling the bark again.

‘Come on,’ said Chip, ‘they’re not taking any notice,’ and he led her away across the meadow, the lean rabbits opening a way to let them pass.

‘No wonder they are eating bark. Look – the grass has been eaten down to its roots.’

All over the field were scuff-marks and bare patches of earth, showing where even the roots themselves had been dug up.

On the far side of the meadow they rested in the bracken below a pine tree. Marguerite was calmer now and said the Understanding Kernel.

‘If you could know all

Then you could understand all

Then you’d forgive all.

‘Those poor creatures are starving!’

Later, with the help of Chip’s Bark-rush, they calculated the breeding rate of rabbits on a predator-free island.

‘If each pair of rabbits has a litter of eight, three times a year and each of these young ones has…’

The result was just what they had seen for themselves that morning in the meadow.

They tried the squirrel calculation again.

‘If each pair of squirrels has…’

The result at six generations was not as bad as at six generations of rabbits, but it was clearly far more than the island could ever support, Marguerite imagined squirrels as lean and as hungry as the rabbits, and looked at Chip in horror. ‘We must do something,’ she said.

Something was already being done as far as the rabbits were concerned. A newly-dead corpse of a mainland rabbit had been surreptitiously laid in an island rabbit-hole by a human, and the fleas were leaving the cooling body to seek a living host. The fleas were themselves hosts to a virus known to humans as Myxomatosis.

A few days later Marguerite was telling Ex-Kingz-Mate Thizle of her concern about the likelihood of there soon being too many squirrels on the island.

‘Why didn’t the squirrels overpopulate the island before we came?’ she asked the dignified old Ex-Royal.

‘The King dizcouraged it,’she replied.