The Tale of Oat Cake Crag (17 page)

“That is commendable,”
replied the owl.
“But I doubt that yooou’ll learn anything. There’s nooobody at hooome. There’s been nooobody at hooome all evening. At least,”
he amended,
“since I have been here.”
He raised his round eyes to the moon.
“Which (according tooo the stars, whooose passage I have been observing from my vantage point atop the crag) has been a considerable while. Three hours at least, I shooould say. Venus is now past ten degrees from its meridian and Jupiter has nearly reached its zenith, which is tooo say—”

“Nobody at home?”
Hyacinth interrupted, coming out from under the bush. She had never felt it necessary to defer to the owl, whom she viewed as rather a stick-in-the-mud. She was always polite, though, because the Professor was Uncle Bosworth’s friend and, as an older animal, deserving of respect. She was also quite aware that once he had well and truly launched into a lecture on the movement of the stars, they were likely to be here all night.

“That’s odd,”
she went on, before the owl could get his second wind.
“If Mr. Baum didn’t come to the meeting and he’s not here, where is he?”

The Professor had not liked the idea that a female badger might hold the Holly How Badge of Authority, and when Bosworth had first mentioned the possibility, the owl had opposed the appointment vigorously. He was in fundamental agreement with the French novelist Guy de Maupassant, who said, “The experience of centuries has proved to us that females are, without exception, incapable of any true artistic or scientific work.” The owl believed, as he had said to his friend Bosworth, that females suffered from
“certain innate and irremediable intellectual deficiencies”
and should not be allowed to hold positions of authority.

However, since the owl was an owl and not a badger, his opinion regarding the Badge of Authority had not been considered. After a grueling test that proved to Bosworth that she suffered from no deficiencies of any sort, Hyacinth had been named to the post. Which did not mean that the owl had to like it. Moreover, he did not like to be interrupted when he was discussing the stars. In fact, he did not like to be interrupted at all.

He turned a severe gaze on Hyacinth.
“Perhaps Mr. Baum met with an accident on the way tooo the village,”
he suggested in an icy tone. He lifted his wings, shook them, and resettled them.
“An unfortunate possibility, but a possibility nooonetheless. The horse runs away, the cart is overturned, the driver is throoown out and killed. It’s a possibility that must be considered.”
Having settled the matter, he took a deep breath and went on.
“Now, as I was saying about Jupiter—”

This time it was Rascal who interrupted, since they really had to get on with the discussion and not be sidetracked by an academic dissertation on the stars.
“But we came by the road, Professor, and we didn’t see anything of Mr. Baum. So I don’t think there’s been an accident.”

“We didn’t come by the road the whole way, though,”
Hyacinth reminded him.
“We only came by the road as far as Raven Hall, with Major Kittredge. After that, we followed the path through the woods.”

“Yes, of course,”
Rascal said, seeing immediately that Hyacinth was right.
“So we need to go back by the road and see if there’s any sign of—”

“Wait a minute,”
Hyacinth said, holding up her paw.
“What’s that?”

Rascal looked around.
“What’s what?”
he asked nervously.

“That noise,”
Hyacinth hissed.
“Listen!”

The animals fell silent. For a moment, they heard nothing—nothing except the companionable conversation of the wind in the trees, the soft
slush-hush-slush
of the lake waters lapping against the shore below, and far away, the inquisitive
crawk?
of a night heron.

“Really,”
said the Professor, still irritated at Hyacinth.
“I dooo not think—”

“Shush!”
said Hyacinth.

And then all three of them heard it at the same time: a long, low moan. Then one word, low, weak, quavery.

“Heellllp!”

It seemed to come from somewhere behind them, at the foot of the cliff.

“Whooo?”
cried the owl, lifting his wings and turning his head from side to side to peer into the darkness all around.
“Who-who-whooo?”

“Where?”
barked Rascal sharply, turning around several times.
“Where? Where are you?”

But Hyacinth wasted no time in asking questions. With her nose to the ground and her ears tuned for any sound, she made off into the dark, moving silently and skillfully in the way of a badger who knows what she’s looking for. It didn’t take her long to find it, either, in a thorny tangle of bushes growing out of a heap of fallen stones at the foot of the cliff, some thirty yards away. That’s where she made her chilling discovery.

For a moment, all she could do was stare. Then she raised her voice.
“Over here!”
she cried urgently.
“Rascal! Professor! Over here!”

When the others reached Hyacinth, they found her crouched beside the sprawled figure of a man. His arms were flung out wide, his legs at odd angles, his head bleeding badly.

“Whooo?”
asked the owl somberly.
“Whoooooo?”

Rascal didn’t have to look twice. Hyacinth and I have already guessed, and I’m sure you have, too. But since the owl has asked . . .

“It’s Mr. Baum,”
Rascal replied.

With a frightened cry, the injured man struggled to push himself up, looking wildly at the three animals clustered around him. Then, coughing weakly, he fell back against the rocks and lay very still, as still as death. He was a heavyset fellow, of a substantial size and girth. His eyes were closed, and in the moonlight, his round face was pasty-white. A trickle of blood oozed out of the corner of his mouth.

“Is he dead?”
the owl inquired anxiously, peering down.

Hyacinth bent closer, checking the man’s breathing.
“No,”
she said,
“at least, not yet. But he’s very badly hurt.”
She looked up at the crag looming above them.
“He must have fallen from up there, wouldn’t you say? He needs a doctor. But how can we—”

“There are servants in the house,”
the owl said. (He always had an answer for everything.)
“We must rouse them. Rascal, gooo and bark at the windows.”

“But there aren’t any servants,”
Rascal replied grimly.
“At the ferry today, I heard Mr. Baum tell Mr. Wyatt that he had to let them go. He said he had put all his money into that aeroplane and couldn’t afford to pay them.”

The man moaned again, but very faintly, and closed his eyes.
“We have to get help,”
Hyacinth said.
“Quickly!”

Rascal turned to the owl.
“Raven Hall is not too far away. You could fly there and bring someone back, Professor. Fly fast!”

“No.”
Hyacinth shook her head.
“That won’t help, Rascal. No offense, Professor, but nobody will pay attention to an owl.”

“Oooh, cooome now!”
the Professor exclaimed, deeply affronted. Still, while he would never admit it, he knew that the badger had spoken sensibly. Big Folks are clever. Some are even clever enough to construct machines that fly. But they simply do not have what it takes to understand animal language, particularly the languages of wild creatures. Some amongst them might interpret his calls as an omen of death, but the more enlightened—Major Kittredge, for instance—would view that as mere superstition. As far as the major was concerned, his alarm cries would be just so much night noise.

“Well, they certainly won’t listen to me, either,”
Hyacinth said in a practical tone.
“In fact, somebody would probably shoot me. Rascal, that just leaves you. You’ll have to go and get help. Hurry.”

“I’ll do my best,”
Rascal said without hesitation, and set off. Racing through the night, he followed the path through the woods, back to Raven Hall. When he reached it, he saw that most of the windows were dark and guessed that the residents had gone to bed. By moonlight, the house looked even more commanding than it did during the day: an imposing example of baronial Gothic, a Victorian version of a medieval castle, with crow-stepped gables and turrets topped with candle-snuffer caps and battlements. Rascal could almost imagine that defenders were stationed behind those battlements, ready to pour boiling tar upon the head of any intrepid trespasser.

But Rascal was undeterred. There was a light burning on the main floor, and he knew that the major was at home. So he ran around the house to the main entrance and raced up the wide stone steps. The bell pull was out of his reach (no one imagines that a small dog will have need of a door bell), which meant that he had to jump up on his hind legs to yank at it with his teeth. He jumped and yanked and jumped and yanked several times, then began barking and yelping and pawing frantically at the door.

At last, it opened and an elderly man-servant, his sparse gray hair in a muddle all over his head, peered out. He was wearing a dressing gown and carried a candle. (A candle? Yes. The major has installed an electrical generator that provides a reading light in the library and two lights in the kitchen, but the rest of the huge, sprawling house is lit by paraffin lamps and candles. It’s very romantic and certainly in keeping with the idea of the medieval castle, but a little hard on the eyes, I should think.)

“What’s all this noise?” the butler demanded, for that’s who this was. “What do you want?” Not seeing anyone, he opened the door wider, holding up the candle and putting out his head to look around. “Who’s there?” he called loudly.

“It’s me!”
Rascal barked.
“I’ve come to get Major Kittredge! We have an emergency.”

The old man looked down. “Why, it’s only a little terrier!” His voice hardened. He was a butler and accustomed to giving orders to underlings, who were expected to follow his orders. “What are you doing here, dog?” he barked. (I’m sorry, but this is the only way of describing his tone.) “Where’s your master?”

Of course, the butler didn’t expect an answer to his questions. He was simply expressing his displeasure at being summoned to the door after he’d already gone to bed—and by a dog. A mere
dog,
for pity’s sake.

“I’m here about Mr. Baum!”
Rascal barked. He pawed the air, dancing around in a circle.
“He’s hurt! He may be dying! The major must come and help! Hurry!”

It was an urgent message, delivered urgently and succinctly, and if it had been you or me or Miss Potter, I am sure that we would have understood that something important was being said and that we should have to pay attention. But all that the servant could hear was a flurry of barks and yelps, and all that he could see was a pesky little dog, bouncing up and down on his hind legs, waving his forepaws in the air.

“Go away,” the old man growled. By now he was feeling extremely out of sorts. “Go home, cur. Whatever it is that you want, we don’t have any of it here.” And with that, he put out his foot and gave our Rascal a very hard kick.

Now, I understand that it is late and the butler wants to go back to bed and has no patience with a noisy little dog, barking and yelping at the front door and threatening to rouse the whole household. But even so, I hardly see the necessity for calling Rascal a cur, do you? And giving him a
kick
? That really is going too far. All the man had to do was shut the door in the dog’s face, and that would have been the end of that. (Although probably not, for Rascal is a determined fellow and would have raced right around to the kitchen and got in that way.)

But Jack Russells do not like to be kicked, and they especially do not like to be addressed as “cur.” When Rascal heard that offensive word and felt that sharp toe in his ribs, he did something he had never before considered doing, for he is by nature an accommodating, polite little dog. That is, he is accommodating and polite in ordinary circumstances. But this was an extraordinary circumstance, so he responded in an extraordinary way.

He bit the butler’s ankle.

“Yowch!” cried the old man, grabbing his ankle and jumping up and down. “Mad dog! He bit me! There’s a mad dog on the loose! Get a gun!”

Now, you may feel differently about this, but I am of the opinion that a man (no matter his age) who kicks a dog ought to get something in return for his effort. So I don’t have a problem with Rascal’s giving him a generous nip. Tit for tat, I say. Perhaps this person will think twice before he kicks another animal.

Then, whilst the butler was assessing the damage to his person, Rascal took the opportunity to dash between his legs and through the open doorway, and thence into the wide baronial hall, arriving just in time to meet Major Kittredge, who had been sitting up reading under the electric light in the library and was still fully dressed. The major had heard the racket and wanted to know what was going on.