Fish (7 page)

“I am sorry. I can find nothing,” he said, and sat down gratefully and took a bowl of porridge from Mum.

We all made noises of thanking him for trying anyway when he must be as tired as the rest of us, and I tried to eat my porridge but couldn't manage very much.

My stomach ached, in an empty, hungry way, but somehow the porridge only seemed to make it ache more after a while.

We were all so tired that we lay down straight after eating and pulled our blankets around us to sleep. Even the donkey, who had been cheerfully tucking into the sparse greenery as though she would never stop eating again, propped herself with one back hoof resting under her, and sank her head low, her eyes blinking and almost closed.

That night, something strange happened.

My stomach must have been hurting so much in
my sleep that it finally bothered me enough to wake me up—at least, I thought I was awake. I could hear a slight whimpering sound, and when I came to a bit more I realized to my surprise that it was coming from me.

I quickly bit my lip, because I didn't want to wake the others—even the Guide seemed to be sleeping tonight. But another pang hit my middle, and in spite of everything, I groaned again.

Tonight, there was a moon, and the light glowed whitely along the edge of the bank I was facing. The glowing embers of the fire warmed my back. Suddenly, I sucked in my breath. On the bank stood a wolf—or a wild dog—looking straight at me.

Its coat, I suppose, was dark gray, but lit by the moon, it glowed silvery white all round. Its shadow was huge, and close enough to fall near my backpack, which I was using as a pillow. I glanced instinctively at the little bottle of water on the rock next to my head. The moonlight shone in through the clear plastic, and the Fish, for the first time on the journey, darted around
cheerfully, with tints of all his beautiful colors shining in the light as he turned this way and that.

Then I looked over at the donkey. She dozed still, but had one eye fixed calmly on the visitor, and one ear tipped lazily toward it.

I felt the eyes of the creature on the path still fixed on me and looked back at it.

The eyes were very pale gold, the pupils just thin, black slits.

In one movement, it put its head down and picked up something I hadn't noticed that had been lying near its front paws. It took two paces closer to me— still, I didn't feel afraid, I don't know why—and dropped the something with a light thud about a foot away. Then like liquid, the creature turned and was gone, melting into the night and the unlit scrub.

I pulled myself up on my arms, not wanting to come out from under my nice warm blankets, and inched closer to whatever it was the creature had left.

It was a rabbit, unmarked, but unmistakably dead.

Not sure if I was really awake, I decided that this
was a dream, and best left for discussion in the morning. I crawled back under my covers and went back to sleep, even with my aching stomach.

Next morning, I felt a hand shaking my shoulder. It was the Guide.

“Tiger! Where did this come from?”

“You have not been sneaking off and hunting alone at night, have you?” asked Dad.

Mum said irritably to him, “Don't be—” then changed her mind and said, “Mind you, I wouldn't put anything past Tiger.”

I sat up, rubbing my eyes and a bit cross, as would you be if someone woke you up like that. “What are you talking about?”

The Guide asked more gently, “Don't you know how this rabbit got here?”

“Oh, it's still here?” I asked. The grown-ups looked even more confused.

“I mean, I thought it was a dream,” I explained. “The wolf brought it.”

“Wolf!” said my parents both together.

“Or dog thing. I don't know.”

Both of my parents looked at the Guide. He shrugged.

“Wild dogs, there are plenty. Wolf—a few have returned, so they say, to this area. Some of the wild dogs look so like wolves, it's hard to know the difference. They can breed together.”

“I wonder why it just left the rabbit,” said Dad. “Perhaps it was startled to find us here and dropped it.”

“I don't see why it should drop it before it ran off,” I said. “And I don't think it looked startled, exactly. I was groaning a bit, I suppose that might have—”

“Groaning?” Mum said, “Whatever for?”

“In my sleep. Well, and when I woke up. I had a tummyache.”

“I wish you'd tell me—” began Mum, looking worried, but Dad interrupted her. He looked as though a thought had just struck him.

“When you say groaning, Tiger, could you have possibly been more like, well, whining?”

“I don't whine,” I said stiffly, and in the pause that followed this statement the adults looked at me intently. I thought for a moment. “Well, I suppose it might have been a bit like whining.”

“I just wondered if she was carrying food for her cubs. Maybe she'd even lost them. People have claimed similar things have happened.” Dad looked at the Guide.

“Certainly, all the females share in looking after one family of cubs. If the mother dies, another will become the mother. It's true that if this one had heard the—excuse me, Tiger—whining sound—she might have taken it for a cub in need of food.”

“Well, she wasn't far wrong there,” I said.

“This is true,” said the Guide, “and why do we question what has been given, when it was needed?”

“That's a point,” said Dad cheerfully. “Ours is not to reason why, and never look a dead gift rabbit in the mouth.”

The Guide, who was picking the rabbit up by the back legs and drawing his knife, stopped and looked
so puzzled at this that Dad had to explain the true saying to him, which he thought was a really good one. He became very cheerful too, and said there was plenty of firewood here on the bank, and we deserved a really good breakfast after yesterday.

Then, thankfully, he took the rabbit away to deal with it, and Mum and Dad sorted out the fire, so that I could get up in a bit of peace.

Hot roast meat is a strange sort of breakfast, but at the time it tasted like the best one I could remember eating, ever.

There wasn't very much—one rabbit doesn't go far between four people, and this one was skinny as there was so little food here for it. But we all went quiet and concentrated as we ate, and I made mine last as long as I could, and then we all licked our fingers before having a few swigs of water each, and packing up the things again.

It was good to put on my socks and sandals again, and set off on foot like everyone else. As the Guide set off ahead of the donkey, upriver along the bank, Dad
turned to me and said, “All right, Tiger? It's up the mountain today!”

“Yep,” I said, “I'm good at climbing.”

“Good,” called back the Guide, “but don't worry, we are using the pass and it is narrow in places, but not too steep after the first part.”

Just then, there was a distant bang, a pause, and then another. The Guide stopped and listened.

“Is that thunder?” asked Mum, looking at him, and then at the sky, puzzled. It was colorless and cold, as ever.

The Guide didn't say anything, but stood grim-faced, listening. We were all quiet. I could see from Mum and Dad's faces that the grown-ups, as usual, were all in on something, and I didn't know what.

“What is it?” I asked, and at that moment there was another dull bang, from somewhere way behind us, and a nasty, sharp, repeated crack, crack, like a firework.

“The fighting has come,” said the Guide simply, and the look on his face was not of fear, but sadness.

“Will they … I mean, will we … ?” I asked urgently. I didn't want to be in a war. I had seen the people with bits missing, whom Mum and Dad had helped in our village.

“Their war is down there, not up here,” said the Guide reassuringly, waving his arm in the direction we'd come from.

“Are you sure there won't be soldiers up here?” I asked.

“Fighting men, maybe, I wouldn't call them soldiers,” he said. “Some are hiding in the mountains. But they have no quarrel with you and your parents. Don't worry.” And he turned and walked more quickly along the bank, the donkey jogging to catch up, and Mum and Dad and me hurrying behind.

We walked in silence for a while, listening to the terrible sounds behind us. I kept reminding myself, Everyone has gone, everyone has left. They can only blow up the huts and houses. But then I thought of the rough little house that we had called home for so long, and the things we'd had to leave behind, and
the school hut Mum and Dad had helped build, and I felt a lump in my throat. Looking at Mum, I realized she must have been thinking the same thing, so I caught up with her, held her hand and gave it a squeeze.

Mum is really very pretty, but now I saw that her hair, which is usually shiny and dark, stuck to her face in dusty strands, and her eyes looked tired and old. There were pale streaks in the grime on her cheeks, and I realized with a shock that they were made by tears.

Mum absolutely never cried. Even now, you wouldn't have known it. She sniffed a bit, and her nose went a bit red, but she kept on walking without making any other sound.

I looked back at Dad, and he must have seen something in my face, because he came up alongside us, put his arm around Mum's shoulders and gave her a sort of sideways hug. That made her stagger and nearly lose her footing, so that she hit his shoulder and they laughed a little.

By now, we had tracked to the right, away from the
bank, and were onto a proper path. As this climbed, it grew narrower.

We all pressed on, especially when the Guide called back, “We can be at the top before nightfall, if we keep moving.”

“And then it's all downhill from there,” said Dad, and called forward to the Guide: “Do you reckon a day for coming down the other side?”

“Yes, yes, less than that. But the downhill part might be trickier.”

I didn't see how, and our spirits rose. Maybe only one more night out in the open, with our vitamin C tablets and porridge and mouthfuls of water.

Up, up we went, and I was hardly bothered that my sandals were starting to rub the old sore patches again. After the good breakfast we'd had, we decided not to stop for lunch—we hadn't much food left, and the path was becoming so narrow, there wasn't really anywhere to camp.

“It flattens out on the top,” the Guide called back, “so there will be a place for the fire tonight.”

We had come to the narrowest part of the path so far, so that you almost only had room for one foot in front of the other. There was a scrubby, sheer drop to the right, where the mountain plunged down into what looked like a bottomless gorge, and another, larger mountain loomed up beyond that. To the left, our mountain continued up, higher, above the path. The rocky outcrop, dotted with a few bent bushes, nearly knocked your shoulder as you passed. I found it easier going if I didn't look down.

I looked ahead to see how the donkey managed. She was now in the lead, as the safest one to check the way for us.

Under the packs her little rump was, I saw, narrower than any of us, except maybe for me. Her hocks almost bumped together, and her hooves were tiny, tip-tupping along on the hard rock.

“Maybe your wolf will bring us something else for tea tonight, eh, Tiger?” said Dad, always a big eater, and missing lunch more than the rest of us.

Suddenly, I saw the donkey tilt her head sideways,
roll her big eyes and jump to the right with all four feet at the same time. I just had time to glance up at the rocky outcrop to see what had startled her, before I realized that she was almost over the edge.

Her front and back hooves on the right-hand side slithered off the path. Frantically, she managed to twist so that both front hooves were on the path, but in doing so lost her other back hoof over the edge. Her back end swung out over the gorge, so that for a second she seemed to be only touching the ground with her front feet. She let out a bray of fear.

We froze for a second. Then, as the dust whirled and the loose pebbles bounced away down the gorge, we realized that she was still there. Somehow, just the toes of her back hooves balanced on a jutting edge of loose rock.

The Guide rushed to her head, but there was no rope to grab. Instead, he threw one arm around the trunk of the nearest bush, which clung perilously to the edge of the path in the thin soil, and the other arm around her thin neck. He had her, but she
wheezed and gasped, whether in fear, or because the Guide's viselike grip was throttling her, I didn't know.

Mum seized her spiky forelock, as she would have led a pony back in her home country, and braced herself on the path, but the Guide said urgently, “No, or at least, take the bush with your other hand, or she will take you over when she slips again.”

I didn't like the “when” instead of “if.” Mum and the Guide had the donkey, for the moment, but there was no way they could pull her up, and no way the donkey could pull herself up, with both hind feet balanced on rubble that would give way at any moment.

Dad, who had been standing thunderstruck, seemed to give himself a shake. “It's the packs,” he said, darting over to the Guide and fumbling for his knife in its sheath at his side. “She could get up if it wasn't for the packs.”

The Guide said nothing, but held desperately to donkey and bush. More stones slid away with a hollow rattle, down into the gorge. The donkey stood, tense all over with the effort of balancing, her eyes wide with fear and her mouth open and gasping.

Mum said, “But …” and then fell silent.

Dad sat down on the edge of the path by the donkey's front feet, and his fingers felt along an old tree root. It curved out and back into the soil again like a perfect handle. He pushed his left hand between it and the rock, and gave a good pull. It seemed to hold well enough to satisfy him, and, crouching down,
keeping one foot on the path and one just below the root, he reached up with the knife in his right hand and slashed and sawed at the straps holding our bags.

The Guide's knife must have been very sharp. As quick as a flash, one after the other, the bags fell and crashed away down the gorge.

“Now!” said Dad, backing up and reaching the path, and he seized a handful of the donkey's mane, and one of her ears, disregarding the advice about holding on to the bush, and all three of them heaved.