Larkrigg Fell (13 page)

‘Stop it!’ Beth screamed but no one heard her, or if they did, paid no heed. ‘Let him go. Call the dog off.’

‘Dart’s only doing what’s natural. So’s the badger,’ laughed Jonty. ‘Place your bets folks, who do you reckon’ll win?’

It was sickening. The terrier brought the badger down on to its back time and time again, sinking his teeth into its rump and the screams which rang out were so heartrending she covered her ears, yet still couldn’t blot them out. Bile rose in her throat. The badger’s glossy coat was slick with blood but still he fought. Tenacious, fearless, eyes glistening with a fierce terror in the moonlight. One small ear was almost ripped off and Beth had had enough. ‘I’ll stop them. I will, I will.’ She leapt forward but never reached the sparring animals as Jonty grabbed her and yanked her cruelly back.

‘You stupid bitch. He’d only turn on you. Stop being so bloody sentimental.’

She struggled furiously in his grasp, wanting to strike him, almost as fearless as the badger and desperate at her own impotence. ‘Stop them. Stop them!’ she screamed. ‘Don’t let Dart kill him. Oh please, don’t.’

Jonty laughed out loud, a sound that chilled her blood. Then somewhere above their heads a shot rang out. The terrier was so startled it stopped fighting instantly and scooted away, tail between its legs to disappear in the undergrowth. The badger’s instinct for survival was such that even with its awesome injuries it attempted to crawl back into its sett. Perhaps for the dignity of a quiet death. It didn’t quite make it and collapsed in a bloody heap, inches from its sanctuary.

‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing?’ Andrew’s voice rang out, cold with anger. Beth almost collapsed with relief.

‘Having some sport. What does it look like?’ Jonty faced him, a cynical twist to his mouth.

Andrew jumped down from the ridge, the gun still in his hands. ‘You bloody swine. Don’t you know that badger baiting is illegal?’

‘So what? Everyone does it.’

‘Everyone doesn’t do it. Not here anyway. Does it give you a thrill to see a fine animal die for your pleasure? Maybe we should put you through a similar process.’ He raised the gun slightly and Beth’s heart contracted. Surely he wouldn’t actually shoot Jonty? She stepped quickly forward.

‘Thank goodness you’ve come, Andrew. Never mind about Jonty. What about the badger? It’s injured.’

Andrew glanced down. The animal had got as far as the entrance to his sett, barely out of sight but too exhausted to go further.

‘For goodness’ sake,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s just an old badger.’ Andrew and Beth both looked at her and said nothing. There seemed nothing appropriate to say.

‘We should perhaps not have let the game go this far,’ Pietro muttered and Beth rounded on him, eyes glittering.

 
‘No, you shouldn’t. Why didn’t you try to do something? Why didn’t you stop him?’

Jonty snorted. ‘Because he was as willing as me.’

‘He knew he couldn’t stop you,’ Beth responded. ‘He probably didn’t understand exactly what you were up to. Did you Pietro?’

Pietro looked at her sadly, then shook his head. ‘No, I did not understand.’

‘There, you see?’ She turned back to Andrew. ‘What will happen to the badger? Can we save it?’

‘Probably a goner but I’ll take it to old Ellen. If she can’t save it, no one can.’

Beth didn’t ask who old Ellen was, but was intrigued and concerned, feeling somehow responsible. ‘I’ll come with you.’

‘Lot of fuss about nothing,’ Jonty grumbled. ‘Why do you, a farmer, try to protect the bloody thing? Badgers are thieves and they infect cattle with TB.’

‘It hasn’t been properly proved. It’s still only a theory.’ Andrew was hunkering down beside the hole, reaching for the badger, easing it out. ‘Even if these gentlemen of the woods need to be culled, it should be done humanely. Not torn apart by a bloody dog, or a madman.’ He cradled the animal in his arms, then as he rose, slid the barrel of the gun beneath the jut of Jonty’s chin. ‘Which is more than can be said for men like you. Now go on home, peaceable like, or I might forget my manners and treat you the same way.’

Jonty tensed but the gun pressed tight against his throat, and though his eyes blazed hatred, he deemed it wise to stay silent. ‘If I ever catch you or that dog of yours harming an animal again, you know what to expect, right?’

Andrew led Beth unerringly through the darkness to a part of Brockbarrow Wood she had not so far discovered. He swung along at such a pace she almost had to run to keep up with him, her feet slipping and sliding on the damp earth, tripping over stones. Then suddenly he stopped.

‘We’re here. Go quiet. We don’t want to upset the residents.’

‘Residents?’

Down in a small hollow, with the sound of water from the force ringing in their ears, was the dark huddle of a cottage. All about it was a clutter of small compounds wired off into sections, from which came a cacophony of unidentifiable barks, squeaks, whistles and grunts. ‘Ellen lives here, with her animals.’

They slid and stumbled down a slippery path and came at last to the front door. Andrew tapped softly on it. ‘It’s me, Ellen. I’ve a patient for you.’

A light came on, a door opened and a woman stood on the doorstep, looking down upon them, a storm lantern held in her hand. She glanced at the bundle in his arms and with a jerk of her head, ushered them inside.

The smell which hit them as they stepped into the cottage almost knocked Beth out. Of badger and bird and dog. Several dogs, in fact.

Two spaniels and a collie jumped down from a narrow bed and came over to investigate, tails waving like flags, drooling to be patted. Beth obliged. A tawny owl sat on a perch, one wing strapped down with what appeared to be a pad of foam rubber, and in a basket by a glowing fire sat a grey goose, apparently completely healthy and content, save for the fact that it possessed only half a beak.

The hurricane lamp in the woman’s hand revealed the kind of stark tidiness which seemed to indicate she had little regard for material possessions and no interest at all in comfort.

As she bent to her patient, Beth studied her. A tall, rangy woman in her late sixties, her features could only be described as embattled, with the deepest brown eyes Beth had ever seen, with squint lines at each comer. She wore her grey hair in a plait around her broad head which gave her a rather medieval look, a sort of otherworldliness. Several layers of woollens covered a check shirt and green corduroy trousers, signifying that, late as it was, she had not yet gone to bed. Around her neck was tied a dirty blue scarf but her hands, Beth noticed, as they set the animal on a small table, were surprisingly clean if brown and weathered and criss-crossed with scars.

‘Badger-baiting, eh?’

‘Aye.’

‘Thought I could smell its fear.’ The hands were sure and firm as she silently and methodically examined the injured animal which seemed none too happy with her probings yet miraculously permitted them, as if it guessed this was for its own good. ‘I reckon he’s had it.’ The prognosis was issued with complete lack of sentiment in a sharp, no-nonsense voice that cut Beth to the heart.
 

‘You can’t mean to let him die?’ The words burst from her before she’d had time to think and keen eyes turned consideringly upon her for the first time. The question, when it came, was addressed to Andrew.

‘Who’s this?’

‘Beth Brandon, from Larkrigg.’

The eyes widened perceptibly. ‘Not Rosemary Ellis’s granddaughter? No, great granddaughter you’d be, eh? Well, well.’

‘Never mind about me. What about the badger?’ Beth was incensed suddenly. ‘Can you do nothing at all for him?’

‘Feeling guilty, eh? Your friend’s dog was it, who tore him apart? Thought you’d have a bit of fun, did you? Well, I can’t cure them all after you’ve had your laugh, much as I’d like to. They have feelings, badgers do, same as you and me, and they get depressed and give up when they’re in pain.’

‘But you mustn’t let it.’

‘Beth,’ Andrew touched her arm. ‘Don’t get upset. He’d probably die of blood poisoning no matter what Ellen did.’

‘I only save what can be set free,’ she said, gazing again upon the inert badger. ‘If it can’t live a normal, useful life, better it be dead. It’d only mourn for its own kind if I shut it in a cage. Social animals, badgers are. They like to be together.’

But Beth wasn’t for giving up. She was the one fighting now, for the badger’s life. ‘You’ve kept that goose, yet how can it feed itself without a proper beak? And what’s the matter with the owl? Broken wing? Why don’t you shoot it?’

‘It might get better.’

‘Or be killed by a larger bird when you let it go?’

‘Aye, that could happen too.’ After a long moment, Ellen spoke again. ‘You weren’t in on it then, this game?’ The eyes were so deeply hidden beneath the thatch of eyebrows that Beth couldn’t read their expression. But she recognised something of the wild creature in Ellen too. Reserved, a bit prickly, not trusting people easily. Probably been given no reason to. Trust had to be earned. And man probably destroyed her work every day.

‘No, I was not,’ she firmly responded. ‘I tried to stop them as a matter of fact, but they took no notice.’ She reached for a sack lying near. ‘If you won’t help him, then I’ll take him home with me. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.’

Another small silence, broken at last by a cackle of laughter. It erupted onto her face like sunlight on a dry-stone wall, smoothing out the folds and cracks to a craggy radiance. ‘She’s got spirit, this one, eh?’ And as she met Beth’s furious gaze, there was merriment now twinkling in her own. ‘I’ll fetch my herb chest and we’ll see what we can do. But I make no promises.’

‘Do you think he’ll live?’

Dawn was breaking, pink and clear in the eastern sky and the three of them were sitting with huge mugs of tea, relaxing at last.

‘Fate and good medicine will decree that.’ Ellen sipped noisily at her tea.

‘I think you’re wonderful. You must be very gifted,’ Beth said, remembering the way the woman had mixed herbs and dealt with the badger with a deft skill born of years of experience.

But the effect of this simple statement was alarming. ‘Utter poppycock,’ Ellen exploded. ‘I do what I can and it’s pitifully small at times. I’m not the hand of God, nor Mother Nature.’

Beth looked startled by the outburst. ‘I never meant to imply you were.’

‘Do a bit of good every day, that’s my motto. There’s plenty doing the opposite.’

‘You’re right there,’ Andrew put in.

‘Never failed in that philosophy, ever since the outbreak of World War Two. Kept busy with the VAD while my Hugh was incarcerated in that damn concentration camp. Then when he came home and he wasn’t too good, we started a smallholding which grew into taking in lodgers of the animal variety. Never made much money but it added a bit to his pension. Then he went and died.’ She made it sound as if he’d done it on purpose, to spite her.

‘How sad,’ Beth murmured.

‘All those years in the damned service. Missed being killed by the skin of his teeth more times than he cared to count, then he gets taken by a double dose of pneumonia and malaria. Never left him, that malaria.’ She tossed a dead mouse to the owl on the perch behind her, who took it greedily. Beth averted her eyes. ‘Lovely man he was, but weak you understand. I always did all the hard work. But he never got over whatever it was they did to him. After he died, I gave up the lease on the smallholding and came here. That was more than twenty years ago and I’ve never regretted it.’

Andrew grinned engagingly at her. ‘How would the wild creatures on these fells have managed without you? Come on, admit it. You’re more than a mite flattered by Beth’s faith in your skill.’

‘If folk didn’t interfere with them I wouldn’t have half so much work to do,’ she barked. ‘Damned tourists pick youngsters up: owls, kestrels, lambs even, thinking they’ve been deserted by their parents which usually they haven’t, without the faintest idea how to feed or care for them and they end up fetching them to me, sick or dying.

‘It can take months to get a young animal healthy and properly rehabilitated to go back into the wild. Took me two years once with a young peregrine falcon that had been imprinted with the smell of humans. What’s the point of all that effort of making it well again, if it can’t enjoy life? So I have to make choices. Survival of the fittest. Besides which, I’m not made of money.’

‘Yes,’ Beth said, fascinated by the fierce passion of the woman, and full of admiration. ‘I do realise that. I’m sorry if I was a bit sharp with you last night.’

Ellen rubbed at her red eyes with a finger and thumb. ‘Aye well, it was late. We were all tired. Think no more of it. I’m off to feed that lot outside then get me head down for a few hours’ shut-eye.’

‘Can I see what you have here?’

‘Another time, Beth,’ Andrew said, getting up. ‘I have some animals of my own to tend and Ellen is all in.’

‘Of course. I’m sorry. Thanks for saving the badger.’

‘I haven’t saved him. Not yet.’ A sharp reminder, bluntly given.

Beth swallowed and asked, very tentatively, ‘May I call and see how’s he’s getting on?’

Brown eyes regarded her quizzically for a moment. ‘So long as you’re prepared to be disappointed. I can’t do with a fuss, waterworks and all that, if nature decrees otherwise. This brock will either have the stamina to survive or it won’t.’