The Runaways (3 page)

Five minutes later Smiler was out of the cottage (the back door locked and the key returned to its place) and up in the hayloft of the barn. He had with him – found in the kitchen sideboard – two tins of sardines with keys cello taped to them for opening, a big, unopened packet of slightly salty biscuits and a large bottle of hard cider. The whole lot he carried in a thick car rug which he had found in the little hall outside the kitchen.

Smiler picked himself a spot on the hay bales where he could lie and watch the yard through a dusty, cobwebbed little window. Methodically he stripped off his clothes, wrung them out as best he could and then spread them over the bales to dry. The red dye of his socks had run and given his feet a rosy pink hue. He wrapped himself in the thick, warm car rug. It was made of a furry kind of nylon stuff and tickled his bare skin in a pleasant kind of way.

All his dispositions made, Smiler sat down and began to attend to the inner man. Within fifteen minutes he had eaten all the sardines, and drunk the oil they were preserved in. He had worked his way through two-thirds of the packet of biscuits and had considerably punished the contents of the bottle of cider. Almost immediately he began to regret the cider because it started to make his head spin a little. He had to keep flicking his eyelids up and down to clear his vision so that he could watch the yard outside. But it was no good. Flick as he might he could not keep his eyes from wanting to shut. There were moments, too, when his head seemed to be spinning so fast that it threatened to takeoff like a helicopter. The last tiling Smiler remembered before slumping in to sleep was giving himself a good talking-to, saying, ‘Samuel M., my lad, you wolfed your food and swigged your cider like a glutton. If you don't end up by being sick, it'll be a miracle.'

While Smiler was sleeping flat out on his hay bales in the loft, and snoring so loudly that anyone who had come by the barn would have heard him, Yarra was about a mile and a half away from him on the far side of the valley through which the river by Ford Cottage ran. The rain had slackened to a thin drizzle now. Some time before, following the line of the road she had first seen, Yarra had found herself coming into an area with more and more cottages and houses. Instinctively she had turned away southwards to avoid, although she didn't know it, what were the outskirts of the town of Warminster. Her restlessness was still with her and with it now there was also another feeling. Yarra was hungry. It was between five and six o'clock in the afternoon which was past the time at which the cheetahs were normally fed. More significantly, this day was a Tuesday which meant that Yarra was hungrier than usual because in the Longleat animal reserve Monday was a fast day for all the big cats. They were given no food on that day for health reasons. In their wild state the big cats hunted and then ate, and then only hunted for food again when hunger returned. To feed them regularly every day would in the end have dulled their appetites and injured their health. So, each Monday, they were starved. Yarra now had her eyes open for the chance to find something to eat.

Moving along the grass headland at the side of a field of young winter wheat, which was bounded by a post and wire fence, Yarra caught the quick movement of something white to her left. Immediately she froze in her tracks. She remained statuesquely still, her right foreleg poised immobile in mid-air. Beyond the low fence was a small run of pasture that sloped up to a line of tall elms: Through the trees showed a glimpse of a red-roofed house with a wisp of smoke coming from its chimneys. At the foot of the elms was a large wooden chicken-house, perched up on iron wheels so that it could be moved from one field to another. Scattered around the henhouse and out across the field was a flock of White Leghorn fowls.

Yarra watched them and rich saliva rose swiftly to her mouth. She stretched her jaws silently and then dropped low to the ground. For all her bulk Yarra moved under the bottom strand of the fence wire like a silent flow of undulating, molten, tawny gold, shadowed by the fast ripple of her markings. Once through the fence she remained for a while flat to the ground. Fifty yards away she marked the nearest straggler from the flock, a cock bird with fine rain-washed comb and wattles of shining vermilion. The great arch of its white, cockaded tail was ruffled now and again by the wind which was rising, coming in from the west to sweep away the last of the rain.

With a slow deliberate movement Yarra rose to her feet. Her eyes on the cock, she moved forward. Her body was charged with the controlled intensity of her stalking and the sharp lust for food inside her. Every movement she made came from instinct and from hereditary memory. Although she had been captured as a well-grown cub, and had never done much hunting for herself, she moved now as surely and knowledgeably as though she had spent all her time in the wilds where she had been born.

She was twenty yards from the bird when it saw her. Its head turned with a jerk that flicked wide its cape feathers and tumbled its bold crest. At these movements Yarra streaked into action. She went fast across the winter-pale grass in two running leaps. The cock bird screamed in alarm and jumped high, wings slashing the air. Yarra took the bird three feet from the ground, her jaws closing over its lower neck, crushing and breaking the vertebrae. A great white explosion of feathers sprayed into the drizzle-soft wind. Farther across the pasture there was a noisy gust of alarm calls from the other fowls as they scooted across the grass with flapping wings for the shelter of the henhouse.

Yarra, holding her prey high, raced back to the wire fence and cleared it with an easy spring. She loped away down the far side of the field and then turned through an open gateway out on to the hummocky, steep sides of a sweep of bracken- and gorse-covered downland.

She found a hollow, ringed by gorse and broom bushes and, couching down, the cock between her outstretched paws, began to eat it. She tore and gnawed at the carcase, relishing the warm savour of its entrails and stringy flesh. She ate like a cat, seldom holding the food with her paws, but jerking, chewing and tearing at it with her strong teeth. When she had finished there were left only the wings, the once boldly arched tail and the stout yellow legs of the proud cock.

Her meal finished, Yarra groomed and cleaned herself, licking the margins of her great jaws, and carefully combing with her rasping tongue her creamy chest mantle. She lay for a while on her side, contented, her head twisted back on one shoulder, and grunted once or twice with the pleasure of the food inside her.

The rain stopped and the wind, swinging from the west to the south, strengthened and began to clear the clouds from the evening sky so that a few early stars showed thinly. Yarra rose, her old, unnameable restlessness back with her. But this time there was habit with it, too. Each night in the cheetah reserve Yarra with all the others – Lotus, Apollo, Schultz, Suki and the rest – was herded by the warden in his Land-Rover into the night pen at the bottom of the enclosure where they were shut in. In fact it was seldom necessary for them to be herded by the warden. As darkness came habit activated them and they sought the cover of the warm, straw-floored hut of their own accord. Night was coming fast now and Yarra moved on to find a place to shelter herself.

Half an hour later, the dusk thickening, she came down a valley side and up on to a high bank above a main road. A car went by quickly with its sidelights on. Its movements did not alarm Yarra. She was used to cars and the smell of exhaust fumes. The small lights on the car puzzled her a little but with the passing of the car her curiosity went. She dropped down the bank side on bunched feet and was across the main road like a shadow. On the far side a minor road, stone-walled and thorn-and hazel-topped, ran down towards the river. Something white in the hedge attracted Yarra's attention. It was no living thing but she padded towards it with caution, sniffed it and then passed on down the side road. The white thing was a small direction board with the words – Ford Cottage – on it, followed by a black arrow pointing down the road. Three-quarters of a mile away at that moment Smiler was sitting up in the gloom on his hay bale, groaning and holding his head, knowing that within the next few minutes he was going to be violently sick.

Yarra padded down the road, flicking a front paw now and then with irritation because the ground was running with water from the overflow of a small ditch at one side. Although it was almost dark now she could see well enough to mark the stir of a blackbird settling to roost in the mid branches of one of the hazel growths on the bank. As she neared the bottom of the lane she heard the sound of the river running in high spate. She crossed over a stone bridge, the noise of flood water loud below her. She stopped just short of the white padlocked gate which was the barn entrance to Ford Cottage.

Her eyes went over the house, cream-plastered, the old thatch grey in the dying light. Then she saw the barn across the yard with its garage bay and to the right of that an open doorway cut in the lower weather-boarding of the barn side. The doorway reminded her of the doorway at the side of her sleeping hut at Longleat. For shelter and warmth at night she knew you went through such a door. She took one long leap, went high over the five-barred gate, and landed silently in the yard and then padded forward towards the barn.

She was almost at the old wellhead in the centre of the courtyard when a figure came through the open barn door. Yarra froze. With immobility she became part of the gloom, her spotted pelt merging into the night shadows, her bulk blurring against the grey and indigo courtyard surface and the hedges and walls of her background.

The figure turned along the side of the barn with a curious stumbling and flapping movement and disappeared. Yarra knew it was a human being, the scent told her that, though it was the first time she had seen one who walked with this curious flapping movement. It was a tallish human being. The large human beings, Yarra knew, had to be treated with respect. It was the very small ones that roused her and all her kind, the children who looked through the windows of the cars going round the park. To her they were small game to be hunted, like young deer; the right size to be stalked and killed. Sometimes in the park Yarra and the other cheetahs would be suddenly and unpredictably aroused by the sight of a child and would lope alongside the car and chase it for a while. But this figure was too big to rouse any killing instinct in her.

She waited for a while to see if the figure would return. After a time, she unfroze slowly and padded across to the barn door.

Smiler, bare-footed, wrapped in the car rug which flapped about his body in the strong night wind, had been sick in the little orchard that lay behind the barn. He felt better but his head still ached and his stomach was queasy and tender. Despite the blanket, he was cold, but for the moment he wasn't sure about going back to the barn. He had a feeling he might be sick again. The dizziness in his head was still there, too. That came from the cider. He'd swilled it down as though he'd been parched from thirst in a desert for weeks. He had had the same experience once before when he had gone for a day's fishing with his father. He remembered now how his father had grinned at him and said, ‘ Samuel M., never drink too much cider under a hot sun and on an empty stomach.' His father had given him black coffee from the thermos and put him to sleep in the back of the borrowed car.

Smiler walked down a small path to the edge of the river. He knelt down and splashed water over his face and head.

Five minutes later, he went back to the barn. The ladder that led to the top loft was just inside the door. Beyond the ladder the bottom floor of the barn ran back in darkness for about thirty feet. His head still dizzy and throbbing, Smiler turned through the door and groped for the ladder rungs. He was busy giving himself a good talking-to about eating and drinking like a pig. He was so busy doing this, in fact, and so full of self-pity for his queasy stomach and pounding head, that he did not hear the sudden movement of an alarmed Yarra rising to her feet on a patch of straw litter. She came up fast, dropping her shoulders, sphinx-like head thrust out, jaws open, her face-mask wrinkled with a mixture of fear and anger. She gave one sharp, spitting hiss of warning – which went unheard by Smiler as he climbed his way up the steps, grumbling aloud at the awkwardness of his blanket.

Yarra, silent now, holding her warning position, watched him go. He disappeared. There was a thump as the trapdoor at the head of the ladder was dropped.

Yarra heard noises from above. Then there was silence and she slowly relaxed. She settled again in the straw litter, flat on her side, her head thrown back at an angle from her shoulders. She was tired and she was disturbed by the restlessness in her. She could sense a slight irritation in the line of dugs along her belly. Her belly, itself, felt strange and, as she lay stretched out on her side, showed that it was slightly swollen. What Yarra didn't know, and what her Cheetah Warden at Longleat would have been delighted to know, was that she was going to have cubs. The father had been Apollo and the mating had taken place thirty days previously. In sixty days' time Yarra was due to litter. Cheetahs seldom breed in captivity and those at Longleat had never shown any signs of doing so – which was perhaps the reason why Yarra's condition, for she showed but little, had gone unnoticed.

Slowly, her restlessness fading, Yarra dropped away into sleep.

Above her, rug-wrapped in a nest of hay, Smiler slept, too, and dreamt that his father had got a job for him in his company. They had shipped to sea together and here they all were; deep in the dazzling blue of the South Seas, sitting on the foredeck, sun streaming down, and albatrosses, frigate birds and gulls thick in the sky. The off-duty crew were gathered about them as his father gave out on the mouth-organ and Smiler, strong-lunged and musical, accompanied him in their favourite song:

The gallant frigate Amphitrite, she lay in Plymouth Sound Blue Peter at the fore-mast head, for she was outward bound. We were waiting there for orders to send us far from home. Our orders came for Rio, and then around Cape Horn …