Babe: The Gallant Pig Page 5

  “Memorize it”

  Because Babe had now saved the flock not only from rustlers but also from the worriers, the Hoggets could not do too much for him.

  Because he was a pig (though Farmer Hogget increasingly found himself thinking of Pig as Dog and fed him accordingly), they gave him unlimited supplies of what they supposed he could not have too much of—namely, food.

  Because he was strong-minded and reveled in his newfound speed, he ate sparingly of it.

  Because there was always a lot left over, Fly became fat and the chickens chubby and the ducks dumpy, and the very rats and mice rolled happily about the stables with stomachs full to bursting.

  Mrs. Hogget even took to calling Babe to the back door, to feed him some tidbit or other that she thought he might particularly like; and from here it was but a short step to inviting him into the house, which one day she did.

  When the farmer came in for his tea, he found not only Fly but also Pig lying happily asleep beside the old stove. And afterward, when he sat down in his armchair in the sitting room and switched on the television, Babe came to sit beside him, and they watched the six o’clock news together.

  “He likes it,” said Hogget to his wife when she came into the room. Mrs. Hogget nodded her head a great many times, and as usual had a few words to say on the subject.

  “Dear little chap, though you can’t call him little no longer, he’s growed so much, why, he’s big enough to you-know-what, not that we ever shall now, over my dead body though I hopes it ain’t if you see what I do mean, just look at him, we should have brought him in the house long ago, no reason why not, is there now?”

  “He might mess the carpet,” said Farmer Hogget.

  “Never!” cried Mrs. Hogget, shaking her head the entire time that she was speaking. “He’s no more likely to mess than he is to fly, he’ll ask to go out when he wants to do his do’s, just like a good clean dog would, got more brains than a dog he has, why ’twouldn’t surprise me to hear he was rounding up them old sheep of yourn, ’twouldn’t honestly, though I suppose you think I’m daft?”

  Farmer Hogget grinned to himself. He did not tell his wife what she had never yet noticed, that all the work of the farm was now done by the sheep-pig. And he had no intention of telling her of the final part of his plan, which was nothing less than to enter Pig in that sternest of all tests, the Grand Challenge Sheep Dog Trials, open to all comers! Never in his working life had he owned an animal good enough to compete in these trials. Now at last he had one, and he was not going to be stopped from realizing his ambition by the fact that it was a pig.

  In a couple of weeks they would be competing against the best sheepdogs in the country, would be appearing, in fact, on that very television screen they were now watching.

  “No, you’re not daft,” he said.

  But you won’t get half a surprise when you sit here and watch it he thought. And so will a lot of other folks.

  His plan was simple. He would appear at the Grand Challenge Trials with Fly, and at the last possible moment swap her for Pig. By then it would be too late for anyone to stop him. It didn’t matter what happened afterwards—they could disqualify him, fine him, send him to prison, anything—as long as he could run Pig, just one glorious run, just to show them all!

  And they couldn’t say they hadn’t been warned—the name was there on the entry form. He had been worried, for he was a truthful man, that the heading might say ‘Name of Dog,’ and then whatever he put would be a lie. But he’d been lucky. “Name of Competitor” (the form said)…“F. Hogget.” “Name of Entry”…“Pig.”

  The simple truth.

  Shepherds usually give their dogs short names, like Gyp or Moss—it’s so much quicker and easier than shouting “Bartholomew!” or “Wilhelmina!”—and though someone might say “ ‘Pig’? That’s a funny name,” no one in their wildest dreams would guess that was the simple truth.

  —

  The two weeks before the Grand Challenge Trials were two weeks of concentrated activity. Apart from Mrs. Hogget who as usual was busy with household duties, everyone now knew what was going on. To begin with, Hogget altered the practice course, cutting out all the frills like the plank bridge over the stream, and he built a new course as close as possible to what he thought they might face on the day.

  As soon as Fly saw this, she became convinced that what she had suspected was actually going to happen, and she told the sheep, with whom she was now on speaking terms.

  Every night of course she and Babe talked endlessly about the coming challenge before they settled to sleep (in the stables still, though the Hoggets would have been perfectly happy for Babe to sleep in the house, so well-mannered was he).

  Thoughtful as ever, Babe was anxious, not about his own abilities but about his foster mother’s feelings. He felt certain she would have given her dog teeth to compete in the National Trials, the dream of every sheepdog, yet she must sit and watch him.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind, Mum?” he asked.

  Fly’s reply was as practical as ever.

  “Listen, Babe,” she said. “First of all it wouldn’t matter whether I minded or not. The boss is going to run you, no doubt of it. Second, I’m too old and too fat, and anyway I was only ever good enough for small local competitions. And lastly, I’ll be the happiest collie in the world if you win. And you can win.”

  “D’you really think so?”

  “I’m sure of it,” said Fly firmly, but all the same she was anxious too—about one thing.

  She knew that the sheep-pig, speedy as he now was, would still be much slower than the dogs, especially on the outrun; but equally she was confident that he could make this up by the promptness with which the sheep obeyed his requests. Here, at home, they shot through gaps or around obstacles as quick as a flash, never putting a foot wrong; the ones to be shed dashed out of the ring like lightning; and at the final penning, they popped in the instant that the boss opened the gate. But that was here, at home. What would strange sheep do? How would they react to Babe? Would he be able to communicate with them, in time, for there would be none to waste?

  She determined to ask the flock, and one evening when Babe and the boss were watching television, she trotted off up the hill. Since that first time when she had been forced to speak civilly to them, they no longer cried “Wolf!” at her, and now they gathered around attentively at her first words, words that were carefully polite.

  “Good evening,” said Fly. “I wonder if you would be kind enough to help me? I’ve a little problem,” and she explained it, speaking slowly and carefully (for sheep are stupid, she said to herself, nobody will ever persuade me otherwise).

  “You see what I mean?” she finished. “There they’ll be, these strange sheep, and I’m sure they’ll do what he tells them…asks them, I mean…eventually, but it’ll all take time, explaining things. The last creature they’ll be expecting to see is a pig, and they might just bolt at the sight of him, before he even gets a chance to speak to them.”

  “Password,” said several voices.

  “What do you mean?” Fly said.

  “Password, password, Pa-a-a-a-assword!” said many voices now, speaking slowly and carefully (for wolves are stupid, they said to themselves, nobody will ever persuade us otherwise).

  “What our Babe’s got to do,” said one, “is to larn what all of us larned when we was little lambs.”

  “ ’Tis a saying, see,” said another, “as lambs do larn at their mothers’ hocks.”

  “And then wherever we do go…”

  “…to ma-a-a-a-arket…”

  “…or to another fa-a-a-a-arm…”

  “…we won’t never come to no ha-a-a-a-arm…”

  “…so long as we do say the pa-a-a-assword!”

  “And if our Babe do say it to them…”

  “…why then, they won’t never run away!”

  Fly felt her patience slipping, but she controlled herself, knowing how important t
his information could be.

  “Please,” she said quietly, “please will you tell me the password?”

  For a long moment the flock stood silent, the only movement a turning of heads as they looked at one another. Fly could sense that they were braving themselves to tell this age-old secret, to give away—to a wolf, of all things—this treasured countersign.

  Then “ ’Tis for Babe,” someone said, “ ’tis for his sa-a-a-ake.”

  “Ah!” they all said softly. “A-a-a-a-a-a-ah!” and then with one voice they began to intone:

  “I may be ewe, I may be ram,

  I may be mutton, may be lamb,

  But on the hoof or on the hook,

  I bain’t so stupid as I look.”

  Then by general consent they began to move away, grazing as they went.

  “Is that it?” called Fly after them. “Is that the password?” and the murmur came back “A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ar!”

  “But what does it all mean, Mum?” said Babe that night when she told him. “All that stuff about ‘I may be you’ and other words I don’t understand. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “That doesn’t matter, dear,” said Fly. “You just memorize it. It may make all the difference on the day.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “Today is the day”

  The day, when it dawned, was just that little bit too bright.

  On the opposite side of the valley the trees and houses and haystacks stood out clearly against the background in that three-dimensional way that means rain later.

  Farmer Hogget came out and sniffed the air and looked around. Then he went inside again to fetch waterproof clothing.

  Fly knew, the moment that she set eyes on the boss, that this was the day. Dogs have lived so long with humans that they know what’s going to happen, sometimes even before their owners do. She woke Babe.

  “Today,” she said.

  “Today what, Mum?” said Babe sleepily.

  “Today is the day of the Grand Challenge Sheepdog Trials,” said Fly proudly. “Which you, dear,” she added in a confident voice, “are going to win!” With a bit of luck, she thought, and tenderly she licked the end of his snout.

  She looked critically at the rest of him, anxious as any mother that her child should look right if he is to appear in public.

  “Oh Babe!” she said. “Your coat’s in an awful mess. What have you been doing with yourself? You look just as though you’ve been wallowing in the duck pond.”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean you have?”

  “Yes, Mum.”

  Fly was on the point of saying that puppies don’t do such things, when she remembered that he was, after all, a pig.

  “Well, I don’t know about Large White,” she said. “You’ve certainly grown enormous but it’s anyone’s guess what color you are under all that muck. Whatever’s to be done?”

  Immediately her question was answered.

  “Come, Pig,” said Hogget’s voice from the yard, and when they came out of the stables, there stood the farmer with hosepipe and scrubbing brush and pails of soapy water.

  Half an hour later, when a beautifully clean shining Babe stood happily dripping while Hogget brushed out the tassle of his tight-curled tail till it looked like candy floss, Mrs. Hogget stuck her head out of the kitchen window.

  “Breakfast’s ready,” she called, “but what in the world you doing with that pig, taking him to a pig show or summat, I thought you was going to drive up and watch the trials today, anybody’d think you was going to enter ’e in them the way you’ve got un done up, only he wouldn’t be a sheepdog, he’d be a sheep-pig wouldn’t ’e, tee hee, whoever heard of such a thing, I must be daft though it’s you that’s daft really, carrying him about in the poor old Land Rover the size he is now, the bottom’ll fall out, I shouldn’t wonder, you ain’t surely going to drive all that way with him in the back just so’s he can watch?”

  “No,” said Farmer Hogget.

  Mrs. Hogget considered this answer for a moment with her mouth open, while raising and lowering her eyebrows, shaking her head, and drumming on the windowsill with her fingertips. Then she closed her mouth and the window.

  —

  After breakfast she came out to see them off. Fly was sitting in the passenger seat, Babe was comfortable in a thick bed of clean straw in the back, where he now took up the whole space.

  Mrs. Hogget walked around the Land Rover, giving out farewells pats.

  “Good boy,” she said to Babe, and “Good girl,” to Fly. And to Hogget, “Goodbye and have you got your sandwiches and your thermos of coffee and your raincoat, looks as if it might rain, thought I felt a spot just now though I suppose it might be different where you’m going seeing as it’s a hundred miles away, that reminds me have you got enough gas or if not enough money to get some if you haven’t if you do see what I do mean, drive carefully, see you later.”

  “Two o’clock,” said Hogget. And before his wife had time to say anything, added, “On the telly. Live,” and put the Land Rover into gear and drove away.

  —

  When Mrs. Hogget switched the television on at two o’clock, the first thing in the picture that she noticed was that it was raining hard. She dashed outside to bring her washing in, saw that the sun was shining, remembered it wasn’t wash day anyway, and came back to find the cameras showing the layout of the course. First there was a shot of a huge pillar of stone, the height of a man, standing upright in the ground.

  “Here,” said the voice of the commentator, “is where each handler will stand, and from here each dog will start his outrun; he can go left or right, to get into position behind his sheep; today each dog will have ten sheep to work; they will be grouped near that distant post, called the Holding Post” (all the time the cameras followed his explanations), “and then he must fetch his sheep, through the Fetch Gates, all the way back to the Handler’s Post, and round it; then the dog drives the sheep away—to the left as we look at it—through the Drive Away Gates, turns them right again and straight across the line of his fetch, through the Cross Drive Gates, and right again to the Shedding Ring, and when he’s shed his sheep and collected them again, then finally he must pen them here.”

  “Mouthy old thing!” said Mrs. Hogget, turning the sound off. “Some folk never know how to hold their tongues, keeping on and on about them silly gates, why don’t ’e show us a picture of the spectators, might catch a glimpse of Hogget and Fly, you never knows, though not the pig, I hopes, he’s surely not daft enough to walk about with the pig, can’t see why he wanted to take un all that way just to lie in the back of the Land Rover, he’d have done better to leave un here and let un sit and watch it on the telly in comfort which is more than some of us have got time for, I got work to do,” and she stumped off into the kitchen, shaking her head madly.

  On the silent screen the first handler walked out and took up his position beside the great sarsen stone, his dog standing by him, tense and eager in the pouring rain.

  CHAPTER 12

  “That’ll do”

  Hundreds of thousands of pairs of eyes watched that first dog, but none more keenly than those of Hogget, Fly, and Babe.

  The car-park was a big sloping field overlooking the course, and the farmer had driven the Land Rover to the topmost corner, well away from other cars. From inside, the three so different faces watched intently.

  Conditions, Hogget could see immediately, were very difficult. In addition to the driving rain, which made the going slippery and the sheep more obstinate than usual, there was quite a strong wind blowing almost directly from the Holding Post back toward the handler, and the dog was finding it hard to hear commands.

  The more anxious the dog was, the more the sheep tried to break from him, and thus the angrier he became. It was a vicious circle, and when at last the ten sheep were penned and the handler pulled the gate shut and cried “That’ll do!” no one was surprised that they had scored no more than seventy points ou
t of a possible hundred.

  So it went on. Man after man came to stand beside the great sarsen stone, men from the North and from the West, from Scotland, and Wales, and Ireland, with dogs and bitches, large and small, rough-coated and smooth, black-and-white or gray or brown or blue merle. Some fared better than others of course, were steadier on their sheep or had steadier sheep to deal with. But still, as Farmer Hogget’s turn drew near (as luck would have it, he was last to go), there was no score higher than eighty-five.

  At home Mrs. Hogget chanced to turn the sound of the television back up in time to hear the commentator confirm this.

  “One more to go,” he said, “and the target to beat is eighty-five points, set by Mr. Jones from Wales and his dog Bryn, a very creditable total considering the appalling weather conditions we have up here today. It’s very hard to imagine that score being beaten, but here comes the last competitor to try and do just that,” and suddenly there appeared on the screen before Mrs. Hogget’s eyes the tall long-striding figure of her husband, walking out toward the great stone with tubby old Fly at his heels.

  “This is Mr. Hogget with Pig,” said the commentator. “A bit of a strange name that, but then I must say his dog’s rather on the fat side…hullo, he’s sending the dog back…what on earth?…oh, good heavens!…Will you look at that!”

  And as Mrs. Hogget and hundreds of thousands of other viewers looked, they saw Fly go trotting back toward the car-park.

  And from it, cantering through the continuing rain, came the long, lean, beautifully clean figure of a Large White pig.

  Straight to Hogget’s side ran Babe, and stood like a statue, his great ears fanned, his little eyes fixed upon the distant sheep.

  At home, Mrs. Hogget’s mouth opened wide, but for once no sound came from it.

  On the course, there was a moment of stunned silence and then a great burst of noise.

  On the screen, the cameras showed every aspect of the amazing scene—the spectators pointing, gaping, grinning; the red-faced judges hastily conferring; Hogget and Babe waiting patiently; and finally the commentator.