The Crowstarver Read online

  ‘For Per-cy,’ he said.

  Percy took the carving. It was of a long low short-legged animal with a round head like a cat and a long tapering tail. It was brown in colour, for Spider had by chance made it from a piece of chestnut wood.

  ‘For me?’ said Percy.

  Spider nodded. ‘Hotter,’ he said.

  ‘I can see it is,’ said Percy.‘A right good likeness too. Thank you, boy, thank you. I shall treasure it.’

  The model Spider next made was of a fish. He had cut this from a piece of yew, so that the wood was red in colour, and he had even scratched with painstaking care a pattern of scales upon it with his knife-point.

  ‘Fish,’ he said proudly as he showed it to his parents.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ they said.

  ‘For Mister,’ he said.

  In all the years he had worked at Outoverdown Farm Tom had never actually been to the Yorkes’ house. It was not the original farm house, a modest building adjoining the farmyard, in which Percy Pound and his family lived, but a rather more imposing manor house just outside the village, with stabling and a fine garden.

  Rather than go to it, Tom and Kathie decided that the best plan would be to intercept Mister and his wife after church. They themselves were not churchgoers but they knew that the Yorkes were, so the next Sunday morning they all stood by the lychgate waiting, Spider carrying his gift which Kathie had carefully wrapped. When Mister and his wife came down the church path, Tom pushed Spider forward.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ Tom said. ‘My boy’s got something for you.’

  Spider held out the wrapped fish. ‘For Mis-ter,’ he said.

  The farmer smiled. In his own house his wife always referred to him as ‘the Major’, when talking to the servants, and on the hunting field he was ‘Major Yorke’, but he knew quite well what the farm men called him, though never to his face.

  ‘A present?’ he said.

  Spider nodded.

  ‘It’s his way of thanking you,’ said Tom, ‘for getting his knife out of the river.’

  The farmer unwrapped the fish carving and held it out for his wife to see. ‘Just look at that!’ he said.

  ‘That’s lovely!’ Mrs Yorke said.

  ‘You made that, Spider?’ asked Mister, and he could not keep a note of incredulity from his voice.

  Spider nodded.

  ‘He’s carved quite a few things lately,’ Kathie said.

  ‘With that knife you fished up for him,’ added Tom.

  ‘How glad I am that I did,’ said Mister, and they all smiled, the Sparrows with pride in Spider, the Yorkes with pleasure at the realization that this poor damaged boy could make such an object. Spider smiled because the rest were smiling.

  Not long afterwards, Spider was sitting on the bank of the Wylye, listening and watching and mimicking the cries of the waterfowl when he suddenly saw a movement on the far bank. The river was not wide at this point, and directly opposite Spider a willow leaned out at an angle over the water. Among the exposed roots of this tree there was a sizeable dark hole, and it was in this hole that he saw the movement.

  Then he saw the round face of an otter, looking out. The animal was looking directly at him, testing the wind with upraised head, a wind which must have carried the boy’s scent. But instead of immediately disappearing back into its holt, as any other otter would have done at the sight of a human so close, it gave a short sharp whistle and came out and down to the water’s edge. Then a second, slightly smaller otter emerged from the mouth of the holt and came to join its mate. The firstcomer, the dog otter, slipped into the river, and the bitch joined him.

  Spider sat, still and silent, seeing only strings of bubbles rising to the surface as the pair hunted in partnership. Presently they both suddenly appeared, and hauled themselves out, oily-smooth, on the near bank right below him.

  The dog had a big fish in his mouth, and after some noisy bickering, he and his mate settled down to eat it, taking not the slightest notice of the watcher on the bank above.

  No-one would have believed Spider if he had had the power to describe the utter fearlessness of these wild animals, almost within touching distance of him, but Kathie believed him, implicitly, when he came in that evening and told her, in his limited way, what he had seen.

  ‘Hotter!’ he said to her, and then he put a forefinger crossways between his teeth and made chewing faces. ‘Fish!’ he said, and then in his excitement he put together what was without doubt the longest sentence he had ever spoken in his life. ‘Hotter!’ he said again.‘One, two hotters, catch big fish, eat big fish, Spider see!’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Above all things, Mister loved horses. As an infant, he had ridden before he could walk, and though he had always lived surrounded by dogs and had, since taking over the farm, a deal of pride and interest in his cattle, his sheep and his poultry, the horse was for him the most beautiful of God’s creatures.

  In the Great War he had been a cavalryman, commanding a squadron of the 17th/21st Lancers (and, as things turned out, he thanked God he had not been a foot-soldier).

  He hated to part with a horse, and so, apart from Em’ly and Jack, now seconded to Ephraim Stanhope in the carthorse stables, there were several others, retired from the hunting-field on account of age and loss of pace, that lived a happy retirement up on the downs. Not only did Major Yorke dislike selling such old friends, he was also a sucker for acquiring new ones, and only the fact that his wife reined him in very tightly, especially on his Irish trips, stopped Outoverdown Farm from being covered in horses.

  One day however, when Mrs Yorke was away visiting relatives, a most intriguing advertisement caught Mister’s eye. There had been an American travelling roadshow in the county, a kind of blend of circus and fun fair, one of whose attractions had been a rodeo. Now the whole outfit was packing up and returning to the States, and the owners had decided to sell all the rodeo horses, six of them, rather than ship them back home.

  The broncos, as the advertisement styled them, were to be sold at auction in Salisbury market.

  At this sale, perhaps because he was temporarily free of Mrs Yorke’s restraining hand, perhaps because no-one else seemed especially keen to bid for these half dozen rather wild-looking beasts, Mister had a rush of blood to the head and bought the whole lot.

  When the haulier arrived back at Outoverdown Farm with them, Mister was waiting, with the horseman, at the junction of the road with the drove, up which Percy Pound had already ridden his motorbike. He would open the gate into the most southerly piece of downland, and then wait there, to turn the horses in, for the drove continued on beyond the boundary of the farm, until it eventually met the next main road.

  ‘We’re going to run them up into the Far Hanging. They’re a bit on the frisky side, I think, so they can let some steam off for a while and then we’ll see what we can do with them,’ said Mister.

  ‘Up to your weight, are they, sir?’ asked Ephraim, as the haulier was unscrewing the clamps prior to letting down the tailboard of the cattle-lorry.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Mister.‘To tell you the truth, Ephraim, I bought them because I felt sorry for ’em, I suppose. They haven’t had much of a life – these rodeo chaps, they put a cinch round the horse’s belly and draw it up tight, to make ’em buck, you know, damned cruel.’

  At this point, the haulier dropped the tailboard and opened out its wings. Then suddenly there was a violent explosion from the dark interior, and out rushed the rodeo horses and thundered down the tailboard and set off up the drove, neighing and whinnying, leaping and kicking like mad things, as though this was their first taste of freedom for ages, which it probably was.

  ‘They’m bucking broncos all right, sir,’ said Ephraim.

  He just had time to see – before they settled into a gallop – that they were strong-looking animals and of unusual colours. Four were piebalds, one a pale red, one a greyish yellow, or, as the sale catalogue listed them, using American
terms: ‘Four pintos, one sorrel, one buckskin’.

  Farmer and horseman began the long walk up the drove after the horses but before they had gone very far, they heard the noise of the foreman’s motorbike returning.

  ‘You got a right lot there, sir,’ he said grumpily as he stopped beside them (the wind was sharp and his knee was hurting). ‘Take some breaking, they will. They come up to me full gallop and then off and away over the Far Hanging like the wind. Wouldn’t surprise me if they was to jump the boundary fence and keep going. They could be in Dorset by tonight. Mebbe they’re making for America. Best place for ’em, from what I could see.’

  ‘Oh they’ll be all right,’ said Mister. ‘They’ll soon settle down.’

  But they didn’t.

  Over the next few days they behaved like the wild creatures they were, mustangs, feral horses rounded up specifically to be used in a ‘Wild West’ show. For all their captive lives they had been used to a routine wherein they were penned while some likely lad was lowered on to one or other of them. Then the cinch would be tightened, the pen door opened, and out into the makeshift ring would go the bronco, kicking madly against the pain of the cinch, while the amateur cowboy on its back promptly fell off it.

  Now they were free again, and the Wiltshire downs were a fair substitute for their native prairies, and they had no intention of ever being caught again.

  Each day Mister rode out into the Far Hanging on his big bay, and each day, at sight of him, or Percy on his motorbike, or of Tom on foot among his ewes in a neighbouring piece, the broncos would kick up their heels and gallop away into the distance.

  Mister consulted the horseman, and Ephraim said that the only thing to do was to drive them into a confined space where it might be possible to handle them.

  ‘Round ’em up and corral them, eh?’ said Mister.‘Like the cowboys do in the movies!’

  ‘Don’t know about that, sir,’ said Ephraim. ‘I never bin to the talkies. I only ever went once to the cinema in Warminster, to see that Charlie Chaplin. But the lambing-pens’d be the only place.’

  Out of the lambing season, Tom Sparrow did not use the stone-walled yard in which he set up his pens, except perhaps to house the occasional sick ewe, and often the shepherd’s hut, with Flower in the shafts, would be hauled out to some handier location. So now it was an easy matter to stack the hurdles of the pens to make space for the broncos within the walled enclosure. But first they must be rounded up.

  Mister planned this operation with military precision, to be undertaken by cavalry, supported by infantry. All the farm staff would take part. It would be spearheaded by three mounted men, himself on Sturdiboy, and Ephraim Stanhope and his soldier son Albie, who chanced to be home on leave, riding the two ex-hunters, Em’ly and Jack.

  They would enter the Far Hanging and between them drive the broncos out through the gate that led into the drove. Above this gateway, to turn the animals down, would be stationed the poultryman and his two sons. Towards the lower end of the drove Percy Pound and Tom Sparrow and Spider and the three Butts would bar the further progress of the broncos and turn them in through the gate of the walled yard.

  At first the operation looked doomed to failure. Hard as Mister and the two Stanhopes galloped, the six wild horses ran rings round them, but eventually, by good luck, the riders herded them close enough to the open gate for them to see it, and to see it as a place of escape. Through it they dashed, to be greeted by a wild chorus of yells from the three Ogles, and away they galloped down the drove, till they met the other section of the infantry and another loud hullabaloo that turned them into the yard. Then the gate was slammed shut behind them. When the horsemen and the Ogles arrived, it was to find the broncos standing bunched and blowing, flanks heaving, the steam rising from their odd-colored coats.

  They had circled the yard at speed, trying madly to find an escape route. But the stone wall was too high, and on the top bar of the gate, over which they might have been able to jump, Tom and the others sat and so barred that way out.

  Once the cavalry had dismounted and tethered their horses, the scene was set for the strangest confrontation ever to take place on Outoverdown Farm. Inside the yard were six American-bred broncos. Outside it, eleven men and a boy looked on.

  ‘Right,’ said Mister. ‘Let’s get a halter on one of them, and then we can tie him up, and catch the rest one at a time.’

  There was a moment’s silence, all hoping that someone else would be chosen to go in among those snorting wild-eyed brutes, and then Billy Butt voiced the thoughts of all.

  ‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ he squeaked, ‘but I don’t want to go in with they baggers. Now years ago, when I were a young chap, I might have risked me life and me limb in amongst they bleddy things, but I bain’t so quick on me feet as I was, thees know, and I don’t want to make our Martha a widder.’

  ‘What we need, sir, is some kind of crush to run them into,’ said Percy. ‘Otherwise someone’s going to get killed.’

  ‘Tis they baggers want killing,’ said Billy to his nephews while farmer and foreman were talking. ‘There’s only one proper place for they bleddy mad-headed things and that’s the knacker’s yard. The dear Lord only knows what Mister were a-thinking about, buying they. Cats’ meat, that’s all they’m fit for.’

  ‘Save thy breath, Billy,’ said Ephraim. ‘This here’s my job,’ and, halter in hand, he advanced upon the six, who immediately erupted in a wild explosion of movement and noise, bucking and neighing. Hooves flashed everywhere as they lashed out at the horseman. Suddenly, struck by the rump of one of the broncos as it whirled round, the horseman lost his footing and fell and lay on the ground in imminent danger of being trampled.

  Before anyone else could move, Spider got down from the gate on which he had been sitting beside Tom, and shambled, splay-footed, out towards the squealing, clattering horses.

  Instantly they drew back from the fallen man, and stood watching the boy, every head turned towards him. They trembled a little and blew, and some hooves stamped, but ears were pricked, not laid back, and teeth were not bared. All the watchers were shouting, at Spider to come back, at Ephraim, now on his feet again, to get out of harm’s way, which he did.

  ‘Keep quiet, all of you,’ said Tom. ‘Don’t shout no more, don’t start ‘em off,’ and in the silence that followed his words, Mister and his men could hear the noise the boy was making. It was a soft snickering noise such as one horse makes on greeting another, and a couple of the wild horses snickered in reply.

  Then Spider reached the foremost of the six, a big flashily-marked pinto, and reached out a hand to its muzzle and began to stroke it, at the same time making the bubbly blowing sound that a horse makes through its nostrils.

  ‘Good un!’ said Spider softly to the horse as he stroked, and at the sound of his voice the other three pintos and the sorrel and the buckskin pushed gently forwards, seemingly anxious for their share of attention.

  It was left to Billy Butt to encapsulate – in a few words, for once – the feelings of all.

  ‘Well, I’m baggered!’ he said softly. ‘Well I’m bleddy well baggered!’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Mister used more moderate language when describing the event to his wife. (On her return, he’d made a clean breast of his purchases and had, he hoped, been partially forgiven).

  ‘Never have I seen such an astonishing thing,’ he said now. ‘Talk about Daniel walking into the lions’ den. He saved Ephraim from serious injury, no doubt of it. Handicapped and backward that boy may be, but he has this extraordinary gift with animals.’

  ‘An idiot savant, ’Mrs Yorke said, pronouncing the French phrase in a proper accent.

  ‘Eh? What’s that mean?’

  ‘Someone who is mentally subnormal but yet displays outstanding talent in a particular area.’

  ‘Yes, right, that’s it exactly,’ said Mister. ‘With young Spider’s help I’m sure we shall be able to break those animals.’

>   ‘I’ve never liked the term ‘break’ when talking of horses,’ his wife said. ‘By what you’ve described, the boy is not going to break but to ‘gentle’ these broncos – which I still think you were extremely foolish to buy.’

  ‘I was, my dear, I was.’

  ‘And if he succeeds, by kindness, then I think you will owe him a great debt of gratitude.’

  ‘I certainly shall. Though it’s not much good giving the boy money, and if I gave it to the Sparrows, that’d be rather missing the point, wouldn’t it? What d’you suggest I should do?’

  ‘I’ll think of something,’ said Mrs Yorke.

  Next day Mister had a word with Percy and Percy spoke to Ephraim and Ephraim talked to Tom.

  The upshot of their discussion was that the broncos should remain in the yard – lambing would not start for six weeks or so yet – and there be hand-fed. Spider would spend as much time as possible with them, in this gap between his winter and his spring crowstarving, but the horseman would be on hand in case the boy needed help or advice. So began a quite new routine for the crowstarver.

  Each morning after he had finished essential stable work, Ephraim would put Em’ly or Jack in the Scotch cart, and he and Spider would ride up the drove to the lambing-pen yard. Then the broncos would be fed and watered, by Spider – for they were still very suspicious of Ephraim – and then he would spend some hours among them, touching, stroking, patting, in fact, as Mrs Yorke had said, ‘gentling’ them, all the while communicating with them either in his few staccato phrases or by making comfortable horse sounds.

  He always carried a rope halter, which Ephraim had taught him how to use, and he showed this to the broncos, letting them sniff at it, laying it against each neck in turn, until the day came when he was able to slip it over the head of one. It was, once again, the biggest of the pintos, the dominant animal in the little herd, and as Spider led him around, the others all followed, as though anxious to be next. Within a couple of hours all the rest, the sorrel, the buckskin and the other three pintos had submitted to the halter.