Quest for the Faradawn - страница 16

When Brock reached the top he cautiously put the black tip of his nose out and looked to left and right before proceeding, a pace at a time, until he could see almost the whole of the field at the front. All around him, in the wood, hundreds of rabbits were running in from their morning feed and vanishing into their holes. He could see Pictor in the field shouting at them to get a move on, hopping after them and herding them in like a sheepdog until he himself finally vanished down his hole in the centre of the rhododendron bush to the left of the Great Beech. He could also make out in the distance a number of hares running off over the fields, although he couldn’t tell whether Perryfoot was among them. If only they could keep their ears down when they ran, Brock thought, they would be so much more difficult to spot. Still they were far enough away from the Urkku not to be fired at and there were no mishaps.

He could see the Urkku approaching over the field. It was a frightening sight. There seemed to be very many of them and they were stretched in a single straight line right across the field. Slowly they walked towards Silver Wood with their death sticks pointing outwards and downwards from their bodies. There was a hum of conversation from the line which broke the stillness of the morning and shattered the peace. Brock could smell the unmistakable pungent smell of Urkku and the other smell which often came from them: a cloying smoky smell which rasped in his nose and stuck in his throat so that he found it hard to breathe. These smells lingered in the wood where the Urkku had been, sometimes for a whole day and night, tainting the air and serving as an awful reminder of the death and suffering they had caused, for it was extremely rare that Urkku came into Silver Wood except to kill.

When the line got to the very edge of the wood it stopped and an Urkku at one end gave a great shout; suddenly the air was full of a cacophony of strange whistles, shouts, guttural calls and the sound of the undergrowth being thrashed. This noise came from behind Brock, at the back of the wood, and slowly began to come nearer. These were the beaters.

Brock waited, his heart pounding. He could see very close to him one of the Urkku standing with his legs apart and the death stick raised against his shoulder ready to kill anything that flew out; his body was round and fat so that Brock could see, where the overjacket was open, a great roll of flesh hanging over the belt in the middle of the man’s stomach; the face was a purply-red colour and had loose jowls of skin hanging down around the neck.

Sterndale had gathered his pheasants together in the innermost part of the wood where the rhododendrons and undergrowth were so thick that the beaters were unable to get through. They had been there since before dawn and he had been talking to them in his low murmuring cackle, telling them to stay on the ground, keep their heads down and their tails low and above all not to move, no matter how close the beaters came. If they stayed where they were then they would be safe, but if they lost their nerve and flew up they would be as good as dead. Some of the pheasants were last year’s brood and there were a number of veterans of two or even three seasons; these experienced ones knew the routine and were fairly easy to handle. It was the current year’s brood that were always difficult; they had been bom and reared by the Urkku and kept in cages until they were old enough; then they had been let out into the fields and woods around the Urkku dwelling and fed with com twice a day by hand. They had therefore got used to trusting the Urkku and expecting only food and protection from them; they were far more likely to go towards the beaters than away from them and were totally unable to comprehend the fact that if they flew up and were seen they would be shot at and injured or killed. Sterndale had had to have many long and frightening talks with them but it was really only when one of the arrogant young cocks who had consistently accused Sterndale of being old-fashioned and out of touch had come limping back one day with half his chest blown away by the very same Urkku who had some short time previously been throwing down com for him, that they had begun to comprehend. The difficulty was that Sterndale couldn’t explain, because he himself couldn’t understand, why the Urkku went to such enormous trouble to protect them from poison or shooting by any of their natural enemies and then later, when they were fully grown, would organize themselves into groups and purposely try to slaughter as many as they could. In one of his talks with Wythen, the owl had told him that the Urkku were a race of creatures which enjoyed killing and that they protected the pheasants only so that they themselves could have the pleasure of killing them later on, but for a long time Sterndale had been unable to believe that.