Quest for the Faradawn - страница 28

The animals feared autumn; not because of its natural sadness or because it heralded the beginning of winter but because it was the season in which, after a period of delicious peace during the summer, the Urkku amply compensated for the rest with a time of killing and slaughter which was the most terrible of the year. Nab was now allowed to watch the Urkku from the shelter of his bush, although Brock was always with him to make sure he did nothing foolish. Although Nab had been told, when he had seen animals that had been shot, that their death was the doing of the Urkku he had become confused this summer because he could not reconcile the image he had built up of them as a race of savage killers with the reality of the two he had actually seen. However, as he watched with mounting horror and shame the activities of members of his own race as they spread terror and pain throughout the wood, his confusion gave way to a seething anger. With every crack of a shot which echoed through the wood his whole body ached as he imagined the pain that was being inflicted, and Brock was always having to restrain him from rushing out of the bush to attack the Urkku.

That autumn the killing seemed to be particularly bad; more Urkku seemed to Come and they came more often. The wood seemed to be constantly full of the lingering smells of gunpowder and cigarette smoke and wherever Nab went he found reminders of them. The undergrowth was crushed, branches were broken, toadstools had been kicked over and tufts of bloody fur and feathers lay amongst the withering brown leaves. The wood seemed defiled and, unable to escape the oppressive weight of their almost constant presence, Nab’s moods wavered from a brooding silent depression to a seething rage.

The animals crept furtively through the bushes, moving quickly and quietly so that the whole wood seemed to have died. The rabbits, led by Pictor, had suffered particularly severely this autumn as the result of a new method of killing which meant that they were now no longer safe even at night. Nab had been out in the wood the first time it was used and watched it in operation. He had been crouching down behind the old rotten stump of a silver birch picking a toadstool and examining it for worms when he had suddenly become aware of the most terrible noise, grinding and clanking, coming from the direction of the pond. Looking up he had seen an enormous Urkku machine lumbering and lurching its way ponderously over the field towards the wood. The clouds were covering the moon that night and it was dark but Nab could make out the shape of the machine; it seemed like an ordinary tractor with a large trailer behind such as he had seen in the fields on hundreds of previous occasions, but somehow, at night, it seemed terrifying, like an enormous beast. When it arrived in the middle of the field at the front of the wood it shuddered to a halt and suddenly Nab was blinded by a bright shaft of light that shone straight in his eyes; he could see nothing and do nothing; he shook his head and screwed up his eyes in panic but when he opened them again he found that the light had gone from directly in front of his eyes and was moving away to his left in a great white beam that came from the trailer and searched across the field. As the light moved on, it found three rabbits who had been eating just to the front of the wood; they stopped exactly as they were when the light had caught them, paralysed with fear and unable to see just as he had been. Two shots split through the night and two of the three toppled over onto their sides, their legs kicking in the air. The third one was galvanized into action by the shots and began to scurry away but, instead of turning to its side and so getting out of the light, it ran down the path of light which shone from the trailer. Nab heard the guttural sounds of an Urkku as it whooped with delight at the prospect of some sport and the machine started to clank and grind on in pursuit of the rabbit, which was now hopping pathetically from side to side in its prison of light. The laughter and shouts of the Urkku as they tried to make it run faster filled Nab’s ears and head and his stomach felt sick. He watched as the rabbit eventually became so tired and confused that it stopped and, turning round, ran back up the shaft of light towards the tractor in a last panicking attempt to escape from its torment. Nab’s ears rang from the shot and the rabbit looked as if it had run into an invisible wall as it was suddenly flung over into a backward somersault and landed kicking on the grass. The boy watched as the tractor stopped and two Urkku jumped down and ran to pick up the dead rabbits. They threw them into the back of the trailer and then the machine went back the way it had come to disappear finally as it went behind the hill at the back of the pond.