Free The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams

Hawks-head to Nibthwaite, or from Satterthwaite to How Head, one lonely knoll surmounted discloses another, all the way up to the watershed, and little moves but the falling becks, and grey sheep that start in alarm out of the fern and go bucketing away from intruders, whether human or animal: the proper landscape to lie drenched beneath a silver dawn, low clouds and an east wind in October.
    Here, among the dripping grasses and spongy, sodden mounds of moss, Rowf and Snitter lay gazing in astonishment and dismay as first light made plain the emptiness about them.
    "It can't be the whitecoats," said Snitter desperately. "Not a house, not a lamp-post, not a fence
    —it's not natural! Not even the whitecoats could—" He broke off and once more raised his head to the wind. "Tar—there was—yes—for a moment—but faint. And the dustbins gone—every single one—it's not possible!" A cock chaffinch, slate-blue-capped and rosy-breasted, fluttered across a wall with a flash of. white wing feathers. Snitter turned his head for a moment, then let it fall once more upon his outstretched front paws. "And no men anywhere—so why make it?—and all that sky, how can it ever stop raining? Rowf? Rowf, come back!"
    Rowf opened his eyes, his upper lip curling as though in anger. "What?"
    "What's to be done?"
    "How the death should I know?"
    "They've taken everything away, Rowf—the houses, the roads, cars, pavements, dustbins, gutters—the lot. How on earth can they have done it? I tell you it's not possible! And where have they all gone? Why make all this—make it and then go away—why?"
    "I told you," said Rowf. "What did you tell me?"
    "The world, I said. I told you it would be the same outside the pens. There isn't any outside. You say it's been altered, so the whitecoats—or some men, anyway—must have altered it so that they could do something or other to some animals. That's what animals are for, have things done to them by men.
    It's what men are for, too, come to that—to do the things, I mean."
    "But Rowf, my master—my master never used to do anything to animals. When I was at home with my master—"
    "He must have, else he couldn't have been a man."
    "But how could they have taken away the streets and houses and made all this?"
    "They can do anything. Look at the sun up there. Obviously some man must once have put up his hand to light it, same as the tobacco man does in the dog-shed. But you wouldn't believe it unless you'd actually seen the tobacco man do it, would you?"
    Snitter was silent, shivering in the wind. The whole expanse of the fell was now light, heather and grass flashing with raindrops in the fitful sunlight breaking here and there through the clouds. The long call, like human laughter, of a green woodpecker sounded from the woodland below them. "We've got to find some men," resumed Snitter at length. "Why?"
    "Dogs have to have men. We need masters. Food, shelter. Come on! We can't stay here. The whitecoats'll be looking for us."
    He got up and began to pad away through the bracken, downhill towards the north-west. For some little time it seemed as though Rowf, still lying in the wet heather, would let him go alone, but at length, when Snitter had passed out of sight over the curve of the slope and reached the edge of the woodland two hundred yards away, he suddenly jumped up and ran after him at full speed, overtaking him under the trees. "Do you think they've really gone, then?" asked Rowf. "I mean, suppose there aren't any men left, anywhere—if there was none at all—"
    "There will be. Look—there are boot marks in the ground, and not more than a day old, either.
    No, there are men. What I can't understand is why they've changed everything. It's confused me—it's not what I was expecting. I was expecting streets and houses, naturally."
    They had already pushed their way between the bars of the gate into the wood and were now following the path leading down to the road beside the lake. The air