Free The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams Page A

was full of the scents of autumn—
    acorns, wet fern and newly sprouted fungi. The Rowan trees were glowing with brilliant orange berries, among which, here and there, robins perched to defy one another, twittering, listening and answering across their narrow territories. Despite the strange, lonely surroundings Snitter began to take heart—
    from the long-forgotten sensation of damp earth between his pads, from the twinkling light, moving branches and leaves, the coloured fragments all about him in the grass— harebell and lousewort, scabious and tormentil—and the smells and rustling sounds of other, unseen creatures. A rabbit crossed the track and he dashed after it, lost it, hunted back and forth and then forgot it as he stopped to sniff at a dor-beetle under a blue-and-green-banded fungus growing between two stones. At length he ran back to Rowf, who lay gnawing on a stick.
    "There are cats here, anyway. Sort of cats. Long ears, but you can chase them."
    The stick snapped and Rowf let the broken end fall from his mouth. "Nothing to eat."
    "There will be. How the wind sends the leaves running across the trees! Then where do they go?
    Never mind, there are always more." Snitter raced away again. Rowf, hearing him crackling through the undergrowth on the other side of the brown, turbid beck, followed more slowly.
    A mile below, they came out on the road skirting the east side of Coniston Water. The wind had died completely and all was lonely and deserted, with never a car on the road so early. The lake itself, where they glimpsed it between the trees, lay so clear and smooth that the stones, sunken leaves and brown weed within its shallow, inshore depths appeared like objects in a deserted room seen through the windows from outside. Yet at their next glimpse these had disappeared, their place being taken, under a burst of pale sunlight, by the reflections of moving clouds and autumn-coloured branches along the shore.
    "Look, Rowf, look!" cried Snitter, running down towards the water. "Everything keeps still in there! I wouldn't be mad if I was in there—things would keep still—covered over—my head would be cool—"
    Rowf hung back, growling. "Don't go down there, Snitter! Keep away if you've got any sense.
    You can't imagine what it's like. You couldn't get out."
    Snitter, about to plunge, ran back up the bank but, still fascinated, went sniffing up and down along the edge, covering three times the distance of Rowf. Once the canvas dressing on his head caught in a long bramble and he wrenched himself free with a red blackberry leaf hooked into the black sticking-plaster. He ran along the shore with a shifting and rattling of loose pebbles, lapped thirstily, splashed in and out of a shallow place, shook himself and scampered back to the road, scrambling clumsily up and over the dry stone wall and dropping down into the wet grass along the verge.

    "All the same, old Rowf, it's better out here than in the pens. I'm going to make the most of it.
    Only the flies in my head—they keep buzzing. And I feel like smoke. My feet are cold as a gate-latch."
    Still surrounded on all sides by the early morning solitude, they came to the northern end of the lake, ran past the turning that leads to Hawkshead, crossed School Beck bridge and so on towards Coniston. Soon they found themselves approaching a little group of three houses, two on one side of the road and one on the other. The sun had risen clear of the clouds in the east and in the gardens, as they came to them, they could hear bees droning among the phlox and late-blooming antirrhinums.
    Rowf, coming upon an open gate, lifted a leg against the post, then made his way purposefully along the garden path and disappeared round the corner of the house.
    The clang of the falling dustbin-lid and the overturning of the bin were followed by the sound of a first-floor window being flung open, then by threatening cries, the thudding of feet running downstairs and the sharp clack