Free The Crowstarver by Dick King-Smith

then?’
    â€˜Spider’s house! Good un!’
    They parted, Spider towards the stables, Tom up the drove, dog at heel.‘He’s happy, Moll,’ said Tom.‘That’s the main thing. Don’t matter he’s got no learning, don’t matter he can’t run and play games like other kids his age. Just so long as he’s happy. Which he seems to be, whether ’tis cleaning harness or thinking he’s a sojer, marching up and down banging his drum to frighten they croaks. Thank God he’ll never be able to be a real sojer, no matter how long this war do last.’

C HAPTER T WELVE
    T hus far the War, although now a few months old, had not really impinged upon most people in Britain. Life in the Wylye Valley went on much as usual, and at the beginning of March 1940 Spider Sparrow once more took up his duties as crowstarver.
    Percy had found work for him where he could throughout the winter, and now, with the sowing of both spring wheat and barley, there was once more need for his shouting and whistling and barking and banging, in his war against the ‘croaks’.
    The spring corn was drilled on the lower grounds, not far from the lambing field, which meant that, though no longer able to use the shelter in the spinney, Spider could if needs betake refuge in the shepherd’s hut.
    On pouring wet days (and there were many) he stayed in the lambing-pens and helped his father, and at midday and in the evening they ate together, in the hut, the food which Kathie brought out for the two of them. At suppertime she waited till Spider had finished his meal and then took him back home with her.
    â€˜You’ve got to get your proper sleep,’ she said.‘Your father has to do the best he can, this time of year, but you need yours, you’re growing so fast.’
    And indeed Spider was shooting up, ‘like a runner bean’Tom said. He did not put on much weight but only height, it seemed, and by his fourteenth birthday he was taller than his mother and not far short of his father.
    For a birthday present they gave him two things, one because it would be useful, one because they knew, from little things he had said, he very much wanted.
    The first was a big silver whistle that could hang round his neck on a lanyard.
    â€˜You blow that when you need to rest your voice,’ they said.‘That’ll put the wind up the croaks,’ and it did for a while, until of course the birds grew used to it, as indeed they’d grown usedto all Spider’s noises. They flew up, and over to the next nearest piece of corn, and down again.
    The other present was a knife. All the farm men carried pocket-knives, and Tom had a big one with a single curved blade which he used for paring the sheep’s hooves, and for years now Spider had murmured ‘Good un’ whenever he set eyes on it. So they bought him a really good knife with two long blades that folded into a stout handle, metal-capped at either end, the haft made from stag’s horn. Let in to the stag’s horn was a little plate, on which Tom had carefully scratched the initials J.J.S.
    Kathie was not as happy about this present as Tom.
    â€˜He’ll cut himself,’ she said.
    â€˜He’ll learn,’ said Tom.
    Both were right.
    A day or so after his birthday Spider, whittling at a bit of stick with the blade of his new knife facing towards the hand in which he held the wood, cut the ball of his thumb quite deeply, as Kathie had said he would. But as Tom had said, he learned by that always to cut with the blade facing away.
    On his actual birthday something rather unusual happened, as though in honour of the event.
    They had just eaten their lunch in the hut, and Tom told Spider not to go back to his crowstarving but to stay a little while and help with what Tom suspected would be a difficult birth.
    One way of denoting the age of a ewe was to describe her, when young, as a two-tooth, then a