Free Fraser's Voices by Jack Hastie Page B

toppled and careered to destruction.
    Had he come back after dark he would have heard the eerie cry as Cruach hunted over the very spot where he had slept for two months.

THE PROMISE
    Fraser’s ankle had only been sprained and, at the time, that had seemed a small price to pay for not having been chopped up and eaten alive by the murderous ogre of the moor. As soon as he could escape from his mum’s worried fussing and could walk without too much pain he went to see Rona.
    â€œI’ve found out who’s poisoning the water,” he told her and went on to explain about Dyer’s caravan and the new road on the moor.
    Rona told Cathy and Cathy, after checking that such a road and caravan did exist, phoned the Department of Environmental Health at the offices of the District Council. The Department sent two men in a van as far as they could go, but, as they told Cathy later, the road had been washed away, bits of the van were smashed and scattered over the moor like a plane wreck and a flock of wild goats was browsing contentedly where Dyer had hoped to make his home. They had also taken samples of water from the Ballagan Burn and it was now free from pollution. Dyer himself went away, possibly believing that there were, after all, spirits in the Burn and the Sgurr and the clouds.
    All this information Rona passed on to Fraser, but when he started to go into a triumphal victory chant – “Serves him right! He’d no right to…“ she cut him short.
    â€œFraser, there’s something you must promise me.”
    â€œOh, Oh!”
    â€œYou’ve solved the mystery?”
    â€œUhuh.”
    â€œThen you must promise me that you’ll start taking your medicine again.”
    â€œAll right.”
    â€œAnd you musn’t ever again stop taking it.”
    â€œEver?”
    â€œNot ever!”
    â€œI suppose so. Rona?”
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œWhere’s Sandy?”
    The big labrador bounded up and the girl who loved animals listened in envy and sadness as Fraser had his last
conversation with a four-footed creature.

THE MADNESS

OF THE WOLVES

THE DEAD TIME
    After it was all over Fraser realised that it had started with the strange white ship; a tall ship with three masts like pine trees and a tangle of ropes and spars and sails. It had anchored in the loch late one evening and in the morning had been gone; like a ghost ship, Fraser had thought.
    Jim Douglas, who had been out fishing with his dad that night, said the men on board “talked funny”, but then Jim thought that folk from Glasgow talked funny.
    Fraser did not see the ship; from his bedroom window the view to that part of the loch was blocked by the tall trees of the wood and now that his illness had come back so seriously, he was not allowed to leave the house – ever. Klamath the heron brought him the news of what was happening in the animal world around him, and it was Klamath who told him that an animal of some kind – Klamath thought it might have been a small dog – had been thrown overboard.
    It was October, the coldest and driest anyone could remember. There was little wind and most of the leaves hung on the trees instead of falling to the ground to rot, and they burned gold and yellow and chestnut brown like the rich cloaks of kings in a book Fraser had been looking at. A few days later the first flotilla of wild geese arrived on the wetlands below the wood, exhausted after their long flight from their summer grounds in Iceland.
    The geese were an unusual lot. They actually
wanted
to spend the winter at Dunadd.
    Most birds and animals definitely did not. They called winter the Dead Time and those who could, avoided having to live through it. The swifts and swallows had gone long ago, following the summer south into Africa where there would be plenty of delicious insects to take on the wing.
    Those who could not fly away got ready for the Dead Time in other ways. Hobdax the