Free The Runaways by Victor Canning Page A

that sounded all right, particularly the free lunch. For a moment he remembered longingly Sister Ethel’s Irish stews. Whatever else she was not, she was a jolly good cook. Kennels, eh? Well, he liked dogs and he supposed he could be called strong. But where was Heytesbury? He didn’t want to be too far from his barn if he could help it. Always supposing he got the job, of course. He took out his map and consulted it. It didn’t take him long to find Heytesbury, which was just inside the right-hand edge of the map. It was about three miles south-east of Warminster. He saw that he could take a back road from Heytesbury, through a place called Sutton Veny, and, by another side road, come down to the river below Crockerton without having to go into Warminster at all. He worked out that by this route – if he got the job – he would only have about three or four miles to go.
    A few minutes later Smiler was cycling east from Warminster towards Heytesbury along the main road, wondering what Mrs Angela Lakey would be like.
    Yarra, when she left the barn that morning, followed her usual route up the river, keeping just inside the fringe of the woods, but she was unlucky with her hunting. Half a mile from the cottage she put up a drake mallard from the edge of a swampy hollow just inside the wood. The drake went up like a rocket and with him, unexpected by Yarra, went his mate. For a moment the choice of two targets made Yarra hesitate. When she leapt for the female mallard she missed it by a foot. Farther on in the woods she put up a wily old buck hare.
    The hare raced away down the wooded slope, twisting and turning. Yarra went after him, but his twists and turns in and out of the trees balked her of a clear, fast run. At the bottom of the slope Yarra expected the hare to turn up or down the river bank. The hare, however, which had lived a long time and knew when something faster than he was on his tail, took off from the bank in a long leap. He splashed into the water and swam across. Yarra pulled up on her haunches and watched him go. Only if she were absolutely forced to it would she take to the water. She watched the hare go caterwise down the river with the strong current and then pull himself out on the other side and disappear. She wrinkled her mask in disgust. She was hungry now and even more restless than she had been on any other day. Because of this she was in a bad temper. She raked the ground with her back legs, her talons sending a shower of dead leaves and twigs and earth flying. An hour later, she was almost at the end of the wooded valley slope where the trees gave way to rough pasture. Fifty yards ahead she saw a lean grey shape at the edge of the water. Yarra froze and watched.
    It was a heron standing in two inches of water where the flooded river lapped just over the bank. Below the heron a back eddy had cut a deep pool close in under the bank. It was a favourite fishing place of the heron. When the water was high he knew that the trout and grayling liked to get out of the main current and seek the shelter of the slower pools and back eddies near the bank. Here, too, in winter there was more food than in mid-stream for often the floods washed fat worms, grubs, and insects out of the eroding banks and floated them down for the taking.
    Yarra watched the heron for a while and then lowered her body close to the ground and began to stalk him. She kept close to the cover of the winter dry clumps of flags and reeds and the high tufts of dead nettle stems. She had never seen a heron before. The bird moved once, sliding its head an inch lower, dagger-like beak a foot from the stream.
    The heron, the wisest and most cautious of birds and possessed of infinite patience, was well aware of Yarra. When she was thirty yards away he had caught, from the corner of his eye, the slight sideways flick of her tufted tail. There were times in Yarra’s mounting excitement when she could not stop that momentary