Free Gently North-West by Alan Hunter Page A

then turned to follow after the sheep.
    ‘Hold on a minute!’ Gently called. ‘What’s so special about going into a deer forest?’
    The man came back. He bent down to the window. ‘Either ye ken or ye dinna ken,’ he said softly.
    ‘I don’t ken.’
    ‘Then no harm’s done. Jist hauld to the track like a douce mannie – it’s a guid road if you take it quietly – jist go your ways down Glen Knockie.’
    He strode away, his stick swinging, and began shouting unintelligibly to the others. Gently shrugged and looked at Brenda, who made a face and shrugged back.
    ‘There’s no doubt about it – we
dinna
ken,’ she said. ‘Do we go on?’
    ‘We go on.’
    ‘That’s my man,’ she said. ‘Damn the torpedoes.’
    The track still continued to climb, though at a much easier rate; but the extreme roughness of the surface prevented Gently from raising the pace. They were well on the tops now and the pasture had given way to heathy moorland, a dark, sad, desolate plain enclosed by rounded shoulders and fretted rockrims. It was high. There was a shelterless bleakness that carried a sure stamp of altitude, though no contrasting depth was at hand for reference. Vegetation was scant, loose rocks and boulders were plentiful; bare rashes of rock and peaty soil showed picked and scoured by violent weather. A few curlews, tame as sparrows, were all that stirred on the tops. They rose limping-winged to sail a few yards, their liquid yelping sharp and spirit-like.
    ‘I keep watching for the deer,’ Brenda said. ‘But I’m darned if I’ve seen a single antler. And I keep watching for a forest, but the last trees we saw were at the farm.’
    ‘Perhaps a deer-forest isn’t what we think it is,’ Gently said.
    ‘I think it’s a forest with deer in it,’ Brenda said. ‘That’s the impression one gets in Hampshire.’
    ‘Well, perhaps the car scares them away.’
    ‘Perhaps,’ Brenda said. ‘And perhaps.’
    They bumbled on, and even the curlews seemed to be losing heart and falling behind them. For huge distances in every direction the black, boulder-strewn plateau stretched away. To the west a declivity was appearing, slanting in from between two shoulders, on a line suggesting that eventually it would converge with the track. Brenda compared it to the map.
    ‘I think we’re getting there,’ she frowned. ‘That ravine would probably be the beginning of Glen Knockie. In about a mile we’ll be going down – there’s a delightful double-hairpin – then we cross a bridge, and it’s level strath: about twelve miles to the main road.’
    ‘It’s always twelve miles,’ Gently grumbled. ‘That’s standard measure in the Highlands.’
    The declivity broadened and deepened, and revealed a stream gushing down its bottom. Soon the track joined it to begin a sharpish descent along its flank. The ground fell away on the right and a vista of glen began to grow, with a carpet of tiny trees, oaks and ashes, and level panels of pasture. They came to the hairpins. It was a rugged step of a corner with violent wrong-way cambers. Gently dropped to first, clawed in, out, in and out again. Then his nearside front wheel touched the heathy verge and dipped suddenly. Before he could react, the rear wheel followed – and the Sceptre listed to a halt.
    ‘Now you’ve done it,’ Brenda said disgustedly. ‘You’ll never get out of this one, George.’
    Gently switched off and climbed out ruefully to inspect. The wheels had run into a mud-filled gully which the heath had effectually hidden from view; they were in to the axles, and the side of the car was canted hard against the bushy heath.
    ‘We’re stuck – aren’t we?’
    Gently nodded reluctantly. ‘I’m afraid it’ll take a tow to shift her.’
    ‘And where,’ Brenda said, ‘do we get a tow from – in the middle of nowhere, West Perthshire?’
    ‘Perhaps there’s a farm—’ Gently was beginning, when an unexpected sound cut him short. From the glen below