Dawn of Fear by Susan Cooper Page A

bottom sticking conspicuously up in the air. He was so intent on perfecting his wriggle that he ran his face into the bush before he realized that he was there, and jerked sideways. Prickles: of course, it was a hawthorn bush. Probably most of the bushes and trees in this field would be hawthorn; that, with the brambles, was the only thing that grew in his own back field. Raising his head, he saw Tom, clearly vis
ible now, move on from the group of trees in another zigzagging direction that would bring him closer to the thicket; almost as soon as he started, he was cut off from view by the trees, and Derek felt a moment’s panic and began wriggling hastily off again in his wake. Now that he was away from the shelter of the fence, the field seemed very open; he felt that anything could at any moment pounce on him from above. But at the same moment he realized that there was no danger after all of losing the way, even with Tom out of sight; the passing to and fro of the wheelbarrow had flattened the grass and weeds along this way to the thicket so that it was as clearly marked as a rabbit’s path. Here and there he could even see a few clumps of mud that must have dribbled off the load in the barrow. Reaching the trees, he glanced up and saw Tom peering back at him from behind a gigantic clump of nettles. Looking back at the fence, a long way away now, he saw Peter standing waiting to leave the gap. Geoff was presumably somewhere in the middle. It was like a chain. Tom vanished again, and Derek crawled on more confidently.
    Â 

    Â 
    When he reached the thicket, he found the cover was so dense that Tom was standing casually upright beside the damp mound of clay. Derek got up, rubbing his grass-green hands and knees, and grinned in triumph. Geoffrey wriggled up, and then Peter, and they squatted in a row looking about them in pleased discovery. It was like being in a ship at sea. They were almost in the middle
of the field, with acres of open space on every side of them; the thicket was the size of a small house and made up of hawthorn trees and scrub so closely tangled that it was obviously impossible for anyone to spot them from any direction except the one from which they had come.
    Tom said, “That was good. I couldn’t even see you when I looked back. Nothing moving at all. You’d all make good commandos.”
    They tried to look modest. Peter said, “This is a smashing place for an ambush. Or it’s like a fort, a castle; you could be besieged in it, and nobody could get at you except from the back.”
    â€œI don’t see how we ambush them, though.” Geoff peered ahead through the branches. “I can see the place where their camp is, but we can’t throw mud-balls that far. I mean, all they have to do is retreat to it, and we can’t get at them without going out into the open.”
    â€œWell, I daresay they will retreat in the end,” said Tom. “But with any luck we’ll have got them lovely and muddy before then. See, I’ve watched those kids for years from our house. I know what they usually do. They don’t just hang around inside their camp all the time any more than you would; they play in this field the way you do in yours. And once they’re out, they’re an easy shot from here, and if they’re caught out past these trees, they have to pass pretty close to them before they can get back to their garden. There isn’t any other way. You look.”
    Through the gaps in the trees, narrow indeed as castle windows, they saw that he was right. Between the backs of the White Road houses on one side and the remnants of an ancient orchard that joined the field to the railway line on the other, there was only an open strip of land with scarcely any protection except a few odd patches of brambles. From their thicket they could land a shot on anyone within that open strip. And if the White Road gang were out, the interesting trees of the old