The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams Page B

shelter, no friend.
    "I'm like an apple tree in autumn," said Snitter suddenly. "Tumbling down, full of wasps and maggots And after that, you know, the leaves come down as well—the sooner you leave me the better for you."
    "I won't leave you." . "Everything I've tried today has gone wrong. This isn't the world I left when I was sold to the whitecoats. It s all changed.
    Perhaps I've changed it. Perhaps I'm mad even at the times when I don't feel it. But surely all this smoke can't be coming out of my head?"

    Brim Fell and Levers Haute
    "It isn't smoke. There's no burning. You can smell. The whitecoats are mad themselves. That's why they cut you—to make you mad too."
    The mist was close about them now and the slope very steep. In the cold, the pockets and shallow pools of water among the rocks were already crizzling. Snitter could feel minute shards of ice splintering and vanishing under his pads. Presently he said, "Are you hungry?"
    "I could eat my own paws. We'd have been fed by now, wouldn't we?"
    "Yes, if you'd survived the metal water today. You always said you were sure they meant to kill you in the end."
    The ground became level and now they could once more feel a light wind—or rather, a kind of draught—in their faces, causing the mist to stream past them, so that to themselves they seemed to be moving even when they stood still. Wet through and very cold, they lay down, both completely at a loss.
    "We couldn't even find our way back to the whitecoats now," said Rowf at length. "I mean, supposing we wanted to."
    "Why would we want to?"
    "The tobacco man's got our food—the men we've seen today probably give food only to the lorries or to some other dogs—whatever animals it is that they have to hurt. Animals like us—if we're not the particular ones they hurt we don't get any food."
    "Do you want to go back?"
    "I don't know. We can't starve. Why did we come up here? I shouldn't think anyone has been up here since the men made it, whenever that was."
    "The men with the lorries made it. No one dares to come up or down it now for fear of starving.
    Not even their tobacco man's used it. When he wants to come down he jumps off the top and lands in the water to keep his boots clean. He's really the wind, you know. He keeps his animals hung on his belt. He's dressed all in red leaves, and he gives them packets of maggots to eat. He lights his pipe with lightning and wears a cap made of cats' fur—"
    "If he comes here I'll fight him—I'll tear him—"
    "He won't come. He got lost in the garden and kicked my brains to bits trying to find the way out."
    It was shut of eve now, dark and very silent. A sound of mallard's wings went whauping overhead, diminished and died, and in the cold a torpid beetle fell from a stone and lay on its back, apparently unable either to right itself or to crawl away. There was no sign of any other living creature.

    After a long time Rowf rose slowly to his feet and stood with out-thrust muzzle, staring ahead of him so fixedly that Snitter turned his head and followed his gaze, trying to perceive what new enemy might be approaching: but there was nothing to be seen. Just as he was about to speak to him Rowf, without looking round and as though to someone else, barked into the darkness, "I know I'm a coward and a runaway—a dog who can't do what men want, but I'm not going to die up here without making a fight for it. Help us! Help!"
    Quickly, he turned and pressed his muzzle to Snitter's loins. "We've tried your way, Snitter. Now we'll try mine. That mouse isn't the only one who can do without men. We can change if we want to.
    Do you know that? Change—into wild animals!"
    He flung up his head and howled to the blotted-out, invisible sky, "Damn men!
    Damn all men! Change! Change!"
    Nothing moved in the silence, yet Snitter, nose lifted in fear and uncertainty, could now perceive, growing about them, a rank, feral scent. An old, wild scent it seemed, drawn up, one might imagine, from