The Water Horse, page 3
“Fifty or sixty feet.”
“Oh, Grumble, you’re pulling my leg! He’d have to grow fantastically quickly.”
“He will,” said Grumble. “You mark my words.”
And, only twenty-four hours later, Kirstie marked them.
They had had a successful morning’s expedition down to the beach, Kirstie and Angus hunting through the rock pools with a shrimping net each, and Grumble, wearing a pair of tall waders, trawling through the shallows with the big prawning net. The children had found a number of little rockfish, blennies, and gobies, and Grumble had caught a couple of fair-sized dabs.
Crusoe had had the dabs for lunch, and now, at teatime, was just polishing off the last of the rockfish. When he had finished, he came to the pool’s edge as before. Angus had already gone into the house. “It makes me hungry just watching him,” he had said.
Grumble knelt down and made a span of his hand. Stretch it as he might, the little finger could not reach the tail tip.
“He’s grown an inch!” cried Kirstie. “A whole inch! In a day!”
And as the days passed, the Water Horse grew and grew.
Feeding him was less of a problem than one might have thought, for as Grumble had forecast, he was not the least bit choosy. In addition to various kinds of fish, he happily tucked into prawns and shrimps and starfish and easily crunched up quite large green shore crabs. He particularly liked mussels, fortunately, for the rocks were thick with them, and the children spent a lot of time opening them for him.
The fact that all these were saltwater creatures, released into the fresh water of the goldfish pond, presented no problems. They did not last long enough to be troubled by the change, for Crusoe’s appetite was growing as fast as his body. And his body, as the weeks passed, had already grown from kitten size to cat size. At one month of age, when Grumble measured him, he needed two spans, thumb to thumb, to reach from nose to tail.
“When d’you think he’ll be big enough to go in the lochan, Grumble?” Kirstie asked.
“Not yet,” said Grumble. “There’s pike in there twice that size.”
“But he’d beat ’em up, I bet he’d beat ’em up!” shouted Angus. “He’d bite chunks out of those old pike, Crusoe would! He’d tear ’em to bits!” and he ran around and around the pond, paddling his arms like flippers and roaring and making horrible biting faces.
“No, no,” said Grumble, “he needs to be a lot bigger yet. We must keep on cramming him full of food for a good while longer, till he can look after himself and protect himself. After all, the great thing is that, here in the goldfish pond, Crusoe is perfectly safe.”
But Grumble was wrong.
5
In the Midst of Foes
THERE’S A LINE in a very old hymn that says “Thou art in the midst of foes,” and, though none of them realized it, Crusoe was.
The first foe came on four feet.
Early one morning when Crusoe was three months old, Kirstie awoke just before dawn to hear a noise in the distance. It was a sharp fluty whistle. Mother heard it too, took it for a bird, turned over, and went to sleep again. Grumble, wakeful in the early part of the night as old people often are, had dropped off at last. Angus, of course, was in the deepest of sleeps and heard nothing.
The whistle came again.
Behind the small white house on the cliff top was moorland, great stretches of heather and peat bog where curlew trilled their sad bubbling cries and the red grouse shouted, “Go back! Go back!” But whatever was whistling was coming closer, coming off the moor toward the house.
And suddenly an awful thought struck Kirstie, so that she jumped out of bed and grabbed a book from her bookcase. It was called Wild Animals of the British Isles, and was, because she was interested in such things, a favorite of hers. Something she had been reading in it quite recently rang alarm bells in her mind, and hastily she found the page she wanted. She skimmed hurriedly through “Life History,” “Yearly Life,” “Daily Life,” and “Food,” until she came to “Voice.” “A hiss when playful or scared,” it read. “A squeal when angry. A sharp fluty whistle…”
Even as she read it, the noise came again, very near now—the whistle of an otter!
Throwing on her bathrobe, Kirstie rushed downstairs, stamped her bare feet into her boots, and dashed out of the house. It was light enough now to see—to see as she ran—a long low-slung hump-backed shape crossing the grass toward the goldfish pond. Otters, Kirstie knew, ate all sorts of fish, and to this one the Water Horse would be just another, different, kind.
She opened her mouth and let out the loudest yell she’d ever yelled in her life, and a very surprised and startled otter turned and galloped away as fast as its short legs would carry it.
Kirstie knelt by the pond, panting from the effort of running and from the mixture of fear and anger that had gripped her, and in a moment the sleeping form of Crusoe floated up. His nose poked out and he took a breath and sank again. He had heard nothing of Kirstie’s shout. Nor, of course, had Angus, but soon Mother and Grumble came hurrying to see what was the matter.
“What can we do?” asked Kirstie when she had told them. “The otter might come again.”
“I doubt it will,” said Grumble. “The noise you made was enough to frighten the life out of it. It certainly frightened me. But, just in case, we must take steps to protect Crusoe.”
And that morning Grumble made a big frame, a wooden frame with wire netting stretched over it, which fitted over the top of the pond like a lid. Throughout the rest of that summer it remained there, day and night, only lifted off when Crusoe was being fed or played with.
The second foe came on two feet.
It was a month or so later, in the autumn now, and it just so happened that no one was at home. Mother had caught the bus to do the week’s shopping, and the others had gone down to the sea, to beachcomb and to catch food for Crusoe. He would be safe, they thought, under his wire lid.
They had nearly reached the top of the cliff path on their way back, Grumble carrying a load of driftwood and the children a bucket of fish each, when suddenly they heard, from the direction of the goldfish pond, a sudden loud harsh croaking noise. “Frank!” was what it sounded like, and it was repeated, hurriedly, frantically it seemed: “Frank! Frank! Frank!”
“Quick!” shouted Grumble, throwing down his load. “Put down those buckets and run!”
“What is it?” cried the children.
“A heron!”
Oh, no! thought Kirstie as she ran. Not only had she read about them in her book, but she had seen a heron before now, standing in the shallows of the lochan on its long legs, long neck outstretched, peering forward into the water. She had seen it pause, motionless, and then with lightning speed stab downward with its long yellow beak and spear a fish.
But the scene that met their eyes was more comic than tragic.
The heron had indeed tried to stab the Water Horse, but the point of its beak was now stuck in the wire mesh of the protective frame. “Frank!” cried the bird again, tugging madly to free itself at the sight of the approaching humans. And at last it succeeded, and, jumping into the air, flew away with slow flaps of its great curved wings.
“There’s blood in the water,” said Angus somberly, and indeed the tip of the heron’s bill had gone far enough through the wire to nick Crusoe’s back. But it was not much more than a scratch and he did not seem too worried about it. At any rate, he ate all the fish that they had caught with his usual gusto.
The third foe came in the winter, not on four legs or two. It had no substance, could not be seen or smelled or heard. But whereas the coming of the first two foes was a surprise, the arrival of the third was actually broadcast.
One evening early in the new year, Grumble sat listening, as was his custom, to the radio, waiting for the weather forecast so that he could, as was his custom, grumble about it.
And then news of the third foe came out of the radio.
“Tonight,” said a voice, “there will be widespread frost in Scotland. It will be severe in the Highland and Grampian areas, though only slight in the western parts.”
As usual, the west coast of Scotland was to come off lightly, thanks to the warm waters of the Gulf Stream flowing to it across the Atlantic. But the threat of even a slight frost was enough to put Grumble on his guard. On checking it last thing that night, he found the surface of the goldfish pond still unfrozen, protected perhaps by the wire screen. But by first thing next morning there was a thin skin of ice on the pond.
Before breakfast he stood with the children and watched as Crusoe, obviously enjoying himself, rammed his way through the ice, breaking it up with a crackling noise.
“He’s an icebreaker!” shouted Angus, running around the pond, arms outstretched and fingertips together in the shape of a ship’s prow. “An icebreaker in the Antarctic, old Crusoe is, full speed ahead, crash, bang, wallop!”
“But before too long he may not be able to break it,” said Grumble to Kirstie.
“Why not?”
“Because they’re saying now that this is the start of a really cold spell, and in a few days’ time a small pond like this could be frozen very thick.”
“Too thick for Crusoe to break?” said Kirstie.
“Could be.”
“Thick enough to slide on?” said Angus, coming to a halt. “That would be fun!”
“It wouldn’t be any fun for Crusoe, you silly boy,” said Kirstie. “If he was stuck under the ice, he couldn’t breathe.”
“He’d drown,” said Angus in a solemn voice. He clasped both hands around his throat, stuck out his tongue, crossed his eyes, and made dreadful gurgling noises of suffocation.
“Oh, don’t be so stupid,” Kirstie said. “Grumble, what can we do?”
“We’ll have to move him.”
“To the lochan?”
“Yes, that will never freeze.”
“But the pike? The otter? The heron?”
“I reckon he’s big enough to look after himself now.”
And indeed, the Water Horse, now ten months old, had grown enormously. The pond had long been empty of animal life except for him, since he had eaten everything in it, and his demands for food meant that for some time now it had been necessary to make two trips a day to the beach. He was as big as…well, it’s difficult to measure such an animal against a different one, but since the comparison was first with a kitten, then a cat, you could say that now, though he looked nothing like one, he was the size and weight of a half-grown tiger. Like a tiger’s, his body had grown very long, though of course he did not have legs and feet, but simply those four big diamond-shaped flippers.
“Big enough to look after himself!” said Angus. “Blow me down, I should think he is! I bet he could beat up that old otter and that old heron now, Grumble! He’d shiver their timbers all right!”
“But how are we going to move him?” asked Kirstie.
“That’s what’s worrying me,” said Grumble. “I’ve waited a bit too long. I had planned to get him into the wheelbarrow somehow, but I doubt I could do that on my own, and I can’t ask anyone else or the secret of the Water Horse would be out and that would never do. This is the problem. I really need the help of a strong man.”
“What shall we do?” said Kirstie.
“Let’s have breakfast,” said Angus. “I’m starving.”
As they walked toward the house, they caught sight of Postie, the mailman, riding away down the road on his old red bicycle, and when they came into the kitchen, Mother was standing there with an opened letter in her hand. She looked very happy.
“Guess what!” she said to the children. “It’s from your father! His ship berthed in the Clyde yesterday. He’ll be home this very morning!”
6
Home Is the Sailor
KIRSTIE WAS SO excited at the thought of Father coming home on leave that she could not manage to eat much. Angus was excited too, but that didn’t keep him from finishing his own breakfast and Kirstie’s leftovers.
Because they knew what time the bus arrived at the stop at the bottom of the glen, they were ready and waiting on the road outside the small white house when the distant blue-clad figure appeared, duffel bag on shoulder, packages under one arm, waving happily with the other.
“Home is the sailor, home from sea,” said Grumble contentedly to himself as he watched Mother and the children running to greet him.
At first it was all excitement in the house as the packages were opened, presents from far, distant lands. For Mother there was a length of beautiful silk, for Grumble a packet of strange foreign seeds to plant in the garden, for Kirstie a necklace made of sharks’ teeth, and for Angus a four-masted ship with a full spread of canvas, sailing eternally within its bottle.
“How you’ve grown!” said Father to the children. “Why, last leave I was carrying you about easily, Angus. I wouldn’t be able to now.”
“He likes his food,” said Mother.
All this reminded Kirstie of the Water Horse and how he had grown too heavy to carry.
“Grumble!” she cried. “We haven’t fed Crusoe yet!”
“Who’s Crusoe?” said Father.
“He’s our monster!” shouted Angus. “We found him on the beach and he hatched in the bathtub, and he lives in the goldfish pond, and we catch fish for him every day, and he gobbles them up, chomp, chomp, chomp. You should see his teeth, Father, miles bigger than the ones on Kirstie’s necklace, they are!” and Angus made frightening chewing faces.
“Whatever’s the boy talking about?” said Father, and the others explained everything to him.
“You couldn’t have come home at a better time,” said Grumble. “We must get him into the lochan, the quicker the better, and he’s too heavy for me to manage. Getting him out of the goldfish pond won’t be easy, to begin with, so my idea is not to feed him at all today, and then he’ll be so hungry that he might manage to climb out himself if we tempt him with something tasty.”
“Come and see him, Father,” said Kirstie, and they all went out to the pond where Crusoe was calling hungrily.
They took off the wire frame, and Kirstie said “Crusoe!” and the Water Horse came and laid his head on the rim of the pond.
“Holy mackerel!” said Father. “I’ve sailed the seven seas and never seen such a creature! Is it some kind of sea serpent?”
“A Water Horse,” said Grumble.
“I’ve heard you speak of such a thing. Was there not one in Loch Morar, I think you told me once?”
Grumble nodded. “Gentle him,” he said. “He’s an amiable beastie.”
And Father bent down and scratched and pulled at Crusoe’s ears. “When shall we try to move him, then?” he said.
“In the morning, I thought,” said Grumble. “Between us we can maybe get him into my old wheelbarrow and wheel him down the road to the lochan. It’s a Sunday, so Postie will not be coming and there’s no bus and not likely to be anyone else about.”
—
Crusoe had been swimming rapidly up and down the length of the goldfish pond, as he always did as midday approached, raising his horse head at intervals to gaze in the direction of the top of the cliff path. It was at this time that he received his first meal of the day. Now, when he saw the giants approaching, he began to call out impatiently. He could no longer be said to chirrup, for his voice had broken, so that he made a kind of rough bellow, like a cow with a sore throat calling for its calf. It was a hoarse noise, you might say.
But when the giants arrived and removed the wire frame, he could see that they had brought no food. Moreover, there were now not four of them, but five. One of the smaller ones called his name, and at the sound he came, as he was now accustomed, and laid his head upon the rim of the pond. The new giant—another very large one, with a good deal of hair on its chin—bent down and scratched and pulled pleasantly at his ears, and they all made their usual medley of sounds, some deep, some shrill.
Then they went away, and as they disappeared, a steady cold rain began to fall. By evening the rain had stopped, but by then Crusoe was very hungry. He had had nothing at all to eat for twenty-four hours now, and his mind was filled with tantalizing visions of food—tender spotted dabs and fat little brown rockfish, and crunchy green crabs and juicy pink starfish. As for mussels, he could have eaten a barrel of them.
For the first time in his life he felt the need to go looking for food instead of waiting for it to be brought to him, and for the first time he actually tried to get out of the goldfish pond. After a great deal of clumsy effort, he managed to lift the wire frame with his head and get both front flippers up onto the rain-soaked concrete rim, but it was too steep and already frozen, and he slipped back with a moan of disappointment.
That night the frost was much more severe. But the surface of the pond had no chance to freeze over, because Crusoe’s hunger pangs kept him swimming around urgently.
Dawn came, and the sun rose and climbed in the sky and shone down without warmth, and the ravenous Water Horse bellowed his hunger to the frozen world. And then at long last, four of the giants appeared again, and as they came closer, he could smell the food that they were carrying!
Father and the others could see that though there had been a hard frost, Crusoe had kept the pond ice-free, paddling hungrily about. But everything else was ice-covered, for the previous afternoon’s rain had frozen solid upon every surface. Even the branches and twigs of the trees were coated in ice.
Crusoe came eagerly to the side without waiting to be called. He could smell the fish that Kirstie was carrying on a plate.
To everyone’s surprise (and to Angus’s dismay), Mother had donated a small can of herring as bait to lure the Water Horse out of the pond. Actually, she was delighted to think that he was going somewhere where he could catch his own food from now on, freeing her from the endless washing of clothes covered in slimy fish scales.
