Piers Torday - The Last Wild

*Hey — are you having a laugh or what? I’m not going anywhere with a blooming pigeon —*

But they are gone, off into the sky, up high, and then I see — silhouetted against the setting sun — a wriggling ball drop high from their claws, still screaming loud enough for us to hear, down into a metal tube sticking out of the kombylarbester’s thrumming engine.

I close my eyes. I don’t want to look.

And just as I think we’ve lost them forever — and the machine is about to disappear out of sight –

Everything stops — the humming, the grinding, the clacking and the lights. Just like that. Winding down with a huge groan, like the engine itself has been given an injection to put it to sleep.

I open my eyes. She did it. The mouse actually did it. I feel dizzy, every part of me tingling and fizzing with excitement. Running back, I find the cub still in the shadows of the stalks. I give him a hug.

*She did it! The mouse did it, Cub!*

*Maybe that mouse did play a small part in it,* he says, all quiet and sad, *but I think I played the best part.*

I slap his side. *Of course you did, you totally did.*

Then we’re running towards the machine as fast as we can, talking quickly, until just as we reach it, out of breath and exhausted, high above our heads a door swings open out of the metal green wall of the machine. And the driver of the kombylarbester climbs down to meet us.

It’s a woman with ruddy cheeks, splattered with mud and engine grease, blonde hair tied up in a scarf wrapped round her head. She takes a wedge of smouldering cigar out of her mouth, chucks it on the ground and squashes it into the stubble with her heel. Then she jabs her finger at me.

‘What you looking at me like that for, little man? I was going to come back and get you as well. Your young lady friend was very firm on that point.’ She flicks a bit of ash off her shoulder, pointing at the silent machine behind her, oily smoke still trailing into the sky from its exhausts. ‘Or at least that was my plan, till the flaming engine just cut out. Still, nothing that can’t be fixed, I’m sure.’

I think of the mouse wriggling about in the machine’s hot pipes.

*I do not like this woman or her smell, Wildness.* growls Wolf-Cub.

The woman folds her arms, rocking back on her heels, looking us up and down. And then a toothy smile cracks across her face and she stretches her arms out wide as if to hug us all.

‘No need to look at me like that, my lad! I’m going to help you, you daft thing. Already helped your friend Polly — found her down by the river, I did — and in a terrible state she was. You must be Kester,’ she says, and there’s a strange flicker across her face for a second, but then she’s all smiles again, bending down to face us dead on. ‘You can call me Ma, if you like.’

I can’t call her anything, but I nod and glance towards the dead machine, thinking of the others inside.

‘Fair enough. You need help, I hear. And you’ve come to the right place for it. I’m no friend to cullers.’ She twists to look at the wolf-cub, hands on her thighs. ‘But first, I’ve just got to check one thing, if you don’t mind.’

Before the cub can do anything, she strides forward and, straddling him from behind, grabs his head tight between her legs so he can’t snap at her. He wriggles, but she’s got him tight. With her other hand she whips a silvery pencil torch out of her back pocket, which she shines right in his eyes. Ignoring his yelps, she calmly shines the torch all over one rolling eye, and then the other, before releasing him on to the ground with a thump.

‘You’ll do,’ she says.

He shakes his coat, his fur sticking out in spikes and waves like he’s electrifying himself against her. *I only submit because you are the Wildness. Otherwise I would take out her throat.*

The woman smiles at me. ‘Oh, I don’t mind his bark. Once upon a time I’d have shot him myself, just like that.’

She mimes swinging an invisible gun over the crook of her arm, raising it to her shoulder, aiming it right at the cub and then firing an imaginary trigger. His growl turns to more of a whimper, but he doesn’t move. She swings the invisible gun round at the pigeons on the ground, still squinting. They freeze where they stand. Ma seizes her moment and, before they can react, she is in the middle of them, quickly shining her torch into their eyes one by one — like an expert, like Dad would have done.

‘Not bad, not bad at all,’ she says. ‘Fat healthy-looking birds you’ve got there, my lad.’

*Not a bad-looking fat bird yourself,* says the white pigeon quietly.

‘You can’t be too careful,’ Ma explains, stuffing her torch back in her pocket. ‘I lost everything to that stinking plague: my best beasts, prize herds, these crops I had to let rot — everything.’

She presses a small black fob in her hand. With a clunk and a hum, the whole back wall of her kombylarbester folds down into a ramp.

‘Right — we’d better get you in there with the rest of ’em before a blasted culler sees us.’

While Ma bashes and hammers at the outside of the machine, fixing the broken cable — we crowd inside the metal cave. Straightaway the stag rushes forward out of the darkness, and the General is suddenly on my shoulder, the pigeons crowding round all of us and getting in the way and flapping in my face so I have to push them away.

I’m looking for someone else.

It’s big in here and smells stale. By the cracks of light I can see the cave is full of smaller machines, jagged shadows and curves, straining at the chains holding them to the sides. And sitting right underneath one of them, her foot resting on a pile of old sacks — it’s Polly. She gives me a big smile.

‘I told you there were others who could help,’ she says. ‘That woman found us, she put me on the back of the stag, and I’ve told her everything, and she’s on our side, Kidnapper, and —’

I’m about to go over to her, when there’s a loud rattling noise from the corner, and the pigeons explode upwards crazily.

At first I think it’s just the kombylarbester restarting. Ma must have fixed whatever the mouse did, because with a loud roar from beneath our feet, the machine is suddenly lurching off over the field again. But the rattling continues — growing louder, pushing against metal, trying to get in, met by a low steady growl from the wolf-cub. And then, with a plop, a small ginger furry ball explodes out of a chute in a cloud of dust and rolls across the floor, spluttering.

The mouse gets to her feet and does a massive sneeze, and then as we all stare, she puts one paw out and rotates her whole body around it. First in one direction, then the other. And then the other paw, spinning twice around again. Next she touches her tail with her nose. Finally she rolls on to her back and spins around, her tiny feet waving in the air. She wriggles back on to her front and shakes her whiskers.

No one says anything. I take a photo, and the flash in the dark makes everyone jump, blinking.

*Sorry,* I mutter, and the mouse looks at us all in surprise.

*You got a problem or something?*

*No, just wondering what that was meant to be,* I say.

*That, my two-legged friend, was a special harvest-mouse Dance of Welcome.*

*I’ve never seen a mouse dance before,* growls the wolf-cub.

*Well! You ain’t seen nothing yet in that case, my good friends from the north. As a matter of fact, we harvest mice have over forty-six thousand different dances. We’ve also got the Corn Is Coming Dance. We’ve got the Corn Has Arrived Dance. We’ve got the Corn Is Really Something Now, You Should Check It Out Dance. We’ve got the Corn Is Kind Of On The Turn Now, So Hurry Up Dance. We’ve got the—*