Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons (Complete Series)

“It must have worked or people wouldn’t have gone on doing it,” said Titty.

“Anyway it’s a bad sort of magic,” said Susan.

“But it would be good magic if it made the great-aunt go away and stop being beastly to Mrs. Blackett.”

“Well, nobody’s going to try it,” said Susan.

“She’ll go sooner or later,” said Nancy. “She doesn’t usually stay more than a week. I believe she’s only stopping now because she knows mother would let us come and camp with you if she wasn’t here.”

The potatoes, unluckily, were in one of their bad moods. Peggy and Susan kept on prodding them, almost as if each potato was a Voodoo doll being prodded to make a great-aunt uncomfortable, but for one reason or another they would not get soft. And the two mates had set themselves to make a really good dinner, with the hotted pemmican and the potatoes coming along at the same moment instead of letting the potatoes lag behind and come dawdling in when the meat course was over, so that they spoilt the taste of chocolate or apples that might be meant for dessert.

The result of this was that dinner started very late and took a very long time. People were making the pemmican last out in hopes that the potatoes would be ready before the last mouthful of pemmican had gone down. It was very late in beginning, and lasted indeed so long that, by the time it was done and Captain Nancy threw the core of her apple into the camp fire and asked Captain John to look at his chronometer, it was already past eight bells, and it was clear that even if Captain Nancy and Mate Peggy ran the whole way home, they had not the smallest chance of being back for tea.

They looked at each other in dismay, and were on the point of bolting home over the moor when Nancy remembered that drawing-room teas did not wait, so that they would do no good by running home now and putting on best frocks when everything was over. “We’re late now whatever happens,” she said. “It can’t be helped. Besides, if we do go now there’ll be no tea.”

“There mustn’t be any mistake about supper,” said Peggy.

“There’ll be a dreadful shivering of timbers if there is,” said Nancy.

So they stayed on, and, to lose no time, Susan kept the fire going strongly and had water boiling for tea almost as soon as washing-up was done after dinner. Dinner had been late and tea came very soon after it, but the hot August day made it a good one. The pirates and explorers were just finishing their second mugs, when they heard a big stone crash down among the rocks by the upper waterfall.

They looked up. A native was just dropping down into the valley. Hot, tired, panting, he came trotting down the beckside dragging a bundle of dusty sacking after him at the end of a rope. He stumbled as he ran, and was in the middle of the camp before he saw what it was. He pulled up short.

“You’ll be having the hounds through here, but don’t you mind them.”

“Hullo!” Nancy had jumped eagerly up. “Is it a hound trail?”

“Aye,” said the man. “Practice-like. Maybe a score of hounds from Low End and round about.”

“What is a hound trail?” asked John.

“You’ll see it,” said Nancy. “When’ll they be off?”

“Happen before I get down to Low End.”

“Will you have some tea?” asked Susan, who had quickly washed out her mug.

“I will that, and thank you,” said the native. “It’s a hot day and all.” He drank the whole mug in one gulp, and went trotting on his way.

“Never you mind the dogs and dogs won’t mind you,” he called back as he disappeared down the beck.

“What is it?” asked Roger. “Is someone coming after him.”

“Bloodhounds?” said Titty.

“No, no. It’s the loveliest thing,” said Nancy. “That sack he was lugging round is full of some smelly stuff. And they let all the hounds go together, no one with them, and they race over the trail made by the sack, right round over the fells and back again into the bottom. And when they’re coming in, you’ll hear all the men shouting to their own hounds, and each man has his own noise and each hound knows the noise that belongs to him. Listen! Listen! You can hear the hounds away at Low End, down by the steamer pier, wanting to start.”

They listened, and far away in the valley below, down by the foot of the lake, they could hear gusts of hound noises.

“Won’t they tear the tents to pieces?” said Susan.

“Not they,” said Nancy. “They’ll run right through the camp. They’ll stop for nothing. We’ll go up to your watch-tower and see them coming far away, and then we’ll come back here and see them come leaping down by the waterfall.”

She told the Swallows of the great hound-trails of the district, of the guides races where the young men row in boats across the lake, race up to the top of a big hill and down again each to his boat, and so back. She told them of the wrestling and the pole-jumping. She told them of the sheep-dog trials, where the sheep-dogs gather sheep, pen them in a field, take one sheep from among the others, and all at no more than a sign or a whistle from the shepherd. Then she was back again talking of the hound-trails, of the white specks flying through the heather, dropping down through the bracken on the steep hillside, getting larger and larger, until at last with the whole world yelling itself hoarse the winning hounds come loping into the sports field and the hound-trail is over. The missed meals at Beckfoot, the great-aunt, and everything else was forgotten.

Nancy was still in full cry, when the chorus of hound noises far away in the valley swelled out very loud and urgent and then came suddenly to an end.

“They’re off,” she shouted. “Come on.”

“What about the telescope?” said Titty.

“Bring it. Bring it,” said Nancy, who was already scrambling up the side of Swallowdale.

For some time after they had all climbed up on the Watch Tower Rock, there was nothing to be seen. Then, suddenly, Nancy, who had borrowed the telescope and was searching the hills with it, called out, “There they are!”

“Where? Where?”

“Coming up out of Longfell Wood. Look! They’re all pouring up out of the trees into the heather.”

“Close together,” said Peggy.

“No. There’s another lot.”

“Where? Where?” said Roger. “Longfell Wood” meant nothing to him because he did not know where it was. Nancy gave him the telescope, let him see where they were, but presently took it again, looked through it, and gave it back. It passed from hand to hand. Everybody had a look through it.

“They’re spreading out now,” said John, who could see the white specks even without the telescope now that he knew where to look for them. “One white speck’s a long way ahead of the others.”

“They’re going up Brockstones,” said Nancy. “We can’t see the front ones now. . . . There they are again. Going it like anything.”

The white spots far away, slipping into sight and out again among the screes and heather, dropping away into a dip, showing again now startlingly nearer on the moorland slopes, disappeared. Farther away one or two white spots, hounds wavering and at fault, could still be seen. Then these, too, vanished, and it was as if all the hounds had fallen over a precipice or been swallowed up in some hidden chasm in the fells. “We shan’t see them any more,” said Titty. But Nancy knew better.

“We shall see them again in a minute,” she said. “They must come through here, because the man with the drag did. They’ll be working up through the woods on the other side of the fell. We’ll see them again. Somewhere over there. They must come that way.”

“There’s one,” said Susan. “All by himself. By Trout Tarn. No. There’s another.”