Unknown - Heartsease

But it was only seconds before the first dog reached the rumple in the ice she’d chosen as a mark, and she could slip back in and hook the door shut. As she closed out the last of sky she thought she glimpsed black blobs hurling down.

Then there came a thud, a long, tearing crack, a lot of smaller bangings; the yelping changed its note, faltered and vanished; then there were only a few whimpers, mixed with a sucking and splashing. She unhooked the door, edged it open and poked her head out.

The whole surface of the ice had changed — it had been nothing like as thick as she’d thought and was really only snow frozen together, without the bonding strength of ice. Now the under water had flooded out across a great stretch of it and the part between her and Heartsease was smashed into separate floes, overlapping in places and leaving a long passage of open water. The smaller dogs had not come far enough to be caught and vvere rushing away to the far quay, but most of the larger ones were struggling in the deadly water. As she watched, one which had been marooned on a floating island of ice shifted its position; the ice tilted and slid it sideways into the water; it tried to scrabble back but could find no hold; then it swam across to the fixed ice and tried there, but still there was nothing on the slippery surface for its front legs to grip while it hauled its sodden hindquarters out; it tried and tried. Margaret looked away, and saw several others making the same hopeless effort round the edges of the open water. In the middle two still shapes floated — dogs which had actually been hit by the falling boxes. She shut the door and went trembling up the stairs.

Jonathan had shut his door and was sitting on a bale with his head between his hands. He looked white, even in the dimness.

“It worked,” she said, “but I couldn’t go on looking.” “Nor could I,” he answered. “It’s not their fault they’re killers.”

Margaret was surprised. She was so used, after five years of knowing him well, to his instant reaction to the needs of any happening that she hardly thought about it. Jo would say what to do, and he’d be right. Now, for the second time — the first had been when they’d crouched at the top of the stairs and listened to Mr. Gordon hypnotizing Aunt Anne — he’d buckled under the sudden load of his feelings. He felt the death of the dogs more than she did — she was only shocked, but he felt something deeper, more wounding, in his having done what he had to do. She put her hand under his arm and coaxed him to his feet.

“The ponies are getting worried,” she said.

He followed her listlessly down the dusty flights; the ponies were stamping fretfully in the shadows, but as much from boredom and strangeness as from fear — or perhaps the stress the children felt was making them kick the cobbles in that fretful way. Jonathan walked up to Caesar and slapped his well-padded shoulder.

“Shut up, you fat ninny,” he said. “We could stick it out for months here. Corn for you and pineapples for me and a million rats to talk to.”

Caesar enjoyed being spoken to like that. Margaret fondled Scrub’s nose and gently teased his ears until he was calm. Then she opened the door. The water was almost still now, though two dogs still paddled feebly at the far edge. A few more shapes floated in the middle of the water — the others must have got out somehow, or sunk when they drowned. As she looked, a hatch on Heartsease opened and a cautious head poked out — Lucy’s. Margaret stepped into the open and waved; an arm waved back. Jonathan came and stood beside her, with his usual perky, cat-faced look.

“If they used their pole to break the ice round her,” he said, “they could cast off the far hawser and we could haul her over.”

“Scrub and Caesar could, anyway,” said Margaret.

But it took five minutes of signaling and hallooing before Lucy grasped the idea and persuaded Tim to do the work. Meanwhile Margaret devised a makeshift connection between the near hawser and Scrub’s horse-collar, and an even more makeshift harness for Caesar to do his share of hauling in. Caesar didn’t mind, but the ramshackle and once-only nature of the whole contraption displeased Scrub’s conservative soul, and she had to bully him before he suddenly bent to his task like a pit-pony and began to haul the inert but frictionless mass across the dock. Margaret led the ponies back into the warehouse, so that they could pull straight.

“Whoa!” shouted Jonathan from the quayside, and she hauled back on the bridles. The hawser deepened its curve until it lay like a basking snake along the floor, but it was many seconds before she heard the dull boom of the tug nudging up against the stonework. Three minutes later they had shut the ponies back in the warehouse and were standing on the deck, where Tim was cuddling a draggled yellow blob with a snarling black snout.

“What’s he got?” said Margaret.

“Puppy,” said Lucy. “He fished un off a bit of ice as the boat ran past. Come and see Otto. He’s better — in his mind, that is. He can’t move his legs still, and his side hurts him, but he’s better in his mind.”

She led them below.

VI

It was glorious to be out of the fingering wind.

The cabin, an odd-shaped chamber with a tilting floor and walls which both curved and sloped, was beautifully warm and stuffy — warm from the round stove which crackled against the inner wall, stuffy from being lived in by three people. The witch lay in a corner, his feet down the slope of the floor, and watched them scramble down the ladder; the reflection of daylight from the open hatch made his eyes gleam bright as a robin’s. He looked thin, tired, ill — but not dying, not any longer.

“Welcome to the resistance movement,” he said in his strange voice, slow and spoken half through his nose. “What you got there, Tim? Another patient?”

Tim cooed happily and put his bundle on the floor, a wet, yellow, floppy pup, just big enough to have followed its mother with the pack but not big enough to fend for itself, nor to tilt off its patch of ice and drown. It snarled at them all and slashed at Tim’s hand; he

didn’t snatch it away but let the puppy chew at it with sharp little teeth until Lucy handed him a mutton bone. The puppy took it ungraciously into the darkest corner and settled down to a private growling match.

Otto laughed.

“What shall we call him?” he said. “If it is a him.”

“Davey,” said Margaret without thinking. The other two children looked at her, surprised.

“Means something to you?” said Otto. “Okay, fine. What happened outside? We heard the noises but we couldn’t figure them out. Leastways you won your battle.”

Jonathan told him what they had done in dry sentences, as though it had happened to someone else and was not very interesting anyway. Otto listened without a word and then lay silent, twitching his eyes from face to face.

“Yeah,” he said at last. “I reckoned I’d just been mighty lucky till now. I didn’t know we had a thinker pulling for us.”

“We can’t do it if we’re not lucky,” said Jonathan without emphasis.

“Yes,” burst in Margaret, “but we couldn’t have got anywhere without Jo. He’s made all the luck work

“The question is can we make the engines work,” said Jonathan.

“What’s she got?” said Otto.

“I think it must be diesel,” said Jonathan. “It’s very old; there’s a brass plate on the engine saying 1928. I can’t see anywhere for a furnace, or for storing coal; and there are feed-pipes which look right for oil and wrong for water, and a big oil tank behind here.”

He slapped the partition behind the stove. Otto whistled.