The Cone-Gatherers. Robin Jenkins
Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу The Cone-Gatherers - Robin Jenkins страница 3

Название: The Cone-Gatherers

Автор: Robin Jenkins

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Контркультура

Серия:

isbn: 9781847675040

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ what use is a dead man? Trees can be replaced in time. Aren’t we ourselves picking the cones for seed? Can you replace dead men?’

      He knew that the answer was: yes, the dead men would be replaced. After a war the population of the world increased. But none would be replaced by him. To look after his brother, he had never got married, though once he had come very near it: that memory often revived to turn his heart melancholy.

      ‘We’d better get down,’ he muttered. ‘You lead the way, Calum, as usual.’

      ‘Sure, I’ll lead the way, Neil.’

      Delighted to be out of this bondage of talk, Calum set his bag of cones firmly round his shoulders, and with consummate confidence and grace began the descent through the inner night of the great tree. Not once, all the long way down, was he at a loss. He seemed to find holds by instinct, and patiently guided his brother’s feet on to them. Alone, Neil would have been in trouble; he was as dependent on his brother as if he was blind; and Calum made no attempt to make his superiority as climber compensate for his inferiority as talker. Every time he caught his brother’s foot and set it on a safe branch it was an act of love. Once, when Neil slid down quicker than he meant and stamped on Calum’s fingers, the latter uttered no complaint but smiled in the dark and sucked the bruise.

      It was different as soon as they were on the ground. Neil immediately strode out, and Calum, hurrying to keep close behind, often stumbled. Gone were the balance and sureness he had shown in the tree. If there was a hollow or a stone or a stick, he would trip over it. He never grumbled at such mishaps, but scrambled up at once, anxious only not to be a hindrance to his brother.

      When they reached the beginning of the ride that divided a cluster of Norway spruces, Neil threw over his shoulder the usual warning: to leave the snares alone, whether there were rabbits in them half throttled or hungry or frantic; and Calum gave the usual sad guilty promise.

      During their very first day in the wood they had got into trouble with the gamekeeper. Calum had released two rabbits from snares. Neil had been angry and had prophesied trouble. It had come next evening when Duror, the big keeper, had been waiting for them outside their hut. His rage had been quiet but intimidating. Neil had said little in reply, but had faced up to the gun raised once or twice to emphasise threats. Calum, demoralised as always by hatred, had cowered against the hut, hiding his face.

      Duror had sworn that he would seize the first chance to hound them out of the wood; they were in it, he said, sore against his wish. Neil therefore had made Calum swear by an oath which he didn’t understand but which to Neil was the most sacred on earth: by their dead mother, he had to swear never again to interfere with the snares. He could not remember his mother, who had died soon after he was born.

      Now this evening, as he trotted down the ride, he prayed by a bright star above that there would be no rabbits squealing in pain. If there were, he could not help them; he would have to rush past, tears in his eyes, fingers in his ears.

      Several rabbits were caught, all dead except one; it pounded on the grass and made choking noises. Neil had passed it without noticing. Calum moaned in dismay at this dilemma of either displeasing his brother or forsaking a hurt creature. He remembered his solemn promise; he remembered too the cold hatred of the gamekeeper; he knew that the penalty for interfering might be expulsion from this wood where he loved to work; but above all he shared the suffering of the rabbit.

      When he bent down to rescue it, he had not decided in terms of right and wrong, humanity and cruelty; he had merely yielded to instinct. Accordingly he was baffled when, with one hand firmly but tenderly gripping its ears, he felt with the other to find where the wire noose held it, and discovered that both front paws were not only caught but were also broken. If he freed it, it would not be able to run; it would have to push itself along on its belly, at the mercy of its many enemies. No creature on earth would help it; other rabbits would attack it because it was crippled.

      As he knelt, sobbing in his quandary, the rabbit’s squeals brought Neil rushing back.

      ‘Are you daft right enough?’ shouted Neil, dragging him to his feet. His voice, with its anger, sounded forlorn amidst the tall dark trees. ‘Didn’t you promise to leave them alone?’

      ‘It’s just one, Neil. Its legs are broken.’

      ‘And what if they are? Are you such a child you’re going to cry because a rabbit’s legs are broken in a snare? Will you never grow up, Calum? You’re a man of thirty-one, not a child of ten.’

      ‘It’s in pain, Neil.’

      ‘Haven’t I told you, hundreds of times, there’s a war? Men and women and children too, at this very minute, are having their legs blown away and their faces burnt off them.’

      Calum whimpered.

      ‘I ken you don’t like to hear about such things, Calum. Nobody does, but they are happening, and surely they’re more to worry about than a rabbit.’

      ‘Put it out of its pain, Neil.’

      ‘Am I to kill it?’ In spite of him, his question was a gibe.

      Calum had not the subtlety to explain why death, dealt in pity, was preferable to suffering and loneliness and ultimately death from fox’s teeth or keeper’s boot.

      ‘Why don’t you kill it yourself?’ persisted Neil.

      ‘I couldn’t, Neil.’

      Not only love for his brother silenced Neil then: he knew that what Calum represented, pity so meek as to be paralysed by the suffering that provoked it, ought to be regretted perhaps, but never despised.

      Nevertheless he remained thrawn.

      ‘I don’t like to do it any more than you do, Calum,’ he said. ‘It’s not my nature to seek to hurt any creature alive.’

      ‘I ken that fine, Neil.’

      ‘We’ll just have to leave it for the keeper. He’ll kill it soon enough. It’s not our business anyway. If he finds we’ve been interfering again he’ll tell the lady on us and she’ll have us sent out of the wood. Not that that would worry me much. I don’t like it here as much as you seem to. I’d far rather be back at Ardmore, cutting the bracken or clearing the drains.’

      ‘But Mr Tulloch wants us to work here, Neil. He says the cones are needed.’

      ‘The cones!’ In anger Neil snatched from his bag a fistful of cones and flung them viciously into the trees. They rattled against the branches and fell to the ground. He hated these cones, which kept them prisoners in this wood just as the snare held the rabbit. Mr Tulloch, the forester at Ardmore, where they worked, had asked them as the men most easily spared to take on this six or seven weeks’ spell of gathering larch and pine and spruce cones. The seed was necessary, as the usual imports were cut off by the war. Lady Runcie-Campbell had given permission as a patriotic duty. She managed the estate in the absence of Sir Colin, who was in the army. If they offended her so that she insisted on their being removed, Mr Tulloch, for all his kindness, might be so annoyed he would sack them altogether, and they would have to set out again in search of work, shelter, and friendliness. For five years they had been happy at Ardmore, planting trees on remote hills, living in their own cosy bothy, and bothering no one.

      Defeated by the cones, Neil took another handful and flung them, this time feebly.

      ‘It’s not the cones’ СКАЧАТЬ