Instead of resting that afternoon, Miss Smith wrote letters, while Kathleen took a nap on Miss Smith’s spare bed. It seemed to Sirius, staring at Miss Smith’s racing pen and the growing pile of envelopes, that Miss Smith had at one time taught everyone of importance in the town, from the Member of Parliament to the man in charge of the R.S.P.C.A. Sirius thought she was rather enjoying herself. When Kathleen came downstairs, she was much more cheerful. She enjoyed herself washing Miss Smith’s kitchen floor, and then got tea, with scones, in Miss Smith’s gold-edged tea set.
“I didn’t ask you here to do my housework!” Miss Smith kept snapping crossly as she wrote.
“But I like to, because you’re such a dear,” Kathleen called back.
Sirius and Bruce left large pawprints on the wet floor going out through the dog-door into the garden. They settled that they would leave as soon as Miss Smith and Kathleen went to bed. Then, somehow, they found themselves romping like puppies, up and down the grass and over the tangled flowerbeds, struggling furiously for possession of a ribbed stocking that must have belonged to Miss Smith. When the stocking came to pieces, they went indoors and ate buttered scones. After that they lay snoozing, while Miss Smith finished her letters and Kathleen curled up with one of Miss Smith’s many books.
When Miss Smith had posted her letters, and only then, she telephoned the Duffields. Sirius bristled. He could hear Duffie at the other end. “Kathleen and her dog are with me,” Miss Smith said. “My name is Smith.” Then, after a pause filled with cold, strident talk from the telephone, she said, “My good woman, complain to whom you please. I don’t intend to listen to a word of it.” She slammed the receiver down and came back to her chair, looking militant.
“You didn’t say your address,” Kathleen said.
Miss Smith chuckled. “That’s the best of being called Smith. It will take them some days to find out which Smith. I don’t want the woman bothering us until we’ve got something settled.”
Nevertheless, halfway through the most peaceful evening Sirius had ever spent, the telephone jangled. When Miss Smith answered it, Sirius found his ears pricking up at the high voice inside it. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” said Miss Smith. “Who is Shamus?” The high voice corrected itself. “Or Leo,” said Miss Smith. “A dog? Goodness me, I’m not a pet shop!” She put the receiver down. “One of your Duffields seems to be trying to find you,” she said to Kathleen. “He sounded very young.”
“Robin!” Kathleen exclaimed. “Oh dear, I hadn’t thought! Robin must be missing us terribly.”
“He’s welcome to visit you as soon as we’ve sorted things out,” said Miss Smith.
After all those letters, Miss Smith was tired, She went to bed early, telling Kathleen to remember to lock the door and switch the lights out when she had finished her book. Kathleen had seemed to be absorbed in her book. But, as soon as Miss Smith was upstairs, she laid it quietly aside and sat staring in front of her. After a while, tears began to trickle down her face.
“And I shouldn’t have broken Duffie’s pots,” she told Sirius, out of her misery. “That was because my daddy was shot. It wasn’t what Duffie said at all. I told you what a muddle being sad is.”
Sirius came and sat on her feet, leaning against her to comfort her. Kathleen twisted her fingers in his collar gratefully, but she went on crying. After an hour, Sirius became anxious. It was not long now to moonrise. He had found Kathleen a home and a friend. But she plainly still needed him too. He wondered if he would be able to leave at all.
Bruce became frankly impatient. He got up and wandered around the room. He nosed the door open and looked meaningly at Sirius.
“You go,” Sirius said. “I’ll meet you by our elder trees if I can get away.”
“Really?” said Bruce. “I don’t want to miss that hunt, but—”
“Go on,” said Sirius. “You can do me a favor, if I don’t come. When the hunt’s over, ask the Master of it for a thing called a Zoi. If he gives it you, bring it to me.”
“A Zoi,” said Bruce. “All right I’ll see you.”
He tick-tacked quietly away through the hall and the kitchen. The dog-door thumped. Kathleen took no notice. She just sat there with her hand twisted in Sirius’s collar and cried. Another worry came to Sirius. His Companion must be looking for him. The later it grew, the more certain it was that she had found out he was not at the Duffields’. She would search the town, and he would be forced to go on his own to the cleared space while she searched. She could easily find him, and Earth might not be able to help him this time.
Bruce had been gone nearly an hour, when Miss Smith’s doorbell rang.
Kathleen jumped. “Oh, Leo, suppose it’s Duffie! Should I answer it?”
Sirius got up and went quietly to the front door. He sniffed cautiously at the crack beneath. It was not Duffie. He pawed at the front door and whined, to show Kathleen she should open it.
“Well, if you think so—” Kathleen opened it dubiously, just an inch or so.
Robin burst the door the whole way open and threw himself on both of them, shivering and tearful and glad all at once. “I knew you’d be here! She was the only Smith who didn’t say I’d got the wrong number. Kathleen, please can I stay with you! I want to be with you and Shamus. It’s horrible at home with only Basil.”
“Hush!” said Kathleen. “Miss Smith’s asleep. Come in the warm. You’re frozen.”
She took Robin into the sitting room. He threw himself into the chair which was a better fit for dogs and burst into tears. “It’s been awful!” he said. “They’re so angry. And Basil and I had to cook supper in the end, only we burned every thing. And that made Basil have a terrible row with Mum and go storming off to look for Remains. And when he didn’t come back—”
“Didn’t come back?” said Kathleen.
“No,” sobbed Robin. “He told them he was going to stay away for good. I think it was really because Mum’s going to have the Ra—er, Shamus—put down, only they both pretended it was about the supper. So then Dad and Mum had another row and Dad phoned the police again, and so I had to wait for ages before I could get away. Please let me stay here, Kathleen.”
“You can stay till you’re warm,” said Kathleen. “And then I’ll take you back. I’ll have to,” she said, as Robin wailed. “They’ll be mad with worry if you go missing too. But it’s me they’re angry about. I’ll explain to Uncle Harry for you, and I’ll stay if you want me to. I knew it was too good to be true, staying with Miss Smith.”
Sirius sighed as he listened to Kathleen comforting Robin. That was Kathleen all over. She would spoil all Miss Smith’s plans and his own, and go back to be miserable with the Duffields, just because Robin was upset. But at least she was so taken up with Robin that she did not seem to be needing Sirius any more. He thought he could go. He had already got up to leave, when the doorbell rang again, an angry, jabbing trill.
Robin seized Kathleen’s arm. “Is it Dad?”
“I’ll see.” Kathleen braced her shoulders and marched to the door. Sirius followed her. If it was Duffie, he supposed he might have to bite her again.
But it was Basil. He stood on the steps staring rather accusingly at Kathleen. “I saw Robin and trailed him,” he said aggressively. “What did you want to go and let him bite Mum for?” Before Sirius could wonder who had bitten whom, Basil pounced past Kathleen and proved he had been talking about Sirius by hugging him crushingly. “Beastly old Rat!” he said, burying his face in Sirius’s coat. “She won’t let you in the house again now.”
Robin arrived in the hall. “How did he get here?” he demanded unwelcomingly.
“Quiet!” said Kathleen, shutting the front door and glancing anxiously at the stairs. “Poor Miss Smith was so tired. Come in the sitting room, all of you.”
Sirius realized he was not likely to get away at all that night. Basil kept tight hold of him and flopped into the chair Robin had just left, with Sirius pinned between his knees. And Sirius found he was not displeased to see Basil again. His tail wagged itself energetically, “I thought I saw you, Rat,” said Basil. “Near the river, where they’ve knocked a lot of houses down. There was this dog, barking at a man and a woman. They were ever such peculiar types, sort of lit up round the edges, one blue and the other sort of white. I only went near them because I thought it was you barking. And they ran off when I came, and then I saw it wasn’t you, it was a dog just like you.”
“That must have been Bruce,” said Kathleen. Sirius thought so too. It was clear New-Sirius and his Companion had made the same mistake as Basil. Sirius hoped Bruce was safe. “But, Basil,” said Kathleen, “what did you think you were doing, going off like that?”
Basil went Sullen. “I was festering furious. That’s why. I was going to stay out all night and scare them properly. I’ve read hundreds of books where people are up all night. Only,” he said resentfully, “they none of them warn you how boring it is. And they say you get tired—but you don’t. You just get a sick, hungry sort of feeling and keep on wanting to sit down, and all the cafés close, so you can’t get anything to eat. That’s why I went home—only I saw Robin come out and followed him instead. Kathleen, have you got anything I can eat?”
Basil seemed so desperate that Kathleen crept to Miss Smith’s kitchen and made him a pot of tea and buttered some leftover scones. Sirius pattered mournfully beside her, worried about Bruce and certain that his chance to find the Zoi had gone. He had not the heart to eat the scone Kathleen gave him. He lay with it between his paws in the sitting room while the others ate and drank and talked. It was clear Kathleen was going back to the Duffields. Robin wanted her to. Basil simply assumed that she would. Sirius sighed.
A sudden silence fell. After a while, Sirius looked up to see why. To his surprise, all three of them were asleep, Basil in the dog-shaped chair and Robin and Kathleen packed together in the frayed chair opposite. The room sounded only of heavy breathing and the loud ticking of Miss Smith’s eccentric clock. It was the most astonishing piece of luck. Sirius got up and crept to the dog-door. It thumped behind him as he bounded down the garden.
To his relief, the Moon had not yet risen. But he could feel it near, close to the horizon. He set off at a gallop for the cleared space, in far too much of a hurry to care whether or not his Companion saw him.
The cindery space was dark and quiet, but, from where the bulldozers sat like crippled monsters, a breeze blew a faint scent of ozone and jasmine. It was only faint. Nevertheless, Sirius bent his legs to a crouch and slunk like a dim white cat until he came to the shelter of the first clump of nettles. He slid this way and that among the weeds, hurried and low. And there, at last, was the black heap of rubble breaking in amongst the wheeling stars. He could smell the musky sap of elders. A white coat glinted among the bundles of new leaves. Bruce was there.
“Hallo,” Sirius said cautiously.
“Hallo, hallo, hallo!” The white coat surged and the branches parted this way and that. Bruce bounded to meet him. Dim white dogs spurted out of the thicket behind him. The place seemed crowded with milling dogs, all running around him and saying Hallo. Sirius touched noses with Rover, with Redears, with Bruce himself, and with Patchie. Patchie, because she had Rover there with her, was friendlier than any of them.
“What on Earth are you all doing here?” Sirius asked, running round and round with the rest.
“Bruce says there’s going to be a hunt,” said Redears. “What fun, what fun, what fun!”
“I opened their gates,” said Bruce. “Some queer people chased me and I got lonely. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” said Sirius, still hardly able to believe it.
The Moon slid softly above the houses.
The cleared space was suddenly new and strange. It was an enchanted mesh of blue shadows and white leaves, and the mounds of rubble stood about in it like crusty old creatures. They looked as if they might wake up and stretch, and scratch where the bushes itched them, at any moment. Every living thing seemed ten times more alive. Patchie sneezed, and Rover growled. Ozone-jasmine and a green scent as strong as the elders flowed across the space, almost drowning the flat white scent of the Moon. A large figure and a small one walked across the level ground. The light of the Moon met and clashed with the blue-green light around one and the pearly light around the other, so that they winked and stretched like candle flames.
“Keep running round and round!” Sirius said desperately.
The other dogs obeyed, rather bewildered. “Is this part of the hunt?” Redears asked.
“Sort of,” Sirius answered, running around him and then around Patchie. The two figures had stopped, but he did not think they would be confused for long. Now the Moon had risen, he could see that he and the other dogs were not identical. He and Bruce were indeed very alike, with their long legs and narrow bodies, but Rover and Redears were of a dumpier Labrador build, and Rover was distinctly chubby. Patchie was in between, narrow-bodied like Bruce, but shorter in the legs. Sirius knew that his Companion had only to look at his eyes to tell him apart from the rest.
“One of them must be him,” New-Sirius said.
“Don’t waste any more time,” said his Companion. “I can feel the Zoi near. You’d better kill the lot of them.”
New-Sirius raised an arm with blue-green rays winking and stretching around it. At the same moment, there was a fierce fresh pricking from the Zoi. A great dim shape appeared out of nowhere. It might have been a man on horseback, or it might have been something else. Whatever it was, New-Sirius and the Companion were right in its way. New-Sirius turned and struck at it. At least, Sirius thought he did. Blue-green flared and vanished, swallowed up in dimness. Then the great shape knocked both him and his Companion aside and swept on its way.
Sirius was astonished. No creature, no child of Earth, ought to be strong enough to do that to two luminaries. But there was no time to wonder about it. That sound which was not a sound rang out in a noiseless fanfare. “Follow me, follow me, follow me!” It clamored through Sirius’s head, stronger and fiercer even than the tingling, spitting life of the Zoi. And the hunt was on.
Glimmering, frantic, frosty, the cold hounds came pouring into the open. Everything was helter-skelter, gleaming eyes, gleaming coats and the wild pattering of feet, as hundreds of white dogs raced after the dim shape.
“Come on!” said Bruce.
Uncertain whether they were following or pursuing, the five warm dogs bounded in amongst the cold hounds. The hunt took them up and swept them through the cleared space. A moment later, they were streaming pell-mell down the nearest road that led to the river. Sirius supposed New-Sirius and his Companion must be following, but he had no time to think about them.
At the end of the street, by the river, the noiseless noise rang out again and again. “Follow me, follow me!” The dark shape and the pursuing white ones turned upriver and sped along the muddy towpath, strung out and struggling for position. Sirius and Bruce, being the lightest-built of the five, forced their way into the center of the pack and ran there, surrounded by chilly panting bodies, all of which gave off the stinging tingle of creatures that had been near a Zoi. But Sirius almost forgot the Zoi. He was simply glad the hounds were cold. He was hotter than he had ever been in his life. And the weird compelling fanfare kept ringing in his ears, telling him to follow, follow, follow, and think of nothing else.
Follow he did, madly, panting and jostling, along the towpath and through the dark railway yard, across railway lines and over jumbled old sleepers. Beyond the engine sheds, they raced beside an iron fence. Through it, Sirius glimpsed a grassy old bridge across the river. Their quarry was already flying across the bridge, with the hounds on its heels. It looked like a great black beast with branched horns. The sight made him want to bay with triumph. But the cold hounds ran silent, and he did not dare make a noise.
The next second, the same dim shape—surely the same: he knew there was only one—was at his side, right beside the racing, struggling pack in which he ran, urging them on to cross the bridge. “Follow me, follow me, follow me!” shouted the urgent fanfare. And Sirius, though he followed frantically, was suddenly terrified in case the great beast was caught. Yet he rushed across the old bridge and plunged after it between the houses beyond.
After the houses, they were in open country. And there Sirius found that the hunt up to now had hardly been in earnest. Out in the fields, they ran more madly still. They raced over sprouting corn with the white Moon over them and their black Moon-shadows flickering underneath. They poured around dark copses where bats flittered and owls wheeled above them. They leaped fences, tore through hedges and struggled in and out of ditches, regarding nothing but that noiseless sound calling them on, on, on after the dim shape. Sometimes the sound was dim and urgent out in front. Sometimes it was at their side. Sirius ran in a daze and in a muddle. Once or twice, in the early stages of the hunt, he scented ozone-jasmine faintly. But it soon vanished. Sirius hardly noticed. He was trying too hard to understand whether they were with the quarry or after it.
The muddle grew worse. Sirius did not understand what he wanted. Their quarry raced and looped and doubled. It led them in a desperate circle around a black clump of trees, and they almost lost it. Sirius, with all the other hounds, cast about in a frenzy, afraid they had lost it for good. Yet, at the same time, he was overjoyed that it had got away.
It was Bruce who found the right scent. “Here! This way! Oh, I do hope we don’t catch him!” And he led the hunt streaming away over the silvery brow of a hill, hot on the trail of the beast, agog for its blood, and madly wanting it to escape.
The dim beast evaded them several times more. Each time they were after it quicker, pell-mell, more savagely, and each time Sirius hoped harder it would escape. Mile after mile, his feelings became more of a muddle. He wanted to stop and think, but he could not, because, each time he paused, the dim shape itself came dashing past the silent pack and the soundless noise shouted “Follow me, follow me!” And they had to follow. Sirius began to hate it with a sort of tender terror.
And at last, in the middle of a field, miles from anywhere, they caught it and pulled it down. It was a mad heap of white bodies and fighting black shadow, and Sirius ran around it, savage with sorrow and frantic with triumph. The heap subsided to a flat blot of milling dogs, all tearing and pulling at something. The soundless noise rang out again from underneath, only this time it said, “The kill, the kill, the kill!”
A queer cold lump of meat came to Sirius—he did not know how. He fell on it furiously and ate it guiltily. Beside him, Bruce, Redears and Yeff snarled and tore at lumps of their own. Then, when every scrap was eaten, they all lay down, cold and panting under the sinking Moon, because something had ordered them to rest. Sirius had never felt so wretched and so triumphant in his life.
“What does all this mean?” he asked the Moon.
“Hush,” said the Moon. “You’ll see.”
Of a sudden, they were up again. First up was the great dim shape. It went flying back across the field, summoning them all to follow, follow. Sirius saw—though he did not understand in the least—that Master and quarry were indeed one and the same. He knew they had just eaten him, yet there he was, and they were chasing him, cold dogs and warm dogs alike. Sirius raced after the dim shape, trying to see what manner of being it was. He could not tell. But, in an odd way, he no longer wondered why Earth had gone to such trouble to help this being. Sirius found he wanted to help him, himself. It was not the soundless call which made him follow so fast now: it was a peculiar fierce pity.
The hunt went streaming back toward town. Meanwhile, in Miss Smith’s house, Kathleen woke up. In her sleep, she had heard the dog-door thump and the gate whine and click as Sirius left, and she had been waiting, in her sleep, to hear the same again in reverse, meaning Leo was back. When she did not hear it, she woke up.
“Robin! I think Leo’s run away!”
Robin and Basil both jumped awake and stared around Miss Smith’s unfamiliar room, wondering why it had come there instead of their bedrooms. “He can’t have done!” Robin said sleepily, and Basil said, “Why would he?” while he tried to get the crick out of his neck.
“Because he heard me say I was going back home with you,” Kathleen explained impatiently. “He thought he was going to be destroyed.”
Robin accepted that without question and levered himself out of the chair. “We’d better go and look for him.”
“But he doesn’t understand that kind of thing!” Basil said crossly. He wanted to go back to sleep.
“Yes, he does,” Kathleen assured him. “He knew what Duffie meant after he bit her. And when I had to tell Duffie I was going to take him to the vet myself, he wouldn’t move until I told him I wasn’t.”
Basil believed her. He privately knew the Rat was exceptional anyway. But he still wanted to go back to sleep. “How could we ever find him?” he asked contemptuously.
“I think he’s gone with Bruce,” said Kathleen. “You saw Bruce earlier on, Basil. Take us to where you saw him.”
In spite of Basil’s grumbles, she borrowed Miss Smith’s pen and wrote her a note in case she was worried. Basil and Robin and me have gone after Leo and Bruce down near the river. Love, Kathleen. While she was writing it, Robin crept sleepily into every room in Miss Smith’s house, just to make sure Shamus was not asleep on a bed or somewhere. But he was not. So they let themselves quietly out of the house.
They were all three no more than half awake. What they were doing seemed as logical to them as the things you do in dreams. They were too sleepy to notice it was cold outside, and the empty echoes in the street simply added to the dreamlike feeling. So did the lit-up deserted shops, the late yellow Moon, and the way the street lights and the moonlight doubled and sometimes tripled the shadows stretching from their clopping feet. When their feet stopped clopping and crunched on cinders, and the only light was from the Moon, it felt like another phase of the dream. None of them was alarmed when they saw a man and a woman slip out of sight behind a bank of rubble. It was odd, but natural, the way it is in dreams, that the man was outlined in faint turquoise light and the woman in white.
“Those are the people the dog was barking at,” Basil remarked. “It was along here, where it’s all overgrown. I’ll show you.” He led the way beyond the bank of rubble. Weeds looped across their feet. They stumbled on concealed bricks and dimly noticed that they were being stung by nettles, but it was still all like a dream.
It was even more like a dream when the wild hunt swept toward them. They heard a furious frosty pattering and turned to look. The great dark shape in front was bearing down on them. They got out of its way as fast as they could. But, before they could feel frightened, the shining white hounds came leaping and pouring after it, more and more and faster and faster. They watched, dizzy and fascinated.
“I think it means bad luck,” Robin remarked dubiously.
“There’s Leo!” shrieked Kathleen.
“Where?” said Basil.
“There! There!” said Kathleen. She stumbled forward into the whirling crowd of dogs. They simply divided and ran around her, cold and fast as a foaming river. But Kathleen saw a dog with a collar go by and managed to catch hold of it. Bruce went on running with the rest, and Kathleen was swept across the cleared space with him.
“That’s not the Rat,” Basil said scornfully.
The dizzying line was coming to an end. The last dogs were fewer and slower. Redears and Patchie came laboring by, footsore and draggled, only running still because the unheard fanfare was ringing out and making them follow. Robin seized Patchie’s collar.
“Catch hold!” he called to Basil. “We’ll find Shamus when they stop.”
Rover came last of all, limping, almost done up. Basil snatched hold of Rover’s collar and ran with him after the rest. It was probable that, without Basil to pull him, Rover would not have covered the last few yards. But he made it, and ran with Basil into nothingness.