Chapter 35
The last free elephant of England
Cat telling me to find Bear Shirt winded me somehow.
I’d lain in the dark and told her about what had happened in Stitch Country countless times.
She liked to hear it so she could imagine it for herself.
I had thought it was because she wanted all the details in order to figure them out.
But telling me to find Bear Shirt showed she’d been figuring me out as well.
As ever, knowing me better than I did myself. I paused and thought about it.
But, I said.
You need help, she said.
I’ve got you, I said. You’ll get better and better and then…
We need help, she said again.
But I could be wrong, I said. About them. I haven’t met enough people to know if I’m a good judge of who is good and who is bad.
Yes you do, she said.
And of course she was right, because she was Cat, and she always knew the inside of my head better than I did.
If Bear Shirt and the girl with the scarred hands and the tough old woman had ridden into view right then I think I would have let go of all the tightness I was holding knotted across my chest and burst out crying in relief.
And that, with Cat beside me, felt like a betrayal.
You need people, she said again.
We do, I said. OK. We do. You’re not getting better quick enough.
So, she said. Move fast.
I don’t know where to find them, I said. And Cat, there’s a lion out there. We could get stalked by it and it could kill us all.
You have Digger, she said.
Digger is not enough, I said.
You light fires, she said.
She said a lot of other things very forcefully as we went back and forth about it.
Mainly this was because I couldn’t think very straight, or believe she was so convinced about all this.
I was exhausted of course, and still in shock, and, though I didn’t know it at the time, brewing some kind of fever.
That hit me later, on the road. When I had no choice but to ignore it and keep on travelling to keep everybody safe.
You go north, she said. Find the library.
I do remember saying that finding the library shouldn’t be a problem because I had the book of maps, but that there was no guarantee that they would be there or would visit it anytime soon.
So? she said. Keep going
What? I said. If they don’t come, if they aren’t there?
Find their island, she said.
It was annoying how she had a simple answer for everything when I knew that all that lay ahead of us was complication.
I can’t sail, I said. And we don’t even have a boat.
But I’d told her everything they’d said, including the name of the island. And that the library had a great store of maps and charts. She said if they weren’t there and didn’t come I’d still find maps. And if I found maps, I’d find the island, and if I found the island…
You find them, she said.
We would still need a boat to find their island, I said. And even if we did…
Right then I could not sail a boat any more than Cat could walk.
I knew as much about it as I knew how to fly.
So even if it did happen that I found a boat that could be made seaworthy at Glasgow or anywhere along the coast, in terms of sailing my way across however narrow the strip of sea between the mainland and their island, it would be as useful to me as a lump of concrete.
Light a fire, she said. On the mainland. Be brave, Mouse. Don’t give up.
Same to you, I said, and found myself tripping up on my words. If I do this, and even if I don’t, don’t you think of giving up either, Cat. Not ever…
In those days I was close to tears most of the time, mostly through fatigue, but also because I was haunted by the fear that every conversation we had might be the last, that things might spin just out of reach, beyond my ability to grasp them and pull them back to safety.
I never said it like that to Cat because I knew it was important she shouldn’t add to the stress on herself by worrying about me.
She needed all her energy to heal. To get enough breath to say more than three words at a time.
But still. Like I said. She knew the inside of my head better than I did.
I’m going nowhere, she said.
And I could feel her smile like a warm glow on me as she said that.
I swear it, she said.
And then I said that was good and she said don’t waste time, and by the middle of the day the babies were fed and Red was loaded up with the panniers of food and supplies and Cat made as comfortable and safe as I could manage, half lying, half propped-up in one pannier with her damaged legs protected, and the babies curled up in the one on the other side of the horse while I walked, following Digger, holding the reins and leading the way and just like that we were on the road north.
Your life can change in an instant, or a morning. In this case it was both, and maybe the speed of the decision and then acting on it so fast was to avoid time for second thoughts.
We were on the way before any of that could kick in.
Following the M-way with the south and our old home at our backs, until we stopped at the Glasgow library which was, my map-book said, right beside it in the middle of the city, just before it crooked into a hard bend it would be difficult to miss.
We travelled strung-out like an old picture I’d once seen of silhouettes in the desert, except instead of a line of camels and goats we had Red, who was led by me who followed Digger, and trailing behind Red were three goats that definitely didn’t like being tied to anything, let alone each other.
That was our little caravan: A fragile chain of humans and animals adrift in an endless green and brown landscape.
The adrenaline of the decision and the departure wore off as the sun began its slow tumble to the evening horizon on our left shoulder as we followed the road lazily snaking away from the south.
I sometimes wondered how we looked to the birds that criss-crossed the sky overhead, but mostly I spent my time worrying whether the lion was stalking us as we went.
I was scared, exhausted and after an hour or so, not so convinced we were doing the right thing at all.
But it wasn’t a completely mad or even bad idea, going north.
I knew from the map that it was less than a hundred and eighty miles.
I’d made a point of being quite unambitious in the miles that I thought we could cover every day, more than five, less than ten.
Say seven and a half miles on average, which would take somewhere between twenty-five and thirty days.
Less than an old month. Even if we hadn’t had the goats and their milk to take along with us, the panniers on Red held enough oatmeal and dried apples and nuts to make mush for the babies for way more than three times that amount of time.
So maybe, with hindsight, it was a rash decision made in shocked reaction to the trauma of the lion and the devastation of our home coming so hard on the heels of the other disasters, but it wasn’t totally mad: Smooth is fast, and I had still planned rationally enough for the journey in the short amount of time I had in which to do so.
And Cat’s cleverness in always making a point of spreading important things out and storing our food cached in several different places had really paid off.
In fact it probably did more to keep us alive than anything else.
We couldn’t have moved if the fire had burned all our stores rather than just some of them.
We’d have had to stay where I knew the hunting and the foraging opportunities and taken our chances with the lion, if it was still around.
But of course my estimate of making the journey in short order was wildly optimistic, given how it all turned out.
And I should have maybe made more allowance for that, especially because I now know anything involving babies is much more complicated than it looks at first sight, since the main things young babies do even more than just eat and shit and grizzle and sleep is change your plans for you on an hourly basis.
And I couldn’t have foreseen that I’d become ill on the journey.
When I threw up on the afternoon after the lion and the fire, I thought it was just delayed shock.
But while it may have been delayed, it wasn’t shock, it was an illness, and it dogged our footsteps as I pushed us north.
The second time I was sick we were much further along on our journey.
The terrain had got progressively bleaker, as a sharp wind came off the moor and woodland to our east and worried at us as we passed.
In some ways it’d have maybe been easier if it was in our faces, because then I’d have known to get my head down and push against it.
Or maybe it would have been so strong and unpleasant fighting it that we’d have holed up earlier.
As it was, I got sicker and found it hard to keep food down, while travelling with a crosswind in one ear all day led to ear-aches that stopped me sleeping properly at night.