Chapter 32 #3
And more than my abruptly sharpened physical senses, my mind was kicking into action on several levels at once which added to the feeling of sickening disorientation: I could see nothing coming after Digger and I couldn’t hear anything crashing through the undergrowth towards us, but I didn’t want to stop focusing on the direction from which she’d come in case I missed it.
At the same time, if it was wolves, I felt I needed to get the goats inside as well as us.
And the horse. And then there was the real, immediate problem: What had felt like a clever practical solution to carrying the babies in my specially designed harness – one in front one behind – now seemed the stupidest idea in the whole empty world.
Because although I found I had instinctively picked up my bow as soon as Digger came in sight, running towards us, I obviously hadn’t thought any of this through fully enough, because using a bow with a baby strapped to your chest was not practical and would injure the baby the moment I let go of the bowstring.
Worse than that was the horrible realisation that the babies were not only hampering any movements I might have to make at speed in order to save us, but that strapping them onto me was doubly dangerous for them.
In fact I couldn’t have done anything worse.
I had basically put on a suit of armour made of babies.
I was also painfully aware that I had left Cat unprotected in the Bunker with the doors left wide open to get some cooling air in, and that if the wolves, or whatever had hurt Digger had circled round us in a wide loop, she would not be able to get up and defend herself if they got inside.
Thinking of Cat kicked me out of the frozen state I had fallen into and started me moving, automatically doing one thing at a time.
I could hear her voice reminding me: Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. So I did one thing at a time.
Smoothly as I could. I unhobbled the goats, and led them back to the Bunker, dragging them as they resisted – not so smooth – looking over my shoulder all the time to make sure that nothing was coming at us.
Digger brought up the rear, criss-crossing back and forth, making her low warning noise as she did so.
The babies must have picked up the fear coming off me and the dog because they started crying, so that we made an awkward and noisy procession as I stumbled us towards the safety of the Bunker.
Luckily the only wolves in the Bunker were in my imagination, and after I had dragged the goats through the door and closed it, I realised that Digger had remained outside and was looking at me and then away towards the direction where we had left Red to graze earlier in the morning.
I put the crying babies on the floor in the pen and decided they would have to calm themselves for the short time it would take me to get the horse into safety as well.
When I got to Red she’d been spooked by Digger, and was even harder to lead back into the Bunker than the goats had been.
None of that was a bit smooth, but I stuck with it.
As we neared the door I could hear the babies crying even louder through the glass, and somehow that made me angry.
It didn’t seem fair that they should be so upset when they didn’t understand anything, not least the danger that might now be stalking us.
In the end I got the horse inside and closed the door again, dropping the bolt across it, this time with Digger beside me on the right side of the door.
She remained staring out across the Tanglewood to the landscape beyond while I extracted the babies from the harness that I had left them in, and tried to calm and feed them.
I kept up a running commentary of what I was doing and why I was doing it so that Cat could know what was going on as I did so.
And then, when the babies were finally quiet, I went and stood by Digger in the open doorway, staring over the dry bramble thicket to see if whatever had hurt her was about to appear out of the dusk now falling over the familiar landscape.
I didn’t know what to do about the cut on her side.
I thought about stitching it up, but knew she would never sit for me to do that, and Cat was too weak to hold her still.
For me I sat with my feet on either side of the bucket of cold dripping and cooking fat we collected through the year to soak the strips of rag we wound round sticks to make our torches, thinking I might as well keep my hands busy doing something useful, but my mind wandered and I only wound a couple of torches, and then lost myself wondering if I could soak some of these rags in our antiseptic salve instead of rancid cooking grease, and somehow attach them to her wound, but she turned and snapped at me as I reached for her to try dabbing some on to start with.
The nip was not hard. She wasn’t trying to hurt me.
But it was just enough to tell me to stop fiddling at her.
I think even if I had managed to put some salve on the slash she would just have torn the bandages away and licked it off, and that would probably have made her sick, so maybe leaving it alone was the right thing to have done.
Animals are pretty good at healing themselves if you let them.
As I sat with her watching the shadows lengthen I felt twice as exhausted as normal, and one hundred per cent convinced that the coming night would be a sleepless one.
But then this was the time when I seemed to get almost everything wrong that I should have got right.