The Incredible Journey: Chapters 6-8

The patch of vegetable garden, the young orchard and the neatly fenced fields, each with their piles of cleared boulders and stumps, were small orderly miracles of victory won from the dark encroaching forest that surrounded them.

Reino Nurmi and his wife lived here, as sturdy and uncompromising as the cabin they had built with their own hand-hewn logs, their lives as frugal and orderly as the fields they had wrested from the wilderness.

Reino Nurmi and his wife lived here, as sturdy and uncompromising as the cabin they had built with their own hand-hewn logs, their lives as frugal and orderly as the fields they had wrested from the wilderness.

They had tamed the bush, and in return it yielded them their food and their scant living from trap lines and a wood lot, but the struggle to keep it in subjection was endless.

She ran along by the boiling water to investigate, scrambling down the bank, to stand looking pityingly at the wet, bedraggled body, wondering what it was, for she had never seen anything like it before.

She tucked him tenderly into an old wooden cradle, and he lay in sleepy contentment, his dark face incongruous against a doll’s pillow.

...they saw, with eyes withdrawn and dreaming, the palace watch-cats of long-ago Siam, walking delicately on long simian legs around the fountained courtyards, their softly padding feet polishing the mosaics to a lustred path of centuries.

And at last they learned how these nobly born Siamese acquired the kink at the end of their tails and bequeathed it to all their descendants.

And as they listened, they looked down in wonder, for there on the rag rug lay one of these, stretched out flat on his royal back, his illustrious tail twitching idly, and his jeweled eyes on their daughter’s hand as she turned the pages that spoke of his ancestors—the guardian cats of the Siamese princesses.

So zealous in their charge were those proud cats that they bent the last joint sideways for safer custody, and in time the faithful tails became crooked forever, and their childrens’ and their childrens’ children...

One after another the Nurmis passed their hands admiringly down the tail before them to feel the truth in its bent bony tip; then Helvi gave him a bowl of milk, which he drank with regal condescension before she carried him up the ladder to bed.

And in the late afternoons when Helvi returned he was there waiting for her, a rare and beautiful enigma in the certain routine of the day.

His long sinuous tail thrashed to and fro as he measured the distance to the ground.

Through a blur of tears, she watched him go, stealing like a wraith in the night towards the river that had brought him.

The dog, for the first time and last time in his life, capitulated.

They had mellowed with the years, however, and were now more tolerant, exacting only the dutiful homage they felt to be their due as conquerors.

But they were luckier than usual: once they surprised a large fisher in the very act of dispatching a porcupine.

Another time the young dog caught a bittern, who had stood like a frozen statue on the edge of a lake, his long neck topped by the slim head flowing into a line down to the elongated body, and nothing moving but an apprehensive, blinking eye.

The flesh was stringy and fishy, but it was all gobbled down voraciously, nothing remaining but the beak and feet.

He struggled to his feet: the terrier released his hold and walked away, his back turned arrogantly but his eyes slewed slyly in his flat head so that he looked almost reptilian.

The Labrador would have called it a day and left now, but the terrier was enjoying himself and still eyed the collie speculatively.

He started to circle, faster and faster, almost as though he were chasing his own tail, and then, like a whirling dervish, he approached the bewildered collie and spun against him, knocking him several feet with the force of the impact, and following up his advantage with another crash at the end of each turn.

The farmer stared incredulously at the two culprits, who were now making off across the field to the cover of the bush, the young dog with a torn and bloodied ear, and several deep bites on his forelegs, but the happy old warrior jaunty and unscathed.

When he saw the mass of feathers he flung his stick in sudden rage at the retreating white form, but so many sticks had been thrown after so many fights in the course of his long life that the bull terrier dodged it instinctively without even turning his head and continued at a leisurely trot, swinging his rounded stern with gay insolence as he went.

Outside the cave was a large, sloping slab of exposed rock littered with discarded garter-snake skips, so light and dry yet supple that all night long they swayed and whispered to every small breath of wind as though repossessed.

Try as he might the dog could do nothing to remove the pliant quills; he only succeeded in pushing them farther in.

He would huddle miserably under shelter during a shower, his ears laid flat, his eyes baleful and more crossed than ever, waiting until the last drop had fallen before venturing out again.

The cat stayed staring at him from behind some bulrushes for a while, then raised his tail so that it alone was in sight and twitched the end, enjoying the dog’s silent frustration.

He heard their excited argument, and then, an intentional poseur, he shook each paw daintily in turn, stepped delicately down from the rocks, and vanished from the men’s sight.

Behind him he heard a burst of incredulous laughter, and continued on his way, well satisfied.

It was a wild, cruel face that the Siamese saw, and he recognized instinctively a wanton killer—and one that could easily outclass him in strength, ferocity and speed.

The cat was fortunately out of reach, so the lynx lowered its head and rashly applied one malevolent green eye to the hole, withdrawing it quickly, however, and shaking the tawny ruffed head in baffled fury when a flurry of earth hit it full in the face—the cat’s hind legs were working like pistons, hurling the earth back out of the hole.

He came out on the crest of a hill forming one side of a valley, where a small stream meandered between alder-grown banks.

Across the valley, clearly discernible among the bare trees on the opposite slope, he saw two familiar and beloved golden and white figures.

The cat leaped on to an overhanding rock, and as the hollow, raucous howl went ringing back and forth again the dogs turned questioningly, their eyes straining to seek the reality of the call.