Fraser's Voices Read Online Free PDF Page A

rooks.
    Immediately the smaller birds took up the cry. “Chick-en kill-er, chick-en kill-er,” they chanted and flew in circles above the two rooks.
    This only made the older bird more determined – the younger had retreated a few yards to a low branch – and he stepped purposefully towards the boy, beak darting forward and back at each stride.
    In the fox’s earth, just outside the wood, One-eye was sleeping lightly after the custom of his family. He turned in his sleep, awoke and scratched himself. It was midday and no time for hunting, but some sixth sense, to which foxes often owe their lives, made him amble up to the mouth of the den instead of simply curling up again and going back to sleep. There he heard the commotion in the trees.
    â€œWhat moves?” he growled.
    A confusion of a hundred voices answered him, “Boy dead! Rooks… eyes.”
    It made no sense, but foxes are curious and there is always a little empty space inside them for an unexpected tit-bit, so One-eye decided to investigate and stepped out of the tunnel. As soon as he saw the situation he realised that this was no hunting for him. Then he saw that the unconscious boy was Barook’s rescuer. With a couple of sharp barks that put the two rooks to flight for the moment, he turned back to the lair.
    Badgers do not wake up, let alone venture above ground by daylight, but when Barook was rooted out of a beautiful sleep by One-eye’s wet black nose and told what was happening, he remembered his promise and, rumbling his warcry, “Barook, Ya-Barook, Ya-Barook,” galloped out, blinking, into the hostile strange sunshine to honour his pledge.
    Half an hour later Bob Paterson, who lived across the road from Fraser, was walking his labrador in the woods. He too heard the commotion of the birds and the dog ran on ahead. Moments later it was back, whining, tail between its legs, and, as Bob walked on, fell, uncharacteristically, behind his heel. Bob told his story that night.
    â€œI saw the lad lying on the path and beside him, in broad daylight, a badger, every hair on its back bristling and every tooth bared.”
    Only when he had put his dog on the lead and gone over to look at the boy had the animal turned and vanished into the undergrowth.

RECOVERY
    Fraser’s adventure in the wood had one good result, from his point of view. It postponed for a time the day when he would be pronounced recovered and sent back to school in Glasgow. In fact it put him into the local hospital for a week for observation. As he didn’t feel anything wrong he would have been bored out of his mind if it had not been for his conversations with the birds, and, although these were, as usual, surprised and suspicious at first, they soon got used to him and would even fly off and bring him news of what was happening beyond what he could see from the window of his ward.
    Most of this didn’t really interest him – a rook’s story of a dead hedgehog in the hospital car park – the tale told by a big black-backed gull of a delivery of fish left unattended for a minute by the kitchen staff – the warnings of smaller birds of kestrels in the hospital gardens.
    But he did hear something more interesting from a wild drake, a mallard who settled for the night in an ornamental pond in the grounds just outside the window.
    The drake was exhausted and had clearly flown some distance.
    â€œDecided to shift my quarters,” he quacked. “Big party of men and dogs came through the woods just before dark. We weren’t worried, my mate and I. We just got into the water. But then, from the other side, came more men with the tame lightning.” (The mallard meant guns, but, as all birds and animals fear guns and none understands them, they make up all sorts of ways of describing them.)
    â€œThey were shooting at everything. The small animals went underground, so they shot the birds. My mate was killed; I was