Fraser's Voices Read Online Free PDF

lucky.”
    â€œWhy did they do that?” asked Fraser, who had never seen a shoot.
    â€œDon’t know. Some of the tree birds say there’s been farm animals killed. The gamekeepers set a trap and it was raided. The bait was taken but nothing caught. That’s the second reason I came away. My friends, the coots and moorhens, tell me there has been something coming out of the water by night. It attacks them in their nests. A lot of them have been killed. ‘No place for me,’ I said. ‘Dogs and guns by day; something from the water by night; my mate dead; time to go.’”
    Fraser’s other important conversation was with someone called “the consultant” the day his dad came to take him back to the cottage.
    This time the hospital people
did
seem to know what his trouble was. The consultant produced a flat cardboard box with “Keep out of reach of children” printed prominently on the side. He opened one end and slid out a strip of silver paper with the days of the week printed on it and below each day a large, round, brown pill stuck under cellophane.
    â€œYou’ll remember to take one every day. You musn’t ever miss a day.”
    Fraser nodded.
    The consultant replaced the strip and handed the box to Fraser’s dad.
    â€œHe should be all right now. He’s stable, provided he takes one every day.”
    They went back to the cottage and in a week Fraser’s parents said he was so much better that he could go to stay for a few days with Jim Douglas on the farm.
    When he arrived Jim was there to meet him and the two dogs, Misty and Tess, came bounding out, barking a welcome. On his previous visits the dogs had always been out working the sheep with Jim’s dad and this was the first time he had heard them talk.
    By now Fraser was so used to understanding all the animal chatter that went on around him that he was surprised to discover that he could make out only a little of what the dogs were saying, as if he was listening on a crackly telephone line to someone with a foreign accent.
    â€œThat’s funny,” he thought. “Perhaps tame animals speak a different language.”

KWARUTTA!
    In the heart of the wood lay a tiny lochan threaded like a bead on the Ballagan Burn as it tumbled and splashed from the moors down through the wood and at last pushed its way through marshes and mudflats to enter the loch.
    Once the lochan had held trout, and mallard and moorhen had nested by its edges, but it was empty now. Twenty yards from the bank, buried in ferns and brambles, sat the ruins of a cottage. The walls still stood shoulder-high, but long ago the roof and the higher parts of the gables had collapsed into a pile of stones and slates and rotten timbers, under which a hundred rats might have nested in safety. But there were none there now.
    Slowly, from a crevice between two of the fallen stones, there emerged, first the muzzle, then the silky seal-like head and finally the sleek body of a full-grown mink.
    He was not a native to these parts, having recently escaped from a farm in which he and his kind were bred and killed for their fur. His family came from Canada where he was proud to be cousin to the wolverine who could drive wolves from a kill.
    He slipped into the pool and swam across, wasting no time, for long ago the other inhabitants had been killed by this cleverest and boldest of hunters. On the far side trails led off in two directions. One led to the farms and the village where the mink had been hunting for the last few nights, but here the scent was heavy with men and dogs for they had at last tracked him as far as this.
    Tonight, therefore, he turned in the other direction and headed up towards the moor. This was a different world from the woods and farmlands. Here tracks of big blue mountain hare, of grouse, and of adders wound in the black peat among rocks and clumps of heather and fern and the droppings of sheep and red