In fact, Tom did not have to buy a replacement knife for Spider. The very next day he was walking up the drove towards his hut, his new puppy at heel. He was remembering walking thus once and speaking to Molly, telling her that nothing else mattered as long as Spider was happy. He suspected then that the days of his old dog – and she was very old – were numbered, for she had bad arthritis and was in pain, and indeed shortly afterwards Tom had had her put to sleep. Explaining it to Spider had been difficult, but Molly’s replacement, a dog puppy that Tom called Moss, soon took her place in the boy’s affections.
Now, the shepherd heard the clop of hooves and saw his employer riding down the drove towards him.
‘Morning, Tom,’ said Mister as he reined in Sturdiboy.‘How’s the new puppy doing?’
‘He’ll be all right, sir,’ Tom said. ‘He’s got a lot to learn, but he’s learning it.’
‘And that boy of yours?’
That boy of mine, thought Tom, is lucky to be alive today, and he told Mister the tale of yesterday’s drama.
‘Mr Pound rescued him, you say?’ said Major Yorke. ‘Damn good show! No harm done then, in the end?’
‘No, sir. The boy lost his precious knife, that’s all, but I’ll get him another one.’
‘Why not let me buy him one?’ said Mister. ‘I’d like to. What was it like, this knife?’
‘Matter of fact you can see it, sir, on your way home, if you’re going by the little bridge. You can see it, led in the bottom, clear as can be, but it’s in deepish water, no way of getting it out.’
As well as being a hunting man, Major Yorke was a keen fisherman. Ten minutes later, crossing the bridge, he leaned out of his saddle and looked down and saw the knife. It had, he was pleased to see, a little ring at one end, a ring in which, with a lot of luck and a great deal of patience, a hook might catch. Need a biggish hook, he thought, like the one I use for pike, and he rode on home to fetch a rod.
Later that day, Kathie was giving Tom and Spider their tea when there was a knock at the cottage door at which Moss barked. She went to open it, to find the farmer standing outside in the darkness. ‘May I come in?’ he said. ‘I have a surprise for your boy,’ and, once inside, he took from his pocket something wrapped in a piece of rag, something that he had oiled, something at sight of which Spider’s jaw dropped.
Mister handed it to him, smiling.
‘You’ve surely never been in the river, sir?’ Tom said.
‘No, no,’ said Mister. ‘I’ve been fishing. I dropped a line off the bridge and managed to hook it. Took a bit of patience, I don’t mind telling you. Each time I nearly succeeded, the current would beat me at the last minute, so I put a little lead sinker on to weight the hook and managed to get it through the ring at last. I tell you, when I pulled it up, I was as proud as if I’d landed a good-sized trout.’
‘Oh we are grateful, sir,’ said Kathie. ‘Spider, what d’you say?’
Spider stood, grinning hugely. He looked at his parents. ‘Spider’s knife,’ he said. Then he looked at Mister and pointed a finger at him. ‘He’s a good un,’ he said.
Before its loss, Spider had only used his knife in a fairly aimless way, whittling at odd sticks and bits of wood with no particular end in view. But after its recovery, he began, by some chance, to make use of it constructively, in fact to carve things with it. Unsurprisingly, he carved animals. Maybe it began because he picked up a piece of wood that in shape already resembled some creature or other, but before long he succeeded in carving what looked quite like a dog. He made several of these, improving all the while, until one day he came into the cottage kitchen where Kathie was baking, and thrust something into her floury hand.
‘For Mum,’ he said.
‘What is it?’ said Kathie.
‘Moss,’ said Spider, and indeed Kathie could now see clearly that the carving was, apart from colour of course, a rough representation of a Border Collie.
‘Oh thank you, Spider my love,’ said Kathie. ‘There’s clever you are!’
Tom said much the same, some days later, when he too received a present.
‘Barrit,’ said Spider, ‘for Dada,’ and a pretty good rabbit it was too, sitting up, ears pricked, alert for danger.
Neither Kathie nor Tom knew anything about naive art or indeed art of any kind, but they could see now that Spider, despite all his handicaps, had some gift for carving in wood. His next efforts proved this beyond doubt.
Though there was much about the world that Spider did not understand, his recent experience had left him with two definite impressions. The foreman had pulled him out of the nasty cold river. The farmer had rescued his most prized possession, his knife. Now that he had made presents for the two most important people in his life, his mother and father, he would make two more for the men who had helped him. The common element that bound both men to him was, in his mind, water, and now he set to work to make two more models, both of water creatures.
When the first of them was ready, he took it down to the stables with him in the pocket of that old army greatcoat that had once been much too long for him but was not now.
Percy Pound usually left Spider till last when giving out his morning orders, and so the other farm men had gone and there was no-one else in the stables except for the horseman down at the far end when Spider approached the foreman, and pulling the gift from his pocket, proffered it to him.
‘For Per-cy,’ he said.
Percy took the carving. It was of a long low short-legged animal with a round head like a cat and a long tapering tail. It was brown in colour, for Spider had by chance made it from a piece of chestnut wood.
‘For me?’ said Percy.
Spider nodded. ‘Hotter,’ he said.
‘I can see it is,’ said Percy.‘A right good likeness too. Thank you, boy, thank you. I shall treasure it.’
The model Spider next made was of a fish. He had cut this from a piece of yew, so that the wood was red in colour, and he had even scratched with painstaking care a pattern of scales upon it with his knife-point.
‘Fish,’ he said proudly as he showed it to his parents.
‘It’s lovely,’ they said.
‘For Mister,’ he said.
In all the years he had worked at Outoverdown Farm Tom had never actually been to the Yorkes’ house. It was not the original farm house, a modest building adjoining the farmyard, in which Percy Pound and his family lived, but a rather more imposing manor house just outside the village, with stabling and a fine garden.
Rather than go to it, Tom and Kathie decided that the best plan would be to intercept Mister and his wife after church. They themselves were not churchgoers but they knew that the Yorkes were, so the next Sunday morning they all stood by the lychgate waiting, Spider carrying his gift which Kathie had carefully wrapped. When Mister and his wife came down the church path, Tom pushed Spider forward.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ Tom said. ‘My boy’s got something for you.’
Spider held out the wrapped fish. ‘For Mis-ter,’ he said.
The farmer smiled. In his own house his wife always referred to him as ‘the Major’, when talking to the servants, and on the hunting field he was ‘Major Yorke’, but he knew quite well what the farm men called him, though never to his face.
‘A present?’ he said.
Spider nodded.
‘It’s his way of thanking you,’ said Tom, ‘for getting his knife out of the river.’
The farmer unwrapped the fish carving and held it out for his wife to see. ‘Just look at that!’ he said.
‘That’s lovely!’ Mrs Yorke said.
‘You made that, Spider?’ asked Mister, and he could not keep a note of incredulity from his voice.
Spider nodded.
‘He’s carved quite a few things lately,’ Kathie said.
‘With that knife you fished up for him,’ added Tom.
‘How glad I am that I did,’ said Mister, and they all smiled, the Sparrows with pride in Spider, the Yorkes with pleasure at the realization that this poor damaged boy could make such an object. Spider smiled because the rest were smiling.
Not long afterwards, Spider was sitting on the bank of the Wylye, listening and watching and mimicking the cries of the waterfowl when he suddenly saw a movement on the far bank. The river was not wide at this point, and directly opposite Spider a willow leaned out at an angle over the water. Among the exposed roots of this tree there was a sizeable dark hole, and it was in this hole that he saw the movement.
Then he saw the round face of an otter, looking out. The animal was looking directly at him, testing the wind with upraised head, a wind which must have carried the boy’s scent. But instead of immediately disappearing back into its holt, as any other otter would have done at the sight of a human so close, it gave a short sharp whistle and came out and down to the water’s edge. Then a second, slightly smaller otter emerged from the mouth of the holt and came to join its mate. The firstcomer, the dog otter, slipped into the river, and the bitch joined him.
Spider sat, still and silent, seeing only strings of bubbles rising to the surface as the pair hunted in partnership. Presently they both suddenly appeared, and hauled themselves out, oily-smooth, on the near bank right below him.
The dog had a big fish in his mouth, and after some noisy bickering, he and his mate settled down to eat it, taking not the slightest notice of the watcher on the bank above.
No-one would have believed Spider if he had had the power to describe the utter fearlessness of these wild animals, almost within touching distance of him, but Kathie believed him, implicitly, when he came in that evening and told her, in his limited way, what he had seen.
‘Hotter!’ he said to her, and then he put a forefinger crossways between his teeth and made chewing faces. ‘Fish!’ he said, and then in his excitement he put together what was without doubt the longest sentence he had ever spoken in his life. ‘Hotter!’ he said again.‘One, two hotters, catch big fish, eat big fish, Spider see!’