5

In the Midst of Foes

THERE’S A LINE in a very old hymn that says “Thou art in the midst of foes,” and, though none of them realized it, Crusoe was.

The first foe came on four feet.

Early one morning when Crusoe was three months old, Kirstie awoke just before dawn to hear a noise in the distance. It was a sharp fluty whistle. Mother heard it too, took it for a bird, turned over, and went to sleep again. Grumble, wakeful in the early part of the night as old people often are, had dropped off at last. Angus, of course, was in the deepest of sleeps and heard nothing.

The whistle came again.

Behind the small white house on the cliff top was moorland, great stretches of heather and peat bog where curlew trilled their sad bubbling cries and the red grouse shouted, “Go back! Go back!” But whatever was whistling was coming closer, coming off the moor toward the house.

And suddenly an awful thought struck Kirstie, so that she jumped out of bed and grabbed a book from her bookcase. It was called Wild Animals of the British Isles, and was, because she was interested in such things, a favorite of hers. Something she had been reading in it quite recently rang alarm bells in her mind, and hastily she found the page she wanted. She skimmed hurriedly through “Life History,” “Yearly Life,” “Daily Life,” and “Food,” until she came to “Voice.” “A hiss when playful or scared,” it read. “A squeal when angry. A sharp fluty whistle…”

Even as she read it, the noise came again, very near now—the whistle of an otter!

Throwing on her bathrobe, Kirstie rushed downstairs, stamped her bare feet into her boots, and dashed out of the house. It was light enough now to see—to see as she ran—a long low-slung hump-backed shape crossing the grass toward the goldfish pond. Otters, Kirstie knew, ate all sorts of fish, and to this one the Water Horse would be just another, different, kind.

She opened her mouth and let out the loudest yell she’d ever yelled in her life, and a very surprised and startled otter turned and galloped away as fast as its short legs would carry it.

Kirstie knelt by the pond, panting from the effort of running and from the mixture of fear and anger that had gripped her, and in a moment the sleeping form of Crusoe floated up. His nose poked out and he took a breath and sank again. He had heard nothing of Kirstie’s shout. Nor, of course, had Angus, but soon Mother and Grumble came hurrying to see what was the matter.

“What can we do?” asked Kirstie when she had told them. “The otter might come again.”

“I doubt it will,” said Grumble. “The noise you made was enough to frighten the life out of it. It certainly frightened me. But, just in case, we must take steps to protect Crusoe.”

And that morning Grumble made a big frame, a wooden frame with wire netting stretched over it, which fitted over the top of the pond like a lid. Throughout the rest of that summer it remained there, day and night, only lifted off when Crusoe was being fed or played with.

The second foe came on two feet.

It was a month or so later, in the autumn now, and it just so happened that no one was at home. Mother had caught the bus to do the week’s shopping, and the others had gone down to the sea, to beachcomb and to catch food for Crusoe. He would be safe, they thought, under his wire lid.

They had nearly reached the top of the cliff path on their way back, Grumble carrying a load of driftwood and the children a bucket of fish each, when suddenly they heard, from the direction of the goldfish pond, a sudden loud harsh croaking noise. “Frank!” was what it sounded like, and it was repeated, hurriedly, frantically it seemed: “Frank! Frank! Frank!”

“Quick!” shouted Grumble, throwing down his load. “Put down those buckets and run!”

“What is it?” cried the children.

“A heron!”

Oh, no! thought Kirstie as she ran. Not only had she read about them in her book, but she had seen a heron before now, standing in the shallows of the lochan on its long legs, long neck outstretched, peering forward into the water. She had seen it pause, motionless, and then with lightning speed stab downward with its long yellow beak and spear a fish.

But the scene that met their eyes was more comic than tragic.

The heron had indeed tried to stab the Water Horse, but the point of its beak was now stuck in the wire mesh of the protective frame. “Frank!” cried the bird again, tugging madly to free itself at the sight of the approaching humans. And at last it succeeded, and, jumping into the air, flew away with slow flaps of its great curved wings.

“There’s blood in the water,” said Angus somberly, and indeed the tip of the heron’s bill had gone far enough through the wire to nick Crusoe’s back. But it was not much more than a scratch and he did not seem too worried about it. At any rate, he ate all the fish that they had caught with his usual gusto.

The third foe came in the winter, not on four legs or two. It had no substance, could not be seen or smelled or heard. But whereas the coming of the first two foes was a surprise, the arrival of the third was actually broadcast.

One evening early in the new year, Grumble sat listening, as was his custom, to the radio, waiting for the weather forecast so that he could, as was his custom, grumble about it.

And then news of the third foe came out of the radio.

“Tonight,” said a voice, “there will be widespread frost in Scotland. It will be severe in the Highland and Grampian areas, though only slight in the western parts.”

As usual, the west coast of Scotland was to come off lightly, thanks to the warm waters of the Gulf Stream flowing to it across the Atlantic. But the threat of even a slight frost was enough to put Grumble on his guard. On checking it last thing that night, he found the surface of the goldfish pond still unfrozen, protected perhaps by the wire screen. But by first thing next morning there was a thin skin of ice on the pond.

Before breakfast he stood with the children and watched as Crusoe, obviously enjoying himself, rammed his way through the ice, breaking it up with a crackling noise.

“He’s an icebreaker!” shouted Angus, running around the pond, arms outstretched and fingertips together in the shape of a ship’s prow. “An icebreaker in the Antarctic, old Crusoe is, full speed ahead, crash, bang, wallop!”

“But before too long he may not be able to break it,” said Grumble to Kirstie.

“Why not?”

“Because they’re saying now that this is the start of a really cold spell, and in a few days’ time a small pond like this could be frozen very thick.”

“Too thick for Crusoe to break?” said Kirstie.

“Could be.”

“Thick enough to slide on?” said Angus, coming to a halt. “That would be fun!”

“It wouldn’t be any fun for Crusoe, you silly boy,” said Kirstie. “If he was stuck under the ice, he couldn’t breathe.”

“He’d drown,” said Angus in a solemn voice. He clasped both hands around his throat, stuck out his tongue, crossed his eyes, and made dreadful gurgling noises of suffocation.

“Oh, don’t be so stupid,” Kirstie said. “Grumble, what can we do?”

“We’ll have to move him.”

“To the lochan?”

“Yes, that will never freeze.”

“But the pike? The otter? The heron?”

“I reckon he’s big enough to look after himself now.”

And indeed, the Water Horse, now ten months old, had grown enormously. The pond had long been empty of animal life except for him, since he had eaten everything in it, and his demands for food meant that for some time now it had been necessary to make two trips a day to the beach. He was as big as…well, it’s difficult to measure such an animal against a different one, but since the comparison was first with a kitten, then a cat, you could say that now, though he looked nothing like one, he was the size and weight of a half-grown tiger. Like a tiger’s, his body had grown very long, though of course he did not have legs and feet, but simply those four big diamond-shaped flippers.

“Big enough to look after himself!” said Angus. “Blow me down, I should think he is! I bet he could beat up that old otter and that old heron now, Grumble! He’d shiver their timbers all right!”

“But how are we going to move him?” asked Kirstie.

“That’s what’s worrying me,” said Grumble. “I’ve waited a bit too long. I had planned to get him into the wheelbarrow somehow, but I doubt I could do that on my own, and I can’t ask anyone else or the secret of the Water Horse would be out and that would never do. This is the problem. I really need the help of a strong man.”

“What shall we do?” said Kirstie.

“Let’s have breakfast,” said Angus. “I’m starving.”

As they walked toward the house, they caught sight of Postie, the mailman, riding away down the road on his old red bicycle, and when they came into the kitchen, Mother was standing there with an opened letter in her hand. She looked very happy.

“Guess what!” she said to the children. “It’s from your father! His ship berthed in the Clyde yesterday. He’ll be home this very morning!”