The Runaways by Victor Canning Page B

Heytesbury he began to whistle to himself. Everything had gone perfectly. Samuel M., he thought, you carried it off like a hero. You’ve got a job, as easy as kissing your hand. Milly? Who was Milly, who didn’t like gloomy people, only big and cheerful eaters? Well, he’d soon know. And soon know, too, what he had to do. Crikey! – seven-thirty! That meant he would have to be up by six-thirty. Ought he to buy himself an alarm clock in Warminster? Yes, he’d certainly have to do that. If he turned up late, he knew he’d have Mrs Lakey on his tail, biting worse than her bark. In high spirits he began to swerve from one side of the road to the other. Free lunches and seven pounds a week. He was in clover.
    In the rough pasture on the plateau at the valley top, Yarra put up a rabbit and killed it within three yards. She carried it into a clump of wind-dwarfed thorn trees and ate it. It was a small, winter-lean rabbit and nowhere near satisfied her hunger.
    She moved out of the trees and began to quarter the ground eastwards across the rough amber-coloured grasslands. A hundred yards from the edge of a Forestry Commission plantation of young, waist-high firs she put up a hare. The hare laid its ears back and went like the wind. Yarra raced after it, the memory of the hare she had lost by the river giving her a fierce determination to catch this one. The hare reached the edge of the plantation and found its way blocked by a three-foot high, small-meshed wire fence. It turned right along the fence ten yards ahead of Yarra. She swung across the angle at top speed and leapt for it. Her forepaws smashed down on its back, talons gripping into the fur, and her hindquarters skidded round to crash into the fence. She bit clean through neck and vertebrae, and lay where she had made her kill to eat.
    As she began to worry and chew at the soft belly of the hare, a black and white striped Land-Rover came over the ridge of downland away to her right. Yarra heard and saw it simultaneously. She looked up from her meal and watched it. The Land-Rover was moving towards the top end of the fence which ran down the plantation side. Two hundred yards away it turned and began to bump and sway slowly along the fence. Her strong jaws clamped across the belly of the hare, Yarra stopped eating and watched the Land-Rover. For the moment there was no fear in her. The Land-Rover was exactly the same as many she had seen in Longleat Park. She had chased meat trailing on a rope from behind one of them. She had jumped to the cab roof, and even gone to the open cab door of the Cheetah Warden’s car when he tossed her a lump of meat which hid worming or other medicines.
    She lay watching the Land-Rover come down towards her. As it neared her she let go of the hare, opened her jaws, and gave a slow, warning spit and hiss. She wanted to eat undisturbed.
    When the Land-Rover was within forty yards of her, the driver and the man beside him saw her. The driver stopped the car. The man beside him began to speak into his walkie-talkie set. Over the air the news of Yarra’s discovery and her location went out to the police cars on the roads and to the policemen who were with the line of beaters now moving slowly up through Southleigh Wood.
    The top boundary of the wood lay a few hundred yards down the slope from Yarra. She watched the Land-Rover for a while and, when it did not move, she began to eat. Almost immediately, from behind her, Yarra’s quick ears caught the growing sounds of men moving up through the wood. A few of them – who had not yet received the warning of Yarra’s discovery – were still beating and rattling their sticks against tree trunks and thickets. The noise disturbed Yarra. She was hungry still and she wanted peace and quiet in which to eat. She stood up, gripped the big hare in her jaws, and leapt over the wire fence into the plantation of young firs. She began to trot fast across the plantation,