Collected Short Stories. Patrick O’Brian
incongruous among the rocks, and he was singing passionately. It was a hymn in Welsh and he was a shepherd: presently he vanished at a turning in the road, and although they heard his singing high up among the stunted trees they did not see the man again.
The road continued to rise and soon there were no more trees on either hand, and the black rocks showed harsher. The top of the valley was desolate with the gigantic spew of a dead slate quarry, high and lonely on the deserted road. Marching lines of square pillars showed where the aqueduct had run: many of them leaned strangely, and some had fallen. Huge, unprofitable slate rocks lined the road, holding back the black hills of jagged spoil.
The men had spoken little for the last half-hour, but now they said to one another that the road would soon turn to the left, and Gonville began to talk about how birds cannot tell how fast they are going in the air if there is a cloud or no light at all. Brown did not believe what he was told, but he was unable to refute it. Gonville, aware of his disbelief, went on in a dogmatic tone, telling him more about the birds of the air and the way they know nothing except possibly by magnetism. However, Brown did not quarrel with him, and when the road turned to the left all thoughts of wrangling went out of his head.
Right before them was Snowdon, sharp and brilliant in the sky, with Lliwedd jutting fiercely on the right and deep new snow over all, sparkling nobly in the sun. New clean snow, unspoiled by runnels, and Snowdon’s eastern face looked smooth by reason of the depth of the snow.
They were looking at Snowdon from a fair height and with a deep valley between: this waste of air below and before them gave the mountain an altitude and a majesty far beyond the amount of its height in feet. The sun was behind them, and it shone on the incisive, spectacular ridge that joins Lliwedd and Snowdon, separating the peaks with a great sweep of hard shadow.
It was a sight to make even a dull man’s heart leap and exult, like sudden good news or a lost thing found.
The way was downhill now, down into Nant Gwynant, with the big lakes one on either hand and the river joining them. The hard walking they had done had caught up with the clock, and when they came down into Nant Gwynant, to the Glaslyn and to the gate leading up to the farm of Hafod Llan they were before their time. For all that, anxiety harassed them as they waited by the gate where the milk churn stood, and they discussed the misadventures that might have happened, the possibility of a mistake in the time and of an error in their route – suppose, they said, the Captain has gone up by another way? But when they had been worrying themselves for a quarter of an hour the car and the trailer passed them and swung up the cart track to Hafod Llan. They ran after it and came up as the Master was going into the farmhouse to ask after his fox. There were a few other people, and the farm children stared at them and the hounds.
Eight couples were there, stretching and walking about: there was a strong smell of hounds everywhere. The outraged farm dogs bawled from a distance, but offered nothing more. The hunt terriers ran busily to and fro; all hard-bitten and many with recent scars and bald patches. The hounds were mixed. There were Welsh hounds, fell-hounds, and crosses, and there was an English bitch with a noble, judicious head who looked strange among the slim, fine-boned creatures around her. Benign hounds they were, but not effusive like some; Ranter, Rambler, Ringwood, Driver and Melody, Drummer, Marquis, and Music, the surest of them all.
The Master came out of the farmhouse. He was of an ancient family, and his people had hunted this country above three hundred years. He had a falcon’s nose and eye, and his moustache curled with a magnificent arrogance. He wore a very old cloth cap and a torn Burberry which concealed his horn and the whip he carried over the shoulder of his jacket. He spoke to the huntsman in Welsh and they moved off towards the Gallt y Wenallt, the mountain behind the wood.
When they came to a gate at the bottom of the wood the Master turned off downward and the huntsman, with the field and the hounds, went up through the copse. Hounds were soon out of sight among the trees, and Gonville and Brown pushed themselves to keep up with the long-legged huntsman. Soon they reached the snow where it lay thin and melting in the open spaces between the trees: they climbed quickly past the height where it was melting and came out at the top of the wood. As they cleared the trees a hound spoke below them, and they paused for a moment. Hounds passed up through the wood, working intently, but with very little sound; they were moving quite fast, and when another hound spoke – a deep-mouthed hound it was – they were far along.
The men had reached a path, and they followed it. It ran up from the wood to the top of a bluff, an almost sheer cliff that rose high above the woods. They could see hounds below them when they reached the top of this bluff and they stopped in a sheltered place – sheltered, because the wind, a small wind that came off the snow, bit very sharp and hard, they being in a sweat with the hurry.
They had come round the shoulder of the Gallt y Wenallt out of the sun, and here it was much colder. The face of Wenallt, running steeply down to Llyn Gwynant, was on their left: below them, at the bottom of the mountain, was a deep belt of trees; above the trees, a long sloping scree that stretched up to the foot of the cliff. Below the wood was the still lake and its river, and beyond the lake the ranks of bare mountains marching away one behind the other.
Hounds were working across the scree just below the snow; they were coming slowly up, and dubiously. However, they puzzled it out across the rocks, up through the heather in the face of the cliff, for the scent lay there, and up almost to the men crouched in their bit of lee.
Now they were hunting more confidently, and it was a rare delight to watch them packed close together with their heads down and almost touching and their backsides wriggling as they carried the line over the hard places, and how they ran streaming out over the easy ones. Down they went again, much faster than they had come up, down and into the wood.
Then the waiting men heard no more for a long time, nor saw anything. Brown talked to the huntsman, a young, tall Welshman who swore in English; he had most of the terriers with him, and the old white bitch nipped precisely into Brown’s lap. The other terriers crawled in the snow, for the pleasure of scratching their bellies against its crust. The huntsman carried a long pole and he wore old blue breeches: he told Brown that the Master would be below the wood, and that if the fox were a Cwm Dyli fox, as he supposed – but as he was speaking there was a crash of savage music in the wood. They all stood up in silence, and directly hounds were speaking again, singly and in a choir. They were running fast. In a minute or two the huntsman said that they had either got him going or they were very near to him, and in that moment the fox came up out of the wood, up to the clear edge of it. A dark brown fox was he, big and rangy, a long-legged fox. He looked up at the men far above him, and plainly they could see him deliberate as he stood there, looking up and damning their eyes. The fox looked down and trotted away along the top of the wood, inclining rather upward to the mountain – a low-pitched diagonal up the great sloping apron of Wenallt.
As the fox went away clear of the wood the huntsman sprang down the face of the cliff and holloed him away with great shrieking hooicks: he went down with a wonderful agility, going too fast to fall, and the snow flew up from his feet. The fox did not hurry for all that, but went steadily on: the men could see him between the rocks and low pieces of broken wall, and once or twice he looked up with a fleeting glance. The huntsman was crying to his hounds to lay them on, but they came up rather slowly, and by the time they were running on the line the fox was farther away than a man would have supposed possible.
He was going toward Cwm Dyli, it appeared, Cwm Dyli, far up at the top of Nant Gwynant, higher up than Llyn Gwynant, and right round the whole mass of the Gallt y Wenallt the men must go to get there.
This mountain, this Wenallt, is the end of the mass of Snowdon on the Nant Gwynant side – the deep valley and the lake define the mass. The mountain faces the lake squarely. Its top part is craggy, but not pointed: two arms run down from the top, arms that would embrace the lake if they ran further, but the one that shelters Hafod Llan is broken by the cliff and the wood swallows it, and the other, the far one towards the top of Nant Gwynant, peters out in the dead ground at the marshy top of the lake. Between these arms and below the crags of the top is a vast stretch of ground, a table tilted to an angle of fifty-five degrees and more. The men must cross this stretch. They were already about two-thirds of the way up it, and the