Read Haweswater for Free Online Page B

daughter was walking next to him, her pace quickening as she was blown a little forward from time to time.
    Samuel noticed the moving form first, a shape that was out of accord with the surrounding scenery, had movement unrelated to the wind. Then he recognized the density of withers, the curve of horn. A bullock had loosened itself from a nearby field by trampling down an old section of wall. Samuel saw it coming up the path towards them, bucking up its hind legs and cutting the rough air with its head. He gave his daughter a savage push to the side.
    – Quick, lass, git up that tree.
    The animal picked up its trot as it saw them, it shook its head and snorted. Janet had reached the rowan tree and climbed half-way up it within seconds, moving like a startled cat. She called for her father to join her, but he was standing his ground, removing the rope from his shoulder. He quickly fashioned a noose at the end of it. The bullock continued forward and, as it did so, Samuel tried to skirt it and come at it from the side, where there would be no horns, no hind legs to wrestle with. But the animal was twisting to face him, itsthick-packed muscle shifting under the skin. There was no chance of getting the rope around its neck head-on. After almost a full circle the bullock had him trapped against the rowan. It butted him twice, the horns finding his left forearm. From the low branches of the tree, his daughter saw the blood starting there, dark red through his torn shirt, snaking down his fingers. Samuel had his right hand on a horn and he was trying to pull the large animal down. His left arm hung at his side, dripping and fractured.
    He tries to remember the next part of the dreamlike sequence accurately, but there is an unreal quality which is hard to clarify.
    It was only a moment later that he heard the cry, a throaty half-growl, half-hiss, and then there was a flash of yellow down from the branches of the tree, on to the neck of the bullock and off, bringing enough weight against the animal for its head to drop with the shock of it. He quickly slipped the rope over the neck of the dazed beast, looped it around the tree. After a few tugs against its bindings the bullock became subdued. For a moment Samuel thought that it had been a lynx which had leapt from the tree. A rare and fantastic creature. Only the corner of his eye had caught it and the morning light was stormy at best. Until he turned and saw the cub of his daughter lying on the ground, with torn breeches and a deep puncture in her head which was beginning to spill.
    By the time father and daughter had reached the Shap surgery in the Hindmarshes’ old Morris, their wounds had nearly stopped bleeding, but the puncture, unlike the gash on the arm, had been too obscure a shape to stitch closed. And Dr Saul Frith had been more concerned with the girl’s apparently fully developed measles than with the damage done to her head. He was less interested in tales of bravery than he was concerned with a potentially lethal epidemic, he told them.

I:II
    In 1936 the village of Mardale consisted mostly of tenant farmers, as it had for a few hundred years, and the land surrounding it was devoted to the grazing of sheep, cattle and mountain ponies, a little agriculture where the soil was deep enough and rich on the slopes beneath the farmhouses. The villagers lived quietly, independently from the rest of the county, almost separate from the world, save for a weekend trip into town, to the cinema, the dancehall, a Tuesday excursion to the market. Or a visit from an adventurous explorer, a climber, the odd geological surveyor, a meteorologist, studying rainfall charts. The farmers were hard-working men, eking a hard living from the land, wholly dependent on the outcome of their husbandry. On Sundays they visited the church with their wives and in the week their children went to the small, blue-walled school, where they were taught to read and write, arithmetic and a little Latin.