“I didn’t know horses could swim like that,” said Margaret.
The stableboy ran a mottled hand along roan ribs, caressing the faintly shivering hide.
“It’s the buoyancy,” he said. “They got these mortal great lungs in ’em for galloping, so they float high. Swim with a grown man astride ’em, they will, always provide he leans well forward and don’t let hisself slip off over the withers — they keeps their shoulders up and let their hinder end tilt down, y’see. If ever you want to swim with a horse, you hold on to the tail of it, or the saddle.”
“But the waves,” said Margaret.
“They holds their head that high the waves don’t bother ’em,” said the stableboy. “Mark you, they gets frighted if they’re not used to it, but I’d sooner be a horse nor a man in a rough sea. We haven’t the buoyancy, nor the balance neither. Too much in the leg, we got, and only two legs at that. Now another thing, missie . .
And he was off again on his endless catalogues of the ways in which the horse excelled all other species, including Man.
Margaret was sorry when he left, swept off in the storm of the great Earl’s progress. But at least Mr. Gordon and his cronies had been kept active and interested for eight days and would have enough to talk about over their cider mugs for a week besides.
The other excitement didn’t happen in the village at all. Just when the witch-hunters were tired of gossip over the great Earl’s visit and were beginning to sniff the wintry air for new sport, a messenger came over from Stonehouse to say that two children had seen a bear in the woods. Nobody had ever been on a bear-hunt, but all the men seemed to know exactly what to do. Wicked short spears were improvised and ground to deadly sharpness; Mr. Lyon the Smith forged several pounds of extra heavy arrowheads, to penetrate a tough hide at short range; the best dogs were chosen and starved. Then all the men moved out in a great troop to hunt the bear.
Mr. Gordon insisted on going too, maintaining that the bear must be a witch who had changed his shape but couldn't change back till the new moon, or had simply forgotten the spell. Even his drinking companions privately thought it more likely to be a survivor from the old Bristol zoo, but they didn’t care to say so. Instead they built a litter and took turns to carry it; he rode at the head of the mob, hunched in his swaying chair, cackling to his bearers.
The whole of the village changed when they had left. Tensions eased; Aunt Anne smiled sometimes and began to look a little pink; the bursts of gossip you could hear up the street were on a different note — the pitch of women’s voices; and it was quieter, so that between-whiles the only noise was the knock of the hired man’s billhook cutting into an elder stump down in Low Wood.
With Uncle Peter gone, Jonathan was busy all day on the farm, but Margaret stole a satchel of food next evening and asked Lucy to creep up and wake her an hour before dawn. The stars were still sharp in the sky when she set off to explore the canal, and Scrub’s breath made crisp little cloudlets in the frosty air. The stars were sharp in the sky again when she got back to find Aunt Anne waiting with a lantern in the porch. Margaret reckoned she’d done over forty miles. After supper Aunt Anne went out to visit a sick neighbor, so the children pulled their chairs up round the red embers of the fire; but in a minute Lucy slid off hers and sat right in under the chimneypiece, her cheeks scarlet with the close heat and every little spurt of flame sending elvish shadows across her face. Jonathan sat out in the gloom, quite silent but twitching like a dreaming hound. Margaret told them what she had found.
“I didn’t start from the docks, Jo, because we can ride along that bit when we’re taking food down to Lucy — besides, I didn’t know how far I’d have to go the other way along the canal. It’s miles and miles, and just the same all the way — just the canal and the path beside it. Except that at first it runs between banks and you can’t see anything on either side, and later it’s up above the rest of the country. It doesn’t go up and down, of course, only the fields round it do. The towpath is easy to ride on, except for one bad stretch a little way down. There are lots of bridges — I counted them on the way back but I lost count — it’s about fifteen, and some of them are open already . . .”
“Open?” said Jonathan.
“Yes. It’s like this: half the bridge is made of stone which juts out into the canal and doesn’t move, but the other half’s iron, all in one piece, and there’s a big handle which you can turn — you have to unlock it at each end first with a piece of iron which you flip over — and when you turn it the whole iron part of the bridge swings round, very slowly though, until it’s right out of the way and you can get a boat through. It’s a funny feeling — you’re moving tons and tons of iron, but it’s all so balanced that it moves quite easily. There’s a little cottage by each bridge where the people used to live who opened the bridges for the boats, but they’re all empty now. Otherwise there aren’t a lot of houses by the canal, except for a little village near the end. I got chased by a bull before that.”
“Rather you than me,” whispered Lucy. Jonathan laughed.
“It wasn’t funny,” said Margaret, “it was horrid. There’s a place where you come out of woods and the canal goes for two miles straight as a plank, but the river’s suddenly quite close, across the fields on the right. There’s a bridge in the middle of the straight piece — it’s called Splatt Bridge, it says; all the bridges have their names on them — and when I got there I thought I’d ride off across the fields and look at the river. I’ve never seen it close, and I was tired of the canal. The fields were all flat and empty, and I wasn’t bothering when I came round a broken piece of hedge quite close to the canal, and it was there, black, bigger than any of the bulls in the village, not making any noise, rushing at us. Scrub saw it before I did, and he got us away, but only just. It was tethered on a long rope through a ring on its nose. It looked mad as Mr. Gordon, Jo, furious, it wanted to kill us, and it came so fast, like a . . . like a . . .”
“Train,” said Jonathan. Margaret shook her head.
“I still can’t think like that,” she said. “I didn’t like opening that bridge, Jo. Not because somebody might catch me, but just for what it was.”
“Poor Marge,” said Jonathan cheerfully. “Still, you got away from the bull. What happened then?”
“Then there’s a strange bit, with the river getting nearer and nearer until there’s only a thin strip of land between it and the canal; and everything’s flat and bleak and full of gulls and the air smells salty and Wales is only just over 011 the other side, low red cliffs with trees on them. It’s funny being able to see so far when you’re right down in the bottom like that, and the river gets wider and wider all the time — it’s really the sea, I suppose. And then you get to a place where you’re riding between sheds, and there are old railway lines, and huge piles of old timber, some of it in the open and some of it under roofs, and one enormous tower without any windows, much bigger than the tower of the Cathedral, and a place like the docks at Gloucester but with a big ship — a really big one, I couldn’t believe it. And then you come to another lock; at least I think it’s a lock but it’s far bigger than the Gloucester one and the gates are made of steel or iron. And beyond that the water’s much lower, inside an enormous pool with sloping sides and places for tying ships to, and another gate at the far end, and beyond that there are two enormous wooden arms curving out into the river, and it’s as wild as the end of the world/’