“Gently, now, don’t let his neck hang like that, support his head, that’s right. Mind that leg…”
Behind Grandma came Lucy, her gentle blue eyes full of pity for Leo, who lay, still as a leaf, with closed eyes in Ambrose’s arms.
They were just starting to cross the glacier when Clarence, who was bringing up the rear, suddenly stopped.
“’og,” said Clarence firmly.
The others sighed. It was so important to bring the boy to safety quickly.
“No, Clarence, there’s no bog here, the ground’s as hard as nails,” said Lucy soothingly.
“And there certainly aren’t any logs,” said Grandma. “We’re much too high for trees.”
But Clarence kept on pointing and suddenly they saw what he meant. Wedged between two boulders, lying flat on his back with his chilblained feet stuck in the air like table legs, was a large and frost-covered St Bernard.
They had found Baker.
It was an embarrassing moment for the yetis. They knew that St Bernards were famous for rescuing people and it did not seem right just to pick the dog up as if he were a baby. But Baker, frenziedly wagging his tail, made it clear that he expected just that, and it was with a St Bernard hanging like a gigantic, snuffling muffler round Clarence’s neck that the party moved on.
They didn’t so much find Biscuit as fall over him. He was rolled into a whimpering ball of fur, half-covered in snow, and even when Lucy picked him up and hung him over her shoulders he refused to open his eyes. No one was going to get Biscuit to look into that awful darkness.
Brutus and Bouncer were lying together under an outcrop of rock. Brutus must have got giddy and fallen from it because he had passed out cold. Bouncer was trying to dry his feet in Brutus’s armpits.
“This is a very strange mountain,” said Uncle Otto, picking up the dogs and tucking one under each arm. “It seems to erupt dogs.”
But the mountain had not finished with them yet. As they came off the glacier on to the last stretch of scree before the monastery, they heard a most unexpected sound.
Somewhere, close by, someone was hiccuping.
Like an old warhorse scenting battle, Grandma lifted her grizzled head. “Wait here for me,” she said grimly.
She stumped off down a little gulley. When she came back she was half dragging, half carrying, the large, befuddled and sheepish-looking Beelzebub.
“You disgusting brute,” she was yelling at him, “Don’t you know what drink does to your liver? Do you want to end up in the gutter?” And all the way down the mountain, Grandma, her grey hand clamped like iron round Beelzebub’s collar, threatened him with an Early Grave, an Alcoholic Dogs’ Home and a Beating He’d Never Forget.
But now they had arrived at the monastery gates. Very gently, Ambrose lowered Leo on to the ground beneath a clump of wind-gnarled firs. Then the others put down the dogs. This was hard to do because the dogs most definitely did not want to be put down, but the yetis were firm.
There was only one more thing to do and Grandma did it. Filling her scrawny chest with air, she threw back her head and yodelled.
And then, carefully leaping from rock to rock so as not to leave footprints on the snowy ground, the yetis vanished.
And so when Con, with the monks at his heels, came rushing out, they found the five dogs clustered in a warm and sheltering huddle round the little boy — and no one else in sight.
“He’s safe! The dogs have rescued him!” cried Con, crossing his fingers inside the pocket of his anorak. “They must have done!”
“No… it can’t be,” stammered Brother Peter. “It would have to be a miracle.”
But the monks were men of God. They were used to miracles. If God could make five loaves and two fishes go round five thousand people — well, maybe he could make some of the silliest dogs in the world carry out the most heroic mountain rescue of the century. And as they carried the little boy gently in to the warmth of the fire and put him down beside his joyful father, it was all the monks could do to stop dancing and singing and shouting, they were so happy.
So far from being sent away, Baker and Brutus and Biscuit, Bouncer and Beelzebub became the most famous dogs in the land. Stories were written about them in the papers; they appeared on television; statues of them were put up in the village square. The American who bred them sent the monks even more money so that they were able to build a new chapel with the most beautiful bells that pealed across the valley, and everyone who passed through Feldenberg stopped off and climbed the steep path to the monastery to gaze at the lion-hearted dogs. But after the accident to the Englishman and his little boy, no one was allowed to go climbing on the Death Peak without a proper guide, so there were no more disasters. Which was just as well, because for the rest of their long and happy lives, Baker had chilblains, Brutus got giddy, Biscuit had to have a night light in his kennel and Bouncer refused to wet his feet. Only Beelzebub got a bit better. Sometimes he would take a little Coca-Cola with his brandy. But only sometimes…
As for Leo, there were no bones broken; he only needed quiet and warmth. But the first night in the hospital in Feldenberg he was restless and stirred in his sleep and said: “My… furry animals… I want… my furry things.” And the night sister, who knew children who are ill often act younger than their years, went and fetched him a teddy bear from the cupboard in the children’s ward. But fortunately by that time Leo was fast asleep.
9
El Magnifico
For two days after they had rescued Leo from the mountain, the yetis stayed quietly hidden in a thick fir wood on the borders of Feldenberg and Switzerland.
The reason for this was Grandma’s tonsils. After her last great yodel outside the gates of the monastery, Grandma’s tonsils had snapped. At least she said they had snapped and Grandma wasn’t the sort of person you argued with. Certainly her voice was very croaky; yodelling was out of the question and she seemed frail and tired. So Perry took the lorry down a long, deserted track leading into the forest and parked it by a disused timber mill and they shut up the lorry and took to the woods.
It was beautiful amongst the firs. The grass was soft and mossy; there were red and white toadstools, and bilberries which tasted delicious and made their teeth a rich, dark blue. There was a stream to paddle in and fir cones for Clarence to play with and squirrels to be Ambrose’s friends. Grandma rested and Ellen had a Great Combing of all the yetis so that their fur shone again and their silky hair blew in the wind. She polished Queen Victoria and washed Ambrose’s bedsock and she rubbed Uncle Otto’s bald patch with resin from the pine trees so that it became the most sweetly scented bald patch in the world. Perry stopped worrying about the insides of the wretched lorry and just lay under the trees smoking his pipe and thinking of his Porker. Even Con forgot to be anxious and when he climbed trees it was more for fun than to see if anyone was coming.
It is always when you are having a lovely and carefree time that the most unfortunate things happen. On the afternoon of their second day in the woods, they were sitting peacefully by the banks of the stream. Clarence was pretending to catch fish; Perry was strumming his guitar. Even Hubert had sensibly decided that a sawn-off tree stump was not, after all, his mother and was making quite a good job of cropping the grass.