"I have to admit, I don't know enough about the habits of hedgehogs to say if I agree with your ideas," I began. Her face instantly cleared and she began to nod in understanding.
"Then you won't know the real question here, and that is, 'What was Tiggy doing there?' "
"I'm sorry, you'll have to explain that."
"Tiggy doesn't live out on the moor, dear. Tiggy likes the woods and the soft places."
"And there aren't any?"
"Not in two or three miles of where I found him."
"What if some animal had carried it? Whatever gave it the bite, for example, or a big hawk?"
"Well, that's possible, I suppose, dear," she said, sounding very dubious. "But I was wondering if it wasn't more likely that Tiggy was accidentally taking a ride on whatever it was run him down."
THIRTEEN
…The reader is tripping over uncertain ground, not knowing what is to be accepted and what rejected.
—A Book of Dartmoor
When I took my leave from Elizabeth Chase, the good witch of Mary Tavy, my mind, to borrow a phrase from Baring-Gould's memoirs, was in a ferment. It was still only midday, and Lew House little more than two hours away; I decided to take a look at the place where she had found the injured Tiggy.
I found it without difficulty—there are not so many stone circles on the moor to make for a confusion—but I was not quite sure what to make of it. The site was typical of its kind, upright hunks of granite arranged in a rough circle on a piece of relatively flat ground and surrounded by the moor's low turf, broken here and there by stones and bracken. A double row of stones (one of Randolph Pethering's "Druid ceremonial passages") lay in the near distance, and a moorland track (the Abbot's Way?) ran alongside.
As Elizabeth Chase had indicated, the most curious part of the hedgehog affair was why the animal should have been out here in the first place. The more I thought about it, the more I had to agree: The little beasts are lovers of woods and the resultant soft leaf mould under which to take cover, a far cry from this blasted heath, which even a badger would have been hard put to carve into a home.
I pulled from Red's saddlebag the cheese and pickle sandwich and bottle of ale that I had asked for that morning at the Mary Tavy inn, and carried them over to a stone that had once, by the looks of the hollow in the ground at one end, been upright. I laid out my sandwich and opened the bottle with the bottle-opening blade of my pocket knife, and ate my lunch, enjoying the sun and my prehistoric surroundings, and most especially the delightful image of a hitchhiking hedgehog.
An almost lighthearted air of holiday had set in. After all, I had more or less completed my assignment, with an unlikely but glittering gem to carry back to Lew Trenchard and a mere handful of houses between here and the edge of the moor at which to carry out the formalities of my enquiries. My sense of taste had returned, I could very nearly breathe the air, and the sun was actually shining. I stretched out with my head on one stone and my boots on another, and rested for ten minutes before gathering my luncheon débris and swinging back up into the saddle.
"Home, Red," I said to him, and endured a few hundred yards of his trot before pulling him back to his usual amble.
This time when he shied, I was ready for him. Unfortunately.
Given a negative stimulus of sufficient strength, one can train even the most stubborn animal to avoid a given activity. Red had trained me quite effectively: No sooner did my mind begin to drift away into its own world than it snapped back to apprehensive attention. Twice, this was unnecessary. The third time my quick reversion to full awareness came at the precise moment that Red jumped. I clung like a burr, knowing that he would calm the moment his feet set down again on solid ground. However, this time, with me on his back, he did not; instead he panicked.
I had thought the gelding capable of two gaits and no speed. I was proved wrong, over the most lethal terrain imaginable, a vicious combination of jagged boulders and the soft, almost mucky turf they were set into. We pounded furiously through two hundred yards of this before his front foot went into a shallow rivulet, and he slewed over onto his side, feet kicking furiously. At the last possible moment I flung myself out of the saddle, but one flailing hoof caught me as I went and I hit the ground, not in a balanced roll, but as any untrained person would: hard. I probably would have broken an arm had I not landed on the sodden bank of the stream. Coughing and choking, I pushed myself out of the water and perched on the edge of the bank with my boots in the frigid stream until my head stopped whirling, and fished around for my fallen spectacles when I noticed their lack was one of the things contributing to my disorientation. Very luckily, they were not smashed, only bent and scratched. I threaded them back onto my ears and looked around for Red; when I saw him, my urge to commit murder was snatched away and my heart went into my throat. He was standing with his head down and one of his front legs raised off the ground.
I scrambled over to him and bent to examine the leg, finding to my great relief that it was not broken, although the knee was bleeding, tender, and swelling rapidly. The same could be said of various parts of my own anatomy: The arms and shoulders that had automatically protected my skull from the worst of the rocks would be a mass of bruises tomorrow, my forehead seemed to be bleeding, and I was not altogether certain about one of the ribs on my right side. Still, I was conscious and walking, and so, barely, was the horse.
I led him back to the stream, pushing and pulling until he was standing in it, and I began bathing his leg and my forehead in the cold water. After a while, the cold began to work. Both of us stopped bleeding and he relaxed his bad leg farther into the water until it was actually bearing a portion of his weight.
It would not, however, bear mine as well. While I waited for him to recover some degree of mobility, I stripped him of his burdens and changed my dangerously wet garments for the dry clothing in the bag. When I had packed them again, I retrieved the torn and sodden map from my pocket and sat with it on my knees.
I was, I decided reluctantly, too far from Lydford to lead the horse, and I was hesitant to leave an injured, elderly animal accustomed to shelter out here on its own. The healing hands of Elizabeth Chase were even farther away, perhaps four hours at a hobbling pace. I could return to the tiny, dirty farm I had stopped at between here and there. Or…
My eyes were pulled north on the map by a patch of tree markings, noteworthy in that expanse of rough grassland, and by its labeclass="underline" Baskerville Hall.
I had not intended to make another, unannounced, visit to Richard Ketteridge. The awareness of his curious establishment had been with me over the last days, of course, and when I had turned north the previous morning I had briefly toyed with the idea, before deciding that any further investigation of Baskerville Hall was best left to Holmes, who knew the ground.
Now, however, I was in a spot, and needed aid of the sort that Ketteridge could readily provide: food, warmth, shelter for the horse, and alternative transport. Of course, it would necessitate appearing before him a second time in a thoroughly soiled and dishevelled state, but pride could be swallowed—so long as it was washed down with a cup of hot tea. I folded the map back into its pocket and went to extricate the horse from its cold bath. Taking another look at the swollen leg, I decided that a firm wrap might make him more comfortable. One shirt did the job, tied into place with a pair of handkerchiefs, and I could then transfer the bags from the horse's back to my own.