We hatched more than fifty, but the mortality rate among goldfish fry is very high. If one saves ten per cent one is lucky, so we were just about right when we finished up with five. We kept them, during the winter, in a plastic bowl on top of the kitchen cupboard; they were too small yet for the big pond, where their relations would promptly have eaten them, and it was too cold to leave them out of doors on their own.
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Charles thought a lot of those fish. He took them down regularly to change the water, feed them and admire them.
Marvellous little chaps they were, he assured them; he was going to build them a new pond all to themselves. Actually there was very nearly no need to. The same night that Seeley was stalked by the magpies, Seeley in turn found the fish. On the kitchen table, where Charles had left them while he came in to have his supper, and where, when we went out, Seeley was happily fishing.
He was standing with one front foot actually in the bowl of fish and the other paw poised to strike. He hadn’t caught any yet – though the fishing paw was wet and had obviously been in the water pretty often – and he couldn’t understand why we yelled and grabbed him. Spoiling all his Fun, he wailed as I bore him away. Didn’t like him doing Anything.
Bet we were in league with those silly old Magpies.
From then on we had to keep a wire cake-tray permanently on top of the fish bowl, remember never to leave it on the table, and keep a watchful eye on the cupboard to make sure Seeley hadn’t found a way of climbing up it. This was indoors. As at the same time we had to make sure he wasn’t chasing Sheba – and, if outdoors, that he wasn’t wandering off or stalking bees, life, like the weather, was certainly warming up.
The qualms I’d had about our own bees had happily resolved themselves. Charles had gone up early in the year to see if they needed feeding and found that they just weren’t there. The most likely explanation, seeing that there were no dead bees in the hive and all the honey had gone, was that the bees from one of the stranger hives up the Valley had come on a raiding expedi tion, as bees sometimes do if 140
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they are close to a weakened hive, and that – as again has been known to happen – our bees, instead of fighting them, had matily gone off to join them taking their honey stores with them.
It was the best thing that could have happened in the circumstances. There were the bees up the Valley to pollinate Charles’s fruit trees. Charles wasn’t likely to be stung any more, with the other hives so far away. Seeley – I sighed with relief – was never likely to come across a hive at all. Not one with bees in it, any way, though our own hive still stood empty on the hill.
‘Better get he down fast,’ advised Father Adams. ‘Afore the bees swarms further up and comes back down here to live.’ There wasn’t much fear of that, however. The man who kept the other bees was an expert.
We had to watch Seeley with the ordinary bees around the garden, but there were nothing like as many as there would have been. Seeley, of course, never having seen a bee before, was absolutely entranced to have so many exciting playmates. He stalked them on his stomach, he leapt after them through the air, he flattened all the crocuses making frustrated pounces.
The main thing was to stop him picking one up in his mouth. If one stung him on the paw he’d learn to leave them alone, but a sting in the mouth can be dangerous.
Olive oil was the best quick first aid if that happened, I’d read – applied with a feather if the bee-sting was in the throat. So I kept a feather and the oil-bottle handy, hoped I’d never have to use it, and meanwhile kept on running.
Out to fetch him back from the lane. Up to fetch him back from the hillside. Out once more because he was now after 141
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a bee – a bumble-bee this time, and it was slower and he almost caught it.
Didn’t want him to have any fun at All, wailed Seeley as I carted him back to where I was weeding a border. It wasn’t that. It was that I wanted to know he was safe. In the end all our precautions were in vain, however. Seeley was bitten by an adder.
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He met up with it in Annabel’s field, behind the cottage. The one place we’d thought, since she patrolled it so solidly and the grass was down to billiard-table level, was completely adder-free. Charles actually saw it happen, though he didn’t know then that it was an adder. He was cementing a gatepost; I was mowing the lawn; we were keeping an eye open for Seeley who we knew was up there somewhere.
It was Charles who saw him come out of the trees at the top of her field, amble a few yards down one of the paths and then crouch, flatten his ears and pounce at something.
A bee, Charles thought at the time – but we weren’t so worried about bees now, seeing that Seeley hadn’t so far managed to catch one.
A moment or two later he said he could hear a cat crying and where was Sheba? Indoors, I said. I couldn’t hear the crying myself on account of the noise of the mower. And 143
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then Charles said suddenly ‘Quick – it’s Seeley!’ and was in the lane and up the hillside like a flash.
Seeley tried to walk to him but could only stumble. And all the time we could hear this dreadful crying.
He was still crying – crying with every breath he took in a frightening monotone – when Charles got him down to me at the gate. His paw was already huge and there was something that looked like water oozing from it. We carried him in and put him on the table, hoping against hope it might be a bee-sting. Seeley couldn’t stand up by now and still he was crying, crying, crying. My own heart nearly stopped beating. I said ‘Oh my goodness… it’s an adder!’
Somehow we telephoned the Vet. Get him over as fast as we could, he said; it was quicker for us to go to him than for him to come to us; he’d have everything ready at the surgery. Somehow we got the car out, and Seeley into his basket, and were speeding up the hill. We hadn’t stopped for anything. We were still in our old gardening clothes. I hadn’t even washed my hands; they were covered in earth.
Halfway to the surgery Seeley suddenly quietened. He was looking at me with big round eyes but he didn’t appear to be quite so frightened. ‘I bet it was a bee-sting after all,’ I said, ‘and we’ve been making all this fuss for nothing.’
The Vet didn’t think so. ‘That’s pretty big for a bee-sting,’
he said, examining a paw which was now swollen up to Seeley’s shoulder. And when I said but wouldn’t Seeley have been unconscious by now if it really had been an adder, he said not necessarily. In his experience, he said, cats and dogs had more resistance to adder-bite than was generally supposed. Some did die within a very short time – if, for instance, they were bitten on the mouth; but if they were 144
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bitten in the foot, like Seeley, he’d known a good many of them to recover. It was shock we had to guard against, he said. It was half an hour now since Seeley’d been bitten and he hadn’t yet collapsed. He’d give him a cortisone injection and we’d keep our fingers crossed. Take him home; bathe, bathe and keep on bathing his paw in water as hot as he could stand it – and if Seeley did collapse we were to call him at once.