Read Online The Crowstarver by Dick King-Smith - Free Book Online

brought it clearly to their ears.
    â€˜Talk of foxes,’ said Tom.
    It was the music of hounds.
    At the sound Em’ly pricked her ears and danced a little in an elderly stiff-jointed way.
    â€˜Come up, you silly old mare,’ said Ephraim, tugging at the reins, ‘’Tis a main few year since you went hunting.’
    He pulled her to a halt and they listened. From the downlands on the opposite side of the valley the wind carried the sound clearly, the unmistakable sound of a pack of hounds in full cry on a hot scent.
    â€˜Mister’ll be out then,’ said Tom.
    â€˜Oh ar,’ said Ephraim.‘They’m hunting oversomeone else’s land, see,’ for though Major Yorke loved above all to ride to hounds, he was not keen to invite the local hunt to Outoverdown Farm, because of his sheep and, now, the new-sown corn.
    Then Em’ly stopped her fidgeting as the distant noise ceased abruptly, and Ephraim clicked his tongue at her and they moved on.
    On Slimer’s, Spider too, quiet for a moment after putting the croaks to flight, heard the noise start and then stop, but thought little about it.
    At midday he went into his new house and sat on the box and took his food from his pocket. But he did not eat it straightaway, waiting for his friend to come and claim a share as usual. But no-one came. He could not possibly know that the cry of the pack had ceased so suddenly because hounds had overrun and broken up their fox, Spider’s fox.

C HAPTER E LEVEN
    O nce the wheat on Slimer’s was too well established for further worry about bird damage, Spider’s days as a crowstarver were, for the time being, over.
    â€˜The boy did very well, sir,’ Percy Pound told Mister.‘D’you want me to see if I can find him some other work that he could manage?’
    â€˜By all means, Percy,’ Mister said. ‘There won’t be any crowstarving for him before Spring, but any time you can give him something to do, well, I’ll pay the lad on a piecework basis. Have you any idea what he does with his weekly ten shillings?’
    â€˜He gives it all to Kathie,’ said Percy,‘and she buys him his favourite sweets out of it, liquorice allsorts, never anything else.’
    Percy talked it over with Tom and they agreed that it would be a good idea to let the boy try his hand at a number of different jobs, to see where he could be most useful.
    The first week after Spider came off Slimer’s, Percy put him with his father. But Tom soon found that there was not a lot that Spider could do to help him at that time of year, comparatively slack from a shepherd’s viewpoint. More, Tom, in making the rounds of his sheep, had to accommodate his long stride to the boy’s plod, or else Spider would become breathless. He noted though that, whereas the flock would bunch or run before him or the dog, they seemed to treat Spider as an honorary sheep, and would stand quiet and allow him to walk in among them and even to stroke individual animals.
    â€˜He might be some use to me come lambing,’ Tom said to Percy, ‘but not right now.’
    â€˜I’ll give him a week up with Stan,’ said the foreman.
    â€˜I don’t think he’ll be strong enough to help shift they fold units,’ said Tom.
    â€˜Well, he can help collect the eggs,’ said Percy.
    So Spider rode up with Stan Ogle in his little rubber-tyred tub-cart loaded with chicken-feedand pulled by Pony. But he was indeed not strong enough to help in moving the heavy folds to fresh ground each morning, and only got in the way of Red and Rhode as they helped their father. The Ogle boys were not particularly kindhearted, and they made sly jokes about Spider which he did not understand, and laughed at him.
    Stan Ogle did, on Percy’s instructions, allow Spider to give a hand in collecting the eggs from his huge flock of hens, but not before he’d given the boy a stern warning about