Read Online The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Richard Adams
Tags: Fiction, General, Fantasy, Contemporary, Action & Adventure, Juvenile Fiction, Fantastic fiction, Pets, Animals, Nature, Dogs, Lake District (England), Laboratory animals, Animal Rights, Laboratory animals - England, Animal experimentation, Animal experimentation - England
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happened. Slowly the rain ceased, the grey rack blowing away and over Windermere as first light came creeping into the sky and the remaining inmates of Lawson Park awoke to another day in the care and service of humanity.
FIT 2
Saturday the 16th October Freedom—that consuming goal above doubt or criticism, desired as moths desire the candle or emigrants the distant continent waiting to parch them in its deserts or drive them to madness in its bitter winters! Freedom, that land where rogues, at every corner, cozen with lies and promises the plucky sheep who judged it time to sack the shepherd! Unfurl your banner, Freedom, and call upon me with cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer and all kinds of music to fall down and worship you, and I will do so upon the instant, for who would wish to be cast into the fiery furnace of his neighbours' contempt? I will come to you as the male spider to the female, as the explorer to the upper reaches of the great river upon which he knows he will die before ever he wins through to the estuary. How should I dare refuse your beckoning, queen whose discarded lovers vanish by night, princess whose unsuccessful suitors die at sunset? Would to God we had never encountered you, goddess of thrombosis, insomnia, asthma, duodenal and migraine! For we are free—free to suffer every anguish of deliberation, of decisions which must be made upon suspect information and half-knowledge, every anguish of hindsight and regret, of failure, shame and responsibility for all that we have brought upon ourselves and others: free to struggle, to starve, to demand from all one last, supreme effort to reach where we long to be and, once there, to conclude that it is not, after all, the right place. For a great price obtained I this freedom, to wish to God I had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when I sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full. The tyrant wasn't such a bad old bugger, and even in his arbitrary rages never killed as many as died in yesterday's glorious battle for liberty. Will you return to him, then? Ah no, sweet Freedom, I will slave for you until I have forgotten the love that once consumed my being, until I am grown old and bitter and can no longer see the wood for the starved, dirty trees. Then I will curse you and die; and will you then concede that I may be accounted your loyal follower and a true creature of this Earth? And, Freedom, was I free? Far away, east beyond Esthwaite Water, Sawrey and Windermere, the sun, from between low streaks of cloud, shone its first, pale rays across the woodland and bleak moor of Grizedale Forest. Already the buzzards were aloft, watching for prey, ready to tempest and tear any creature too slow or weak to escape or defend itself. Before their eyes opened, under the sunrise, the immense western prospect; the hyaline expanse of Coniston Water, five miles from School Beck to High Nibthwaite, lined along its western shore with caravans—orange, white and blue; and beyond, the little town of Coniston itself, grey against surrounding fields and autumn-leaved woods. Behind stretched the Coniston fells, over which, as the sun rose higher, the cloud shadows would flow with a pace smooth and unaltering, like that of ships upon a deep sea. More than four miles away, closing the horizon, rose the Coniston range—Caw, Torver High Common, Walna Scar, Dow Crag, Old Man, Brim Fell and Swirral; highest of all, the Old Man appeared from the east as a sharp peak tilted to the right, its eastern face streaked with the broken, white thread of a falling beck.
Half a mile north of Lawson Park, Monk Coniston Moor rises, hill locked and undulant, above the oak woods below. An old, dry-stone hoggus (or hog-house—a "hog" being, in the Lakeland, the ovine equivalent of a bullock) stands, half-ruined, beside a stream, and a Rowan lays its pliant branches and thirteen-leafleted sprays across the roof-slates. To one walking over the Forest from
FIT 2
Saturday the 16th October Freedom—that consuming goal above doubt or criticism, desired as moths desire the candle or emigrants the distant continent waiting to parch them in its deserts or drive them to madness in its bitter winters! Freedom, that land where rogues, at every corner, cozen with lies and promises the plucky sheep who judged it time to sack the shepherd! Unfurl your banner, Freedom, and call upon me with cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer and all kinds of music to fall down and worship you, and I will do so upon the instant, for who would wish to be cast into the fiery furnace of his neighbours' contempt? I will come to you as the male spider to the female, as the explorer to the upper reaches of the great river upon which he knows he will die before ever he wins through to the estuary. How should I dare refuse your beckoning, queen whose discarded lovers vanish by night, princess whose unsuccessful suitors die at sunset? Would to God we had never encountered you, goddess of thrombosis, insomnia, asthma, duodenal and migraine! For we are free—free to suffer every anguish of deliberation, of decisions which must be made upon suspect information and half-knowledge, every anguish of hindsight and regret, of failure, shame and responsibility for all that we have brought upon ourselves and others: free to struggle, to starve, to demand from all one last, supreme effort to reach where we long to be and, once there, to conclude that it is not, after all, the right place. For a great price obtained I this freedom, to wish to God I had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when I sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full. The tyrant wasn't such a bad old bugger, and even in his arbitrary rages never killed as many as died in yesterday's glorious battle for liberty. Will you return to him, then? Ah no, sweet Freedom, I will slave for you until I have forgotten the love that once consumed my being, until I am grown old and bitter and can no longer see the wood for the starved, dirty trees. Then I will curse you and die; and will you then concede that I may be accounted your loyal follower and a true creature of this Earth? And, Freedom, was I free? Far away, east beyond Esthwaite Water, Sawrey and Windermere, the sun, from between low streaks of cloud, shone its first, pale rays across the woodland and bleak moor of Grizedale Forest. Already the buzzards were aloft, watching for prey, ready to tempest and tear any creature too slow or weak to escape or defend itself. Before their eyes opened, under the sunrise, the immense western prospect; the hyaline expanse of Coniston Water, five miles from School Beck to High Nibthwaite, lined along its western shore with caravans—orange, white and blue; and beyond, the little town of Coniston itself, grey against surrounding fields and autumn-leaved woods. Behind stretched the Coniston fells, over which, as the sun rose higher, the cloud shadows would flow with a pace smooth and unaltering, like that of ships upon a deep sea. More than four miles away, closing the horizon, rose the Coniston range—Caw, Torver High Common, Walna Scar, Dow Crag, Old Man, Brim Fell and Swirral; highest of all, the Old Man appeared from the east as a sharp peak tilted to the right, its eastern face streaked with the broken, white thread of a falling beck.
Half a mile north of Lawson Park, Monk Coniston Moor rises, hill locked and undulant, above the oak woods below. An old, dry-stone hoggus (or hog-house—a "hog" being, in the Lakeland, the ovine equivalent of a bullock) stands, half-ruined, beside a stream, and a Rowan lays its pliant branches and thirteen-leafleted sprays across the roof-slates. To one walking over the Forest from
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