them.
The footsteps went away, but two sets of them returned, briskly and angrily, not long after. All the puppies cringed instinctively.
“Blast you, Bess!” said Mrs Partridge. “Here I am with a parcel of mongrels, when I might have got nearly a hundred quid for this litter. Got that sack, Brian?”
“Uh-huh.” The hoarse youth never used many words. “Brick too. Oughtn’t we to leave her one, Mrs Partridge?”
“Oh, I suppose so,” the woman said impatiently. Sirius felt himself seized and lifted. “Not that one!” Mrs Partridge said sharply. “I don’t like its eyes.”
“Don’t you?” The youth seemed surprised, but he dumped Sirius down again and picked up the next nearest to set beside the mother. The mother whined anxiously, but she did not try to stop him as he seized the other puppies one by one and tossed them into dusty, chaffy darkness. They tumbled in anyhow, cheeping and feebly struggling. Sirius was carried, one of this writhing, squeaking bundle, pressed and clawed by his fellows, jolted by the movement of the sack, until he was nearly frantic. Then a new smell broke through the dust. Even in this distress it interested him. But, the next moment, their bundle swung horribly and dropped, more horribly still, into cold, cold, cold. To his terror, there was nothing to breathe but the cold stuff, and it choked him.
Once he realised it choked him, Sirius had the sense to stop breathing. But there was not much sense to the way he struggled. For as long as he had air and strength in his body, he lashed out with all his short weak legs, tore with his small feeble claws, and fought the darkness and the cold as if it were a live enemy. Some of the other puppies fought too, and got in one another’s way. But, one by one, they found the shock and the cold suffocation too much for them. Soon only Sirius was scratching and tearing at the dark, and he only kept on because he had a dim notion that anything was better than cold nothingness.
The darkness opened. Sirius did not care much about anything by then, but he thought he was probably dead. Being dead seemed to mean floating out into a grey-green light. It was not a light he could see by, and it was stronger above him. He had a feeling he was soaring towards the stronger light. Round bubbles, shining yellow, moved up past his eyes and put him in mind of another life he could not quite remember. Then the light was like a silver lid, thick and solid-looking overhead. It surprised him when he broke through the silver without pain or noise into a huge brightness that was blue and green and warm. It was too much for him. He took a gasping breath, choked, and became nothing more than a sodden wisp of life floating down a brisk river.
Behind him, at the bottom of the river, the rotten sack he had torn spread apart in the current and the other sodden wisps floated out. Two were beyond hope and were simply rolled along the mud and stones of the river bed. But four other wisps rose to the surface and were carried along behind the first. They went bobbing and twisting, one behind the other, round a bend in the river and between the sunny banks of a meadow. Here, the warmth beating from above began to revive Sirius a little. He came to himself enough to know that there was heat somewhere, and that he was helpless in some kind of nightmare. The only good thing in the nightmare was the heat. He came to depend on it.
The river passed hawthorn trees growing on its banks. The current carried Sirius through the shadow of one. He found himself suddenly in deep brown cold. The heat was gone. They had taken his one comfort away now. He was so indignant about it that he opened his eyes and tried to cheep a protest.
He could not manage a noise. But a second later, the river carried him out into sunlight again. Sun struck him full in the eyes and broke into a thousand dazzles on the ripples. Sirius snapped his eyes shut again. The brightness was such a shock that he became a limper wisp than ever and hardly knew that the warmth was back again.
It grew warmer – a golden, searching warmth. “It is you, Effulgency!” someone said. “I thought it was!”
This was quite a different order of voice from those Sirius had heard so far. It puzzled him. It was not a voice he knew, though he had a feeling he had heard its kind before. He was not sure he trusted it. All the voices he had heard so far had done him nothing but harm – and he had a notion he had known voices before that, which had done him no good either.
“You aren’t dead, are you?” the voice asked. It seemed anxious. It was a warm, golden voice, and, though it sounded anxious, there was a hint of ferocity about it, as if the speaker could be far more dangerous than Mrs Partridge and her friends if he chose.
Sirius was not sure if he was dead or not. He felt too weak to cope with this strong, fierce voice, so he floated on in silence.
“Can’t you answer?” The warmth playing on Sirius’s scrap of body grew stronger and hotter, as if the speaker was losing patience. Sirius was too far gone even to be frightened. He simply floated. “I suppose you can’t,” said the voice. “I think this is just too bad of them! Well, I’ll do what I can for you. Just let them try to stop me!”
The warmth stayed, lapping round Sirius, though he sensed that the speaker had gone. He floated a little way further, until he came up against some things that were long, green and yielding. Here the warmth caught and pinned him, gently rocking. It was almost pleasant. Meanwhile, the other four half-drowned puppies floated on in midstream, round bends, to where the river became wider and dirtier, with houses on its banks.
A shrill voice spoke strange words near Sirius. “Oh, eughky! There’s a dead puppy in the rushes!”
“Don’t touch it!” said a voice rather older and rougher. And a third voice, gentle and lilting, said, “Let me see!”
“Don’t touch it, Kathleen!” said the second voice.
However, there were splashings and rustlings. A pair of hands, a great deal smaller and much more shaky and nervous than Sirius was used to, picked him out of the water and held him high in the air. He did not feel safe. The shakiness of those hands and the cold air frightened him. He wriggled and managed to utter a faint squeak of fear. The hands all but dropped him.
“It isn’t dead! It’s alive! Poor thing, it’s frozen!”
“Someone tried to drown it,” said the shrillest voice.
“Throw it back in,” said the second voice. “It’s too small to lap. It’ll die anyway.”
“No it won’t.” The hands holding Sirius became defiantly steady. “It can have that old baby-bottle. I’m not going to let it die.”
“Mum won’t let you keep it,” the rough voice said nastily.
“She won’t. And the cats’ll kill it,” said the youngest voice. “Honest, Kathleen.”
The girl holding Sirius hugged him defensively to her chest and began to walk – bump, jerk, bump – away from the river across the meadow. “Poor little thing,” she said. The two boys followed, arguing with her. Their clamour hurt Sirius’s ears, and the girl kept jerking him by turning round to argue back. But he realised she was defending him from the other two and was grateful. Her convulsive hugging was making him feel safer and a great deal warmer. “Oh!” Kathleen exclaimed, bending over him. “Its tail’s wagging!”
Robin, the younger boy, demanded to see. “It’s a queer little tail,” he said doubtfully. “You don’t think it’s really a rat, do you?”
“No,” said Kathleen. “It’s a dog.”
“It’s
