I started to unsling the gun from my back. The movement caught its attention. It turned its head and crouched motionless, glaring at me, with the blood glistening on the lower half of its face. Its tail rose, and waved gently from side to side. I cocked the gun and was in the act of raising it when an arrow took the creature in the throat. It leapt, writhing into the air and landed on all fours, facing me still, with its yellow eyes glaring. My horse took fright and reared, and my gun exploded into the air, but before the creature could spring two more arrows took it, one in the hindquarters, the other in the head. It stood stock-still for a moment, and then rolled over.
Rosalind rode into the glade from my right, her bow still in her hand. Michael appeared from the other side, a fresh arrow already on his string, and his eyes fixed on the creature, making sure about it. Even though we were so close to one another, we were close to Petra, too, and she was still swamping us.
‘Where is she?’ Rosalind asked in words.
We looked round and then spotted the small figure twelve feet up a young tree. She was sitting in a fork and clinging round the trunk with both arms. Rosalind rode under the tree and told her it was safe to come down. Petra went on clinging, she seemed unable to let go, or to move. I dismounted, climbed the tree and helped her down until Rosalind could reach up and take her. Rosalind seated her astride her saddle in front of her, and tried to soothe her, but Petra was looking down at her own dead pony. Her distress was, if anything, intensified.
‘We must stop this,’ I said to Rosalind. ‘She’ll be bringing all the others here.’
Michael, assured that the creature was really dead, joined us. He looked at Petra, worriedly.
‘She’s no idea she’s doing it. It’s not intelligent; she’s sort of howling with fright inside. It’d be better for her to howl outwardly. Let’s start by getting her where she can’t see her pony.’
We moved off a little, round a screen of bushes. Michael spoke to her quietly, trying to encourage her. She did not seem to understand, and there was no weakening of her distress-pattern.
‘Perhaps if we were all to try the same thought-pattern on her simultaneously,’ I suggested. ‘ Soothing-sympathizing-relaxing. Ready?’
We tried, for a full fifteen seconds. There was just a momentary check in Petra’s distress, then it crowded us down again.
‘ No good,’ said Rosalind, and let up.
The three of us regarded her helplessly. The pattern was a little changed; the incisiveness of alarm had receded, but the bewilderment and distress were still overwhelming. She began to cry. Rosalind put an arm round her and held her close to her.
‘Let her have it out. It’ll relax the tension,’ said Michael.
While we were waiting for her to calm down, the thing that I had been afraid of happened. Rachel came riding out of the trees; a moment later a boy rode in from the other side. I’d never seen him until now, but I knew he must be Mark.
We had never met as a group before. It was one of the things that we had known would be unsafe. It was almost certain that the other two girls would be somewhere on the way, too, to complete a gathering that we had decided must never happen.
Hurriedly, we explained in words what had occurred. We urged them to get away and disperse as soon as possible so that they would not be seen together, Michael, too. Rosalind and I would stay with Petra and do our best to calm her.
The three of them appreciated the situation without argument. A moment later they left us, riding off in different directions.
We went on trying to comfort and soothe Petra, with little success.
Some ten minutes later the two girls, Sally and Katherine, came pushing their way through the bushes. They, too, were on horseback, and with their bows strung. We had hoped that one of the others might have met them and turned them back, but clearly they had approached by a different route.
They came closer, staring incredulously at Petra. We explained all over again, in words, and advised them to go away. They were about to, in the act of turning their horses, when a large man on a bay mare thrust out of the trees in the open.
He reined in, and sat looking at us.
‘What’s going on here?’ he demanded, with suspicion in his tone.
He was a stranger to me, and I did not care for the look of him. I asked what one usually asked of strangers. Impatiently he pulled out his identity tag, with the current year’s punch-mark on it. It was established that we were neither of us outlaws.
‘What’s all this?’ he repeated.
The temptation was to tell him to mind his own damned business, but I thought it more tactful in the circumstances to be placatory. I explained that my sister’s pony had been attacked, and that we had answered her calls for help. He wasn’t willing to take that at its face value. He looked at me steadily, and then turned to regard Sally and Katherine.
‘Maybe. But what brought you two here in such a hurry?’ he asked them.
‘Naturally we came when we heard the child calling,’ Sally told him.
‘I was right behind you, and I heard no calling,’ he said.
Sally and Katherine looked at one another. Sally shrugged.
‘We did,’ she told him shortly.
It seemed about time I took a hand.
‘ I’d have thought everyone for miles around would have heard it,’ I said. ‘The pony was screaming, too, poor little brute.’
I led him round the clump of bushes and showed him the savaged pony and the dead creature. He looked surprised, as if he’d not expected that evidence, but he wasn’t altogether appeased. He demanded to see Rosalind’s and Petra’s tags.
‘What’s this all about?’ I asked in my turn.
‘ You didn’t know that the Fringes have got spies out?’ he said.
‘I didn’t,’ I told him. ‘Anyway, do we look like Fringes people?’
He ignored the question. ‘Well, they have. There’s an instruction to watch for them. There’s trouble working up, and the clearer you keep of the woods, the less likely you are to meet it before we all do.’
He still was not satisfied. He turned to look at the pony again, then at Sally.
‘I’d say it’s near half an hour since that pony did any screaming. How did you two manage to come straight to this spot?’
Sally’s eyes widened a little.
‘Well, this was the direction it came from, and then when we got nearer we heard the little girl screaming,’ she said simply.
‘And very good it was of you to follow it up,’ I put in. ‘You would have saved her life by doing it if we hadn’t happened to be a little nearer. It’s all over now, and luckily she wasn’t hurt. But she’s had a nasty fright and I’d better get her home. Thank you both for wanting to help.’
They took that up all right. They congratulated us on Petra’s escape, hoped she would soon get over the shock, and then rode off. The man lingered. He still seemed dissatisfied and a little puzzled. There was, however, nothing for him to take a firm hold of. Presently he gave the three of us a long, searching stare, looking as if he were about to say something more, but he changed his mind. Finally he repeated his advice to keep out of the woods, and then rode off in the wake of the other two. We watched him disappear among the trees.
‘Who is he?’ Rosalind asked, uneasily.
I could tell her that the name on his tag had been Jerome Skinner, but no more. He was a stranger to me, and our names had not seemed to mean much to him. I would have asked Sally but for the barrier that Petra was still putting up. It gave me a strange, muffled feeling to be cut off from the rest like that, and made me wonder at the strength of purpose which had enabled Anne to withdraw herself entirely for those months.
Rosalind, still with her right arm round Petra, started homewards at a walk. I collected the dead pony’s saddle and bridle, pulled the arrows out of the creature, and followed them.
They put Petra to bed when I brought her in. During the late afternoon and early evening the disturbance she was making fluctuated from time to time, but it kept up naggingly until almost nine o’clock when it diminished steeply and disappeared.
‘Thank goodness for that. She’s gone to sleep at last,’ came from one of the others.