Lord Morgan's Cannon Read online

  Bear had been dreaming about Edward and his plan to find Lord Morgan’s cannon. In his tired mind, the anteater imagined the cannon to be longer than three llama’s standing head to tail in a line. It was a big black cannon that could be raised upright, to point straight up in the air. It could take cannon balls so big they couldn’t be lifted by the gorillas the old leopard sometimes spoke of. And when fired, it would sound louder than thunder breaking over the peaks of the Andes.

  He then dreamed of being strong and well fed. He was home again, roaming the grassy plains, pain absent from his shoulder. He was searching for a site, a clearing in the pampas. It needed to be big enough to take a tent, a tall canvass construction held true by a centre pole and guide ropes. He wanted space for his wagons and some trees to attach billboards to.

  He would set up his very own Big Top and invite a local audience. The armadillos and anacondas would arrive, followed by the rhea, capybara and puma and a lone Geoffroy’s cat, which didn’t recognise its name. They would sit in a circle, around the ring of sawdust, a few opposums taking the cheap seats, and they would watch the humans put on a show.

  First would come the high wire girls, who amazed the animals by keeping their balance despite being whipped by a tufted capuchin. Jim the Strongman would sit atop an iron stool, pulling faces while wearing a red hat and shawl with sequins. The Ring Master would then run in circles, faster and faster until a herd of small orphan children wheeled in the huge cannon, and fired it.

  At that moment in his dream the cannon ball shot through the roof of the tent. But instead of saving the circus, and all the animals in it, the cannon ball went up towards the clear blue sky and then came straight down again. It hit the pole holding up the Big Top, snapping it. The cannon ball fell back upon the gun that had fired it, iron smashing against iron, deforming itself. Down came the canvass, trapping all the creatures within. As blackness fell upon Bear’s dream, he woke with a start to see Doris blowing at him below the shade of the trees.

  As the anteater shook his head, Tony then uttered the most remarkable thing he’d said since meeting the animals from the circus. He declared, with the utmost confidence, that Lord Morgan would by now be taking tea at the college. Bessie asked him how he knew such a thing. Tony replied that dogs always knew exactly how long they had been asleep for. He had often accompanied Lord Morgan to his laboratory at the college. And he knew when Lord Morgan had set off there carrying Edward in his puzzle box. From that, it was quite easy, said Tony, to work out that by now it was tea time, and that Lord Morgan would be in the long room of the college, eating his regular slice of lemon cake, drinking an Assam blend.

  Bear remembered their first ever plan, the one Edward had helped conjure. To find the circus, the animals had decided to climb the trees and look out beyond, for the Big Top poking above the city. He also recalled that the plan had a point, to save the circus. So he took that original plan and adjusted it. To find the college they would ask Tony the terrier what it looked like. They would follow him and, when they could, they would look out beyond, to see if it was poking above the city. And the point of this new plan was to save Edward.

  He told the others of this new plan and they immediately agreed. It tallied with what was already in their minds. But each of them found it useful to organise and direct their thoughts: to fix in their heads that Edward was not with them and that he was at the college, to decide that was not a good thing, and to banish all doubt that saving the monkey from the humans was the right thing to do.

  With this new plan they set off at a pace through the woods. Bessie flew from tree to tree in as straight a line as she could muster, as below the terrier weaved and bounced through an understory of fallen logs, leaves and deer dung. Behind him Bear trotted, with Doris following.

  In years past, when Doris had been free to travel with other elephants, she had naturally taken the lead. She liked, as the third oldest of her sisters and cousins, to head the herd as they roamed the foothills of home, taking responsibility for each next step of their adventure. But her life in England, at the circus, had irrevocably changed her nature. There she became a follower. But while she wandered the wood of elm and ash, passing trees such as redwoods and noble firs that were alien to even her, she began to find meaning in her new character. She was approaching a reflective age. Her ability to mother had long been stolen, but not the urge. And she recognised the power she held in her huge frame. She followed, but she looked over the others as she did. And she began to feel content.

  From her vantage point, she was the first to recognise the unnatural structure in the forest. Tony was leading them towards a hill, with a deep channel excavated around it. Atop the hill crumbled the remains of a wall, grey and covered in green lichen.

  Doris asked the dog if he knew what it was. Tony replied that it used to be the site of an old fort. He didn’t know what a fort was, but he’d heard Lord Morgan describe it as a home to a whole community, a race of people that had once, in the distant past, abandoned all they knew. These people, his master had said, kept cows and sheep and may have been protected by dogs, Tony proudly reported. They had come to live in the forest and they happily spent all their days here, living upon this hill, surviving on the fruits of the forest, its berries and bird eggs, root vegetables and fungi. He knew all this, because his master had told him.

  “Does Lord Morgan know everything?” inquired Bessie. “Does he know everything there is to know about everything?”

  “He learned about the fort from other professors at the college,” said Tony. “That’s one of the things that makes humans special, my master says. Humans learn things from each other, whereas animals do not.”

  “But that isn’t so,” said Bear, speaking over the dog. “It can’t be so.”

  Doris began to wish she hadn’t asked the terrier about the fort. She wasn’t used to thinking about more than one thing at once. She had been concentrating on walking through the wood, trying to find the college and monkey. But now the appearance of the fort had forced her to think of these other things.

  “It can’t be so because you’ve learned about this fort from your master,” said Bear. “And you’re an animal and he’s a human.”

  At this point all the animals stopped. Bessie flew down to rest upon Bear’s head. She pecked at her chest feathers, concentrated, then spoke.

  “Lord Morgan suggested animals can’t learn from animals. That’s different. That’s a different thing.”

  “Yes it is,” said Bear.

  He gazed at the ruins of the settlement.

  “But we’ve learned about the fort from Tony. He’s an animal. And we are animals. So animals can learn from one another.”

  Doris chuckled, pleased at what she’d heard. She stomped upon the soil in pleasure, shaking a nest of baby pheasant hiding not six feet away. Bessie trilled, while Tony turned his nose back to the ground, heading on into the woods. Bear chewed his toothless gums, contemplating this new idea of his. It felt like something he should make an effort to remember.

  Tony led them up and over the hill. It was covered in short grass. Doris lipped its unnatural cut. She tasted rotting eggs, recognising the saliva of another animal, a ruminant, and the fog of methane gas hanging low. It smelled like the fields of cows that the circus often pitched in. But Doris couldn’t understand why English cows might be out and about in a wood. She had only ever seen them behind gates and bound by wooden fences.

  Then she saw them. Three large cows standing on the slope leading down off the hill, with dark auburn hair and clean horns. Tony walked between two of the cows, which Doris recognised as female by their empty hanging udders. They didn’t raise their heads, chewing contentedly on cud.

  Unsure whether to fly past or over the cows’ ears, Bessie landed on the ground. Bear arrived and kept on walking. He’d grown up with cattle losing themselves in the pamp
as. He knew they were docile and didn’t like to talk.

  But Doris noticed the third red animal and the ring in its nose. She sized it against herself, realising it stood almost as tall as her shoulder. She spied the thick muscles in its neck and chest and its musty smell. The bull caught Doris’s scent and raised its head. It stared at her, pushing warm steam from its black nostrils.

  The bull eyed Bear and turned to face the animals. He ignored the terrier and dancing budgie. He focused on the giant anteater and elephant. Confused, he couldn’t tell what was approaching. The bull could smell Doris was female, but she looked to him like an outsized cattle breed, one of those the humans would take to the ring and stick rosettes upon. And he wasn’t sure if he wanted another large bovine passing through his patch of grass.

  Yet the anteater bothered him more. Bear’s long black and white hair reminded the bull of the old English sheepdogs that had herded him in his younger days, when he was raised at his mother’s hip upon a Devon farm. He didn’t like old English sheepdogs. They were too stubborn to get out from under his feet. They liked to nip and bite his ankles rather than encourage him on. This dog appeared taller than any he’d ever met. If it bit like the others, he’d have to teach it a lesson, the bull thought, whether it stood three feet tall or not.

  The bull scraped a hoof into the dirt. It threw back its head. Doris had seen this behaviour before, among water buffalo. Even elephants respected the water buffalo. She immediately flared her ears and raised her trunk. She emitted the deepest, longest rumble she could. The sound was so low in frequency that Bessie and Tony couldn’t detect it, and if any human was capable of hearing infrasound, every resident of the city of Bristol would have lifted their heads and wondered what monster in the woods they had angered. The budgie and terrier felt the air move but only the larger mammals heard the unmistakable threat of an elephant speaking its mind. With a single epic sound, Doris had established a hierarchy among all the animals in the woods, placing her at the top.

  The bull scraped the ground some more, for show. He snorted and bucked to the side, cantering a few steps behind one of the cows. He started to graze upon the grass, feigning nonchalance.

  Bessie chirped up. She’d often talked to the cows that showed an interest in Whyte and Wingate’s Big Top, though they were always black and white, or brown. These were the first red cows she had seen.

  “Hello,” she said happily. “Do you live here, do you live in these woods?”

  The two cows ignored Bessie. They’d heard her but were more used to birds chattering in the trees or upon their backs as they picked off the ticks and horseflies. The bull raised his head.

  “Yes,” was all he said.

  “Is it a nice place?” asked Bessie. “Is it a nice place to live?”

  “Yes,” said the bull again. “Why?”

  Bessie hadn’t the presence of mind to know why she was asking. But she quite liked these woods, which contained a greater variety of trees than she had seen before. They felt quiet and peaceful. She thought of herself living here, forgetting how much she’d enjoyed the theatre of the circus, entertaining a paying public.

  “Will you let us pass?” Doris asked the bull sternly.

  “I suppose so,” said the bull.

  He carried on eating. Bear looked back at Doris. She moved forward, straddling the anteater and terrier, reinforcing her stature. She flapped her ears and twirled her trunk around her left tush. She stuck out her chest, displaying the cuts opened by the barbed wire hidden in the hawthorn hedge of Lord Morgan’s garden, the congealed blood having run a little in the earlier rain. She ambled past the bull, flicking a stick up at his bottom, forcing him to trot on another few steps.

  As the animals walked off the hill, away from the fort, Bear turned to the cows.

  “Is this the way to the college?” he asked.

  The bull lifted his head and was surprised at what he saw. For the first time he noticed that Bear had no teeth inside his mouth. He also noticed the spectacles wrapped around Bear’s head. Both struck the bull as imperfections for an old English sheepdog. He started to relax.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “All I can tell you is you’re heading down to the gorge.”

  Tony the terrier barked.

  “Yes, this way to the gorge,” he said. “I do know where I’m going. Keep following me.”

  With that Tony stepped up the pace, letting the slope carry him back into a thicket of trees that fell away downhill. He started to run right then left, to stop himself tumbling forward. Doris reached the edge of the incline. She could hear the sound of water running against rocks. Thirsty, she went over the edge and picked her way after the dog. She searched for the slabs of stone that started to appear on the forest floor, the granite providing a surer grip. Splaying her large grey toes, she spread her weight as she stepped from stone to stone, trying to avoid the leaf litter than might give way beneath. Behind her, Bear avoided the stone slabs. They scraped against his talons. He preferred to plant his feet upon the sticks and into the clumps of nettles that became more common the further down they ventured.

  The wood became darker and more damp. Tony ran his paws into puddles of dirty water. The slope down the gorge was returning the morning’s rain to a large river flowing beneath. The dog reached its banks first, emerging from the trees out on to a beach of mud covered in wispy strands of dying grass.

  Bessie emerged next, her vision filled by a kingfisher flashing along the river, curving its flight down until its stout body almost clipped the water’s surface, before climbing and alighting on a bare branch. Behind the kingfisher, which ruffled a chest of blue feathers more brilliant than even Bessie’s, smoke rose from the factories and shipyards lining the docks of the city.

  Bear tumbled out of the trees, struggling to control his limbs as he hit the flats. Then came Doris, who immediately sank fifteen inches into the mud, squealing as she squelched.

  “It’s up there,” said Tony proudly. “The college is up there.”

  Bessie’s little heart soared. She loved hearing about places up and above and she was excited to be so close to their destination. Tony too was pleased to have led the others so close. However, Bear quickly saw the problem. The river was running high, bubbling just below the top of the banks. A strong current was flowing. He could see the eddies at the edge of the river, twirling around trapped fallen branches. Any leaves being carried upon the water were heading in the wrong direction, away from the city, rounding a bend in the river. And as he watched the leaves dipping underwater, re-emerging a few yards downstream, he saw the sides of the gorge. The animals were facing a sheer wall of grey rock, run smooth by the wind and rain. It stood one hundred feet high, far taller than the Big Top. Meeting a blue sky, it plunged at an almost vertical angle down the bank opposite. To get to where Tony was pointing with his button nose, the animals would have to swim like alligators across a high river and climb the opposing cliff like mountain goats.

  “How will you get across?” Bessie asked the others. “How will you cross the river?”

  “It’s been years since I last swam,” said Doris. “But I’m sure I can still do it,” she announced.

  Bear too hadn’t entered such a body of water since his arrival in England. He didn’t know what was below the murky surface, whether bull sharks swam this far inshore in this part of the world. Or if the water was cold. He preferred being immersed in warm not cold water.

  “We walk across,” said Tony. “It’s easy.”

  Neither Doris or Bessie had ever seen an animal walk on water. Bear said he had, a small basilisk lizard that had once been frightened on to a pond by a circling hawk. But the lizard had special powers, said Bear. And even it could only run on water for a few strides before it disappeared beneath.

  “No it’s easy,” Tony repeated. “We walk across. I do i
t a few times a week.”

  “Look at me,” implored Doris. “I’ve learned a few tricks from the Ring Master, but there is no way I can walk on water. I’ll swim and use my trunk as a snorkel,” she said. “You can all ride on my back if you wish.”

  “I’m not getting on your back,” said Tony. “And I don’t like swimming. I’m scared of the water,” he said.

  It all became too much for Bessie.

  “I don’t understand. We have to get to the college. We have to save Edward. We have to find the cannon. And then we have to save the circus,” she shouted, catching the attentions of a mute sawn and her cygnets silently drifting by on the current.

  The mute swam opened her orange beak and hissed at Bessie, thinking her a young exotic magpie. Frustrated, Tony barked at the swan, which spread its wings, coiled its neck and hissed again.

  “I’m taking you to the college,” he said, through gritted teeth as he growled at the swan. “And we are walking there.”

  Bear suddenly realised that Tony was trying to indicate how. But being a terrier rather than a pointer dog, he wasn’t good at it. Bear followed the line of Tony’s short neck, realising he was trying to point into the air. Bear stretched his own towards the sky. High above their heads he saw a huge iron bridge spanning the gorge. It rested upon two brick towers set into the cliffs on either side of the river. The bridge looked new and shiny, its black girders shimmering as they formed a gentle arc. Even from far below, he could see two horses trotting on to the far side, their silhouettes passing through those of the girders, their hooves echoing as they left the road and struck the bridge’s wooden boards.

  “We can walk across,” Bear said, in wonder at the first iron bridge he had ever seen.