A countryside mystery for young readers

By Gareth M. Parkes

The South Downs in September felt like the top of the world.

Benji had climbed the chalk track from the valley below and emerged onto the open ridge where the turf was short and springy under his paws — cropped close by generations of sheep, the kind of grass that felt like it had been tended since people first walked these hills, which, on the South Downs, was a very long time indeed. The sky was enormous. The wind came clean off the sea somewhere to the south. And below the ridge, running east to west along the slope in a long ruled line, was the drove road.

Not a modern road. Not even a lane. A track worn deep into the chalk by centuries of sheep being walked to market — wide enough for a flock, flanked on both sides by ditches that had been cut to keep the animals from straying into the fields on either side. The drove roads crossed the downs for miles, their ditches still sharp-sided after a thousand years of chalk drainage, still holding their shape in a landscape that had changed almost everything else around them.

Benji's red collar caught the September light as he came down from the ridge toward the drove road.

He was still twenty paces from the ditch when the rabbit came out of nowhere.

Or rather — she came out of a warren entrance on the sunny south-facing slope, landed in the middle of the chalk track, stared at Benji with enormous amber eyes for exactly half a second, and said:

"Oh! You're the Sheltie from the valley. Sorry, I was going to — no, actually, have you seen the state of the dew pond up at the top? Because there was something very interesting in it this morning and I went back to look and — wait, do you smell that?"

She was already turning, nose twitching, ears rotating independently like two small satellite dishes tracking separate signals.

"Not warren smell. Something else. Something worth investigating." She spun back. "I'm Clover. I'd properly introduce myself but—" and she was already bounding across the drove road toward the far side, her white scut flashing in the downland light.

Benji followed. On the South Downs, this seemed like the only sensible response.

Clover moved across the chalk landscape the way the wind moved across it — constantly, in every direction, and somehow always forward. She noted things, called them out, doubled back.

"See that warren over there? Forty-seven entrances — I counted in July. And there — rabbit scrapes along the ditch edge, this morning's, the chalk is still pale. And that hole on the slope isn't ours, much too narrow, I've been past it twice this week and—"

She stopped completely.

They were on the open drove road now, the short turf stretching away on both sides, the ancient ditches running alongside them. Clover's ears had locked onto something ahead where the track curved around the shoulder of the hill.

"What is it?" Benji said.

"Don't know," Clover said. "That's the interesting part." And she was off — a brown-and-white streak across the open chalk, bounding with the effortless speed of something designed precisely for this landscape, this turf, this particular combination of open ground and burrow-friendly soil.