Bone Jack by Sara Crowe Read Free Book Online Page B

after all, Ash thought, a half-starved feral stray.
    Feral or not, he couldn’t leave it to die. He rocked back on his heels and thought about what to do. The dog was too big and heavy to carry back through the mountains. He needed help. He stood up, looked all around, listened. They were a long way from the main trails, but sometimes hikers left the beaten track and ventured out here along the little twisting paths.
    Not this morning though.
    Something moved on the mountainside. A clot of darkness, racing towards them. He squinted into the sun, trying to see what was casting the shadow, but there was only the empty land and the empty sky. The shadow sped closer, coming straight for him. He ducked as it reached him. Then it stopped. It lay over and all around him. He looked up from within its darkness, his heart thudding. Nothing there but the scrub of gorse and bracken, the distant peaks.
    Nothing that could cast a shadow like this.
    The wolf-dog growled softly, a warning.
    The shadow shook apart, shattering into fragments that morphed into inky, ethereal human figures that fled this way and that.
    Then the shadow-figures thinned, dissolved into sunlight until there was nothing there any more.
    Ash stood up, heart thumping. He scanned the horizon in every direction.
    No shadows. No people around who might have cast them.
    Yet he could still sense their presence. Not evil exactly but savage and predatory, lurking out of sight somewhere on the raw rocky land. And him and the wolf-dog out here alone, miles from anywhere, fragile specks of bone and blood and soft flesh.
    He felt like a mouse waiting for a hawk to strike.
    But nothing struck. The shadow figures were gone.
    If they had ever been there at all.
    He switched his attention back to the wolf-dog. He took a bottle from his backpack and dribbled water into its mouth. It licked its lips and swallowed. He carried on feeding it water until the bottle was empty. By then, the dog’s gaze had lost some of its hardness.
    It still didn’t look exactly friendly though.
    And it needed a lot more than water. It needed serious help, a vet. Maybe it was already too far gone even for that.
    He knew his mobile wouldn’t work out here. He could never get a signal in the mountains beyond Tolley Carn. It was like a black hole for mobile phones. He only brought the thing out with him because Mum insisted. He tried it anyway, just in case. Sure enough, a blue No Signal message flashed up on the screen.
    He could run back to the village, fetch Dad. But he was miles out. It would take too long to get home and back again and he couldn’t rely on Dad for help anyway, not any more.
    It was all down to him.
    His best bet was to reach a road and flag down a car.
    ‘I’m going to fetch help,’ he told the dog. ‘I’ll be back soon.’ He rolled his eyes at himself. Explaining to a dog. Idiot.
    He climbed up onto the higher ground above the path. A couple of hundred metres away, a rocky outcrop as tall as a house jutted from the mountainside. He scrambled up it and stood at its summit. From here he could see for miles. But there was no one in sight, no roads, no buildings, nothing. As if civilisation no longer existed.
    Ahead of him, the mountainside dipped down into a wide, deep valley with a straggly thicket of thorn trees running most of its length.
    A tiny movement about the trees, a breath of bluish smoke unwinding.
    Campers, most likely.
    They’d do.
    He returned to the path and ran down it until a hunch of mountain hid the thorn trees and the path zagged in the wrong direction. He left it behind and loped across rough terrain, through bracken and gorse, over rocks and humps of gnarly root. Then he was out of the rough, running easily across a greasy stretch of short wiry grass. He splashed across a shallow, sluggish stream that had once been a small river and barged his way through the spiky wall of thorn trees onto open ground.
    Ahead stood an ancient shepherds’ bothy, a small