The Wadsley Cache

Right. Wadsley Common, up over the ridge where the track goes to nothing and the murk comes off the ground rather than down from above, which means your boots are wet before you've gone fifty paces and there's no help for it.

This was maybe three weeks back. I'd been asked to find a smeln — specific smeln, not just any, though finding a specific smeln is more work than it sounds, they're not the sort that keeps a calendar or a permanent address. This one went by Drebb. Drebb owed Nana Farantee — who you might not know, and who you probably don't want to — three consignments of packed rockcrust that had been promised, paid for, and not delivered.

My job was simple: find Drebb, find out where the crust was, and bring back the answer. Not the crust itself, just the answer. Nana had made it clear, twice, that I was not to bring back the rockcrust. I should have asked more questions about why.

Wadsley Common in murkfall is a particular experience. The light goes sideways — that's the only way I can describe it. You're walking up the ridge path with the Loxley valley dropping away to your left, and the sky above is still pale enough to see by, but the common itself is already dark, the murk sitting in the hollows between the heather like something poured there. The old drystone walls come up at you out of nowhere. The first time I went up there I walked into two of them. The third time I went up there I walked into the same one twice.

The smell is peat and iron and something underneath that — warm animal, which could mean anything, but up here almost certainly means rooters.

I smelled them before I heard them. Then I heard them before I saw them: a low, continuous grunting from the northern end of the common, where the bog grass grows long and the ground goes soft underfoot. Rooters graze in the murklight, mostly. When they're moving at murkneet it means something has unsettled them.

I stopped at the top of the ridge and listened. The grunting was regular. Not frantic — not the noise of startled animals. More like the sound of animals that have been working. Rooting. Finding things.

Then I noticed the scrufftails.

You have to understand what scrufftails are like in numbers. Individually, one scrufftail is a nuisance — ten inches of grey-brown vermin with a tail it's absurdly proud of, clever eyes, and an absolute conviction that anything you have is more interesting than anything it currently has. They'll steal the laces out of your boots while you're wearing them.

In the aggregate, scrufftails operating as a collective intelligence is one of the more unpleasant sights The Dark Peak has to offer.

There were thirty, maybe forty of them crossing the common in a line. Not running — moving with purpose. Each one was carrying something. I couldn't see what. Small dark objects. They were moving from north to south, which meant they were moving away from the rooters and toward the ridge wall.

They paid me no attention. I was irrelevant to whatever they were doing. That, I have learned, is never a good sign. When things in The Dark Peak stop bothering to be frightened of you, it means they have a sufficient advantage that you no longer register as a threat.

I let them pass. The murk above the common had taken on a granular quality — not thicker, just more attentive, the way it gets when the organic network has something running through it that isn't quite a message.

The smeln camp was set up on the flat ground behind the northern wall — three low structures made of whatever had been lying around, which in Wadsley Common meant a lot of old field slate and some fence posts and one tarpaulin that had clearly been stolen from somewhere with better resources. A fire, small and grudging. Three smeln.

I know how smeln look. I've seen enough of them. But it's still something, walking into the firelight and seeing those arms — too long, too low, knuckles grazing the ground even when they're standing upright. The hair. The way their heads sit on their necks, slightly too far forward, like something that evolved to be close to the floor and hasn't quite managed the transition to standing.

Drebb was the one nearest the fire, which told me something. Smeln near a fire are smeln who need the warmth to think straight, which means they're scared or they've been working hard or both. The other two were at the edge of the firelight, watching the northern bog with the focused attention of creatures waiting to be charged.

"Drebb," I said. All three of them jumped. Which told me more.

Here's what had happened. I'll give you the version without all of Drebb's interruptions, because Drebb's version of a story is architecturally unsound — it goes sideways, develops load-bearing walls in the wrong places, and eventually collapses.

Nana Farantee had paid Drebb to locate a buried crust-cache in Wadsley Common. The cache had been put down by someone else, Drebb didn't know who (which I believed, because Drebb's information was consistently limited to things directly in front of him), and Nana wanted it retrieved. The most efficient way to locate a buried crust-cache on boggy moorland is rooters. Rooters find things with their snouts — they're not smart, but their noses work on frequency registers that most other creatures don't, and rockcrust-packed material gives off a signal that rooters respond to like truffles.

So Drebb had acquired four rooters. I didn't ask how. The rooters had, in fact, done exactly what they were supposed to do. In two hours on the common, they had located the cache — a series of packed oilcloth bundles, buried eighteen inches down in the peat, maybe a hundred metres north of the camp.

The rooters had been magnificent. Drebb had been ready with the sacks. Then the scrufftails had arrived.

The first scrufftail appeared while Drebb was pulling up the third bundle. He didn't worry about it. One scrufftail is a nuisance. He shooed it. It didn't go. He shooed it again. It moved two feet and sat watching him with that expression scrufftails have — the one that says it is making calculations you're not aware of.

By the time Drebb had the fourth bundle out of the ground, there were twelve scrufftails around the edge of the excavation. By the time his associates had loaded three of the four bundles into the sacks, there were thirty scrufftails, and they were not around the edge any more. They were between Drebb and the remaining bundle, and there were two of them sitting on it.

Drebb made a grab. He got the scrufftails off the bundle. The bundle went sideways into the peat. While Drebb was wrestling the bundle back out of the peat, four scrufftails got into the sacks. This went on for a while.

The rooters, meanwhile, had smelled what was in the bundles and decided that their obligation to Drebb's commercial enterprise had been fully discharged. They began investigating the sacks themselves. One of them managed to get its snout through the neck of the largest sack, which brought the sack down on top of it, which caused a significant amount of noise. Another rooter investigated the tent structure nearest the fire, found nothing interesting, and expressed its disappointment by dismantling it. The third rooter sat in the middle of the camp and grunted steadily, as if narrating.

By the time I arrived, Drebb had one of the four bundles. The scrufftails had, at a conservative estimate, taken at least two. The rooters had sat on one and the contents were, in Drebb's words, distributed. The rooters themselves were still on the common, somewhere to the north, moving around in the murk the way rooters move when they are satisfied and not especially interested in going anywhere.

Here's when things became actually dangerous. It wasn't the scrufftails, exactly, though the scrufftails were a persistent problem — they'd started coming for our packs by now, and Drebb's associate had lost a boot to one that had apparently decided the boot was worth more than the foot.

The problem was the rooter that came back.

One of them — the big one, I think, the one that had been doing most of the excavation work — came back to the camp at a trot. Rooters don't trot unless they've decided something. This one had decided something. It had a bundle in its mouth, one of the missing ones, I realised, which meant the scrufftails had taken it and the rooter had taken it back from the scrufftails. The rooter was operating with a level of situational awareness I had not credited.

It stopped at the edge of the firelight. The oilcloth of the bundle it was carrying had torn at one corner, and whatever was inside had bled through, leaving a dark wet stain across the flat face. I had a brief, unwelcome thought about what concentrated crust-pack looks like when it starts to work on an unprotected surface.

You have to understand what a rooter looks like when it's deciding. Low-slung. Dense. All the weight forward. The tusks catch the firelight. The eyes — black as anything in The Dark Peak, nothing behind them except appetite — the eyes just sit there in that wide flat face and you get the feeling, which is probably wrong but feels entirely correct, that the animal is working through its options and that one of those options involves you.

This rooter looked at Drebb. Drebb looked at the rooter. The rooter dropped the bundle and charged.

I have a clear memory of the next thirty seconds, which is more than can be said for Drebb. He went straight over the wall — I heard him hit the ground on the other side, then more distance, then nothing. His associates went in opposite directions, which at least suggested they'd thought about it.

I went up. The only option. There was a standing stone at the south end of the camp — not large, maybe chest height, but the rooter was not going for the stone, it was going for the sacks — so I got on the stone and watched it work.

It was thorough. It went through the camp systematically, checking everything, knocking things over to see what was underneath. The scrufftails scattered. The rooter ignored them. It found the remaining bundle. It picked it up. It stood in the middle of what had been a smeln camp and was now a flat, scorched field of devastation, and it made a sound — not the grunt I'd been hearing all murkneet, something lower and more satisfied — and then it walked off into the murk.

I got down from the stone. Three bundles gone. The scrufftails had probably taken two. The rooter had reclaimed one from the scrufftails and then reclaimed the whole business for itself. Drebb had one bundle, presumably in the peat on the other side of the wall.

I went over the wall. Found Drebb sitting with his back against the stone, clutching the bundle. He handed it over without my asking.

I delivered it to Nana Farantee the following murkrise. She looked at it for a long time. Didn't open it in front of me. Didn't ask where the other three were. "One," she said. "One," I said. She paid me the full agreed amount — for one quarter of the consignment — which tells you something about what she thought of Drebb's chances of delivering the rest. Either generous, or she'd already written the other three off. I didn't ask. You don't ask Nana Farantee follow-up questions.

The thing about Wadsley Common — and this is what I keep coming back to — is that the whole evening made sense, by the standards of The Dark Peak. The rooters had been pointed at something and found it. The scrufftails had seen an opportunity. The smeln had made a mess of a job that should have been simple. Everything behaved exactly as it was supposed to.

The only surprising thing was the rooter that came back. Taking the bundle from the scrufftails. That's not instinct, that's recollection — the animal remembered what it had been doing and decided to reclaim the work. I don't know what that means. I've thought about it more than I've thought about most things I've seen up there.

The rooters are still on Wadsley Common. They go there every season. Nobody knows whose they were originally. Nobody goes up to find out.

I'd recommend not going to find out.

I need a joint, are you going to join me for some air?

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