The Runaways Read Free

enclosure ten yards below Yarra. It ran in an exploding aura of blue fire the length of the wire mesh. It found the metal bolts in a concrete support and ripped fence and support from the ground as though a great hand had smashed and flung them down. The falling top half of the support flattened the low inner fence a yard from Yarra. She leapt, snarling with fright, into the air. Her nostrils were charged with the smell of burning from the lightning strike. She came down from her panic bound on top of the collapsed outer section of the boundary fence. As thunder rolled angrily again she was gone, her whole body, every nerve in her, impelled by fear and shock. She streaked away up the grassy slope towards the wood in a wild, fast-leaping run, moving like a tawny-gold streak at top speed.
    Within thirty seconds of leaving the cheetah enclosure she was in the wood on the hill crest, the first burst of fierce speed dead in her. She found a small path and moved along it, trotting now. Fear and panic were easing from her. With her fright and shock gone, she now found the strange restlessness she had known all day still with her. She gave herself over to it in a way she could never have done in the enclosure because she was at liberty.
    It was less than twenty minutes before the Cheetah Warden in his Land-Rover discovered that Yarra was gone. Over his walkie-talkie set he sent out a message to his headquarters and arrangements were immediately put in hand to organize a search party. By then Yarra was well away, beyond the wood, moving slowly down the lee of a small orchard of bare apple trees. The land dropped steeply below her. A mile away she could see the line of a road with cars speeding along it.
    Yarra stopped, watched the road for a while, and then turned and began to work a line across country parallel to the road below.

2. Shelter For Two
    If there was an instinct in Yarra to keep away from human beings and roads, there was the same instinct in Smiler. Dressed now in his own clothes, the blanket abandoned under a bush, since he knew it was too distinguishing a mark if he should be sighted with it, he half-walked, half-trotted along the down-lands that ran away from the wood. He kept just below the crest of all ridges because he knew, without having to think about it, that if he walked the crestlines he would be too easily seen. He had no idea where he was, not even the name of the county, nor of the nearest town. All he had known was that the policemen had been taking him to Salisbury. Salisbury meant nothing to him except that he vaguely remembered that there was a cathedral there.
    His wet jeans, although they were warming up a bit with his body heat, rubbed him on the inside of his thighs. His wet shirt clung to him under the heavy, sodden weight of his jacket like a tight top skin. He was hungry and he kept thinking of all the second helpings he had refused in his life. Beautiful pictures of steaming sausages and beans, hamburgers and packets of golden potato crisps floated before his eyes until he sternly gave himself a smart talking-to and said, ‘Samuel M., keep your eyes open for danger not for food.’
    He travelled for two hours across country and not for a single second did it stop raining. The thunder and lightning went gradually, sliding away into the east and finally dying out with a few muffled grumbles and a pale, distant streak of blue fire. The rain soaked into his thick tweed jacket so that it grew heavier and heavier on him. The water ran down his fair hair, plastering it to his head like thickly spread butter. It seeped down between his shirt collar and his neck and trickled over his naked body cooling down any heat his exercise was giving him. He shivered now and then. He began to feel miserable, too, but he told himself that misery was to be expected in the circumstances and the best way to beat it was to find shelter for the coming night.
    He crossed three roads, one of them a main highway,