fredbassett | Fic, Whispering Island, Part 4 of 8, Stephen/Ryan, 15

Title : Whispering Island, Part 4 of 8
Author : fredbassett
Fandoms : Primeval & Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books
Rating : 15
Characters : Stephen/Ryan, the Kirrin family and dog
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Word Count : 17,620. This part 2,197.
Spoilers : None
Summary : Stephen and Ryan get the chance to spend a weekend on a private island off the south coast.
A/N : 1) For full author’s note see Part 1 2) Links to previous parts Part 1 Part 2 Part 3.

Stephen automatically stretched out an arm to keep Ryan away from whatever he was looking it, but he needn’t have bothered. Ryan had worked with the tracker long enough to know that you didn’t press too closely when he was working, not unless you wanted to be on the receiving end of a very hard stare.

So he hung back and waited for Stephen’s signal that it was in order for him to approach. He looked down at the wet ground, for once not distracted by the sight of his lover’s long, lean body. He could see what looked like paw prints in the damp sand.

Stephen looked up at him and Ryan raised his eyebrows.

“Timmy isn’t the only dog on the island,” Stephen said in reply to Ryan’s unanswered question. “These prints would have been washed out by the last high tide.”

“So someone else is here.”

“According to Wilf’s map, the cove where we landed is the only safe place, and there was no boat there other than the one George and co. came over in when we went to look.”

“Someone arrived after we were there and came down here with their dog.”

“Dogs,” Stephen corrected. “There are three different sets of prints.” He stood up and gestured to a steep gully cutting down from the cliff above them. “They came from that way and I haven’t seen any human footprints.” He stared up at the cliff then looked around again at the prints.

Ryan didn’t need to possess Stephen’s skill in such matters to make a reasonable guess at what was going through Stephen’s mind.

“Do you really think someone has either abandoned their dogs here or thrown them off the cliff?”

Stephen shrugged. “People do go to quite some length to get rid of unwanted animals.”

Ryan didn’t disagree with him. It reminded him of people who would drive out into the countryside and throw out a ton of junk into a lay-by even though they’d probably had to drive past the municipal tip to get there. Likewise they’d abandon puppies by the side of a road rather than just take them to the nearest dog’s home. He supposed that rowing out to a deserted island was similar enough to be believable and probably slightly more humane than simply dumping them over the side of a boat in a weighted sack.

The thought of dogs being abandoned like that by their owners had put something of a damper on the morning’s activities. They dressed and decided to see if they could follow them to the animals that had made them. The trail was relatively easy to pick up at first, but once the animals had scrabbled out of the steep gully onto the cliff top the prints became a good deal harder to follow. But in their favour was the fact that they were tracking three animals, and therefore had a far greater number of potential prints to find.

Ryan left the tracking to Stephen and simply followed behind, admiring the sight of his lover’s arse in scruffy black cargo pants as he bent over to examine the ground.

“They’re staying together,” Stephen commented.

“What would they find to live on here?” Ryan asked.

“Plenty of small mammals around on an island the size of this one. If the choice is hunt or die, most dogs would learn to hunt. There’s fresh water from the stream we saw going over the cliff and they might even be able to find birds’ eggs.”

The trail led through dense undergrowth, overgrown with some thick brambles. Ryan wasn’t surprised when he saw Stephen pluck a tuft of reddish-brown fur off one thorny strand. He rubbed the fur between his fingers, staring down at the thick hairs.

“Whatever it is has got a thick coat,” Stephen remarked. “The under-fur is grey, but mainly the animal is that colour.” He indicated the russet-coloured outer coat. “Shouldn’t be too difficult to spot if they’re all the same.” He stared down at the ground for a moment and then added, “One of them has got a problem with its hind leg. The paw is dragging on the ground. It’s injured in some way.”

“Then let’s hope we can find them,” Ryan said.

As they made their way across the island, Ryan heard an excited bark and glanced at Stephen, wondering if they were about to find their quarry.

Stephen shook his head. “That was Timmy.”

As Stephen had predicted, a few minutes later they came into a small clearing where an outcrop of grey rock towered above the thick, springy earth. At its base was what looked like a small mound of dug-out soil. Timmy was standing with his nose to the ground, emitting a low whine. The large, usually confident dog seemed uncertain. Timmy pawed at the ground and whined again, then his nose twitched as he caught another scent. The dog turned around and wagged his tail in greeting.

George turned as well and saw them approaching. He nodded in greeting. “Have you been following their trail as well? Timmy picked up a scent and I found some old prints.”

“Yes. They’d been down to one of the coves and had been drinking from a pool at the base of a waterfall,” Stephen said, going down on one knee and examining the mound of earth at the entrance to the den the dogs had dug for themselves at the base of the outcrop of rock. “That’s odd. Dogs don’t normally burrow. Are there any badgers on the island?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” George said. “There aren’t any foxes, either.”

“Well, they aren’t going to come out with three of us and Timmy breathing down their necks,” Stephen said. “I presume we’re going to see if we can get them off the island?”

“I don’t like the idea of leaving them here.” George’s dark eyes flashed with anger. “What sort of nasty sod would decide to abandon their dogs here? Rotten bastards.”

Ryan certainly didn’t disagree with that sentiment. He loathed cruelty to animals.

“And one of them is injured,” Stephen commented.

George looked at him with grudging admiration. “You noticed that as well.”

“I spent a while working on a conservation project in the Brazilian rainforest,” Stephen said. “I learned to track there.”

Ryan kept his surprise to himself. It wasn’t like Stephen to volunteer personal information but he strongly suspected his lover knew a kindred spirit when he met one. It was obvious from the look on George’s face that the man had a passionate love of animals.

“If we go up on the rocks, they might come back out,” Ryan suggested. He knew perfectly well that the afternoon was very likely to be taken up with waiting for the dogs to appear. “The wind is blowing towards us, so if we’re up above, it’ll carry our scent away.”

“There’s a way up over there,” George said, gesturing with his hand. “Come on, Tim.”

Without waiting to see if he was being followed, George made his way to the edge of the ragged outcrop and started to work his way upwards. Timmy seemed to have had prior experience of scrambling up rocks and the big dog was clearly determined to follow where his master led. The climb was easier than it looked and in a matter of minutes, they had an excellent view both down into the clearing below and also over the remainder of the island. They could see the grey crenellated towers of the ruined castle in the distance and the dark sea of trees that covered the undulating landscape.

They settled down to wait.

* * * * *

An almost inaudible growl from Timmy alerted them to the fact that one of the dogs had decided to put in an appearance.

From the size and depths of the prints, Ryan had been expecting something about the size of an Alsatian but he was wrong. The first dog emerged from the burrow, and was smaller and longer bodied. Ryan realised that he had no idea what breed of dog they’d been following. The animal had a heavy, unusually elongated head with powerful jaws, small ears flattened to its cranium and a sinuous body that reminded him more of a large cat than a dog. Its tail was short and heavy, unlike that of any dog Ryan had ever seen. In fact, the whole animal was unlike any dog he’d ever seen before.

He glanced at Stephen and saw that his lover’s eyes had widened with surprise.

“What the hell is it?” George said under his breath.

“I don’t know,” Stephen muttered, but the look he shot at Ryan out of startled blue eyes gave the lie to his words.

Ryan spent a long moment mentally cursing whatever gods had doomed them never to have a quiet weekend away from their day job and then said, “Maybe someone’s disposed of something from a private zoo.” It was the best he could come up with on the spur of the moment and he knew the moment the words left his lips that George was unconvinced.

“It looks like some sort of cross-breed,” the other man said. “Look at that muzzle, it’s like a cross between a bear and a dog…”

George was staring down into the clearing as the creature turned and gave a sharp yip, so fortunately he missed Stephen’s wince. Bear-dogs. Ryan’s memory flashed back to a desperate hunt through thick woodland, running alongside Blade, the hunter turned the hunted. They’d gone to ground in a ruined cottage and had barely escaped with their lives. The animal he was looking at now was only young, far younger than its size suggested. Ryan had seen the fully grown animals and knew all too well the size they were capable of attaining.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked to see whether he had a signal. No such luck. But at least the creatures were on an island and they only had three civilians to contend with. Things could have been a lot worse.

Below them, a second animal came out of the burrow, blunt nose twitching as it scented the air. Luckily the wind was still blowing towards them, carrying their scent away from the animals. They all stayed silent and George had his hand on Timmy’s collar, obviously a signal to the dog to remain quiet.

A few moments later, a third creature emerged. As Stephen had predicted, one hind leg dragged awkwardly on the ground. The leg looked to have been broken, possibly twisted and snapped in a fall. Ryan wondered whether there was still an open anomaly and if so, where. The other two creatures were uninjured, but if an anomaly had opened somewhere up the outcrop or at the cliff edge, one animal could easily have been unlucky enough to hurt itself on the descent.

He heard George’s sharp intake of breath. The sight of an animal suffering obviously affected him the same way it affected Abby or Stephen. His immediate instinct was clearly to want to help, whereas Ryan’s first priority was to get an unsuspecting civilian as far away from the source of potential danger as possible. The fact that they had only been following the trail of three juveniles didn’t mean that there weren’t other, larger animals to contend with. He had no idea how long the young of this species remained with the adults. That was more Stephen’s area of expertise than his, but Ryan wasn’t in a position where he could ask that sort of question.

“We need to get back to the others and see what we’ve got that we could trap them with,” George said quietly, but not quietly enough to avoid his words carrying down to the three animals.

As one, the young bear-dogs looked up, ears pricked. They closed up together in a defensive group, heavy snouts lifted and jaws slightly open. At Ryan’s side, Timmy let out a full-throated growl.

The three creatures turned and disappeared back down their burrow.

Ryan let out a long, slow breath. His mind was already turning over the possibilities, coming up with strategies to try to contain the problem. They could make their way off the rocky outcrop down an easier route to the rear. He didn’t think the animals would be likely to follow them, but he couldn’t rule that out. He’d noticed how thin they looked, their ribs visible even through their thick coats. They’d obviously found enough food to keep them alive, but certainly not as much as they needed.

“We don’t know what we’re dealing with or how they got here,” he said. “And we can’t risk being on the receiving end of those jaws.” He gestured down the jagged slope. “Come on, we need to get back to the others.”

What he really needed was to get all four civilians safely off the island and then find a mobile phone signal so he could call this one in.

But Ryan had a nasty feeling that his life wasn’t going to be that simple.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lukadreaming.livejournal.com

Verrrrrrry interesting! And I like the way you used George and Timmy in the scene ...

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Fic, Whispering Island, Part 4 of 8, Stephen/Ryan, 15

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