A Black Fox Running

by Brian Carter

  Alert for a detailed picture of his Good Place Wulfgar had seen his dreams climb out of the darkness, shaping his joy. For a little while longer he lay staring into the night with the heightened sensibility of the predator. The thin days of winter were forgotten. He stretched and sat up, and his eyes tasted the rabbits feeding on the sward where the wood ended. Their smell was a hot knife turning in his belly – red meat to hold death at bay.

  O Teg, he sang from the silence of his thoughts. Your head is a brow of bracken in the autumn. Your body is sweet like the flow of sunset on a gentle hill. He shuddered, recalling the warm part of her from which the fox future issued in blind, mewling cubs. It was not merely the ache that coupling dulled but a choking happiness.

  She growled as he entered the den but accepted the young rabbit and made a noisy meal of it.

  ‘Down by the river the night is calm and full of scents,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t have to be away long and it isn’t very far.’

  Teg rose and shook the cubs off her nipples. They lay in a quaking mass while she silenced them with her tenderness.

  ‘I would give ten seasons of my life to have a complete set of legs,’ she said. ‘If anything happened to you we would starve.’

  ‘There’s Stargrief,’ Wulfgar said. ‘He wouldn’t neglect you.’

  ‘What about silly little Redbriar?’

  ‘She’s taken a more active mate.’

  Teg smiled and allowed him to cover her on the star-speckled leaves.

  They lingered a long time at the mouth of the earth before departing. Teg moved her head from side to side, testing the wind. Then they dashed into the darkness and shared again the joys of their courtship nights.

  The cubs’ eyes were open. Large and bright they stared from snub-nosed faces. Their coats were chocolate brown and woolly; their tails short and pointed. Teg fussed over them as if they would perish without constant grooming, and it amused Wulfgar to see them staggering under the force of her busy tongue. All of a sudden they had felt the urge to leave her belly-fur to explore the den, but as fast as they waddled off the vixen retrieved them and let them taste her displeasure.

  Wulfgar was rarely permitted to remain in the earth after he had delivered food.

  ‘I’m as servile as a farm dog,’ he told Stargrief. ‘I bring her a coney and she eats it and turns her back on me.’

  ‘You don’t sound too upset,’ Stargrief grinned.

  ‘I’m happy for her.’

  Morning light was slanting across the valley, falling on the scalloped hawthorn leaves and the broken surface of the river. A sparrowhawk rushed past trailing thin, yellow legs, and larks climbed high on their song. The thrill of the living world hummed through Wulfgar’s body. Things soon lost to the eye remained trapped in a fine mesh of ganglia and the musky scent of gorse filled his mind. All round him the season burgeoned. Whinchats had returned to nest on the railway embankment near Moretonhampstead and a nightingale sang after dark in Yarner Wood. Swifts circled the church tower of Holne and cuckoos spoke above the open heathland.

  Several dawns had flared since the sluice at Slapton Ley was clogged with elvers. Spawned in the Sargasso the young eels had drifted on ocean currents for three summers before reaching Devon. Herons trod the shallows and fed well, alongside gulls and waders.

  He went alone to Cherrybrook Farm and ate curlew chicks on the boggy ground. At the foot of the dwarf elm in the goyal by the old quarry the leaves were like a mouse’s ears.

  Golden lichens plugged the cracks and chinks in the wall, and the countryside was the colour of a firecrest. The day had been hot enough to ripple distances, but after sunset the temperature dropped rapidly. Curlews and lapwings fluted across the dusk and he hunted field corners where the rabbit runs were furrows in the dew.

  Teg’s reluctance to have him around permanently had forced him to bivouac on the west side of Longford Tor. From a couch of whortleberries and ling he could watch over the valley and the earth, but sometimes the purring, bell-like cry of the vixen was almost too much to bear.

  During his hilltop vigil he saw Isca the roebuck eating bramble leaves on the edge of Wistman’s Wood. The small, red-brown deer crept through the shepherd’s crooks of new bracken, curling his black, velvety upper lip to tug the shoots off the tendrils. The doe sat under an oak, her ears flickering and her nostrils opening and closing. She had dropped a stillborn fawn and was still mourning the loss. From a hole in a dead limb of the oak came the soft lisping of infant birds. Eight naked marsh tit nestlings crowded together among the pony hair and down. The hen scolded the deer, crying ‘chickabee-bee-bee-bee’, and shaking her head with its glossy black cap.

  Teg hesitated at the earth’s entrance and gathered the scent of roedeer, crow, rabbit, woodpigeon and the myriad vegetable smells of the wood and moorland. The pigeon, who had nested in one of the few rowans that survived amid the oaks, started her song, ‘Cooo-coo, coo coo, coo’, repeated three times and ending abruptly on a crisp ‘coo’.

  Teg was satisfied. She led the cubs into the sunshine, and while she suckled them on a mossy boulder, they kicked their back legs as they drew the milk out of their mother. Teg breathed a sigh of contentment and let her tongue dangle. The woodpigeon gazed at her for a moment then eased the nictating film over its eyes.

  After the feeding the cubs played the Life Game. They hissed and spat like kittens, grappling each other and rolling over and over in balls until the one underneath squeaked for

  Teg to release him. The vixen was keenly interested in all they did. She remembered how she had learnt the tricks that had honed her own hunting skills, so she twitched her brush and the cubs pounced on the tag as they would pounce on a fieldmouse.

  Wulfgar brought them toys: the skull of a fitch, a grouse’s wing, a moth, beetles, dead frogs – things for them to carry around in their mouths or strike with their paws. They brawled over the treasures, playing tug-of-war and pretending to disembowel with a feline raking motion of the hindlegs. Teg answered their cries like a cat greeting its owner and her melodious trilling froze the hair on Wulfgar’s back.

  He laid a rabbit at her feet.

  ‘There can’t be many of these left,’ she said cheerfully. ‘You must have emptied a warren or two.’

  The cubs bustled up to Wulfgar and rubbed against his legs. He touched each one in turn with his nose, for they smelt of Teg, but his stomach did not flood with tenderness as it did when he was close to her. The confusion of the wood seemed an extension of his own confusion. Sunlight felt its way through the massed twigs and branches, settling on the grey-green blister lichens and the yellow lichens, burnishing the luxuriant clusters of mosses and wood rush. Everything was tangled and lost within other things: whortleberries and brambles, filmy ferns, honeysuckle, hard ferns, fallen branches, polypody ferns, the carcass of a sheep, spiky tendrils worming into crevices, rock upon rock.

  And his mind was in a worse muddle. He tried to concentrate on the Star Place but self-doubt clouded his thoughts. Shamefully he realised he had always been woolly-headed. The stages of reasoning were like stepping stones across a wide river, and he could never progress beyond the seventh. Never. But of one thing he was sure: the beauty of the living world stopped when it reached Man.

  Stargrief’s hooded eyes made him look very old and tired – a creature closer to death than life. He is already a tenant of the Star Place, Wulfgar thought. One life is enough until you near the end of it. Star Places are born out of despair and bitterness. Despite his love for the ancient dog fox he listened to the Tod Saga with mounting irritation. Stargrief squatted on a fallen tree and said: ‘We must follow the Tod Saga in the flow of the seasons. Winter is the moors before Tod. Spring is the birth and re-birth of Tod. Summer is his doghood, and autumn his death and fulfilment.’

  Dog and vixen had heard the saga countless times yet never before had it lacked relevance. The cubs were playing hide-and-seek among the boulders close at hand. Brookcelt and Nightfrond fought over a leg of
hare and the woodpigeon continued to croon. This is our time and place, thought Wulfgar.

  But his doubt had taken a new direction and he lowered his glance and sighed. Teg laughed softly, casting her eyes over the two dog foxes.

  Stargrief had read her mind.

  ‘Tod and the Star Place offer hope in a life full of fear and cruelty,’ he said. ‘If we give ourselves to – ’

  Teg stopped him with a cold chuckle and said, ‘We all know that foxes must suffer and die. It has been so for ages. But I don’t care about the Star Place – wherever that is. I’m alive and Tod’s got nothing to do with it. He doesn’t help, he just complicates things. There is me and Wulfgar and the cubs. Maybe I’ll be a golden fox like Tod one night and chase golden rabbits over golden fields; and maybe I won’t. I’m not interested in what happens when I’m crowbait. Get on with the Now of life is my motto.’

  ‘And the visions?’ Stargrief said wrinkling his nose.

  ‘Visions, dreams, runes – rubbish!’ Teg snarled. ‘You bright pair have a lot in common with the lurcher.’

  ‘And perhaps you are Redbriar’s sister,’ said Stargrief.

  ‘O get out of my sight – both of you,’ she sneered. ‘I need more than sunset sagas to put milk in my paps.’

  Wulfgar and Stargrief narrowed their eyes and pretended to find the cubs amusing. Dusksilver balanced on her hindlegs and gave Brookcelt a left hook with her forepaw. She had decided the stoat’s skull was her property and carried it around in her mouth. The little dogs had given up trying to steal it off her.

  ‘Cubs can be quite boring,’ Wulfgar said one night.

  ‘You must make allowances for Teg’s condition,’ said Stargrief. ‘If she had all four of her legs things would be different.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ said Wulfgar doubtfully. ‘But it’s ‘Nightfrond this’ and ‘Oakwhelp that’ and ‘Did you see Dusksilver with that frog’s leg?’ As far as she’s concerned the moon shines out of their behinds. I’m no more than a glorified guest.’

  ‘You sound as if she’s your first vixen.’

  ‘She’s the first I’ve ever cared about. I really need her.’

  He nuzzled the blackness that was scribbled over with scents. The hawthorns wrote a rounded script on the horizon, stars were scattered across the sky. The foxes walked over the dark moorland in the lovely silent hours before dawn.

  Stargrief was panting when they reached the straggling copse below Beardown Lodge but he managed to jump up without warning to catch a moth in his forepaws. He grinned and crunched the insect like a child eating a sweet.

  ‘Pretty good for a bonebag – hey?’ he said.

  ‘I bet it’s knocked five sunsets off your life,’ Wulfgar said.

  The pleasant earthy smell of badger set his nostrils quivering. Perhaps if anything the nights of early May were too rich in scent and he recalled how they used to drive him crazy during the first spring of doghood. More pungent than the badger smell was the tang of freshly killed rabbit.

  The foxes sat among the bluebells and watched the feeding badger. He was a young boar by the name of Rootscowl. Although he had fought desperately for a mate he was still a bachelor and this did not help sweeten his temper. Placing a powerful forepaw on the rabbit carcass he lifted his white head and grunted, ‘Are you looking for trouble?’

  The two black stripes that ran vertically from behind his ears almost to his snout made it difficult to see his eyes.

  ‘That’s a lot of coney for a small badger,’ said Wulfgar. ‘Maybe you’d like to donate it to a better animal.’

  Rootscowl showed his teeth in a mustelid snarl and said, ‘Try and take it – sheep’s fart!’

  ‘Well, let’s see if you’re as nimble as your wits,’ Wulfgar said.

  He swaggered up to Rootscowl while Stargrief sought a strategic postion behind the badger.

  ‘Rootscowl idn stupid,’ the boar said.

  Wulfgar looked down his muzzle at him and smiled. But it was no longer fun. It was fox sport but it wasn’t funny. Standing on the slope of bluebells waiting for the inevitable to happen he surrendered to emptiness. Briefly the shapes and sounds of the night ceased to be real. Then Stargrief was charging and the badger was swinging to meet him and there was no need for further thought.

  Rootscowl lowered his head and rushed at an enemy who was swerving away into the shadows. The badger grunted and turned, slipping on the crushed white flower stems. Both the fox and the rabbit carcass were gone.

  ‘Rootscowl is stupid,’ he groaned.

  Luckily there were bluebell bulbs to grub and more esoteric badger pursuits to blunt his disappointment.

  ‘The trapper will come one day,’ Wulfgar said.

  Beneath the hawthorns and hazels the bluebells rose stiffly from a carpet of dead leaves. Stargrief was close to sleep. They had eaten the rabbit and dropped scats near a scenting post. Now Stargrief surfaced reluctantly from his catnap, sniffing the new day in the east.

  ‘This isn’t the trapper’s hunting ground,’ he yawned.

  ‘He’s like us,’ said Wulfgar. ‘He has our cunning.’

  ‘But he doesn’t know Rocky Wood.’

  ‘If he wants me badly enough he’ll find it.’

  ‘In all my seasons no man has behaved like this.’

  ‘Old fox, I speak the truth. When the cubs are stronger we will go to the Fastness. A man might die hunting us there.’

  Birds awoke and gave voice. To begin with, the crows shook the dew from their feathers with harsh caws, then a robin burst into song followed by a woodpigeon and a blackbird. The cuckoo quickly joined in and as the volume increased a thrush poured out a clean torrent of music.

  The foxes curled up side by side and sank into the mystery. The chorus was crescendoing. Wrens, chaffinches and coal tits opened up, but it soon became impossible to identify individual voices.

  Stargrief was asleep, muzzle pressed between forepaws. And in the river valley the mist hung pearl-grey, luminous, motionless.

  Much of what the cubs did was instinctive, but important parts of the Life Game had to be learnt from their mother. The vixen asked Wulfgar to bring her a fresh cowpat.

  ‘Beetles live in the cowpat,’ she told the cubs. Lactation was finished and she had mixed feelings about the loss of intimacy with her young.

  ‘Beetles are good.’

  She turned the pat over and held the insect in her teeth.

  ‘Chomp-chomp! – good. Now you try,’

  Brookcelt took a big mouthful of dung and spat it out. His eyes widened, for his mother had never deceived him before.

  ‘Beetles live in the scat.’ Teg laughed. ‘Beetles very good. Scat very bad.’

  ‘Bad – ulk!’ squeaked Brookcelt.

  ‘Beetle,’ said Nightfrond. His teeth cracked the insect’s carapace.

  The vixen had left the earth and was lying-up close by under some roots. She came to the cubs with great caution, her zig-zag approach bringing her into the wind and around the earth in a circle. She was suspicious of everything and would prick her ears to decipher the different bird calls and cover the ground with her nose before entering the earth. Beneath the boulder-jumble the chamber was untidy but not dirty. The floor was littered with bones, the skulls of animals and birds, wings, feathers, scraps of sheepskin and the odd putrified body of mole, shrew and weasel.

  Wulfgar’s gifts were dropped near her and wordlessly accepted. She broke up the carcasses and the cubs were given the vitamin-rich entrails and gobbets of masticated flesh. But Wulfgar was not content merely to provide. He was the bold warrior chieftain of an outlawed tribe, yet Teg treated him like a ga-ga vixen. The lizard basking on the dead bracken had more dignity.

  The stalking exercises were simple and there was no need to teach the cubs to pounce stiff-legged. The rule was: ‘Stalk it – don’t charge at it’. Guile was the key word. A fox is born with a head full of cunning but it has to be developed.

  ‘It’s a waste of time to chase a
flying bird,’ Teg said. ‘Grabbing them from the grass or the hedge is the fox way. A sleeping bird can be shuttled quickly from roost to fox’s belly.’

  ‘But it’s hard to see a bird in the dark,’ said Oakwhelp.

  So Teg showed them how to use their noses, how to choose a thread from the web of smells that spread at darkfall.

  One evening Wulfgar trotted in with an old Wellington boot from the rickyard at Cherrybrook. The smell of Man covered it like an unpleasant mould.

  ‘Learn this smell, my little primrose buds,’ Teg said. ‘Learn and never forget. It is the scent of Man, our great enemy, the great killer of foxes. When your nose brings it to you, run, hide, disappear.’

  Like most wild creatures foxes are born without the fear of Man.

  ‘They are the Death Creatures, the bogeywolves,’ said Teg. ‘All animals and birds fear them.’

  And Man set snares and tilled gins. Therefore it was necessary to teach the cubs to recognise the smell of the choking-wire and gin-metal.

  ‘I lost my leg in a gin trap,’ the vixen said grimly. ‘One careless moment and I finished up a cripple. Many foxes die in the metal jaws. It is a bad death.’

  At another mealtime she said, ‘Never crawl under wire or roots or branches. Man puts his snares in these places. Wherever it is possible jump over or go around. Remember this and live.’

  The cubs sat before her in a half-circle while she spoke the deathless words of the clan. The Fox language was sweet on her tongue. Wulfgar lay on his heather terrace high above her and let the music of her voice warm his blood. The days were long and green; the nights magical. He lived the invisible fox life, coming to Teg when the mist was blue-edged; and their talk was low and tender against the quiet chorus of the cubs’ breathing. Then the thoughts that belonged to the kennel of old age were lost in her image.