A Black Fox Running

by Brian Carter

  SHADOWS

  The hills darkened slowly. Leaves silvered and blurred again, heavily green. A raw wind swept along the valley. He turned into the evening and carefully sorted through the scents. His coat was drenched with a hard shower of rain. All day the showers had fallen, sometimes far-off, slowly, like shifting columns of smoke. Grass shone across hollows and everything smelt of rain. Then the cloud was moving on and the sun returned as the rain hammered down and died away to leave the moors glittering.

  He presented the cock grouse to Teg and watched her clipping the wing feathers tight to the flesh. Nosing through the rough heath over Huntington Warren Wulfgar had surprised the chestnut-red bird in its jag amongst the ling. A peregrine had killed its mate on Easter Sunday and the crows had eaten all but one of her eleven eggs. The surviving egg was found by a stoat who rolled it off under her chin to feed her kits.

  ‘I think we should take the cubs away from here, Teg,’ Wulfgar said.

  She gave him a quick sidelong glance and asked why.

  ‘I’ve a feeling about the trapper. And I can’t forget the crow omens.’

  ‘Stargrief reckons you see too many shadows. Crows are crows – nothing else. I throw a shadow.’

  ‘My gut tells it differently.’

  ‘But we have everything here – a safe den, plenty of food, water, the lot. The cubs are happy.’

  ‘Nevertheless we are moving,’ Wulfgar said. His dark, triangular head tilted and his nostrils widened.

  ‘When?’

  ‘At sunset tomorrow.’

  ‘We are not,’ Teg said firmly.

  ‘I’m not arguing,’ said Wulfgar.

  Teg lifted her upper lip and snarled.

  ‘And where are we going?’ she said.

  ‘The Fastness.’

  ‘Is that another of your gut feelings?’

  ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘But the cubs aren’t old enough or strong enough to make such a long journey.’

  ‘Very well,’ Wulfgar said. ‘We go seven sunsets from now.’

  ‘It’s so daft,’ Teg snorted. ‘We hardly ever see men around here.’

  ‘You have my final words on the matter, vixen,’ Wulfgar said.

  ‘O I shall follow you, great fox. But you are as stubborn as a crotchety old boar badger.’

  He smiled and licked her muzzle.

  ‘You should have mated with Wendel,’ he said. The darkness inside himself was diminishing.

  They went onto the east slopes of the valley, where the wetness of grass and rock was turned to gold by the setting sun. Another shower fell, a swallow skimmed the river. The moors smelt like a living creature, and if they stood still and listened they could hear it breathing. Dog and vixen were content in each other’s company. The bond between them could not have been stronger.

  Running on the high ground was the perfect thing, for away from the cubs they could melt into the hush and enrich it with their silence. Her lovely form was all raindrop bright. Her hobbling gait on the steeper slopes made his heart lurch, and her sleekness, her beautiful ears, her delicate muzzle lit by the dying sun would haunt him for the rest of his days.

  A few sunsets later he sat beside the West Dart while Teg and the cubs were hard at the Life Game. The vixen was hiding a rabbit’s foot among the pebbles and encouraging the young ones to sniff it out.

  ‘The thin fox is the fox with an uneducated nose,’ she said. Nightfrond placed his muzzle in the river and got an earful of water.

  ‘The river is alive,’ laughed Teg. ‘But it isn’t an animal. You can’t bite it, silly.’

  The cub gazed into his own reflection and tried to understand. Brookcelt and Dusksilver came galloping up and bowled him over and a tangle of little bodies thrashed about in the shallows. From a grassy hollow between two boulders Oakwhelp turned a deaf ear and chewed the rabbit’s foot. He was almost as dark as his father and half the time he had to be coaxed out of his daydreams.

  ‘He’s different,’ Teg said. ‘He’s Wulfgar right down to the tips of his claws.’

  The cub stretched and yawned, and a faraway look filled his eyes. Yes, Wulfgar thought with a pang, there I am. He flashed across the seasons to the first spring of his life. Shimmering flowers, birds freckling and blotching the sky, the famished way he loved the dusk. Lying under the fresh bramble leaves, his nose among the dog violets, he listened to the steady pulse of his blood. Back there the grasses bent in a thwack of wind but only if he conjured the memory to the front of his mind and excluded everything else. Then he would see the thick, heavy nests of rooks and hear the cawing. A hushed place and Oakwhelp the small liberated ghost of a lost forever cub.

  He closed his eyes and floated calmly on the birdsong. He loved fine weather as all creatures do. The evening rushed into his knowing. A buzzard mewled. Oakwhelp dragged himself through the gap in the drystone wall and ran up the fox path to the boulders and trees. His brothers and sisters scampered after him and Teg leapt onto the coping stones for a better view.

  ‘Don’t stray,’ she barked. ‘Go to the earth and wait for me.’

  The untroubled landscape faded and left an ache around his heart.

  ‘They’re hungry,’ Teg said without looking at him.

  The hunting-passion nagged away at her like toothache. Soon she would visit the nearby vole runs and perhaps make a kill. But it was never enough. In her private moments she still made lightning rushes on rabbits and lapwings.

  ‘If you were to die,’ she said, ‘I would die.’

  ‘And what about the cubs?’ he said carefully, dragging his hindquarters in a slow, stiff-legged stretch.

  She dived into the shadows. The buzzard called again and between its keening and the murmur of the river came the low music of the pony fillies calling across the wilderness.

  WHEN THE WHIMPERING STOPPED

  The Devonport Leat followed one of the lower contours of Beardown Hill up the West Dart to the weir under Longford Tor, and from it a walker could look down into Wistman’s Wood. But the blond boy had crawled on hands and knees through the shallow waters of the leat until he reached a spot a hundred feet above the foxes. Parting the reeds with exaggerated care he sucked in his breath and held it for a moment.

  Three cubs were squabbling where the river curled narrow and low through the debris of last winter’s floods. Another cub was just visible by the drystone wall.

  The boy grinned and let the air hiss out between his teeth. Then the little red vixen glanced up and seemed to look directly at him and he froze again. A buzzard steered a high course over the valley and left its cat-calls on the breeze. Teg swung her head and sniffed at the noise. The shadow of the boulder came to life and stepped out onto the sward to become a large, black fox.

  ‘Old Blackie,’ the boy whispered. ‘It’s Old Blackie. I’ve found ’im! Bleddy hell! You’re beautiful. Beautiful.’

  Excitement loosened his bowels but he fought the urge until his stomach stopped growling. He was ten years old and moved about the moors like a fox. All day he had tramped the heights, robbing birds’ nests and catching butterflies. At dawn he had pedalled from Middle Stoke Farm, south of Venford reservoir, to Postbridge where the bicycle had been left in a cottage garden. With his satchel slung across his back he had walked up the East Dart to the great marshes beyond Sandy Hole Pass. Here he had taken the eggs of curlew, mallard and snipe.

  By noon he was jumping the black ditches of Cranmere Pool, and crows, larks, lapwings and golden plover had surrendered prizes for his collection. The egg box was full and he was happy, but while there was still daylight he was reluctant to leave the beloved places. Returning over Cut Hill and Rough Tor he had heard the vixen bark and had come fox-wise along the leat.

  ‘I idn ever going back to Paignton,’ he murmured. ‘I’m staying here always – for ever. Just me and the birds and the foxes.’

  He had been sent to the farm on doctor’s orders suffering from what his mother called ‘nerves’. Before the end of spring he
would be back in the seaside town eating his heart out for Dartmoor.

  The clitter swallowed up the cubs, the shadows deepened and a last soft blaze of sunlight touched Longford Tor; then the vixen was gone, running awkwardly on three legs.

  ‘A little cripple!’ the boy said. ‘Blackie’s got himself a three-legged vixen!’

  He shivered. The water filled his gym shoes and ran cold around his calves and knees.

  ‘Trust him,’ he thought. ‘Any old animal could mate with a four-legged vixen but he’s got himself a little cripple. He’s a proper hero – a spitfire pilot.’

  Wulfgar was swift and sure-footed over the boulders. He carried his pedigree proudly up the slope to the ridge, a noble black hunter blurred by the long shadows and the massed whortleberries.

  ‘I can give ’ee a lift to Hexworthy,’ said the cider-merchant.

  He hoisted the bicycle into the back of his lorry and wedged it among the barrels.

  ‘Idn you a bit young to be trapesing round the moors this time of night? You’m only a tacker.’

  ‘I’m ten,’ the boy said solemnly.

  ‘You’re him who’s staying at Middle Stoke,’ the cider merchant said.

  The lorry crawled up the hill, coughing carbon monoxide, its headlights settling briefly on the eyes of sheep and ponies.

  ‘Where you been today?’

  The boy told him and opened the egg box.

  ‘You gets about, don’t ’ee!’ the cider merchant said. ‘If I was you I’d clean myself up a bit before I got home. You’re grubby, boy. Dang me! If I didn think ’ee were a gypo at first.’

  ‘I saw old Blackie,’ the boy said.

  ‘Old who?’

  ‘The black fox – the one they can’t catch. He’s got a little three-legged vixen and some cubs.’

  ‘You lying?’ the cider merchant said. He grated down through the gear box and glanced across his shoulder at the boy.

  ‘It was Blackie.’

  ‘Where was he to?’

  ‘Somewhere.’

  ‘O yes,’ the cider merchant grinned.

  Outside, the darkness was complete. The sky had clouded over and the horizon was hard to detect.

  The boy pressed his face against the side-window and said nothing.

  ‘You got the price of a pint, Len?’ said the landlord of the Rock Inn.

  Scoble’s face darkened and he lightly touched his wart, first with one finger and then another, like a man drumming a tune.

  ‘Depends,’ he said.

  ‘Have a word with Ernie Claik.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s about old Blackie.’

  Scoble tugged at his nose while his flesh goosepimpled.

  ‘The old black bugger,’ he said hoarsely.

  ‘He’s around,’ said Claik. And he tapped his empty tankard on the bar.

  ‘Around where, boy?’ Scoble said.

  The shilling rolled out of his palm across the counter into the landlord’s cupped hands.

  ‘Mild and bitter,’ Claik said.

  ‘Around where?’ Scoble persisted.

  ‘That’s for you to decide.’

  The trapper frowned and tweaked his wart between forefinger and thumb. Claik grinned into his pint pot.

  ‘Cheers, Leonard,’ he said. ‘First today. I don’t hold with lunchtime boozin’.’

  Scoble watched him drink.

  ‘I hope this idn no trick,’ he said in a low, dangerous voice.

  ‘Old Blackie’s been seen, I tell ’ee,’ Claik said. ‘I give a lift to the boy from Middle Stoke last night. Cor bugger if he wadn in a state! Mud up to the eyebrows! Well, he swore he’d just left old Blackie.’

  ‘The boy’s mazed,’ Scoble sneered. ‘They say he walks round in his sleep, screaming his head off.’

  ‘Maybe so, but he saw old Blackie. Loobies have got eyes, Leonard. Anyway I picked him up by Clapper Cottage and he said he’d walked from Two Bridges. Now, if his bike was at Postbridge he must have gone up the East Dart to Sandy Hole and across to the West Dart and down past Wistman’s to Two Bridges.’

  ‘And you believed him?’

  ‘I did. His legs was all scratched and he had a girt box of birds’ eggs – curlews, peewits, snipe. You don’t find they by sittin’ on your arse doing nothing.’

  He drank slowly and deeply and added, ‘Seems like old Blackie’s got a mate – a three-legged vixen.’

  Scoble closed his eyes and smashed a fist into the palm of his hand.

  ‘Then he wadn lyin’,’ he crowed. ‘The little sod wadn lyin’.’

  ‘How do you know, Len?’ said the landlord.

  The trapper took something small, dark and furry from his pocket and slammed it on the counter.

  ‘A fox’s pad!’ Claik said.

  ‘Old Blackie’s got a three-legged mate, right enough,’ said Scoble with a pale grin. ‘I made sure of that. Reckon I’ll pay a visit to Wistman’s after tea.’

  Claik said, ‘Why Wistman’s?’

  ‘Vixens bring out their cubs at dimpsey. You picked the boy up after dark and he’d walked all the way from Two Bridges. I bet he was under Beardown at sunset. That old wood is handsome for foxes. I’d bet money on it.’

  He tossed the pad into the corner and said, ‘Go get it, Jacko. Us will have more than a pad before dark.’

  ‘You ought to have been a detective, Leonard,’ Claik said, winking at the landlord.

  But Scoble had forgotten him. He had some business to do with Bert Yabsley.

  Between showers it was very hot and for some reason he could not fathom, Wulfgar was irritable. Teg and the cubs sensed his moodiness and kept away from him. He lay on a rock in the river while the gnats danced round his head and the shadows slowly climbed the hill to Longford Tor. Eventually he got up and drank.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Teg said.

  He shook his head and yawned.

  ‘Cubs have to be fed,’ she went on. ‘I told you it wouldn’t be any fun looking after a cripple and four young ones.’

  ‘O don’t keep on about the cubs,’ Wulfgar snapped.

  Teg turned away, but Wulfgar ran to her side and licked her ears.

  ‘Tonight I’ll go to the chicken runs and kill the fattest bird,’ he said remorsefully.

  ‘A rabbit would be sufficient,’ Teg smiled.

  ‘You shall have both.’

  ‘Run far,’ she said, ‘and shake off your mood.’

  ‘At sunset tomorrow we leave for the Fastness.’

  ‘Will that make you happy?’

  He nodded and gently placed his nose against her own.

  ‘Go, Wulfgar,’ she said in her soft bell-like voice.

  As he sped up to the ridge without a backward glance, Stargrief called to him but he did not answer. The sun was immense in the smoke of day’s end and he ran on, keeping it on his right shoulder. Down the valley he went to the marsh by Powdermill Cottages, along the lane, over the road and into the dusk that was gathering around Bellever Tor.

  Scoble switched off the van’s engine at Crockem and put Tacker in the fishing bag. It had cost him thirty shillings to hire the terrier, but if Yabsley had not been drunk nothing would have persuaded him to part with the dog.

  The trapper loaded his shotgun and clipped Jacko to the leash. The haze of late afternoon had rubbed the hard edge off distance. Jackdaws flighted in to Beardown Lodge. Rain fell, hissing above the babble of the river; but it did not last long.

  Jacko shook himself and whined. His brain had cast its moorings and was nudging the ceiling of his skull. He dreamt the strange red dream of flickering red shapes on the broad delta between night and day. Footprints on the red sands, and the slow curl of the blood-wave carrying him into a dizzy plunge through darkness.

  Scoble crossed the river and trudged up to the leat. His old scars ached as day clotted into dusk. Another shower overtook him, pocking the water of the leat, trickling down his neck. Sweat glued his underclothes to his body, but he felt truly elated. There
were no birds to sound the alarm and he was walking into the wind. He knew he was going to kill foxes, of that he was certain sure. Yet it galled him to think of their mindlessness. They weren’t like people, they weren’t afraid of dying. Bloody vermin, he thought. God had an off-day when he made they buggers.

  The clouds were blowing away, leaving a clear sky. Teg’s chin went up and she smelt the sour reek of the thing she dreaded most. A short, harsh bark sent the cubs scuttling underground.

  ‘Lie quiet,’ she hissed. ‘Man is coming.’

  Dusksilver began to whimper but the vixen said ‘hush, hush’ and licked the cub’s muzzle. The taint grew stronger and terrible sounds crept down through the boulders: heavy footfalls, the whining of the lurcher and the yap of the Jack Russell, the grating voice of the trapper.

  ‘Tod, Tod,’ the vixen cried silently from a corner of her spirit.

  She was breathing very quietly. Her ears were cocked and her brush was twitching. Then she snarled and the stink of fear broke from her coat. The cubs could not stop whimpering and the loneliness of the sound was hard to endure.

  Her eyes flooded with bitterness and she whispered, ‘It will be all right. Just don’t move.’

  The nightmare was coming true but with a sluggishness from which she felt curiously remote. Tacker came at her and clapped down in the gloom and bayed. He was an excellent terrier, trained to locate a fox, not to attack it. Sometimes an animal turned and fought, and only then would the Jack Russell prove his courage.

  ‘Come to heel, Tacker,’ Scoble bawled.

  The trapper had found two bolt-holes above the earth. The main entrance was big enough for Jacko to squeeze through. Scoble’s plan was simple. When Tacker emerged he carried the terrier to the smaller bolt-hole and left him to guard it. Jacko watched him jealously and barked with the itch to be at the killing.

  ‘Wait a minute, boy,’ the trapper grinned. ‘They foxes idn going nowhere yet.’

  He scrambled up to the hole, which brambles and roots partly concealed, and thumbed back the trigger of his gun. The songbirds had stopped singing and Longford Tor was silhouetted against the moon. The dark-smelling wood withdrew into night and Scoble wiped the sweat from his eyebrows.

  ‘Go find ’im, Jacko,’ he cried. ‘Go in, boy. Go in.’