by Jack Hastie
“There might be footprints at least. I wish I could go.”
“You mean you want me to go and have a look for you?”
“Do you think you should go on your own?” said Fraser, concerned.
“I’ll take Sandy with me; he might just sniff out something interesting.”
THE KING MUST GO
Kids were born to the nanny goats in April. Bhuiridh watched over them protectively. But his hold on the herd was growing weaker. In the rut the previous autumn Gobhar had at last dared to push his rivalry as far as a head-to-head challenge.
With lowered brows and swinging horns the two bucks had faced each other and the thud of skull against skull, the clank and rattle of locked horns wrestling, had drawn gasps of admiration from the watching females and younger males. For long minutes they had butted, battered and wrestled until Bhuiridh sensed that his strength was ebbing and that the younger buck would sooner or later wear him down. He called up all his reserves of energy and cunning and, remembering an old trick he had learned early in his career as a fighter, slipped to one side, caught his opponent off balance, struck him square in the ribs with the full force of his battering-ram head and knocked him to the ground, winded and at the mercy of Bhuiridh’s hooves and horns.
Gobhar had slunk away, ashamed and nursing that special kind of hatred that grows out of humiliation, and swore revenge.
Bhuiridh had pranced away, horns held high, as he had done so often before, following a fight, but this time he knew he was only acting a part. He realised that he was no longer the strongest buck in the herd, and he was thinking of the day when he would be defeated, deposed and humiliated himself before his wives, children and grandchildren as he had deposed and humiliated his predecessor.
Now, in April, there were newborn kids again and the nannies were fussing over them. This was the only time of real danger for the herd, for no predator could tackle a full-grown goat. But the stumbling, tumbling kids – by day Eye of the Wind and by night Cruach the cat or the foxes would steal them away for a prize feast.
Guardianship of the herd was more important at this time than ever. Bhuiridh still did his job well. There was no slackening in his watchfulness, but one night Feargal, hunting for his mate who was about to give birth to their litter, took one of the kids.
Gobhar took advantage of the situation.
“Can’t handle a fox any more, can you? Think you could still see off a stoat? If Cruach came for a kid in the night you’d sleep right through it, wouldn’t you? Don’t you think it’s time to step down and leave the herd to somebody who can look after it?”
Bhuiridh bristled and automatically lowered his horns in the well-rehearsed guard position from which he had won so many battles before.
Their heads clashed; the crack of skulls sounded over the moor and echoed into the wood so that the message went out to all who could hear that a contest for the lordship of the entire territory was taking place. The smaller creatures hid, as children shelter from a thunderstorm.
The larger predators, Cruach and the foxes, took note that there might soon be a new guardian of the herd and far off in the depth of the wood Barook stayed awake specially to listen to the news of the great fight. In the sky Eye of the Wind and Kievarr watched with interest and the gulls and rooks and jackdaws passed the news from treetop to treetop down into the gardens of Dunadd until at last a robin hopping from one hawthorn bush to another cheeped to a chaffinch across the hedge the epic news that Bhuiridh, chief of the goats of the moor, had been battered and beaten, and had slunk away from the herd to brood on his defeat, all alone.
* * *
Rona went to the Goat Trail with Sandy as she had promised. She skirted the wood, crossed the Ballagan Burn on stepping stones and turned along the track towards the great tangle of boulders where the ring had been found.
Here she met the new king. Hooves foursquare, head lowered, horns swinging, stood Gobhar with the nannies and the kids behind him. It was the first test of his leadership and he had to prove himself.
Rona stopped short on the trail and hauled Sandy in by the lead.
The dog challenged the goat, “Give way! Clear out or I’ll tear you to pieces!” But he knew he was on the lead and his challenge was really only meant to impress his mistress.
There was no bluff about Gobhar. He lowered his head further and swung his horns like twin scimitars. “Get off my ground or I’ll kick you off the moor.”
He pawed the ground as a sure sign that he was about to charge.
Rona was not afraid of animals and she had often helped Cathy to treat sheep and goats and even much bigger beasts like cattle and horses, but she knew that with the kids behind him Gobhar meant business and it was safer not to provoke him. So she shortened her grip on Sandy’s lead and dragged him away.
The dog followed unwillingly, barking the most blood-chilling threats over his shoulder. “Lucky for you I can’t get at you. I’d tear your throat out and…”
Gobhar turned away, his first test triumphantly passed, and began to graze while the herd looked on in approval.
THE SKULL
In the new earth four fox cubs were born; little blind, greyish bundles. Sionnaidh waited until they were a month old and could scramble about and then gently nuzzled them up the entrance passage of the earth until they spilled out into the great big world beyond.
At first they were too timid to stray far from the mouth of the earth, but they soon grew bolder and in a few weeks were foraging in wider and wider circles in the bracken and among the boulders, on the moor and in the wood.
They sprawled and wrestled with each other aimlessly at first, but more and more they played at hunting and killing. One of them would stalk a tuft of grass or a sprig of heather and then suddenly pounce and sink his teeth in an imaginary rabbit or rat. Another would find an old bone or a stick and worry it to death. Then two of them would seize opposite ends of the same stick and wrestle over it until a third jumped on the pair of them and all three would collapse in a tumbling heap, the stick forgotten.
Later they explored further afield, along the wall of the wood to the place where the Ballagan Burn splashed down from the moor. This greatly excited them for the cubs had never seen a rushing burn before. What was this long, silvery creature which rushed and rushed and yet never seemed to go anywhere? At first they stood off, barking and growling, but when the burn paid no attention to them they crept closer and dared to touch it with an exploring paw. The strange sensation of wetness made them jump back in surprise, but soon their confidence returned and they came to accept the burn as something as natural as the bracken and the boulders. Then they followed it into the wood as far as Kwarutta’s pool where they wasted a great deal of energy dashing into the water after moorhens.
In the opposite direction the boulders behind the earth were a special playground for the cubs; a kind of gymnasium of steep rocks for them to clamber over and narrow spaces they could crawl into. There were big dark hollow holes under the stones where they could play hide and seek, but they never stayed there long for there was a strange, mouldy smell about the place quite unlike the clean air of the earth.
One evening the oldest and boldest of the cubs found a treasure there. He had great difficulty in getting it out for it was bigger than he was, but he tugged and hauled and heaved and shook it, growling all the time deep in his throat. Then it stuck between two big stones and the cub gave up and went off to play with the others.
But the next night he came back again, digging and scraping until eventually he found a way of getting it out into the open. One final heave and it came away. The cub sat down suddenly on his tail and the thing rolled off down the slope until it stopped against some dense bracken on the opposite side of the Goat Trail.
Then he barked to draw the attention of the others, “Look what I’ve found. I caught it all by myself,” and he licked it and gnawed at it.
When Feargal heard the cries he trotted over out of curiosity to se
e what his eldest son had found and there, eyeless and jawless, pale and cold, was a smooth, round skull.
VANISHING EVIDENCE
Fraser did not get any better.
The consultant visited him regularly and seemed concerned that the new drug he had prescribed didn’t seem to be having any effect. Fraser didn’t pay much attention to what he said, but he did notice that his mum never seemed to smile any more.
He could hardly crawl out of his bed some mornings and his only interest was in the tales of the animals of the wood and moor which he got from the birds. For those who hunted by night his main source of information was Nephesh. Fraser didn’t sleep well these nights and often he would get up when his mum and dad were asleep, open his window and call softly, “Nephesh, what moves?”
If the owl was within hearing distance he would come and perch on a chimney pot and call back, “Nothing moves, Birdboy” – this was a name he had given Fraser – and then he would tell of his night’s hunting or pass on news of Barook. It was Nephesh who assured Fraser that One-eye had not come back.
By day most of Fraser’s information came from Klamath. New people had moved into a house down the road and they had dug a large ornamental pond in their back garden and stocked it with goldfish. To their great annoyance Klamath had discovered this and made a point of dropping in regularly for a snack.
The heron covered a lot of ground in his flights from pool to pool and he knew more of what went on by day than anyone except Eye of the Wind. It was Klamath who gave Fraser one last hope that One-eye might still be alive.
“I heard a story from some of the geese coming south last autumn, of a fox with one eye hunting somewhere on the moors to the north,” he said.
Fraser told Klamath how the leader of the goats had stopped Rona and Sandy from exploring the spot where the ring had been found, so when Gobhar took the herd up the Goat Trail as Bhuiridh had done so often, and settled them in their other grazing grounds on the moor, the heron made a special visit to the garden to tell him that the goats were gone.
Fraser told Rona and made her promise to go back now that the way was clear to try to solve the mystery of the gold ring.
She went on her next day off and that night came to visit Fraser with a story so strange that it almost made him forget that he was ill.
“I went the same way as last time and was just past the place where the goat stopped us. I had Sandy on the extending lead and he was trotting on ahead when he stopped suddenly and started barking at something on the track. You’ll never guess what it was.” She paused and waited for Fraser to ask. “A skull! A human skull! It just lay there as if it was looking at me out of those big, hollow eyes.”
“What did you do?” gasped Fraser. “Have you got it with you?”
“I ran away,” she said.
“Ran away!” Fraser was disgusted.
“It was horrible. So I went to the police station and a policewoman came back with me, but when we got there it was gone.
“Are you sure this is the place?” she asked.
“I said, ‘Yes,’ but I don’t think she believed me.”
“I want to speak to Sandy,” demanded Fraser.
When the dog had been fetched and had got over his surprise that Fraser could talk to him in his own language again, the boy began to question him.
“Did you find anything interesting today?”
“Not really. There was an old skull on the Goat Trail but there was no meat on it and it didn’t smell good. I think it was old, very old.”
“What did it smell like?”
“Sort of mouldy, as if it had been lying in the mud for ages. Also,” Sandy wrinkled his nose in disgust, “there was a stink of fox about it.” Like most dogs Sandy despised foxes almost as much as he disliked cats.
“Fox!” Fraser would have put his ears up if he had been a dog. “You sure it was fox?”
“How can you possibly mistake the stink of a fox?” Sandy snorted. “I’d have thought that even a human could recognise fox scent.”
“One-eye,” muttered Fraser. “Has he come back at last?”
“How should I know? One fox is as bad as another as far as I’m concerned.”
That night Nephesh went hunting over another part of his territory so that Fraser didn’t get the chance to ask him if he had any news of One-eye. As he lay in bed unable to sleep and uninterested in the chatter of the bats outside, Fraser decided that, sick or not, he must go to the Goat Trail to see for himself.
ON THE TRACK OF THE SKULL
It was late one warm May afternoon when Fraser struggled into his outdoor clothes and slipped away along the track that led across the fields into the wood and past Barook’s set. This time he had further to go because the Goat Trail ran along the far side of the wood, but he reckoned he had several hours before his parents came home and he would be missed.
There was a lump in his throat as he passed One-eye’s old hunting grounds, but he pressed on as fast as he could. Barook would be fast asleep at that time of day anyway. He crossed the Ballagan Burn, now fresh and clean again, and then, to save time, cut across the dead part of the wood where last year’s great fire had swept through it. The fresh green growth of spring was coming up but there were blackened bushes and charred tree trunks everywhere. His feet kicked up puffs of black ash and there was a smell of soot in the air.
Fraser was glad when he was across that dark scar in the wood and could follow the boundary wall till he came to a place where it was easy to climb.
“If I was well I could climb it at any place,” he thought to himself.
Then he was on the Goat Trail, and he doubled back in the direction of the wild tangle of boulders near where, according to what Klamath and Rona had said, both the ring and the skull had been found.
Although it was still several hours before sunset, the cubs were outside the earth playing. They dropped out of sight as soon as they picked up the boy’s scent.
Whatever Sandy thought about the smell of fox, humans have such poor noses that they can’t detect it at a distance and Fraser would never have known the cubs were there if they had behaved like sensible foxes and kept quiet or if Sionnaidh or Feargal had been there to keep them in order.
But they were only cubs on their own and before long, although they did have enough sense to keep out of sight, they were tumbling over each other in the bracken and making a great deal of noise.
“Got you.”
“No you didn’t.”
“I’m faster than you.”
“I’ve got the skull.”
Fraser heard their sharp barks and stopped. Foxes they were, but not One-eye.
“Hiya kids,” he called. “What moves?”
The cubs froze.
“Who was that?” asked the oldest and boldest, the one who had found the skull and was now sitting on it.
“There’s nobody there,” said number two cub. “Only that stupid human.”
“I heard that,” said Fraser with a chuckle. “I’m a human all right, but I’m not as stupid as you think. I know you’ve got the skull.”
The cubs were petrified. Unfortunately this strange being was between them and the only entrance to the earth or they would have bolted underground.
“We didn’t know it was your skull,” whimpered the oldest and boldest. “We’ll give it back if you want.”
Fraser was just about to explain that it wasn’t his skull but that he would like to see it when there was a snarl behind him and a blurr of red shot past and crouched between him and the cubs, every tooth bared to the gums.
It was Sionnaidh.
“Keep back,” she snarled. And then to the cubs, “Run! Keep under cover. I’ll call when it’s safe to come back.” How she regretted not having been able to dig another entrance at the back of the earth.
“Keep back,” she repeated, the bristles on the back of her neck standing up as stiff as a brush.
Fraser could hear scufflings in the undergrowth behind
her. He sat down.
“I’m a friend of foxes,” he explained. “I came looking for my friend One-eye. He saved my life once. Have you seen him?”
Sionnaidh was suspicious. The idea of a man with a beast’s tongue who said his life had been saved by a fox was new to her and she had never heard of One-eye.
“You haven’t a dog with you?” she asked.
“No. Nor tame lightning either.”
“What do you want?”
“I’m looking for One-eye. He’s an old fox and he has been ill. You haven’t seen him?”
“I don’t know anything about him.” She was still suspicious, but there was something in the tone of the boy’s voice as he asked after his friend that made her feel that he was telling the truth.
Fraser realised that he had got the answer to one of his questions; so he moved to the next.
“Have your cubs really got a skull?”
“What’s that got to do with you?”
“Nothing really. I’m just curious. Is it a human skull?
“They didn’t kill anybody. They just found it. There wasn’t even any meat on it. It was as dry as a stone on a hillside.”
“Look,” said Fraser patiently, “I’m not a gamekeeper. I haven’t got a dog or the tame lightning with me; I’m not going to set any traps. Have you ever met a human who talked to you like this?”
“No,” admitted Sionnaidh.
“Then why won’t you trust me?”
“What do you really want?” she repeated.
“I just want to know where you got the skull. And there was another thing, a sort of coiled thing that was hard and shiny. You couldn’t eat it; you’d have broken your teeth.”
“My son found the skull up there,” she jerked her nose in the direction of the boulders. “Under the stones. I don’t know anything about the coiled thing.”
“Thank you very much,” said Fraser politely. He got to his feet. “I’ll go and have a look round. By the way, if you’re looking for rabbits a good place to go just now is… “ and he gave her directions to a newly dug warren with young in it that Nephesh had told him about. “Good luck.”