Frost Dancers: A Story of Hares

by Garry Kilworth

  When she had gone about a hundred and twenty lengths, the dogs were let loose, and with them, all hell.

  There was a startling roar from the humans, and they began barking and shrieking at the tops of their voices. There were twelve greyhounds all together, and they ran with tremendous speed. There was no talking amongst them: they were intent on seizing the quarry before it escaped. It seemed they were in competition, overtaking each other, and nudging, in their efforts to reach the hare. Skelter’s heart was in his throat as he watched the jill telemarking over the frost-hardened turf, skidding occasionally. Keep going! he thought. Don’t look back. It seemed the jill knew what she was doing, for she did not pause an instant, but made straight for the hedge on the far side of the meadow.

  The lead hound came up to her tail when she was about ten lengths from the ditch running below the hedge, but she avoided the snap of his jaws, breaking left. The dog swerved, and a second hound was alongside her, driving her towards the previous leader. She did a skip and a jump, over the nose of the second hound, and reached the thick hedge. Unhesitatingly, she flung herself at the hawthorn. Her long muscled body curved through the air, forepaws touching, hind legs trailing. It was a slow graceful leap, as if she knew it might be her last and she wanted to go out with dignity.

  Miraculously, it seemed to those watching from the far side of the conflict that she had managed to find a weakness in the foliage, and was away on the other side. The dogs all piled up against the side of ditch, milling around, shouting now, calling after the prey, no doubt telling her they would have caught her if this had happened, or that had not occurred.

  Shortly afterwards the second hare was prepared.

  The first two hares made it safely through the hedge, and Skelter was beginning to feel some hope. It seemed that the handicap the dogs were given was just enough to allow a healthy hare to outrun them. It did not seem important to the men that the dogs caught the hares, though of course the hounds themselves did not feel the same way about it.

  So far Skelter had seen no mountain hares in the event, only field hares, so he would be the first of his kind to run that day. Skelter knew he was not as fast as a field hare, and this of course worried him a great deal. He would have to rely on tricks, yet the terror had erased all he knew from his mind. It was a blank. He had to calm down, get some sort of hold over himself, before the run.

  However, before him it was the turn of the hare from the dales, who had already been through this horrifying circus once before in his life.

  From the moment Trickster’s cage was sprung and he left the starting line, Skelter could see the dale hare was in trouble. His telemarks were too acute, the angles too sharp, and he was wasting energy before the hounds had even been slipped. When the dogs were loose Skelter could tell from the urgency of their running that they knew, they just knew, they were going to catch their quarry.

  They went as a body, hurtling across the field, the wind streamlining their coats. This time they did not bother to jostle or concern themselves with winning. They simply went straight for the kill.

  Trickster might have made it.

  At the last moment, when the dogs were up alongside him and he only had six lengths to go, he seemed to panic and doubled-back on himself, turning into the field instead of going for the hedge.

  No! thought Skelter. The other way!

  It was only a matter of time after that, with the hare desperately jumping this way and that amongst the dogs. Skelter could hear the jaws snapping viciously together. Snap! Snap! Snap! A piece of tail came away and Trickster rolled sideways. A hound took him by the back, flipped him high in the air. Trickster’s scream, like that of a human baby in intense pain, pierced the air. Skelter and the other hares went into a frenzy of terror, running round their cages, drumming, biting the wire, scratching at the floor of the cage trying to dig their way out.

  Trickster landed in the middle of the dogs and then disappeared, still screaming, under a melee of savage mouths. The greyhounds tore at the dying hare, ripping away pieces of skin and flesh, running around and worrying the bits they had in their mouths as if the leg or the ear was a toy.

  There is a creed which governs the moral code of predators, whether they be wildcats, eagles or men. The creed runs: The true hunter is one who hunts out of necessity, not out of the pleasure of killing. This creed is not set down anywhere, nor repeated from mouth to mouth in plain words. It is a knowledge that is intrinsic to all creatures who hunt: deep within their souls they know they should heed the code. Those who are concerned with their morals, concerned with the purity of spirit, do not hunt out of the pleasure of killing. There are many men who observe the code of the hunter, but there were none present at the death of Trickster.

  Trickster’s screams had stopped, but the bloodlust of the greyhounds was high. They shouted to one another, in their own language, and the sounds were of fevered triumph. They ran and cavorted, evading attempts to restrain them. The humans now tried to get some order back into the beasts they had unleashed on the unfortunate hare, but it took quite some time before any sort of calm was restored.

  There was a different look in the eyes of the greyhounds now. The heat of the kill was high. They were frantic to get at the next hare. They had tasted blood, and they wanted more.

  The next hare was Skelter.

  By now Skelter had come to recognise the procedure of events from the activity amongst the men and dogs. Once the confusion of the recent kill had settled down, there was an air of speculation amongst the humans. They moved amongst each other, making earnest noises, making gestures. Then a single bark would go up, and all noise ceased. The hounds at this point became attentive and began to get restless. Finally, there would be utter silence, a moment in which the whole world stopped, before the cage was sprung. Most hares believed that this suspended moment was the point at which they should sprint, run for their lives, until their lungs were bursting … except that Skelter, though he would not have thought it of himself, was an exceptional hare. He was actually capable of thinking ahead, making a plan, instead of carrying out one of the two traditional alternatives for escape – freeze, or run.

  If the hare froze, of course, the men would just make noises and prod it with sticks, until it did run. So Skelter saw that there was really only one result, with no real alternative. Skelter had also noticed that none of the hares so far, even the experienced Trickster, tried to double back immediately on leaving the cage, and run to the rear. That must have meant there was a barrier of some kind, preventing the hare from running the other way. The barrier had to be arranged to funnel the hare out onto the open field, towards the far hedge.

  However, there was one aspect of it all that Skelter realised had not been exploited, probably because the running hare was so terrified, it simply did what it had been traditionally taught to do: race away from the predator as fast as possible, using one or two unpredictable moves during the flight, like zig-zagging and leaping. Show your enemy your backside, and run! The white bobbing tail, especially if there were many of them, was supposed to confuse the hunter.

  Skelter now remembered Bucker’s words – those he had not understood at the time Bucker was advising him. He knew what they meant now. It’s not always the fastest runner that escapes the predator!

  Outside the cage the animation amongst the men had stopped, the dogs began to strain on their leashes, an air of expectancy fell upon the scene.

  Then came the suspended moment.

  Skelter’s heart was thumping in his chest.

  The cage was sprung.

  He shot out into the open field, but only at half-speed, knowing that the hounds would not be released until he was a certain distance from them. There had been no deviations to this rule of the proceedings. Every hare that had been sprung had been allowed one hundred and twenty lengths, before the dogs were allowed to follow. Skelter gambled that even if he hopped and skipped casually over the field, eating daisies on the way, he would still
be permitted his hundred and twenty lengths.

  When he had gone a certain distance, he knew he was right. He could hear the hounds shouting and the men baying, as he made a line for the corner of the field, but at a much slower pace than his top speed. In this way he conserved his energy for the final dash for freedom, wasting little on his precious head start.

  The far hedge seemed an infinity away, and he had to keep his panic in check, to stop himself from bolting too early. He even noticed a pigeon flying nonchalantly overhead, and it seemed incongruous that this bird should be so free and easy, while a life and death drama went on just a short distance away.

  Halfway across the field, the shouting amongst the dogs suddenly stopped, and Skelter knew the race was on. He immediately kicked up into top speed. Had he been a field hare, he might have wasted even more ground space by zig-zagging and increasing the distance he had to run. But he was a mountain creature, a blue hare, and he did not zig-zag in flight. Instead he curved outwards, away from the pursuing hounds, in a wide graceful arc. It was not the shortest distance between two points, but it gave the dogs an extra piece of ground to cover, and it was certainly shorter than weaving or tacking.

  The space between Skelter and the hedge seemed to close so very slowly in his own mind, but in fact it was only seconds between his spurt and the point at which he reached the hedge. He had left most of the dogs behind him, though one was gaining rapidly. Then, consternation, there seemed to be no break in the hawthorn hedge, through which he could fling himself.

  He darted sideways, running along the side of the ditch, desperately seeking a gap. A brown hare, which lives in the fields and knows the hedges like he knows his own paws, would recognise weak places in the high hedge of hawthorn that Skelter would fail to identify.

  There was a shout amongst the hounds, as they realised their prey had not yet escaped, even though he had tricked them with his fancy running. There was a renewed vigour amongst them, as they worked their tired muscles to greater efforts, and tried to be the first to clamp jaws on the small hare who was giving them so much trouble.

  The lead hound came up within a length of Skelter’s tail, preparing for the kill. Skelter could feel and smell the dog’s hot musty breath on his body, knew the slavering mouth was fractions away from a strike. There seemed to be no escape. Skelter skipped desperately as the jaws snapped, taking a few hairs from his rump. There was a shout of triumph from the hound. Two more dogs came up alongside now, and cut off Skelter’s retreat. They closed in.

  Suddenly, a miracle appeared in the side of the ditch, a dark round thing which Skelter instantly recognised. A field hare, never having been underground, might have instinctively avoided the hole, and run on, no doubt, to his death. Skelter had lived in tunnels all his life, although his form was much shorter in length.

  It was a rabbit warren’s bolt hole. He shot in, past a chamber occupied by a startled doe and her kittens, and out of the main entrance. Looking around he realised that he was now on the other side of the hawthorn hedge. The hounds were scrabbling around the bolt hole on the other side, terrifying the rabbits in their galleries below.

  Skelter’s heart was still battering his ribs, and his legs would not stop running. He crossed one field, then another, then another, before he finally came to a halt, exhausted. He lay on the cold ground and got his breath back, before surveying the countryside around him.

  He was free! He had outsmarted them, for all their sleek and cunning ways, their narrow heads and bodies, their long legs. A whole pack of greyhounds! And a little mountain hare had shown them its heels. That was something. That was really something. He wished his clan had been there to see him. He hoped his ghost-hare had been watching from the Otherworld.

  The cold air bit into his lungs as he gulped it down into his breast. His legs were still trembling with the fright and his muscles still twitching with the effort. He tried to get his bearings in this foreign land, where the mists snaked over the flats, and the sky was an enormous dome with horizons all around. Stark trees stood on the skyline, too few to interrupt his vision of the long flow of the level landscape to distant lines where earth met sky. The light here was murkier – not so much softer, but a kind of dirty yellow with more density, as bog waters were to the clear burns. It was a mysterious land, that held a sense not so much of evil, as dark secrets and ancient laws. Skelter felt he had taken a step back into antiquity, and that he would have to rethink his knowledge of the landscape, and remodel his expectations from it.

  In enclaves between the ploughed fields were places of stagnant ponds, of small forgotten thickets green-barked by time and grown into themselves, of lone creatures not in their right heads, of eremites and inbred suspicions and distrustful eyes.

  There was no evidence of any mountains around. On the cultivated land, which constituted most of what was visible to him, the occasional tree in the corner of a field could be seen above the hedgerows, but for the most part it was tilled earth, ditch and hedge, whichever way he looked. The hedges themselves were squared, neatly-trimmed and straight. Everything appeared very uniform, unwild, open.

  There was absolutely no cover from eagles.

  Chapter Seven

  Skelter’s prime concern was with eagles, and the fact that there were no rocks and gullies, no tufts of grass, no hillocks or hummocks, behind which to take cover. Although the hedges prevented him from seeing a great distance, he had come far enough in this alien land to know that it changed very little from one field to the next. Mostly they were fields of young vegetables, corn, rape seed, and other crops. There were also fields that had been tilled, but were not showing any green. Finally, there was pastureland, but not a great deal of that.

  The sky was vast here: a huge area that frightened him with its openness. From that wide expanse at any time might come an attack from an eagle, dropping out of the dinginess with lightning speed. No longer did his horizons curve up around him, containing his world.

  He had seen no other hares around, and could only assume they had all been killed off or moved out of this vulnerable place. It did occur to him that because the coursing was taking place nearby, the neighbouring hares had vacated the vicinity, and would return at a later time. The thing to do was to keep his wits about him, and try to cover that vast swathe of sky occasionally with a quick all-round survey.

  Every so often his heart would patter, as a shadow swept across the land, and it only settled to a regular smooth rhythm when he looked up to see a magpie cruising like a hawk, or a pigeon playing on the air currents. Once, there was the familiar sight of a shadow that went in lazy circles, and Skelter looked up expecting to see an eagle winding up the world, only to find a heron turning above a small pond.

  One thing he was relieved about was the fact that though there was little cover for him, there was even less for wildcats, who liked to sneak between rocks and outcrops. In that respect, and with no fear of being ambushed by foxes, he was able to travel in relative safety.

  He satisfied his hunger with some corn shoots, that were still green and succulent. Then he set about investigating his new home. Skelter realised that it would take a miracle to return him to his beloved highlands, and he had already used a couple of those in surviving. He had a stoical disposition, and he came very early to the conclusion that he had to make the best of his new situation.

  He found a field where a huge oak overshadowed the corner, and he fashioned his form under one of the great roots of this monster. Once or twice during the day he caught sight of a brown hare, way in the distance, but he was not yet in a mood to approach any of his cousins. He thought perhaps that this might be yet another of the escapees from the hare coursing, and that they might get together some time to pool their resources of knowledge. A field hare would know better than he what was the situation regarding eagles in the vicinity.

  Sighting the brown hare reminded him of his recent conversation with the hare from the dales, Trickster. It had been a terrible experience,
watching him torn apart by the hounds. Skelter had seen hares shot, carried off by raptors, snatched up by wildcats, but he had never before witnessed the complete ripping apart of a body, so that the limbs, head and torso were separated from one another in two minutes.

  Trickster had not been a small hare, either. Most brown field hares were at least two pawlengths longer than blue mountain hares. Their ears were taller, too. They seemed more sturdy, more muscled. What chance would Skelter have stood in the jaws of those vicious greyhounds?

  That night he settled down in his new form, protected from above by the ancient root. The wind was chill, but bearable. The night sky was at first covered by a rash of stars, but later the clouds came over in sheets.

  He heard a fox barking in a nearby field, but it was not close enough for him to worry.

  There was a barn owl in the oak above for part of the night, but it had already had a successful hunt, for it disgorged a paw-sized pellet of undigested fur and bones which landed near Skelter’s form: the remains of some small creature that it had killed and eaten. The owl gave out some shrill kwick-kwick-kwick sounds occasionally, then flew off, presumably in search of the secretive voles and dormice, of which there were many busy in the grasses around the ditch. Not that a barn owl would attack a fully-grown hare in any case, but it was as well to be wary of all predators. Who knew whether owls and eagles were not in league, one pointing out meals of interest to the other? You couldn’t trust carnivores of any kind, even the shrew would exchange its own young for a choice worm or slug.

  With the dawn came a sky streaked with yellow. There were many birds about which indicated a coastline nearby. Oystercatchers and knots flew over in tight little flocks that twisted and turned instantly to unheard commands. There were also seagulls of course, but these birds reach many miles inland, and their name is misleading since they rarely go out to sea. They are more birds of the shore and field, attending the ploughing and seeding of the land. Still there was no sign of eagles, and Skelter emerged and began nibbling at the grassy edges of the ditch, and amongst the fresh barley. He found some succulent bark, and wonder of wonders, some hawksbeard which were delicious.