After he had been feeding for some time, he noticed that the hare he had seen the previous day had come closer, nibbling his way through the field. Skelter made a mental note of the hare’s position, and promised himself that he would speak to the creature later.
However, Skelter did not get the chance of a peaceful approach. While he was busy with some bark, a heavy blow suddenly struck him on the flank. He went rolling into the icy ditch. Jumping to his feet, he looked up to see a large brown hare glaring down at him.
‘What was that for?’ he asked.
‘My field,’ snapped the other hare. ‘Who do you think you are? What do you think you are? You look like a runt to me, with your short body and little ears. Keep off my territory, jack, or there’ll be big trouble.’
Skelter was affronted.
‘Territory? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
The brown hare, a big jill, glowered at him.
‘You know very well what I’m talking about. This is my field. You want to eat in this field, you come and see me first, and I’ll tell you no.’
‘A whole field? You want all of it?’
The jill shook her head as if exasperated.
‘Where are you from, stranger? You have a funny way of talking. No, don’t tell me, I don’t really want to know,’ she said wearily. ‘Listen, you’re obviously not acquainted with the rules around here. We stick to our own piece of ground, and we don’t blatantly invade another hare’s territory, not unless someone’s looking for a fight. Let me give you a little word of advice. You’re small, even for a jack. If you’re going to insist on invading the property belonging to others, then you’d better be prepared to collect a few scars.’
Skelter climbed out of the ditch and backed away from the jill. She was indeed a formidable creature, with strong back legs and enormous shoulders. The way she ground her teeth at him made him sure she meant business. He knew he would have more than a tough fight on his hands if he tried to take her on. There was nothing for it but to try to make a dignified retreat without too much loss of face.
He said haughtily, ‘I have no intention of breaking any rules. I escaped from a hare coursing yesterday, and I was just making my way across country …’
‘I could have told you that,’ she replied contemptuously. ‘You think you’re the first hare to come through my land? I get them all the time. They hold those meetings regularly, always in the same place, and I get the dregs of the earth wandering through my field. I’m sick to death of refugees stealing my crops. Now on your way.’
‘Have you no charity?’ asked Skelter.
‘None whatsoever. If I did, I would have a tribe of you hares, all eating away at my larder. I can’t afford you.’
Skelter began to hop away, but he turned for one last conversation.
‘Listen, surely you’re not the only hare around here, are you? Where’s the rest of your clan? Taken by eagles, or what?’
The jill kicked a sod of earth impatiently with one of her hind legs.
‘Eagles? Clans? Get out of here with your gibberish, before I lose my patience completely.’
This encounter did nothing to help Skelter’s confidence. If he was going to meet with aggression from hares, what were the rest of the mammals going to be like? He was used to living side by side with many hares, sharing feeding grounds, acting as a group. Here was a hare that lived like a hermit, completely on her own. What was more this hare eremite did not want any other hares to share her field, and talked about being threatened by their presence. It was a strange new world that Skelter had entered here.
He left the jill’s field, making his way through the hedge, and across a pastureland. Even before he was halfway across, he noticed yet another hare, staring at him with hostile eyes from behind a cowpat. It was obvious that he had gone from one occupied territory immediately into another. If this was going to be the pattern it was possible that he could travel forever and not find an empty space for himself.
He continued his journey, the smell of salt air becoming stronger all the time. Eventually he came to a road, which he decided not to cross, but to follow for a while. Staying a few lengths inside the field, he travelled in a westerly direction. On his journey he passed one or two humans who were using the road. One was on foot, another on a bicycle. Skelter was not concerned by the presence of humans, so long as they were not carrying guns and were not accompanied by dogs. If they tried to chase him, he could outrun them every time, and what was more important, they knew it too. His recent experience notwithstanding, Skelter knew that most humans were harmless enough beasts.
To Skelter’s surprise the further he went the more the ground began to undulate. There was now a sparsity of hedges, and those that there were had been left to grow ragged and unkempt. They were thorns of a sort, shaped by an offshore wind into a sweptback position.
Marram grass began to appear on sandy patches of soil, and spiky gorse shrubs with small yellow blooms patterned the area in maze-like clusters. There was a sense of wildness about the place which Skelter found heartening.
Finally, he came to a line of sand dunes, tufted with marram, which he climbed. Once on the peak of the dune, he found himself looking out over an astounding stretch of water so vast that it took his breath away. It went out to the edge of the world, where it dropped away, presumably as a giant waterfall. The surface of the water was spattered with cuckoo spit and its whole scape was in a state of continuous flux. There was a roaring and booming from the surf around the ocean’s mouth, as it continually bit at pebbly sands and dragged rattling shingle down its throat.
Skelter had never seen the ocean before, though he had heard a great deal about it from others. One clan was in contact with the next clan, all across the highlands, and they passed on their observations to their neighbours. Hare lore too, had many stories of the sea, and rabbits claimed they had crossed it over a thousand winters ago, coming from a distant land.
It was an impressive sight and one which had Skelter trembling from ear-tips to tail. There was something about its emptiness that frightened him. If the fields of the flatlands were stark and bare, they were nothing compared with the ocean. At least there were hedges in and around the fields, to break up the awful monotony, but the sea had nothing except itself, which admittedly it continually tried to gather up to form hedges. These simply collapsed or ran away from the great body of the water to peter into nothingness.
A blunt-nosed boat was crashing through the seas, dipping and rising, its funnel emitting an almost horizontal trail of black smoke as if it were trying to draw a line across the surface of the ocean. It looked squat and solid, made for rough channel waters, for barging the waves aside and bulldozing a passage through them.
When Skelter tired of staring at the expanse of dark green water, he began to make his way along the dunes. He went over the crest of one, and was about to descend, when he stopped dead in his tracks. There in the dip between the two dunes was a fox, staring back at him. He could see the creature’s brown eyes, the sharp white teeth, the sensitive nose. It was the first time he had come face to face with one of these predators, though he had seen them at a distance, and for a moment he remained frozen.
The fox had a seagull hanging loosely from its jaws, its wings drooping, its tail feathers torn. There were other feathers scattered about the sands, and it was obvious that the fox had killed more than one of the gulls, and that she was in the process of caching this bird. The vixen let the dead gull drop to the ground, but otherwise remained still.
Predator and prey rarely, if ever, speak to one another in the animal world. The languages differ so much that there is a vocal difficulty: foxes and their ilk speak with a low, even, mellow tone, while herbivore languages tend to favour a kind of sharp sing-song rhythmic sound. The cultural gulf between the two kinds of creature does not encourage social intercourse, even if there were no carnal needs to take into consideration: the predator’s whole existence is inextricably enmesh
ed with the skills of hunting, stalking, and killing, while the herbivore’s existence is concerned only with fresh vegetation and staying one jump ahead of the hunters. Finally, and most importantly, carnivores consider it unethical to converse with their prey, though the quarry often attempts persuasion or cries for mercy when all other forms of defence have failed. It is difficult to kill and consume a creature with whom you have just passed the time of day without a feeling of having transgressed some moral code or other.
So neither Skelter nor the vixen attempted any kind of vocal communication. There were other signs, which could be read fairly accurately however, and Skelter soon recognised that the fox had eaten her fill and was not inclined to chase him. If he walked into her jaws, it was doubtful she would refrain from closing them, but like many predators foxes are fairly lazy creatures and do not like to work unnecessarily.
The vixen’s eyes said, Get Out Of Here Fast, and Skelter intended to do precisely that. He skipped around the edge of the dune and continued his trek along the high tide mark of the beach.
There were aerobatic terns dipping and diving over the shallows on the shoreline, and the inevitable heavy-eyed seagulls argued viciously amongst each other, pirating what they had not fished themselves, and generally behaving in a thuggish manner. The worst were the great black-backed gulls, larger in body length than Skelter himself, and ready to attack anything that moved if it meant food. When they weren’t robbing the nests of cliff side birds, they were snatching fish out of each other’s beaks.
One or two of these, accompanied by herring gulls, dive-bombed Skelter as he ran along the shoreline, carking harsh obscenities at the furry intruder. The attacks were not serious, the gulls had merely decided to mob a passing stranger for fun, but they were nonetheless worrying to a lone member of the lepus timidis family.
There was no cover from the creatures and Skelter ran full pelt down the smooth wet sands, scattering dunlin in his path, and gaining a little satisfaction from that. On reaching the point at the far end, he found the road again, which used a narrow man-made isthmus, a causeway, to reach a large flat island. Skelter could see farmlands on the island, with one or two buildings and houses, but no great conglomeration of human dwellings. However, at that time the wind was high and the waves were breaking over the roadway from either side of the spit, and it would have been suicide to attempt to reach the place. A creature his size would be washed away within a short time.
Instead, he turned inland again, and before very long came to a copse of deciduous trees. He made his way into the interior, under the brambles and briars, until the uncomfortable darkness of the woodland closed around him. There he began to feed on fungi. He felt contained for a while, in the dark green bosom of the thicket.
It was not in his culture to like the humid and succulent heart of a spinney, with its smells of mushrooms and toadstools, wet green vines, spongy moss and rotting vegetation. This was a place full of suspicion and dark thoughts, where weasels gathered to hold conferences and corruption could be found behind every ancient trunk. It was a secretive world, full of whispering wood mice, clicking beetles and meaningful silences.
He felt a thousand eyes following his every pawstep. A green woodpecker significantly ceased drilling for insects to watch him go beneath its tree.
He found, near the centre of the spinney, a rabbit warren. The day was coming to an end and he was desperate to find a safe place for the night. He decided to enter the main entrance and ask for sanctuary. Whether the rabbits would allow him to stay, was another matter, but he was determined to try. Anything was better than risking another night in the open country, where the cover was non-existent.
He moved cautiously down the hole.
Chapter Eight
Skelter entered the darkness of the warren, letting his eyes get used to the lack of light, moving slowly so as not to alarm any occupants. The tunnels were tight and airless to a hare, and he had the sense that his body was expanding and would become jammed. Overcoming his claustrophobia, he continued along the dark shaft, trying to keep his panic in check, for if he gave way to it now, and tried to scramble out backwards, there was a serious risk of becoming lodged. Still, he found it hard to breathe, and his chest felt constricted. Once or twice he stopped, his fear of the tight space making him regret he had ever entered, but after a while he managed to beat the terror down and continue the nightmarish journey.
At first he hoped that perhaps the warren was empty, that it had been abandoned, but it soon became obvious from the smell that it was inhabited. Then he began to hear the twitterings of kittens, and the murmurs of does. When he reached the first gallery, he peered inside. It was pitch dark of course, but he formed mental images from his other senses, especially from his sense of smell.
There was a doe in there, and she seemed alarmed.
It appeared as though she was about to squeal for help, so Skelter said, ‘Don’t worry, I mean no harm. I just want shelter for a night or two, until I …’
The doe shrieked, piercingly.
In a few seconds the tunnel was crammed with four or five other rabbits, mostly bucks. Their eyes gleamed red in the darkness. They looked angry.
‘I didn’t touch her,’ Skelter told them.
A buck hopped forward a pace. He was not as long-bodied as Skelter, but he had a lot of meat on him. The buck also had right on his side, which is a formidable weapon, and this obviously gave him courage. The rabbits were on their own territory, which gave the buck another advantage. Skelter had to keep reminding himself that he was a hare, and hares are stronger, faster and meaner in battle than rabbits.
‘What do you want here?’ asked the buck. ‘This is a warren. Go back to your field or your form, whatever you call it. We don’t like strangers in here.’
‘I don’t have a form at the moment,’ answered Skelter. ‘I merely want some safe place for the night.’
The buck sneered.
‘Don’t give me that. All you need to do is scrape out a hollow. That’s your form, for you.’
He hopped another pace forward, but Skelter ground his teeth in annoyance. Humans could root him out of his home, and carry him off to far lands, he knew that. Dogs could chase him across meadows, and he had to accept that. Foxes could stare him out in the dunes, and send him packing, and he had to take it on the chin. Perhaps other hares, whose territory was guarded jealously, might suggest he go on his way. But a rabbit telling him what he could or could not do? This was too much. He ground his nibblers again.
‘You grind your teeth at me?’ questioned the rabbit. ‘This is my home, not yours.’
‘Look,’ said Skelter. ‘If you want a fight, I’ll give you one. I’ll take you all on. Maybe you’ll bite a few chunks out of me, but let me tell you I’ve had enough of being pushed around. I’ll rip off an ear or two before I’m finished with you.
‘On the other hand, we don’t have to hurt each other. All I need is a hole to rest in. I don’t know what you mean about a scraping in a field, but I’m not a brown hare, I’m a blue mountain hare. I’m used to hiding in the rocks, or in a short burrow. Open fields make me nervous. There’s no cover from the raptors. Do you understand?’
The rabbit fluffed himself up, but seemed a little unsure of his ground now. He turned and glanced into the eyes of the doe behind him, who seemed to say, don’t look at me, I didn’t ask him to come here.
‘Are you the chief here?’ asked Skelter.
‘I’m the biggest buck in the warren,’ replied the rabbit, ‘which means I have the biggest say in what goes on around here. Is that what you mean?’
‘More or less. So if you say I can stay, no one will argue?’
‘They can argue, but it won’t get them anywhere.’
Skelter nodded.
‘In that case, what do you say? I won’t bother anyone, I promise. Do you have a spare side gallery, that you’re not using at the moment? I’ll try to pay my keep, by bringing in some food tonight.’
&nbs
p; The rabbit still seemed unsure.
‘It’s not very usual,’ he said.
‘I’m aware of that, which is why I’ll appreciate it all the more. I should be grateful for any help. I was taken from my homeland by men, forced to run a course chased by greyhounds, and now I’m down on my luck. It’s not very usual to find one of my kind in these parts either. It’s not a normal situation.’
The buck made up his mind.
‘Oh, why not. It’s not as if you’re a fox or something. Come on then. My name’s L’herbe.’
‘I’m called Skelter.’
‘Strange name,’ said the buck.
‘So’s yours,’ answered Skelter, beginning to bristle again.
‘No, no, don’t take on,’ said L’herbe, soothingly. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it. Just that I’ve never heard a name like that before, even amongst the hares around here. But of course, you’re not from around here, are you?’
The other rabbits were still clustered in the tunnel, a silent audience during this exchange between stranger and homesteader. Now that it was settled that the hare was going to stay, and there was to be no fight, they could relax and watch what happened without worrying. Rabbits are terrible worriers, obsessive creatures, and fret over the most trivial and commonplace things, like when they last used the south exit, or whether they have eaten the right food for a balanced diet. There were some rabbits that kept small pebbles in their nests, to turn or rub with their paw, in order to relieve them of some of their nervous energy.
‘No, not from around here,’ replied Skelter, ‘but where does your name come from?’
‘It’s an old family name,’ said the buck, ‘which came over the seas with my ancestors.’
Skelter nodded, and said, ‘Oh,’ but his expression obviously gave him away.
Frost Dancers: A Story of Hares Page 7