Frost Dancers: A Story of Hares

by Garry Kilworth

  Bittersweetinspring, the colony’s most handsome jill, said, ‘We’ve gathered just about every lucky charm the countryside has to offer, and still the flogre comes.’

  They all fell into gloomy silence after this remark.

  Speedwell changed the subject.

  ‘I met that hare-speaking hedgehog today, down by the river, do you know the one I mean? Jetsam or something.’

  Followme nodded.

  ‘Well, it stopped me and told me that there was a new hare in the region – a mountain hare of all things, a jack. Said if we didn’t treat this newcomer right she’d put a hex on me and rot my feet. Of course I told her where to go.’

  ‘Of course you did,’ said Followme in a sarcastic tone of voice, ‘you’re not frightened of being hexed are you, Speedwell? It doesn’t bother you that hedgehogs have got a reputation as sorcerers and magicians, and have been known to magic the eyes out of a hare’s head at a distance of two fields. That wouldn’t bother you, would it?’

  Speedwell shuffled in her form.

  ‘Well, I must admit, moonhare, she did have me a little worried, so I thought I’d tell you anyway.’

  ‘You did the right thing,’ replied Followme, ‘though I really can’t see what the hedgehog wants from us. We don’t need yet another hare around here, and certainly not some blue hare that hasn’t the foggiest notion how to behave in the company of brown hares. I for one have never met a blue hare, has anyone else?’

  It appeared that no one had. Their knowledge of blue hares was confined to field hare history, on which mountain hares had very little influence. The colony knew of the existence of such creatures, through word of mouth, but as to what they did and how they did it, no such information was available. Mountain hares lived a long way off, had their heads in the clouds, and were certainly not expected to come down to the flatlands and take up space that would be useful for field hares. It stood to reason that savages who liked to live on a lump of rock which turned to ice in the winter, and chewed on sedges and other unpalatable fare, would not like to live in a civilised society amongst those who were aware of the good things in life.

  ‘So,’ said the moonhare, ‘if I have no idea what goes on in the mountains, why should a blue hare know what goes on in the fields? It stands to reason,’ said the great matriarch of the herd, ‘that if we are each ignorant of one another’s culture, there would be no point in living together. Mountain hares being rough uncouth creatures, almost primitive so to speak, this jack would be uncomfortable in our company. He would not know how to act in a proper manner, would make mistakes and be miserable because of them. Of course, it is not their fault they are ignorant creatures, for they need to be surly aggressive characters in order to survive on the rugged peaks they seem to favour, but their lack of decorum would be a handicap to them amongst us more refined creatures.

  ‘So, my judgement is that if this mountain hare ventures near Booker’s Field, he is to be chased away.’

  There was a murmur of approval from amongst the other hares, and Reacher, her faithful sunhare, drummed the earth with his hind leg to register his own agreement. It was not often that any of the colony disagreed with Followme: she was a very large hare, with broad hind legs, and strong claws. Those powerful weapons had raked many an upstart in their time. Reacher himself bore a few scars as a result of some earlier disagreements with his beloved moonhare and was usually the first to approve of her judgements.

  There was a short period of silence, before Speedwell cleared her throat and spoke again.

  ‘Of course, I wouldn’t question your authority on anything, Followme, but there is the hexing to be considered.’

  The moonhare gave out a surprised whistle and then said, ‘Didn’t you say that the hedgehog threatened to rot your feet off?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Speedwell.

  ‘There you are then, the rest of us are safe, aren’t we?’

  Nothing more, except for a low whining sound once or twice, was heard from Speedwell for the rest of the evening.

  The hares fell to silence again after this exchange and waited. As the dusk deepened, the wind changed and salt air blew in from the sea, refreshing and heady, and cleared the minds of the frightened creatures of the fields. A fox was scented to the east, but though it caused a slight flutter of panic amongst the leverets, the adults hushed them and said that the fox was too far away to be a nuisance to them. It was probably heading towards the farmyard, hoping to find the chicken coop unlatched and the farmer deep into his dinner.

  Night began to move in with a serious determination now, mopping up the last of the light. The hares began to relax as another day came to its end. Soon they would be able to go out and feed under cover of darkness. The flogre was not known to hunt in pitch black, but always in that dreaded half-light that formed a flimsy meeting between night and day.

  ‘Nearly there,’ reassured the moonhare, ‘courage everyone!’

  There were murmurs of relief and one or two hares stirred in their forms, anxious to be at the greenest shoots before their neighbours.

  Highstepper was the first out of his form.

  He stood, stretched, and then rubbed his flank on the totem.

  ‘All right, feeding …’

  The sentence was never finished, though some of them swore they heard a shout of fear drifting down from a long way above the fields. They heard no sound come out of the stillness, prior to Highstepper’s last words, though at least two hares felt the wind of the swooping flogre on their faces, and one said later that he caught a glimpse of a giant flying creature climbing the steps of the sky in the last of the light.

  Once the drama was over and the hearts had stopped beating triple-time, the cadence of the evening returned to normal. The hares went out to feed, their minds numbed by yet another encounter with the flogre. They called to the rabbits who were emerging from their burrows: ‘Have you heard? Another one of our hares has been taken by the monster! Terrible isn’t it? What? You lost a rabbit this morning? Le chou? Wasn’t he the rabbit who was fond of cabbages? That’s awful. We don’t know what to do about it. Every dawn and dusk. At least you’ve got your warrens to go to. We’re stuck out in the open. Yes, I know we could use an empty warren, but you know, we are hares. It would be unnatural, wouldn’t it, to go underground. We’d go mad.’

  Thus they gained some comfort from talking about it, sharing their grief with their manmade cousins, the rabbits.

  The night passed, mostly in feasting. There were sentries posted at various times, but these hares rarely took their duties seriously, even though there were the normal dangers still to beware of, such as the other predators.

  They played too, as hares are wont to do, racing each other over the meadows, down by the river. One or two swam across, to get at the grass on the far bank, then came back again.

  They were in the middle of a game, when Reacher suddenly lifted his head and looked to the east. A dim, grim greyness was beginning to appear in the sky.

  ‘Back to your forms!’ he cried, and they scampered over the fields, through the hedges, and gathered around the totem once again, to face a dread new dawn, out of which might come the rapacious carnivore that was depleting their numbers, one by one, in order to satisfy its insatiable appetite for flesh.

  Chapter Fifteen

  In the dimness of his tower home, Bubba brooded on his life. Sometimes he was lost so deeply in himself he went into a trance. He was usually thinking about how much other creatures had, especially men, while he had to be content with living in a stone tower and eating fare that he had hunted down and killed himself. It was not that he disliked hunting, but that it was necessary to do it so often. Every dawn and dusk, unless he caught some large creature like the dog, he had to leave the tower and find running or flying meat.

  He remembered that the man who had been his mother never used to have to hunt, but had his provisions brought to him by others.

  —Tower, men have rejected me.

  �
��Perhaps they have their reasons, Bubba?

  —But I am of their kind.

  —Only in thought, word and deed.

  —You mean, tower, that though I think like a man and act like a man, they still do not like me?

  —Men do not like themselves very much, Bubba.

  Since Bubba was a very superior part-man, one with wings and able to fly, he believed he should be treated with far more reverence than ordinary men. They should hold him in awe, and bow down to him, like they did that figure on a cross in the church below. Surely Bubba was more important than a wooden man on a wooden cross? Mother had never gone to church, and now that Bubba lived in one, he could see why. Church was full of ordinary people, whereas mother had been larger-than-life, full of noise, especially when he had been sucking at bottles. Mother liked to hit things with his fist, mostly other men, whereas those people in church spoke and wailed softly and never used their hands against each other.

  When Bubba’s mother had been alive he only had to make a certain sound and food would be made available. They had hunted for sport, not out of need. Now this sound was ignored, as were all his sounds. Bubba was left to mewl and screech without any hope of anyone coming to see what was the matter or offering comforting sounds.

  Bubba knew he was physically different from other men, and he guessed that this was what they disliked in him. Men were inclined to be suspicious of all those who did not match their physical and mental likenesses, even other men. The tower was right. The truth was, Bubba knew, that men were afraid, especially of themselves.

  It was because of this rejection, that Bubba had decided to lift his own restriction on himself regarding preying on domestic creatures. Next spring, after the lambing, Bubba intended to feed on the soft flesh of the young of sheep, because he knew it would anger the men who looked after these creatures. He wanted to rouse a resentment in them, so that they knew who they were dealing with, for he was a creature who wanted his presence to be felt on the world.

  If stealing lambs did not get him the satisfaction he desired, then he would do something worse – something far worse. The dark thought at the back of his mind had to do with stealing new-born babies left in wheeled boxes in gardens, or even more heinous, the beloved kittens and puppies that ordinary men doted on. Bubba knew where to hit his enemies. He had already taken a small dog, and he would do so again, if the opportunity arose. Nothing was sacred to him any more, now that mother had died. The world would recognise his existence, or pay the price with their precious ones.

  —I will take their loved ones, tower.

  —You have the power.

  —Am I a man, tower?

  —You are as much of a man as you can be.

  —Then I can do anything I like.

  Bubba shuffled amongst the skulls and bones of his victims, then down below, in the church, the music started – long deep notes overlaid with short high ones, like stardust settling on a dark field. Bubba swayed in time with the rhythm, and when the voices broke into song below, he made noises in the back of his throat, the way he used to do to please mother.

  Mother had never come to the church though. Mother used to keep his hairy burly body covered with sheets and blankets while other humans went to the church. Mother got out of the nest of blankets at noon and growled and grunted at Bubba in a coarse tongue, while his big rough hands stroked Bubba’s head. Bubba liked the petting from the hand, with its cracked and dirty nails. Then mother would fry some soft livers, giving Bubba raw titbits while he cooked, and then when mother was ready to eat he would fetch a small chicken from outside and break its neck, before throwing it to Bubba. Thus the two of them would feast together.

  There were dreams in Bubba’s head, when he tried to think back too far, of being in another world where there were more people like Bubba. There were strange memory-glimpses of another Bubba, a huge Bubba, that stared down from a great height at little Bubba. The look, though terrifying, was kindly. Then the big Bubba’s face changed, to that of mother’s, and there were vague recollections of sleepless times, of hungry times, until one day Bubba woke up on mother’s wrist, and was being fed giblets from mother’s fingers. These dreams were incomprehensible, but certain feelings went with them: milkwarm feelings that softened the edges of Bubba’s soul.

  After the singing and murmuring below Bubba’s nest had stopped, and the gravel had ceased to crunch with human feet, Bubba decided to go out into the air. He went to the window with the point on top, and stood on the stone sill. In the distance he could see the river, winding like a long silver worm over the flatlands. There were clumps of trees, here and there, tufts on the landscape, and a shallow valley fell away from the rise on which the church stood.

  The sky was full of birds: magpies, rooks, seagulls, sparrows, starlings, many others.

  Bubba took to the air and cruised high over the fields, looking down on the patchwork quilt of farms. In flight he felt at his most powerful. There was a road running through the valley which carried the occasional box on wheels, and this went across a causeway to the mainland. Bubba swept down to have a look at how it crossed the sea, and found it rested on rocks against which the waves pounded.

  Bubba found a telegraph pole and perched on its top, watching all that went on below him. A man came along peddling a machine, his legs going in circles, his head down. On his back was a sack. Then some small humans, with sticks. One of these looked up and saw Bubba, pointed, and made a noise. The small humans bent down and picked up stones, which they threw towards Bubba, but their aim was poor and they lacked the strength to throw high enough. Bubba stared at them in contempt, until they finally ran away.

  He took to the airways again, sliding on the wind towards the seashore, seeing the creatures of the strand scuttling this way and that, doing small-creature things. Then he veered away from the sea into the centre of the large island, where there was a cluster of greystone houses. He wheeled over these, watching the humans put out their loose, removable skins on lines of rope. There were wheeled boxes down there, with babies inside them, but Bubba was prepared to wait. In any case, he had not long eaten, and would not be hungry until dusk.

  When he flew over the church again, there was a group of humans putting a dead man into an oblong hole in the ground, lowering him in a wooden box. Bubba knew there was a body in the box, because that was where they put mother when he died. Mother was down there, under the ground. Bubba had tried to scratch him up again, once, but mother was too deep.

  Bubba landed on his sill, and stayed there for a while, letting the sun warm his head and back. While he was there, dozing a little, a pigeon fluttered in, failing to notice Bubba against the dark interior. At the last minute, the pigeon realised its mistake, and veered off, sharply – but Bubba pecked at the bird savagely, stabbing a hole in its head.

  The pigeon flew a short distance, then dropped like a soft brick, and fell with a thump on the death-box below, its wings fluttering. There were screeches from the humans, who looked up, into the sky, seeing nothing. Bubba melted back into his tower, happy to have disrupted the ceremony below. These people took themselves too seriously, entombing their dead in wood, earth and stone. Once dead, you were but a carcass, and fit only to be carrion.

  If he had not had thoughts of escape and had stayed near his mother’s body after he had died, he might have eaten mother, so that the pair of them could have been together for all eternity.

  —Tower, I am lonely.

  —We are both lonely, Bubba.

  —We have each other, I suppose?

  —We are both lonely, together.

  Bubba settled on his bell-perch, waiting for the dusk to come around, when he could go out again and search for quarry on the fields, in the ditches, by the hedgerows.

  PART THREE

  Sunhare, Moonhare

  Chapter Sixteen

  By the time morning came Jittie and Skelter were fast asleep, after being up most of the night foraging for food. It was near noon before S
kelter emerged from his form and shook himself. Today was the day when he was going out to meet the other hares in the district. Jittie had told him about a jill hare called Speedwell, who would help him become familiar with the locals.

  Without waking Jittie, Skelter set out over the fields, in the direction the hedgehog had indicated during the night. He was to look for the white skeleton of a tree, standing in the middle of a cornfield, and this was where he would find the brown hares gathered.

  It was a longer journey than he anticipated, during which he frequently if instinctively scoured the sky for eagles, and it was quite a while before he sighted the tall blanched stump. As he approached it, he saw several flattened humps on the ground, which he recognised as the field hares. One of them, a large jill, came out to meet him. Skelter was a little taken aback by her size: she looked formidable with her long, powerful legs. He noted the yellowish-brown pelage and black-topped tail which separated her kind from mountain hares like himself.

  ‘Hello,’ he said as she approached, ‘my name’s Skelter.’

  ‘I am the moonhare, Followme. You’re not welcome here, mountain hare. We have enough problems without having to worry about a lost soul. I’m sorry for your plight – I understand you escaped at a hare coursing – but we are under siege at the moment from a monster called the flogre and we have no refuge to offer you from this beast. You just wouldn’t be happy with us, not at this time, so I suggest you move on.’

  Skelter could sense the fear amongst the hares. They appeared to be in a state of shock and it seemed that this flying creature that had them battened down was the one the rabbits had warned him about.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t wish to intrude where I’m not wanted, but all I need is company of my own kind. I don’t want you to feel responsible for me: I’m quite capable of looking after myself. All I want is to find a home. Don’t you have a spare place for me? I won’t be any bother.’