Frost Dancers: A Story of Hares

by Garry Kilworth

  ‘You’re lucky, then.’

  ‘Yes I know. The first time I saw that thing was when I crossed over from the mainland, along that causeway, and turned right once I reached the island.’

  ‘You turned right? How sad. If you’d have turned left, you would have found me straight away.’

  Rushie said, ‘I realise that now. Anyway, there’s a large area of woodland on the far side of the island, and I was travelling just to the east of that, during twilight, when I sensed something up above. I knew there were no golden eagles around, but my instincts took over, and I dashed into the trees.’

  ‘Quite right too.’

  ‘I ran deep into the wood, which was quite dense, through the thickets and between tree trunks, convinced that if there had been something in the sky, it could never follow me in there.

  ‘I was wrong. I heard it coming through the trees. I couldn’t hear its wingbeats, but every so often, it used a branch as a perch, as if it was cruising from tree to tree, using the boughs to launch itself deeper into the wood. I panicked a bit, of course, and looked up through the network of branches, trying to locate whatever it was that was following me, and I have to tell you my heart almost jumped out of my mouth when I saw it.

  ‘I mean, I couldn’t see it properly, not enough to get a clear view, but it was obviously huge, a giant creature, crashing through the small branches, unconcerned by the number of trees in the forest. It was used to woodland, it knew how to manipulate the trees, you could see that. Its wings were shorter than those of a golden eagle, and it knew its way around in the tangle of branches, though it was difficult to get a good look – mottled grey against the lacework of a dark wood doesn’t provide the best of views.

  ‘Quite frankly, I’ve never been so terrified in my life before – not in the same way. I mean, it was like a nightmare. There seemed to be no escaping this great bird. You get used to things, like with golden eagles, you know they don’t fly when the light’s bad, and certainly don’t follow you into trees, and things like that. There seemed to be no stopping this creature, no obstacles that it couldn’t surmount. It was as if man had invented a machine that would stop at nothing to get a hare in its talons.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Skelter, ‘we live with it every dawn and dusk here. But you eventually escaped, obviously.’

  ‘I found a space under an oak root and hid there. The creature flew around the trees for a while, but it was getting dark, and it left not long afterwards.

  ‘I reached someone from your colony, a hare called Headinthemist, earlier today. She said you’d been sent on a mission to the church tower. I didn’t wait around for any more, but came straight here. Just as I arrived that monster left its nest and I ran into this tomb.’

  ‘And here we are,’ said Skelter, ‘back together again.’

  Rushie was silent for a while, then she nuzzled him and began speaking again. ‘There’s something I have to say to you, Skelter. I came looking for you after stories reached the mainland about a mountain hare that had taught a colony to dig blue hare forms, and thus protect themselves against a flying monster. I guessed it would be you, and I wanted to speak to you for the last time.’

  Skelter was a little taken aback.

  ‘Looking for me? For the last time?’

  ‘I know how that sounds, but … look, you remember when we were younger, you didn’t really understand why I got so upset about certain things?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Well, the reason was that I was very fond of you. I hoped that one day, when we were in our first mating season, you would box for me, dance for me, and win me. You were pretty dense, you know. You didn’t seem to be aware of me, in that way, though I practically threw myself at you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But the fact is, I’ve grown rather fond of another hare now. He’s a fine field jack who took me into his colony, and looked after me, and he says he’s going to box for me come spring. His name is Racer. I wanted to see you again, Skelter, to explain this.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  Skelter was thinking, how do you compete with a hare called Racer?

  ‘You do understand, don’t you?’

  Skelter’s heart was in his mouth. ‘Yes, yes of course. Fact is, I’ve grown rather fond myself, of … of …

  ‘Of this jill called Eyebright?’

  He grasped at this straw. ‘Yes, yes that’s the one. Eyebright.’

  Rushie let out a sigh. ‘Well, I’m glad you’re not going to be too sad without me. But of course, you thought I was dead, didn’t you, so you’ve had time to get over my being missing?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the reason,’ said Skelter, ‘otherwise I should be very sad that we could not be mates. I always thought we could be, but these things, they don’t work out the way you think they will, do they? Never mind, you have your Racer …’

  ‘And you have your Eyebright.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  He wanted to change the subject quickly.

  ‘So what are you going to do now?’

  ‘I shall get back to my colony, after it’s dark of course, and that thing can’t get me. I advise you to do the same. I can’t think what has got into your moonhare, sending you out on such a dangerous errand. How on earth did you think you were going to get near it?’

  Skelter shrugged. ‘Well, I planned to play it by ear, you know, make it up as I went along.’

  ‘Go home, Skelter.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  They continued chatting until they were sure it was dark outside, then Rushie said she would have to leave. She promised she would send a message by any itinerant animal going in the direction of Skelter’s colony to keep in touch, and Skelter said he would do likewise, in the other direction.

  Then Rushie went to the hole and peeked outside. Although it was quite dark inside the tomb, Skelter was aware that she had paused and turned, giving him one last long look, before she skipped outside and was gone.

  Skelter settled down to wait a bit longer before trying to get inside the church. He felt a little melancholy. Seeing Rushie had brought back memories of his old life up in the highland country, where the heather overpowered everything with its fragrance and the scenery was rugged and powerful, with tough high shoulders and a strong arched back. He recalled the slopes, dips and gullies, the untidy rock projections and the peaks speartipped with ice; glens where the deer roamed in quiet herds; scree where the hare clans gathered when winter came. He remembered the woodlands, of pine, and the scent of the amber sap oozing from the trunks, the smell of the cones and the needles when the breezes were in the right direction. He thought about the burns, rushing down the zig-zagging rocky channels they had cut for themselves, waterfalling into lochs that mirrored colours of the sky.

  He would never see it again. Rushie too, had given up hope of returning to her home country, for she had chosen a local hare for a mate and was preparing to settle down.

  Rushie. Perhaps if they had remained highlanders the two of them would have been mates, producing litter after litter of leverets and gambolling away their lives in the mountains. Instead, they had been singled out for adventure, for a life of living amongst foreigners in a foreign land. The flatlands of the south. So be it. If that was the fate of a highland hare, then he would make the best of it.

  He put his mind to other matters.

  Chapter Twenty Five

  When the darkness was heavy on the ground, Skelter crept from the tomb and stared up at the tower. In the dim light of the stars the great square oblong of stone, the tallest thing on the landscape, reached upwards to the heavens. It seemed to be supporting the night on its crenellations. Without the tower, the upper darkness might come crashing down, and flatten the rise on which the ancient church stood.

  Thankfully the moon was a sliver in the sky, thinner than orange peel.

  Skelter moved to the base of the tower, where the damp moss-covered stones with their crumbling mortar clung t
o some deep shadow. Around the churchyard the carved figures on the headstones: cherubim and seraphim, and fully-fledged angels with open wings, stood silent and watchful, studying the movements of this little mountain hare. So too the gargoyles on the gutters, their mouths open wide in surprise, kept their thoughts to themselves.

  Skelter sensed a thousand winters of heavy idleness in those stones: of standing on the rise above the snaking river down which blond warriors once came in longships, their wild hair and wild eyes the terror of the local farmers. Eyebright had told him stories, passed down the generations from hares of the time, of men with iron in their hands, iron in their blood, iron in their souls. Of men who rampaged across the flatlands, killing and stealing, dragging females back to deckless ships rigged with square sails.

  It was at that time the church was built, strong and sturdy, to withstand marauders from the seas. Its great blocks of stone had been brought by boats from the north and cemented together with local mortar. Living grey stone in those days, now weathered almost black, and dense, dead-looking. Within sight of its walls, witches had been dragged screaming from their isolated cottages, and burned or drowned. Cats, goats, rabbits and hares too, as accomplices of these human sorcerers. There were periods in the church’s history, much of which had soaked into those granite blocks, when its tenants had lost their spiritual way and had worked unwittingly for the dark forces to which it was expected to be opposed. Now, it was a quiet place, visited only for service and prayer, having seen no invaders since those conquerors who brought with them the cousins of the hare. No gold of any worth lay within its walls, only the treasures of the soul.

  Skelter moved along the blackness at the base of the tower, and round to the wooden portal. There, as expected, he found the great wooden doors closed against him. There was a light on inside the church though, which meant someone would eventually go in, or come out. He waited, hunched, by the door.

  A long time later he heard footsteps crunching on gravel and saw a shape coming through the lychgate. A man was coming with some keys that clinked as he walked. Skelter kept absolutely still. A hand reached for the circle of iron by the lock, grasped and turned it, and the heavy door was opened with a creak. Skelter stayed right on the heels of the legs that went before and found himself on the cold stone floor of the church.

  The man would have had to look down and behind him, to see the hare, which of course he did not, there being no reason to do so. Skelter skipped under a pew, and there he waited until candles were snuffed and the man had left the church, locking the door behind him. Skelter heard the ironwork clunk and knit together as the key was turned and withdrawn.

  The church smelled faintly musty, of damp winters trapped inside, unable to escape. It smelled of an ancient time, mostly – time captured by the stones, locked inside when the church was built. The ambience within the church, had nothing to do with the world outside. It was a separate place, kept in the past by strong walls and roof.

  Skelter ventured out from beneath the pew and skipped down the aisle. There was wood in there that had forgotten it had come from living things called trees, and had now metamorphosed into sacred objects that seemed to be ageless. Wood that had been polished deep brown by elbows, haunches, backs, until its shine seemed to come from deep within. In the dim light coming through the stained-glass windows, Skelter could see a brass plate on the floor, with a human figure etched into it. The man had scales, like a fish, and a bullet head. He held a pointed weapon in one hand, and a shield in the other. The brass plate proved to be very cold under Skelter’s hairy pads.

  What shocked Skelter more than any of the wonders around him was a cross which was fixed to the wall above an altar covered with gold-and-white cloth. Its position and the statement it made was, after a while, identified by the intelligent mountain hare. He recognised this thing as a gibbet like the one from which the tractor-man hung weasels and moles and rooks. On this cross-shaped gibbet hung a human form, a slim figure with outstretched arms. There appeared to be spikes through his palms and feet, holding him on to the gibbet. On his face, in the stained starlight, was an expression difficult to define, but Skelter decided it was a mixture of peace and pain.

  Skelter studied this figure for a long time, wondering why men would take one of their own kind and hang him up on a gibbet. The animals on the field gibbet were there to warn other creatures, not to venture into the cultivated fields which were man’s domain. The corpses were displayed to remind animals that men were the masters of the universe. Had this man been executed as a warning to other men? On whose ground had he been trespassing? Whose crops had he violated? Who had they been, his killers, who needed to show that they were the rulers of the world?

  These mysteries left his head spinning, and Skelter finally turned away from the place of the gibbet and circled the room until he found the steps leading up to the top of the tower.

  He decided he would not go up until daylight, for if he were to ascend in darkness, and reach the belfry, he would not be able to see the flogre anyway. It was best to wait until dawn, then while the flogre was out hunting he would make his way up to the tower and hide in some convenient corner waiting for the creature to return.

  There was nothing to eat inside the church of course, and so throughout the night Skelter had only his hunger to keep him company. He ate, as usual, the soft pellets of his previous meal, but these were not enough to sustain a hungry hare. By the time morning came he was ravenous, but there was nothing for it but to go through with his mission.

  After the first rays of the sun had penetrated the coloured glass windows, splashing hues all over the stone floor, Skelter began to climb the spiral staircase. It was not easy, jumping from one worn step to another, but the light coming through the arrowloops assisted his passage.

  ‘I’m the only hare around here who can climb the tower,’ he told himself, thinking of the flatlanders and their horror of heights. ‘Except Rushie of course.’

  His pride in his mountaineering ability kept him from thinking of his empty stomach, and from worrying about what he might find in the belfry when he arrived.

  He hopped over the top stair, to find his way blocked. For a moment he was confused. Gradually, he realised his way was barred by a closed door. He knew he was not yet inside the room at the top of the tower. That had to lie behind this door. How was he going to get in? Had he come all this way for nothing: to be thwarted by a piece of wood?

  He sniffed around the bottom of the door, investigating the strength of the wood with his teeth. There was one part of the door which touched the floor. This had caused dampness to seep upwards through the old beech panels and they had become soft and rotten.

  He began to gnaw at the wood and discovered that it came away in small pieces. Working for quite a long time, he tried to make a hole wide enough to crawl through into the belfry itself. Damp chunks of sodden wood came away in his teeth, as he struggled to get into the room before the time came for the flogre to return. He did not want to be stuck halfway through the hole and come face to face with a monster that could rip him to shreds within seconds.

  Finally, the hole was large enough for Skelter to squeeze himself through.

  The belfry was empty of any living thing. Just inside the doorway was a sack, overflowing with bones, ready to be taken away. Some human had been up to the tower and cleared the flogre’s leavings from the floorboards. There was other evidence of human intrusion in the flogre’s nest: a new rope hung from the great bell.

  The mountain hare settled down in a dark corner by the door, his heart knocking violently, as he waited for the flogre to come back from the dawn hunt. Now that he was here, inside the monster’s den, his fear was at needle-point. He was determined to go through with it, although his legs wanted to take him down the spiral staircase, and away home.

  The day was getting lighter outside. Down below, in the church, someone was moving around. A door slammed shut.

  Wingbeats.

  W
hen the flogre attacked its prey, they never heard it coming, because he stooped on stiff wings.

  Now, Skelter could hear its wingbeats as it came into land on the sill.

  The belfry darkened.

  A great shape hit the sill with a thud, wings closed, and the shape shuffled on the sill. Then it entered, landing on the wooden spar which supported the bell. It was an enormous bird with a topknot of feathers.

  Skelter crouched low into the corner, wishing he could melt into the brickwork. His fear was a terrible thing in itself, holding his body in a grip like a steel gin trap. He studied the flogre in the dim light of the belfry.

  The creature was gorging now, on some unnameable prey which had been ripped and torn out of all recognition. Its huge hooked bill was tearing at a red lump of flesh held by claws the size of a man’s hand.

  It was mottled grey in colour, with an erectile crest of feathers across its head. Its fanned tail was dark-banded, with broad stripes. Its talons and beak were those of an eagle, but it was like no eagle Skelter had ever seen. It was larger than those golden raptors that circled the highlands, and such a strange colour that it looked as if it had been made from woven shadows. Its eyes were deadly: cold and hard like gemstones. It was indeed a monster so formidable that it looked as if it could attack and kill a man should it ever be necessary.

  The flogre continued to gorge on the meat, but when it was finished, and the bones and skin were tossed aside, it stared suspiciously round the room.

  Skelter’s heart stopped.

  The bird knew something was wrong, and first pecked savagely at the new rope dangling from the bell. Then it hopped down to the floor and began a slow swaying walk, stopping every so often to cock its head on one side, as if listening. It moved away from Skelter, going first into the darkness of the two far corners, where it stayed for some time. Skelter could hear it knocking against wood with its bill.

  What should he do? Make a dash for it and hope he could scramble through the hole before the raptor was able to skate across the floor? It seemed possible to escape, but actually attempting it needed great courage.