Frost Dancers: A Story of Hares

by Garry Kilworth

  Before Skelter could move, the giant bird was back, this time on the sill again, staring into the room. It filled the space between sill and arch, preventing light from entering the belfry.

  Skelter inched behind the sack of bones, squeezing himself between its bulk and the wall. There was barely enough space, and the bag was in danger of toppling over.

  The flogre clacked its beak in a gesture which appeared to denote annoyance. The sound was loud in the silence of the tower, and made Skelter jump. The noise was repeated several times, and Skelter could imagine the creature’s brain clicking over, trying to decide what was wrong.

  It was restless, and flew back to the bell-perch again, this time its eyes towards the daylight. Skelter felt much happier when the flogre was looking in the opposite direction to his hideout.

  Down below, there was activity. The sound of music floated up, as someone practised on the organ. Skelter recognised this as the seventh day, the day when the tractor-man and the gamekeeper stayed away from the fields, and people could be seen coming from their houses and going to the church. Later the singing would start.

  There was a strange sound, coming from the flogre now, a sort of low rasping moan.

  Skelter was stunned.

  The flogre was singing along with the music, just like a human might do, only not in any known tongue. It was just making a kind of rhythmic noise, that came from somewhere in its belly, rather than from its throat.

  Skelter decided that it was now or never. While the monster was distracted by the music, he would creep out and crawl through the hole in the door. He squeezed around the sack of bones.

  Just at that moment, the music stopped.

  Skelter tried to retreat, back into the corner, but the sack had been dislodged.

  It went crashing to the floor.

  Bones scattered across the floorboards, skulls bounced across the room, and Skelter found himself exposed to the incredulous gaze of the flogre. It let out a screech of anger and leapt onto the window sill, from which it could launch itself directly at Skelter.

  It was just about to do so when the world came to an end.

  DOOOOOOOOONNNNNG!

  The belfry was a hell of blinding, numbing sound, which filled Skelter’s brain and deprived him of all sensible thought. The whole room vibrated with appalling noise which threatened to knock Skelter’s head from his shoulders. It was so ghastly he could not move, every muscle locked.

  Then the great bell sounded again.

  DOOOOOOOOONNNNG!

  The flogre was gone, out into the world.

  Skelter came to life, ran for the hole, scrambled through, and began to descend the spiral staircase. His progress was slow because a hare finds it much more difficult going down, than he does climbing such artificial slopes. Every second or so the tower vibrated with that awful sound, but Skelter was past caring. All he wanted to do was get down from the heights, and run out onto his beloved flatlands.

  He was halfway down the staircase, when as he rounded a corner, he leapt straight into the arms of a man. There was obviously surprise on both sides, but Skelter felt the man instinctively grip him. Then he found himself kicking and struggling in mid-air, as he was held up by his long ears.

  The man looked into his face and growled in delight.

  Chapter Twenty Six

  When the bell sounded, Bubba’s head felt as if it had exploded. Instinctively, he fled from the noise, as he would from hunters with guns. He flew out of the tower, desperate to clear his head of that terrible sound. The hare was forgotten, a thing of much lesser account than saving his sanity. The tower had become something other than his nest: it was now the domain of a man-thing with a voice that instilled terror even into the terrible.

  On leaving the tower, Bubba drew the immediate attention of several astonished churchgoers on the gravel path below. Then the trees masked his escape. This was the second time he had been seen in a week, for he had also been noticed by the gravediggers when he had left the tower because of the arrival of men at the belfry. It was time to vacate the area and look for a new, safer home. To live in the tower now would be impossible, since he would never know when that great metal voice would fill his head with its sound. In any case, humans now knew where he lived, and would set a trap for him.

  —Goodbye, tower.

  —Goodbye, Bubba. May you quickly find another refuge from your enemies.

  Bubba circled once, then flew to the straits between the island and the mainland. Once he had crossed the island and reached the sea, he travelled southwards to a place he knew just down the coast. Below him the fields swept away, until there was green ocean, then land again. The journey took a long time, but finally he reached his destination, a place mother used to take him when mother was alive. The square tower was behind him, the round tower in front.

  It was a ruined martello tower situated on a low cliff, which dropped directly into the sea. He liked to be high off the ground, and though this new nesting site was not as tall as the church, it was visited infrequently, if ever at all. Difficult to reach from the landward side, it had the ocean to the east and the marshes on the west. Further security was provided by a peculiarity of defensive design: the only entrance to the tower was over three times the height of a man from the ground: halfway up the whole height of the structure. The main danger was from fishermen and birdwatchers, who would brave any natural hazard to reach an isolated spot. However, since Bubba planned to continue with the habit instilled in him by his mother, of leaving the nest to hunt at dusk and dawn, the danger of being seen was considerably reduced.

  There were birds in the marsh area which would help supplement his diet of rabbits and hares. Ducks, oystercatchers, knots, dunlin, herons, gulls and many others. He preferred fat little mammals but he would settle for birds at a pinch. Winter was coming on and the place would soon be swarming with fat rhonking Brent geese, come down from the north to feed in the mud. Upwards of twenty thousand of them would be wheeling in, not expecting to find a predator the size and stature of Bubba lurking behind clouds, waiting to knock them out of the air. In the spring he could travel further inland for lambs and calves, though he knew this was especially hazardous.

  One thing he promised himself was that he would eventually track down and kill that small hare. There was something very strange about that creature. It had come from nowhere and taught his favourite food how to avoid him. It was used to sky-watching and had seen him coming in on the back of the dusk that time and had avoided him by running down a rabbit hole. It had actually invaded his home, for reasons known to itself, as if it were some kind of warrior, a Bubba-killer, out to exact revenge for wrongs to its kind.

  Bubba could not allow such audacity to go unpunished. He saw the hare as the creature who had chased him from his church tower home, its presence creating that terrible din which had sent Bubba’s brain rattling back and forth in his skull. Not once had the sound attacked him, but several times, making the tower vibrate and tremble to its very roots. The dead, below in their narrow houses in the ground, must have started abruptly from their eternal rest at the awful sudden clang, banging their heads on the lids of their boxes as they tried to rise.

  This was more than just a hare though: it had to be something quite extraordinary. Bubba’s mind went back a long way, to his birth, in that humid forested land from which mother had taken him. There were primitives there, who hunted with bow and arrow, blowpipe, and magic. Perhaps those primitive hunters had reached out for him. Perhaps a magical hare had been sent by Bubba’s enemies to destroy him. It was a clever disguise, for if the creature had been a greater cat, or a fierce giant dog, Bubba would have immediately been on his guard. Instead it was a hare, smaller even than the local hares. It had abilities though, that were far in advance of its fellow creatures, and Bubba knew he would have to be as sly and cunning as this hare was courageous, in order to defeat it.

  Bubba sighted the martello tower, and came in on the breeze to land on its b
attlements. There he found a hole in the ceiling of the room below, and entered, finding the near-darkness inside comforting and peaceful. He gathered some debris, of rags and sticks, and made himself a crude nest on the floor. Then he settled down to await evening.

  —Hello new tower, I have come to stay.

  —You are welcome, Bubba.

  Bubba dozed. In his dream state the racial memories, vague and fuzzy, came through from the past of his ancestors. There were his kind, living in the green gloom of thick forest, their nests in trees high off the ground. Rarely did they venture out into the open sky, as Bubba was forced to do, but stayed beneath the canopy of the tall forest with its sweating leaves and murmurous insects. Life was thick on the ground, thick in the air, thick amongst the trees. There were dark rivers flowing through the undergrowth, spreading into great floodplains.

  Bubba’s ancestors were lords of the trees, ruling forests patrolled by a myriad of beasts and birds, few of which Bubba had names for. The food of his grandparents were man-shapes swinging through the branches, some fast, some very very slow: creatures whose athletic bodies were covered in hair. There were colourful exotic birds, with plumes and long hard beaks, to add to this diet of tree-men. Bubba had memory-smells of a dank sunless world in which he had never been cold, where the rain came down like a waterfall from the sky, making a thunderous noise on the waxy leaves. Here there had been snakes the thickness of a man’s waist, and river creatures with long mouths full of teeth.

  Bubba was taken from this world as a fledgling, by his mother, and carried through the air. He had indistinct memories of being hidden in a crate when he arrived at a new land, until mother could take him out and feed him on the chopped livers and kidneys of sheep.

  On waking after such dreams, Bubba always felt disturbed, though not because he desired this exotic fantasy world. The disturbances were buried deeper in his brain than the place where wants were situated. He was not happy in his own world, but neither was he sad. There was food enough, and shelter, and a sky virtually to himself. Occasionally he could enter woodlands and small forests and find a kind of nostalgia there, in the green half-light of the place below the trees.

  That dusk, Bubba left the martello tower and circled his new territory. It was some distance from his old island home, which he could still reach during the twilight, providing he kept his hunt there short. During the winter he expected to feast mostly on geese, because the twilight hours were shorter. On grey overcast days when the gloom was sufficient to give him a shadowy flight, he might go up and snatch a hare or a rabbit, just to let them know he was still around. Then, when the summer came around, he could make his trips more frequently, perhaps staying overnight in some woodland. The marshes were fine, but they did not have an abundance of rabbits and hares, his favourite food.

  —New tower, do you think Bubba is powerful?

  —Bubba is the lord of the flatlands.

  —Yes, I am. This is good, this is right. Mother would be proud.

  —Mother is proud.

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  After seven days, when Skelter did not return, the hares gathered in Booker’s Field beneath the blanched totem whose single branch fractured the sky like white lightning. This meeting, in the middle of autumn, was not only unusual, it was unprecedented. The colony normally never came together before the spring. Those who were unaware of the nature of Skelter’s mission were trying to gather information, and those who knew what it entailed had the burden of disseminating it.

  There were even several rabbits on the periphery of the group, for Skelter’s time in the warren on the mainland had been broadcast amongst the rabbit population. His history had been taken, expanded and embroidered, and passed on, and now his fate was of interest to many amongst them. His travels, his exploits, his fortitude and endurance, were considered by more than a few to have raised the consciousness of all hares. He had given them a pride in their order. He had scorned capture by men, outrun greyhounds, overcome distances and won his way into the hearts of the local rabbits and hares.

  The fact that many hares had done the same, both in the past and in the present, did not diminish his stature amongst his following. It is a quirk of fate that some creatures are born to be lifted above their fellows, often encouraged by a natural attractive personality, to become great. The ordinary population is sometimes in desperate need of heroes and at certain periods in their history will look around for suitable candidates upon whom they might place this weight.

  Skelter was not one of those intensely charismatic creatures, who lead their followers with fiery words and blazing eyes, but a likeable moderate sort of hare who had a reputation for taking on any task with a cool head. He was the elder brother looked up to. He was the father in control. He was the dependable mate. Skelter was dashing in a modest fashion, not a swashbuckler. Inventor of the anti-flogre shelter and a hare with sensible counsel, he was on his way to one day becoming a revered figure in lagomorph history: a legendary gentle lord, who had time for leverets as well as moonhares, and who took on monsters at dire risk to his own life because he saw it as his duty.

  One of the essential ingredients of hero pie is that the potential idol be not of local stock, but close enough to identify with. Back home in the highlands, Skelter could have defeated half the world’s winged shapes and would still have been forgotten by the next generation. Petty jealousies amongst those who had seen him grow to harehood would have besmirched his deeds. He would have been considered lucky, rather than intrepid. It is difficult to take seriously the hare you once saw being tripped by his own ears.

  Here on the flatlands he was unusual enough to be noticeable, yet familiar enough to fit in. No one had seen him soil his form as a leveret. No one had seen him falling over his own feet during his first gambol beyond his mother’s sight. No one had seen him run in fright at his first sight of a worm. He had appeared amongst them fully matured, giving an impression of being wise, worldly, knowledgeable. He was without stain on his character, with no visible mistakes scarring his past. He was a stranger bearing his own irrefutable reputation. He had been in political captivity, imprisoned because he was a hare. If he eventually achieved greatness, which seemed likely (especially if he had been martyred by the flogre) his time in jail would be said to have been his making: a period of meditation, and consultation with some Superior Being. His history as a leveret in the highlands would be re-invented, earlier deeds attributed to his younger years, and those who would say nay would be reviled as bearers of evil slanderous tales.

  Skelter was good potential hero material.

  Moonhare brought the meeting to order.

  ‘Those of you who live on the edge of the community,’ she began, ‘may have heard that the highlander Skelter has not been with us for a few days. You may also have noticed that the flogre has not appeared amongst us for at least a week. These events, or rather non-events, are not coincidental.

  ‘Just eight days ago Skelter approached me with the idea that he go on a mission – a mission to discover the exact identity of the flogre, so that we might know who and what it is that has been decimating our population. It was a brave and selfless decision, and the highlander set out on this mission shortly after we had spoken.

  ‘Sadly, Skelter has not returned, and we must assume the worst. However, neither has flogre appeared in the skies at dusk and dawn, and here we must assume the best. It would seem that there has been a mighty battle, the flogre vanquished and the highlander so sorely wounded that he has not been able to return.’

  A mixture of a general groan and a faint cheer went up amongst the hares, most of whom were not sure whether they were expected to mourn the highlander, or show joy at the defeat of the monster. It appeared that both were required.

  ‘Our skies have been rid of a monster, but we have lost a friend. A sacrifice has been made, and we must mourn the departure of Skelter, one of the most courageous hares. You will all remember that peculiar curving run of his, tha
t wide arc he described when escaping from a foe? It is the intention to hold a race, once a year, just before the colony breaks up for the summer-autumn-winter solitude, in which every runner will be obliged to describe that same arc when competing. In this way we hope to do honour to a valued and much missed highland hare, who sacrificed his life for the good of us all.’

  Moonhare bowed her head slightly.

  After a few moments she lifted it and said, ‘That is all I have to say at the moment. You may return to fields which have been made flogre-safe for you by the leader you have chosen and her faithful errant mountain hare.’

  Moonhare went and sat under the sun-bleached totem, watching her colony disperse. While she waited, Eyebright came up to her and accused her bitterly of lying. The jill could hardly speak through her anger.

  ‘You put him up to it. He didn’t volunteer.’

  Moonhare was not in the least perturbed by this attack.

  ‘Eyebright, isn’t it better for his memory that he be remembered as being one of the most selfless creatures in our history? Why should I take credit for some part of his act, when I can give all the credit to him?’

  Eyebright stared at Followme suspiciously. ‘Is that why you did it?’

  Moonhare was adamant. ‘Of course, why else?’

  Eyebright could think of no other reason at that moment. She was upset and confused, and desperately missing her companion of the last season. A single season is a long time in a hare’s life, and Eyebright had been looking forward to further more exciting times ahead, soft family times. Of course, Skelter had been a little dense, when it came to recognising that females found him attractive, but that would have changed in the mating season. Now all these dreams had been taken from her. She knew from the previous season that Longrunner wanted her, would try to frost-dance his way into her affections, but she wanted no one but her Skelter … and Skelter was gone. Skelter was gone and her unhappiness was increased ten-fold by the fact that she had not even given him a decent goodbye. She had been so incensed at his stupidity in taking up Followme’s suggestion that she had let him go thinking she was angry with him. Of course she had been angry, and upset, and had wasted their last few precious moments together.