Frost Dancers: A Story of Hares

by Garry Kilworth

  ‘It’s a humanly world,’ she said aloud, and with great sadness in her tone.

  ‘Oh, I agree,’ said moonhare, ‘but one must go on, you know. One must go on.’

  Eyebright, suddenly recalling that moonhare had claimed part of the honour of ridding the skies of the flogre, left Followme in disgust.

  On her way back to the meadow, the miserable Eyebright met a hedgehog she vaguely knew. Jittie was vaguely-known by most of the animals in those parts, and many of them avoided her because of her uncertain temper. However, today she seemed disposed to stop and talk.

  ‘What was the meeting about?’ asked Jittie. ‘I’ve never seen you hares gathering at this time of year before.’

  ‘It concerned a hare, a mountain hare that joined us just after the mating this year.’

  Eyebright could barely keep a catch out of her voice.

  Jittie said, ‘Not young Skelter?’

  ‘Yes,’ Eyebright said, ‘you knew him?’

  ‘Of course I knew him – know him. What’s all this past tense? Is he dead?’

  ‘We think so,’ replied the jill.

  She then proceeded to tell Jittie all about the mission that Skelter had been sent on, to the church tower, and how the flogre had not been seen since that time. Eyebright kept her account dispassionate, so as not to reveal her true feelings for Skelter. She spoke of him as if he were just another jack, not anything special to her at all.

  When she had finished Jittie remarked, ‘You’re very fond of him, obviously.’

  Eyebright was taken aback.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘I would. It underlines every word you say about him. I thought you hares weren’t allowed to choose mates until the spring, when the jacks have to battle it out, or something barbaric like that. Mad practice, if you ask me. Isn’t it true you’re supposed to wait until then?’

  ‘Yes, that’s true to a certain extent, but a bit old-fashioned. We don’t rely completely on the results of the boxing these days. Most couples have worked out who they want to pair up with before the boxing starts. I mean, there’s not much point in going with a hare you can’t stand, is there?’

  ‘Well if you’re asking me, I would’ve said that was pretty obvious, but who am I to interfere with the culture and customs of another species, however misguided they seem?’

  ‘So, yes, everyone wakes up dancing in the frosts, and the jacks get themselves all worked up, boxing each other – and us too, though the jills don’t go all out because we’re bigger and stronger than they are and we might hurt them. If there are two jacks, or more, who like one jill, and the jill doesn’t care which one she takes, then naturally they have to battle it out between themselves …’

  ‘Naturally,’ sniffed Jittie, seemingly unconvinced.

  ‘… but where there’s no rival, or the jill has definite preferences, the boxing is just for fun.’

  ‘But what if another jack did insist on fighting for you, even though you had stated a preference?’

  Eyebright shrugged.

  ‘I suppose, strictly speaking, the fight would have to take place, but there would be no encouragement from me for Skelter’s rival, and there’s nothing like knowing your jill wants you to win, to egg you on to victory – so I’m told.’

  ‘But what if this other jack did win? I mean, Skelter’s not the biggest hare I’ve seen in my life, by any means. What if his rival did beat him?’

  ‘If anyone beat Skelter I’d knock his block off,’ growled Eye-bright.

  Jittie twisted her mouth wryly.

  ‘Yes, that would do it. That might be the discouragement the other jack needed.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Eyebright, ‘all this is academic. Skelter’s gone, and there’s nothing that can bring him back.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘What, that nothing can bring him back?’

  ‘No, why do you assume that he’s dead?’

  Eyebright shuffled under the intense gaze of the hedgehog. ‘Well, all the evidence points towards it, doesn’t it?’

  Jittie snorted. ‘Evidence? What evidence. All we know is that he hasn’t returned yet. Where’s his carcass? Where’s his empty pelt? I wouldn’t cross his name off your list of admirers just yet, hare. That mountain jack has a way of bouncing right back into the arena, just when you thought he was finished. He’s the toughest little hare that you’re likely to meet. I’m ashamed of you, what’s your name? Eyebright? You’re supposed to be fond of this blue streak of obstinacy. Have a bit of faith in him.’

  ‘But the flogre …’

  ‘Just because the monster hasn’t been seen, doesn’t mean they both died locked in a death struggle. Can you honestly see Skelter battling it out with a giant bird, or bat, or whatever it is? A creature ten times his size, and covered in claws and hooks? He might be a brave hare, but he’s not stupid. He’ll run just like anyone else – anyone sensible that is.’

  Hope sprang to Eyebright’s breast and began glowing there. Did she dare let herself believe what she was hearing? This hedgehog seemed to know Skelter very well. Better than she did herself. Could it be that Jittie was right?

  ‘But if the flogre hasn’t killed him, where is he?’

  ‘Don’t ask such silly questions. How would I know? It may be that the monster has killed him, but I wouldn’t stake my spines on it. More likely Skelter is hiding somewhere, while the monster is stamping up and down trying to get at him. I know that jack, I tell you, and he’s a survivor. He’s lived with golden eagles – not just one but probably half a dozen – hovering over him every day of his young life. He’s had to contend with things called wildcats, as well as foxes. If there’s a hare around here that can spit in the monster’s face and get away with it, that hare is Skelter.

  ‘Now, much as I’d like to spend the time of day with you, I’m busy looking for a place to sleep out the winter. It’ll be coming on cold soon, and I want somewhere prepared, and out of sight of prying foxes and badgers, a curse be on their black souls for the nuisances they are, so if you don’t mind … just think on, jill, just think on. There are two sides to any affair – the worst and the best. Before you get any hard evidence, expect either side to come out on top. Don’t just assume the worst. There, I’ve said enough, good season to you.’

  And with that the hedgehog waddled off, leaving Eyebright’s feelings in a turmoil.

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  It is said amongst many animals and birds, probably originating with the geese and ducks, that if there is a Creator who once needed rest from his architectural labours, then the place he chose to lay his head was estuary country.

  The flat world where two waters meet, the salt and the fresh, is a place of peace. Man is the spoiler, but like the mountain tops, estuary country is not easily accessible to him. The landscape is fractured by waterways often too shallow to navigate in boats, too deep in mud to traverse on foot, and man finds little business in marshes, maltings and saltings. Man lives on the fringes of such areas, and the heart of estuary country remains unspoiled. This place where rivers and seas mingle is where life comes together in myriad shapes and forms.

  In an estuary the water is layered, with the fresh river water sliding over the heavier salt water, and between them a racial mix of the two, a brackish divider. These three layers move back and forth and change in quantity with the ebb and flow of the tides. All three types of water have their own forms of plant, fish, insect and bird life. Freshwater species live at the top of the estuary, saltwater at the bottom, and the unfussy between. There are shore crabs, grey mullet, gobies, soft squishy lugworms, multi-legged king ragworms, prawns and shrimps, sticklebacks, and many other creatures.

  Where land barely rising to the surface becomes marsh, poa grass, seablite, sea aster and sea parslane grow. There is also rich alluvial soil around an estuary which attracts farmers with its fertility but which is too shifting to use as building land, limiting the presence of man and acting as a buffer
zone, restricting visitors.

  Unlike Skelter, Rushie appreciated the positive similarities of the estuary to her former mountain home. Skelter saw only the farmlands where nature had been landscaped by human hand: a direct contrast to the wildness of his birthplace in the highlands, where the only attempt at refashioning nature was the building of a cairn. Rushie felt the peace and tranquillity, the underwildness of the marshes, the secretiveness of the waterland with its cryptic creeks and mysterious mudways. The maze of channels left when the tide went out, were sometimes deeper than the height of a man, and spread at least to the horizon.

  The sky was bigger: here it made a complete dome, the marshland captured some beautiful colours from the sunsets. Here, the air was as clean and as fresh as that of the highlands, with only pockets of marsh gas to make it interesting. Although there was a protected feeling brought about by natural walls in mountain country, here there was an unfettered world which to a hare who has the advantages of all-round panoramic vision is just as secure. When you can see behind your head, as well as you can in front, openness is appreciated. To Rushie, it was as if the door to creation had been left ajar.

  There was an eerieness, a bleakness, which Rushie found worrying at times, but this dark side of the flatlands had its advantages as well as being disturbing. It told of a history of invaders, some of whom tried to settle in the place of mists and ghosts only to fall into a morose way of life that sucked them down to oblivion. There were old wrecks being swallowed by the mud belonging to travellers from distant lands, who had come periodically through history to conquer what would eventually conquer them. The loneliness, the solitude, the phantasmagorical aspect of the fevered waterland either drove them away with its morbid moods, or corroded their bodies and spirits until they wasted into shadows. There were iron weapons rusting in the bowels of the creeks and old bones shifting in the sludge with each turn of the tide.

  What was hostile to man was friendly to beasts.

  Rushie’s mainland colony was on the edge of the marshes, and indeed spilled over into its creeks. They were wilder hares than those of Skelter’s colony, their coats unkempt, their habits less neat. They ate plants and grasses that moonhare would have considered inedible, and drank from stagnant pools that would have offended sunhare’s nose and taste.

  One hare’s good fortune is another hare’s disaster, and though the flogre was now too distant to bother with Skelter’s colony, Rushie’s hares were well within reach. It began to hunt them down with a ferocity which sent a wave of panic across the marshes. Unlike the former colony, this one had not yet learned to make protective forms.

  Rushie had returned from her meeting with Skelter in the tomb, and had imparted to her prospective mate, Racer, all that had passed between the two blue hares. This large brown hare was a little angry with Rushie, for going off without saying a word to him, and she detected a streak of jealousy in him when she spoke of her old friend.

  ‘One of the reasons I went to see him, was to lay to rest my former life,’ she explained to Racer. ‘Now that’s been done, we have no need to speak of it again – not unless you wish it. I’ve told you, I’m as happy here as I was in the mountains. I’ve accepted the changes in my life. You mustn’t blame me for wanting to say goodbye to someone who thought I was dead.’

  ‘You should have told me before you went,’ was all he would say. ‘I worry about you. You should have told me.’

  She said she was sorry, that it wouldn’t happen again.

  Then word came to her, on the grapevine, that Skelter was missing, that there had been some sort of battle between the blue mountain hare and the flogre. She was distressed, and made up her mind to go to the church tower, to see if she could ascertain what had happened. She told Racer what she planned and he absolutely forbade her to go.

  ‘When I said I would tell you before I did anything like it again, I didn’t mean I was going to ask your permission,’ she told him stiffly. ‘I don’t need it. You have no right to tell me what or what not to do. I shall go if I please.’

  This upset Racer, who knew he had overstepped the mark, for he would never have dared to speak in that fashion to a brown field hare, or he would have got his ears boxed. It was just that Rushie was so small and delicate, and the protective instinct came out in him. He wanted to keep her from the world’s harm. He was on the point of apologising to her when a dramatic change came about in the colony’s circumstances.

  The flogre appeared one dusk, and snatched a hare from a field next to the marshes.

  It was back the next morning for another.

  The elders of the colony, the seahare and the skyhare, called Rushie to account, saying that it was her kind that had forced a change in the flogre’s residence, and that she – or rather her mountain friend, which was much the same thing – had chased the flogre to the martello tower.

  ‘That’s not true,’ cried Rushie. ‘How could Skelter make the flogre come here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said seahare. ‘You tell us.’

  ‘This is absolutely ridiculous, can’t you see that? A hare can’t force a giant flying creature to leave its home and settle somewhere else.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ skyhare said, ‘but maybe this Skelter helped change the circumstances under which the flogre lived, and men forced it to abandon the church tower in favour of the martello tower? The responsibility still lies with the mountain jack, who should never have carried out his stupid mission in the first place.’

  Rushie was angry now.

  ‘He was told to, by his moonhare.’

  ‘The way I heard it,’ said seahare, ‘he volunteered.’

  Rushie continued to protest at this defamation of Skelter’s name, saying that her friend would never rid his colony of a terror, at the expense of another. If the flogre was nesting in the martello tower, then that was by its own choice, and not because of any action by Skelter. It really did not make sense, she told them, that a hare had forced a flying monster to change its nesting ground.

  While she was defending herself, she looked around for Racer, in order to gain his support, but the jack was nowhere to be seen. It appeared that he did not wish to become involved in her dispute with the elders. Instead another jack had something to say on her behalf, a hare called Creekcrosser, a rather disreputable creature who was often seen out on the mud, crossing from one dyke to another. Creekcrosser argued that what one individual did was not the responsibility of another, whether they were from the same place, colony, or even litter.

  ‘If my brother does something wrong, that doesn’t mean I’m accountable for his actions,’ said the jack to seahare, ‘any more than you would be answerable to me if skyhare stole my food. To pick on this jill here, just because someone from her previous colony was indirectly responsible for sending the monster to us, is unfair, unjust and plain ridiculous.’

  Unfortunately Creekcrosser was not well thought of in the colony. He made a habit of breaking rules and lacked deference. His insolence towards the elders had been a matter for censure more than once in the past. Although hares are not famous for their teamwork, many believed that Creekcrosser took individuality too far, and considered that the day he left the community, as he was always promising to do, would be a good day for them all. He was far too easy in his manner, too quick to prick the respectability of important members of the group, too ready with a joke when the situation called for seriousness.

  ‘What you have to say on any subject is of no consequence to us,’ remarked skyhare.

  Seahare said to Rushie, ‘Don’t think because this rebellious individual is defending you that he cares what happens to you. He doesn’t. He’s just using the situation for his own amusement. In fact he has been heard to remark that he’s never met such a snob as you and that your haughty attitude would be your downfall.’

  Rushie looked at Creekcrosser, expecting him to deny the words. Instead he cocked his head to one side, in that indolent manner of his, and said, ‘Sure she’s stuc
k up, but that still doesn’t make her guilty of something another hare has done. The trouble with you, seahare, is you’re too rigid. You need a bit of flexibility. It would help you to see that you connect events and arguments that have nothing to do with each other and then congratulate yourself on being astute. I’ve said my piece: if you still can’t see it you never will.’

  With that, Creekcrosser went away, leaving Rushie on her own again.

  Seahare reopened her argument. Rushie was told that dire events had come about as a result of Skelter’s visit to the church, for it could hardly be co-incidental that the flogre left at the moment Skelter arrived to do whatever it was that he had done. Her kind had got them into a mess, and it was up to her to get them out of it.

  The first thing she did of course, was to show them how to dig mountain hare forms, to protect themselves when they were in reach of their own homes. Some of the more traditional hares pompously refused to ‘burrow in the ground like a rabbit’, but they soon changed their minds after another victim was snatched from amongst them at dawn the following day. Creekcrosser, on the other side, said he found it fun.

  ‘We should’ve dug these things ages ago. It’ll be warmer and out of the rain. Got any more highland inventions up your nose, Rushie?’

  But Rushie had not forgiven him for calling her a snob, and refused to answer.

  Racer appeared on the scene again, saying he had been to check on his fields, and that they were in good order. The pair met by an old oak, and Rushie felt a little peeved with the jack who had promised to box for her in the spring.