The ghost-hares of those deified only two thousand winters before today were not the only hares to have been worshipped as gods, only the most recent. They were aware of ancient ghost-hares on the landscape, beings faded almost to nothingness, creatures who had been venerated by the early men when the bipeds first emerged from their caves. These wisps of half-light were evident only in the most remote places and took no part in watching over living hares, for their time had long since gone. They were snatches of mist from another world, another epoch, and had no relevance to today. There were paintings of them on cave walls, their likenesses caught in the ochres and charcoals of the history of man, rather than that of hares.
The ghost-hare that watched over Rushie however, was a strong spirit and came to her in dreams to give her strength in her time of adversity. This ghost-hare was aware of the greatness of hare history and legend, reaching back some fifty million winters, but had only been deified herself at the time of Boudicca and the Iceni.
Rushie dreamed that she was told that her imprisonment showed not that she was a pathetic creature, but that her captor was himself a miserable wretch, full of fear and unhappiness. Hers was a prison which dignified the prisoner, and demeaned the jailer. Even were she to die in the claws of her captor, she need have no worry, for she was destined for the Otherworld of hares where there was no fear.
‘You must see that since the First Hare, Kicker, known to men as Palaeolagus or Eurymulus, countless hares have come and gone from the world. Yet they still cover the whole face of the earth, in the hottest and coldest of climates, and no man is their master. They are a proud species, wild and free, never tamed by anyone except another hare at mating time.
‘Yet that pride is not an arrogant pride, born out of might, but a humble pride, the pride of never having capitulated, never having become man’s pet, even though the species itself is not a savage one. Only towards rabbits does the charity of hares fail, in myths perpetuated by the ignorant and bigoted, the prejudiced few. The shame of this failing causes much pain to Kicker’s ghost, that weak ray of sunlight that flits over hill and valley on a winter’s day, for Kicker was both rabbit and hare in one, and father-mother of the whole lagomorph race.’
These words carried comfort to the morose jill as she twitched her way through the dreams brought on by starvation. She lay in the shadows of the wall, away from the now blinding light of the shaft of sun which joined floor to ceiling where sat the hook-billed monster, watching her with bright, feverish eyes, greedy for the sight of suffering in others.
Rushie felt she was going to die, but she wanted the great bird to have none of the satisfaction of watching her waste away, and determined to throw herself out of the doorway, to dash herself on the stones below the tower. This she planned to do when the flogre left its nest that coming dusk.
‘Have no fear,’ said her ghost-hare, ‘for while I cannot help you to live, I can certainly help you when you die. You will not be alone along the dark passage to the Otherworld, for there are hares like me every step of the way, and they will show you where to tread, and the precipices of the nethermost regions of the land between the quick and the dead will be of no consequence to you.
‘Remember those who have gone before, keep a cool head and a cool heart, and it will not be so hard. Think of Kicker, the first of those to travel that path, with no others to show the way. Think of the daunting prospect of travelling through the dark craggy regions of the underworld, where there are pits with no bottom, and ridges guarded by fierce creatures without names, without recognisable shape.
‘Though these are all illusion, they are terrifying enough, and are there not to tear you, for you will have no body to destroy being only a spirit, but to rob you of your reason. Kicker did not know of the insubstantiality of these phantoms of the nether regions, yet the First Hare ran bravely through the swirling darkness, scattering their forms like mist.
‘You at least will have friendly guides, whose advice will comfort you, and keep you sane.
‘And what will you find in the Otherworld, that place of boundless meadows and green mountains, where all hares harmonise with its perfection? What besides a million hare spirits racing through the dawns of eternity? Why, toothless foxes and clawless eagles! They will be there too, in that place of many names. Even humans. Yes, you will find man there, stripped of his weapons, without clothes on his back, without brick or mortar, or metal machines. You will find the naked spirits of men wandering the fields of the hare, a new gentleness in them, a new knowledge to guide them.
‘Once there, you too will become aware of the whole, as well as the essence, of hare history. You will learn that hares were once giants – huge lagomorphs that pounded the earth flat with their great hind legs. However, because they were large they were easy to see, and monsters of the landscape, all teeth and claws, chased them into a state of exhaustion.
‘So it was, because hares are not savage predators, with a large array of weapons at their disposal, they had to turn to other defences. And what they turned to was magic. They studied the stars, the moon and sun, the earth and the waters thereon, and learned the art and science of magic. They became the magical hares which fascinated men, who made totems of Kicker and his progeny. Hares were venerated by the early men, who wore hare masks and carved hare symbols.
‘The first thing that hares did with their magic, was to make themselves smaller, altering their size until they found the perfect length and height. Now they could hide in the fields, in the rocks, or be still on an open piece of ground, yet not be seen. They were masters of disguise, and could become a clod of earth, or log of tree, in a moment. They had noble countenances, tall ears, powerful back legs.
‘There were some hares of course, for there are always unbelievers, who had not the strength of mind to go through with the magical change, and these creatures were caught in a storm of enchantment. Because of their scepticism, instead of changing size they were turned into stone, magicked into frozen forms of granite and gneiss, that many men took to be natural rocks, moraine and such, appearing to have animal shape by mere accident of formation.
‘Over the course of millennia most of these statues have been covered by silt and earth, by peat and turf, until now only the ears remain above the surface of the landscape. Those wandering over moor, mountains, or wasteland, will often come across these weathered stone ears, sticking out of the earth as monoliths and tors, sometimes a single one where its twin has fallen or eroded, sometimes in a group where more than one hare was caught in the blast of sorcery that blew across the land.
‘Oh, the magical hares that have raced over the landscape of time are too numerous to count, too wonderful to measure, and you are part of all this, Rushie: you are part of legend and myth, mystery and wizardry. Now you are caught, trapped in the den of the monster, but you will escape to a place he can never follow, and you will laugh down the long tunnel of darkness at him, and the sounds will ring in his head, maddeningly, until he will know that you have defeated him.’
On waking from these dreams in her fevered state of hunger Rushie could remember little of substance, but retained a feeling of wellbeing and peace.
One evening while the flogre was out hunting Rushie went to the edge of the bright blinding opening and looked downwards at the rocks below. It seemed to her that there were small ledges on the sheer wall, which she as a mountain hare, might use to climb down. She stepped out onto the first of these and managed to hunch against the stone. On the next step a giddiness overcame her. She managed to get one paw in a crease between two stones, but then lost her footing. She slipped sideways, out into open space, and felt herself falling. In her almost weightless state, having grown so thin that she was nothing but skin over a framework of bones, she seemed to float rather than hurtle towards the earth.
The marshy ground in the shadow of the tower was softer than it looked. The fall knocked all the wind out of her frail body, but did not kill her, though she knew she was close t
o death. She began to stagger over the rocks, into the tall marsh grasses, towards her home. The journey was a long one, and she could never hope to make it, but someone had come to meet her.
Creekcrosser came out of a frosted field and found her lying on a patch of frozen turf, breathing out the last few wisps of life. ‘Creekcrosser,’ she said, seeing his misty shape above her, ‘I should have chosen you first.’
‘Last is best,’ he said, then, ‘are you dying, Rushie?’
‘I am dying, but there’s no need to be sad because I know where I’m going, and it’s a good place, Creekcrosser.’
Creekcrosser could not promise such a thing, but hares do not weep for the dead: they remember.
‘I shall box for you at the frost dancing,’ said Creekcrosser, ‘and I’m sure you’ll know.’
‘I shall be watching you,’ she replied, and then her eyes glazed over, and the thin breast was finally stilled. Creekcrosser left the place where the spirit of Rushie was struggling through the passages of darkness, her ghost-hares to guide her, towards the Otherworld of hares and rabbits and all things gone from the place of the living.
That evening, the flogre arrived back at his home to find the hare gone. He was enraged and immediately flew out into the darkness, searching for the creature he hated so much. He never found her body, though the tower told him over and over again that she must have died, for she had been so close to death when he had left for the hunt. He wished now that he had stayed to watch her, but that was in the past and he had lost his chance.
* * *
The following day, a gamekeeper from one of the nearby farms came across the frozen carcass and seeing that it was fresh he picked it up. He was amazed at its leanness, and saw that the hare had starved to death, and would be no good for the table.
However, gamekeepers are much the same as tractor-men, who like to keep the world tidy, so he took the skinny carcass of the mountain hare, and hung it on the gibbet which he kept on his own land. It was displayed there, along with two weasels, a stoat, five moles and three rooks. The weasels and stoat were there because they were suspected of killing game birds. The moles were there because they made untidy humps in flat fields. The rooks were there because they were rooks, who built their nests high in the elms shouting insults at men who walked beneath and blackened the sky as if officiating at the funeral of the sun at the end of each day.
For a while, until time and its helpers had ravaged the face of the mountain hare, animals and birds would often pause to study the strange expression on its features. Some of them thought they knew what they saw, some of them gave up on it, lost in ambiguities.
Chapter Thirty Three
The hands that held Skelter on the spiral staircase to the tower were strong and powerful: a farm worker’s hands. They were calloused and creased by the outdoors, by the handling of leather harnesses, tools, farm implements. They were hands that had broken the necks of chickens and rabbits. They were marred by scars from the bites of ferrets. They had gripped hemp ropes, hammered in posts, and torn down fences. They were not the kind of hands to allow a hare any consideration of escape.
Holding him out at arm’s length with his right hand, the man removed his jacket from his left side, then transferred Skelter to the other hand and took off the whole coat. Skelter was wrapped and bound in this nasty smelling garment so tightly that he ground his teeth in anger and would have whistled shrilly if his chest had not been constricted.
In the darkness of the folds of the coat Skelter was carried somewhere, through a muttering of people, away from the deepthroated sound of the church’s musical voice. All he could remember of the journey was the smell of that dried weed that men burned in their mouths, stale sweat, and many other old, old scents, buried deep in the cloth that had seen many summers, many winters, yet had never been immersed in water for the purpose of cleansing it. There was some paper in the inside pocket near to his teeth which he bit into savagely venting his frustration.
When he was unrolled from the coat, he found himself in a run: a wooden frame with chicken wire covering it, forming a cage some six lengths long and three lengths wide. The floor of the run was concrete, so there was no possibility of tunnelling his way out. In fact, his initial reaction was to race backwards and forwards, within the confines of the wire, in a kind of controlled panic. When his hysteria began to subside, and he entered a kind of calmness, he found he had been wearing down his claws on the rough concrete. If he continued to dash backwards and forwards, much as he wanted to, he would have no nails to dig with once he finally did get out. He decided to crouch in a corner for a while, and only jumped away when some human came near to the wire, either peering in too closely, or poking something through the holes.
There were young humans there, pushing cabbage stalks through the chicken wire every so often, trying to get him to eat. He ignored the gestures, partly out of fear, and partly out of sheer cussedness. The stalks had been handled so much they smelled of humans, and in any case he was too miserable and terrified to satisfy his hunger. If he could have bitten his own head off and ended it right there, he probably would have done so. This was the second time he had been in a cage, and he liked this time the least. There was a sense of permanence about this cage, and this time there were no companions to keep him company.
It was a long while before he could bring his eyes to see beyond the wire, into the yard itself, not because his vision was blocked, but because his mind would not allow him to concentrate on studying anything that was not immediately related to his situation inside the run.
When the young humans finally tired of him and went to a different part of the yard to play he was at last able to ascertain his geographical position. He seemed to be on a kind of rough concrete square that had perhaps at one time been the floor of a shed but was now open to the elements. Behind the run was a house, with a back door and an outhouse protruding into the yard.
Next to the back door was an archaic water pump, rusted and obviously no longer in use. The curved S-shaped handle looked as if it had seized long ago, and the snout of the pump, jutting over Skelter’s cage, was blocked with soil.
Skelter could smell the liquid below the device: a deep well that still held sweet fresh water above the rock table. This natural spring water was no longer used by the humans, only by the creatures who lived in the hole that the humans had dug, and then covered over a few decades ago.
There were toads trapped down there, who had been immured since the humans had stopped using buckets on a rope in the well and had installed a then modern device, a water pump. Skelter’s sharp ears could hear them murmuring to one another in the deep dreamful language of spiritual eremites.
Toads are long-living creatures, and sometimes all that time may be spent in the hollow below a stone. Such an existence produces surrealist minds which bend thoughts into strange shapes, and weird philosophies, odd concepts and eccentric theories emerge. Even were Skelter able to understand what the toads were saying it was doubtful he would comprehend the notions which they passed to one another in their vacuous ootheca world with its opiate atmosphere. What did he know about the different musical qualities of light or the material textures of darkness? Or the mystic poetry of still waters, sought and found by the roots of distant trees? Or the whispered history of stone, pressed from creatures and plants beyond his ken?
The toads of the closed well could speak with water, stone and wood, could feel the earth turning, could smell the leaves of the cycad fossils from forests of a former sun, could hear the screams of dinosaurs coming from deep at the bottom of time. The toads of the well had reached an enlightenment unknown to any other creature on the earth, their souls bound for the lap of God when the final darkness came upon them. The vertical abyss in which they existed, wetwalled and smooth, was the hollow core of the universe, and around this shaft of fetid air the macrocosm moved as on a frictionless spindle. They were the inner sanctum of the cosmos and their concentrated minds dreame
d of things that were yet unknown to ordinary life.
Above this dark oubliette the pump was a kind of obelisk, indicating the place where the toad generations might continue until the end of time, producing perhaps brilliant though bizarre insights to the mindscape, parodying the artistic achievements of men, thinking in symbols and images that would stun the greatest of philosophers – beast, bird, fish or man, that the world has ever known – yet lost to any useful contact by the very nature of their situation. They may have had the answers to death and war, disease and famine, life and peace, and all the mysteries of the struggles going on outside the well, but if so these solutions were locked in with them in their vault, never to be opened again.
Skelter shook his mind free of the mumble of monastic toads.
Around the yard itself was junk-fence made of pieces of chicken wire, linear wire, bits of boxwood, the top of a kitchen stove, rusty corrugated iron – anything that filled a hole. In the far corner was a small vegetable patch in amongst which the chickens scratched a living when they were out of their coop, which was during the day. At night they were locked inside their protective house, away from foxes and stoats.
Chained to the coop, night and day, was a bedraggled mongrel with a black, matted curly-haired coat. He was a savage beast, growling even at the master of the house, though softly in the back of his throat. Most of the time the dog would lie in the dirt, watching the world with morose and dangerous eyes that turned to pebbles at the slightest infringement of his territory. The only creatures he ignored were the chickens and the smallest member of the human household. Skelter was glad the dog was well away from his run, for it studied the small hare with dark interest. Skelter knew a killer when he saw one.
Frost Dancers: A Story of Hares Page 26