The rest of the yard was hardpacked earth, with broken toys of young humans scattered here and there. A boxwood cart, which the youngsters had made out of pram wheels, was tied to the fence as if it were a horse and likely to bolt if left unattended.
From one end of the yard to the other ran a washing line on two poles, which was continually in use, there being seven youngsters in the house to keep clean. The earth below this line was sodden and marked with chickensfeet tracks. Wild birds would drink from the puddles there when water was scarce elsewhere.
In a small potting shed by the vegetable patch were other animals whom Skelter occasionally glimpsed when the door was left open. A hamster, some gerbils and a dwarf rabbit shared a shelf amongst a clutter of garden tools, pots, boxes and dried bulbs (some of which were decades old). Spiders were rife, weaving and interweaving webs until all the corners of the shed, and most of its darkened ceiling, were covered in their flimsy flytraps. So thick and layered were these webs that sometimes the catching of a single fly in the strong silken threads of one would jangle the alarms of all the arachnid occupants of the place and they would come dashing out in their dozens only to find that the victim was not theirs at all, but belonged to a far-flung neighbour on the other side of the world.
Skelter could see all this activity, but hares do not have strong enough voices to reach any distance so he was not able to converse with any of these creatures, even the rabbit. They seemed a poor motley bunch in their smelly cages, either staring into space or playing with some human toy, like the hamster’s wheel, or the cardboard rolls in the gerbils’ cage.
This then, was Skelter’s new environment and one he came to hate with a venom unmatched by any feeling he had experienced before his incarceration. It was the concrete that was mostly responsible for this enmity. The unnatural feel of the substance beneath his feet, and its ability to retain the stale smell of his urine and faeces, made him regard it with great loathing. There was no way he could punish it, either, for it resisted his most savage bites. Instead, he had to content himself with gnawing the wooden framework to his run.
Once the children got used to him, and ceased to tease him, he came to regard them as something of a diversion from the terrible boredom that overcomes animals kept in cages. He knew that if he sank into apathy he would become like the animals in the potting shed, all hope having gone from their eyes. Skelter was made of sterner stuff and dreamed of escape. It was possible, he reminded himself, that he was being fattened for the pot – jugged hare – but he did not think so, for the man who had caught him would be paying more attention to him if he were. His food was adequate, nothing more, and if he were being fattened he would be receiving mounds of the stuff.
There was a third possibility: that he was destined for another run against the greyhounds, but that too seemed unlikely. The people who held the hare coursing meets were not the working men, with the soil engrained in their features, but the owners of the farms. This man who had him in his clutches was clearly a fellow like the tractor-man, closer to the earth than those who had captured him before.
Besides the children, who ran and jumped and squealed and cried and laughed, sometimes all at once, causing Skelter much bewilderment at first, there were the chickens. Most of these were hens of course, who spent much of their time pecking at ground that had been pecked to a barrenness unknown outside bare rockfaces by centuries of hens. It would be difficult to find another patch of earth that had less living matter amongst its hardpacked grains of dust. The arid deserts of the world were abundantly fertile compared with the yard in which the chickens pecked. Yet they continued to peck, perhaps out of habit, perhaps for something to do, perhaps from sheer obstinacy.
The chief of the chickens, for it was an hierarchical society, was the cockerel. This mean-looking rooster drove the hens insane with his complete disregard for any mating season. He chased them, pinned them down, and had his way with them no matter what the weather, the colour of the light, before a solstice or after an equinox. Nothing mattered to the cockerel except the satisfaction of his own lust. The only thing that saved the hens from constant abuse was their numbers, which were sufficient to space the rooster’s attacks on their person to an almost tolerable degree.
One or two of the hens liked his attention of course, and would parade up and down before the strutting male bird, showing their dirty brown feathers to the best advantage. Such is the contrariness of life however, that the behaviour of cockerels is no different from any other creature, and those which desired notice were the ones that received it the least. The rooster bypassed these hotblooded females for the shy or haughty ones who spent their time trying to avoid his rushes.
The hens ignored the new hare, not even looking up when he tried to make contact with them. Skelter felt he did not exist in the eyes of chickens. He was like everything else: not being a grain of wheat or yardworm he was nothing to them. They clucked and grumbled away, pecking round his concrete domain, without showing the least bit of interest in his being there.
Occasionally one of the hens would be grabbed by the man and its neck would be wrung for all to witness. The first of these acts so shocked Skelter with its suddenness, that he did not stop trembling for an hour. The man simply came out of the house, looked around the yard, selected his victim, stalked over to the unsuspecting hen, grabbed it, held its body under his arm and twisted its neck. All over.
Skelter looked around wildly, expecting to be next.
After two or three of these executions, Skelter came to realise how the victims were chosen, and was glad he did not lay eggs. It was the bad layers that went to the pot. He could see the desperate amongst them, as their egg-laying abilities dwindled, trying to force out ovoids that were not there. Despite what the rest of the world believed, hens were not stupid but as intelligent as any other creature. They knew when their time was approaching. The rooster too knew who was next for the chop and began to give the hen a wide berth, possibly considering it bad form, or unlucky, to expend his precious seed on those marked out by death. That member of the harem would be ostracised by the rest of the concubines too, making her last days the most miserable of a miserable life on earth.
The only other members of the human household that paid any attention to the hens was the female, who fed them and collected the eggs, and the smallest barely-walking youngster, who loved to see them scatter, and walked amongst them like a giant trying to tweak their tails. This fearless little creature, who would poke at Skelter through the cage wire and burble strange noises at him, could sit on the dog’s back and pull its ears and tail without the slightest indication of annoyance from that proud savage beast whose heart had been turned to stone by those that had chained him in the dust – for life.
Chapter Thirty Four
Skelter did not manage to escape in the first few days, nor the first month and then finally winter massed over the land like slow-gathering iron, taking possession of the outdoors and resenting the resistance of indoors. It took the sky in its firm grip and gave it enough body to crush the three seasons that had gone before, hardpacking them down into the earth, until all traces of them were out of sight. It was as if there had never been a blossom on a tree, or a bird singing, or a delicate insect flying, just this ponderous mottled sky that pressed down like a great metal weight on the land below.
The hedges, shorn of their leaves, were networks of black twigs, and the trees on the skyline were stark and discomforting as gallows. Old birds’ nests were embarrassingly exposed. The nakedness of the land was disconcerting.
Skelter found himself the object of much attention from the household, and was bemused by the reasons for this. Even the man, who once he had caught Skelter and put him in the run, came out to stare at him and shake his head. It was all very strange. They stood over him and barked and growled in the way humans do when they are excited by something, and pointed to Skelter not once, but many times. Friends of the youngsters were brought round and Skelter was disp
layed for their benefit. They seemed sufficiently amazed by him.
Eventually, the novelty of his presence wore off and things went back to normal. He was ignored by most of the humans most of the time. The adult female fed and watered him without fail, and the young one still poked twigs and things through the wire at him, but that too was usual.
Skelter had ceased, like most of the animals about the place, to resent the attentions of the youngster. The small human had nothing but joy in its heart and its attentions were the result of an insatiable curiosity. It wanted to know what fur felt like, tasted like, ruffled like. It needed to grab ears to see what happened when it did so. It needed to chase, with the noise of water swilling down a drain, anything that was prepared to run. This was simply the effervescence of life bubbling up in the youngster and not the malevolence it seemed to be.
After the first hard frost the man came and slipped a wooden box with a hole in it under the run, and some straw followed. Skelter guessed they were worried about him being exposed to weather with nothing but concrete under him. He sheltered in the box occasionally, but ignored the straw. He was not a hamster or a gerbil: he was a wild mountain hare.
A light fall of snow came one evening, settling like white peace over the land.
The dog stayed most of the time in his kennel and Skelter could hear the creature coughing in the night. Foxes sometimes drifted near the coop, but the dog let rip with some foul language if ever they came too close, and they caught his battle scent as well as his words and drifted away again. Skelter wondered why the dog did his duty when he was clearly neglected and misused, never given a walk let alone a run, and treated like a pariah by all, even those he guarded. The chickens were the worst of all, scornful of him, knowing they were safe from attack. They knew they were more valuable than the dog and he would be punished, perhaps by death, if he assaulted one of them.
Why then, did this bitter morose animal carry out diligently his task of protecting the birds? It seemed he had spent his life on the end of a chain, despised by the domestic creatures of the household and neglected by the humans. It was a mystery Skelter never solved.
After the snow, savage winds came and tore into the landscape, trying to rip it apart.
It became much colder and the water they put out for Skelter turned to ice very quickly. Sparrows came to drink it, squeezing through a hole in the wire. Skelter did not mind that. He knew they were dying in their hundreds, trying to find what little unfrozen water they could. The woman threw out crumbs, but the chickens ate them and she seldom remembered the water for the wild birds. Her washing was dried somewhere inside the house, for if she put it on the line it would go as stiff as boards within a short time.
One cold night Skelter was in his box, shivering and trying to keep warm, when there were some sounds by the run. Skelter could smell a familiar creature and when he recognised the scent, he poked his head out of the hole to look. There in the moonlight, just a few inches away and staring in at him, was the dog. At the other end of the yard was a broken leather collar on the end of a chain. Snow was settling all around and gradually covering the manacles of his slavery.
The dog had finally got loose.
Skelter was alarmed. What was the beast going to do? It stared in at him with bright feverish eyes and said something in its own language. The words were soft, no doubt to prevent being heard by the sleeping household, but there was something in the tone that gave Skelter the idea that the dog meant him no harm, that he was commiserating with the hare. The mongrel stared at him a little while longer, gave the house a hard uncompromising look, then slipped away into the night.
Good for you, thought Skelter, get away from this place as fast as you can.
It began to snow very heavily. The escapee had judged his time right, knowing his footprints would be covered and his route unknown. How long he had been planning this deliverance could only be guessed at by Skelter, but the collar must have been ready for snapping for a while for the dog to be able to choose his time so carefully.
When the household woke the next morning, there was no hue and cry, for no one noticed the dog had gone. They put his dish full of food outside his kennel, and did not even bother to look inside. The chickens ate the potatoes and scraps of meat, and still no one missed the guardian.
The youngsters came out into the yard, and there was much excitement for a while. They played snowballs, throwing the missiles at each other, built a snowman, and gave each other rides on a sledge. None of them thought to look inside the kennel for the faithful family guard. When they were exhausted and wet they went indoors, and Skelter did not see them again that day.
Two whole days had passed, by which time the mongrel was probably halfway across the world, before someone thought to peer within the kennel, and found him missing. They dug under the snow and found his chain and the broken collar and there was much barking amongst them. They went off in different directions, letting out yelps, seemingly distraught that their captive slave had taken it into his head to be so ungrateful as to run away from their kindness.
The dog never reappeared and Skelter hoped that he was alive and well and had either found a new home, one that treated him with respect and consideration, or was wild and free, and living off the land.
A clear day some time later, before the new dog came, Skelter had cause to be concerned. At dawn he sighted a shape in the sky and knew it to be the flogre. He remained inside the protective box, watching the terrible creature glide across the heavens in search of a victim. Skelter knew he was quite safe inside the run but this did not help his nerves in any way. He still found himself trembling at the sight of the grey form moving over the world.
He did not come out of his box the whole day.
There were dangers everywhere, even in captivity.
Presumably the family were still hoping to find the mongrel and return him to his chain, for they left the post of guard dog empty for some time before getting a new mongrel.
Skelter was resting inside his box as usual one moonlit night, keeping out of the wind, when a scent came to him that made his heart start pounding in his chest. There was a fox in the yard. He saw the dark shape slip through a hole in the makeshift fence and stand there moving its head slowly, looking from Skelter’s run to the chicken coop.
The chickens smelled his scent too and began to get restless, clucking away within their wooden walls. The house itself was mostly asleep, with only the various tribes of mice active. Certainly the humans were not stirring.
The fox, a young vixen, came over to his run and stared in at him with amber eyes. Her mouth was parted slightly and Skelter found himself looking down a channel lined with sharp white teeth. He began to whistle, which made the vixen narrow her eyes, and she said something. Skelter stopped whistling and ground his teeth, looking around wildly for some avenue of escape, knowing that he was trapped.
Skelter knew the run was not strong enough to keep out the vixen. Formidable as it was to a hare, it was a flimsy piece of wood and wire to an animal the size of a fox. She could drag the frame from the concrete onto the yard and upturn it with only a little effort.
Her eyes glittered as she stared at him, knowing she was terrible, the manifestation of a nightmare.
Then she turned abruptly and headed towards the chicken coop. She worried and fussed around the wooden structure for a while, then eventually found a rotten plank, which she pulled away with her teeth. Then she was inside amongst them and there was bedlam. The noise was such that it woke every creature in the vicinity, including the metaphysical toads, who joined in the cacophony.
The smell of death was in the air. One of the hens squeezed through the hole in the side of the coop and escaped, but inside the wooden walls many were dying. Skelter dashed backwards and forwards in his run, wondering whether the world was coming to an end. There were sounds from within the house, and lights went on throwing swathes of brilliance over the snowy ground.
Just as the vixen
emerged from the hole in the coop with a dead chicken in its mouth the door to the house flew open and a half-dressed man came tumbling out. There was a short pause and the fox slipped into the darkness: a liquefaction of its form, becoming darkness itself.
The night roared sound and a flame reached out over Skelter’s run. The hare’s heart stopped in mid-beat and his eyes popped. There followed the unmistakable odour of fired gun, and Skelter pressed himself down into the cold concrete.
There was much activity after that, with several of the humans coming out to inspect the henhouse, counting the dead bodies, and many barked curses were flung in the direction the fox had taken. The man with the gun went off into the night, but returned without the carcass of a fox.
Finally, the household went again to bed.
Skelter realised he had had a lucky escape and that if the henhouse had been difficult to breach he might have become prey to the vixen. It seemed she had gone mad once inside the coop and had slaughtered the hens, even though she could only take one of them away with her. There was something about foxes, Skelter knew, that made them into machines once they were amongst several prey: if the henhouse had not confined the creatures, most of them would have escaped.
The following morning, there was blood on the snow. Skelter watched the clean-up operation, noting the mood of the woman and man, which was extremely dour. The cockerel’s body appeared amongst the dead, but whether he had died bravely in defending his harem or whether he had panicked with the rest of them and died in the same hysterical struggle to find an escape was never known.
The man came and stared at Skelter for a long time, his eyes dark and heavy and his face long. Skelter wondered whether he was now destined for the pot, since the family had lost many hens and eggs and chicken would be scarce for a while.
Frost Dancers: A Story of Hares Page 27