As it happened, the bearded man did not keep him long in captivity. One frosty morning the run was lifted suddenly and Skelter was grabbed and bundled into the bicycle box. Then he was taken for a longish ride.
Obviously the man had decided not to send him to a zoo but to let him go in the wild. Skelter was taken down to the marshes, presumably where the man felt he would be more at home when he was released, and there the cage was opened. It would have been better if the man had just lifted the run and let him out in the garden, but freedom was freedom. The man watched him walk off into the tall marsh grasses, where he stayed until he heard the bicycle leave.
‘Free!’ shouted Skelter, almost delirious with happiness.
He could hardly believe it.
He ran out of the marshes and into farmland. Once the short grasses were under his feet, he did something which hares reserve for very special occasions, for times like this, and which has rarely been observed by humans.
Skelter did a dancer’s whirligig.
Standing on his hind legs, his ears flat against his head, Skelter spun like a top in the frosty grass, sending droplets of water spraying up from his hind paws. His front legs were held out straight and to the side, as he twirled on the spot, balancing his perfectly vertical stance. Faster and faster he went, the wind rushing in his ears, his hind paws tripping nimbly on the spot: a true dancer’s feet. To any astonished onlookers it might seem as if he was attempting to drill through the earth’s crust to its molten centre.
For him, it was a heady glorious experience: it was a dance to mark his moment of freedom.
The witnesses, animal and bird, to this extraordinary sight were amazed by it. A hare doing a vertical whirl was something they saw once in a lifetime if they were fortunate. It was a dance that was the morning’s secret, something seen and gone like a passing dream, yet caught forever between the folds of light and shadow. His eyes held that look in them of formal ritual, full of pride in himself and his species. The excitement in him was evident in his rapid movement. He was the hare, the wild-headed madfooted breathless hare, who had danced on the lawns of God since the First Creation.
When he had finished, he fell forward on his forepaws, and lay still, resting for a few moments. The world waited with him. Then he was on his feet and bounding across the meadowland, scattering some rooks who happened to be sitting around a fence post plotting the humiliation of scarecrows.
When he came to the river he ran along its banks, looking for a narrow place to cross. The river was coursing through the countryside in a gentle winterly manner. The water looked as heavy as quicksilver, its currents like the rippling muscles of some giant serpent. By the time Skelter found a suitable crossing point, a bright light-yellow sun was on the world, causing the frost and ice to glitter. He entered the freezing water and swam the short stretch, most of his body above the surface. On the other side he stopped to shake himself free of the droplets before they froze in his fur.
He lay in the weak sun for a while, letting it warm him through before he continued his journey. In the direction in which he was heading the first hare he would encounter would be Followme, the moonhare. It might be best to see her in any case, since she was head of the colony and liked these marks of respect for her position.
Skelter set off for Booker’s Field, where the hare totem tree, blanched whiter than the whitest snow by the hard sun of a thousand summers, its wood almost become stone, stood waiting for the return of its lost son. He and the totem had something in common now which had not been there before.
Chapter Thirty Seven
When Skelter reached Booker’s Field there was a husk of hares around the totem. Followme and Reacher were there, and Hind-walker, and one or two others. The discussion they were having seemed to be intense, and Skelter approached slowly to surprise them with his presence. He could not see Eyebright amongst them though, which was disappointing.
Here and there on the ground had been flung patches of snow like cast-off pelts, mostly in the shadows of the hedgerow and trees and in the shallow ditch. Skelter was hot from his long run and decided to rest a while on one of these cold patches, waiting for a suitable time to interrupt the meeting.
‘There’s nothing we can do,’ Reacher was saying. ‘It’s not Skelter’s fault that things have turned out this way. The forms did protect us for a long while, remember.’
Skelter’s ears pricked up at the mention of his name.
Moonhare said, ‘What I can’t understand is how the flogre manages to undermine everything we do. It must have some source of magic.’
‘Let’s face it,’ said Hindwalker, ‘the flogre is magic. We’ve come to accept its presence over the land, but when you think back, why, there’s no other creature like it, is there? Where did it come from? Who are its parents? It just appeared, didn’t it? I say it’s been sent from the Otherworld, to rule over us. We should offer it sacrifices to appease it rather than running away and hiding from it. Maybe it would come less often then?’
Skelter couldn’t believe his ears, but he remained quietly in the shadow of the tree.
Headinthemist said, ‘What do you mean, sacrifice? Are you suggesting we should draw lots or something, and the loser just stand out there in the open, waiting to be snatched?’
‘No, no,’ Hindwalker replied, ‘not us. But each set of parents should put up one of their leverets in turn. The older hares are established members of the colony but the young ones, well, some of them will die anyway. Why not give the weak ones to the flogre so the strong amongst us will live?’
Headinthemist let out a startled cry. ‘That’s a terrible thing to say. It’s easy to see you haven’t had any litters yet. I’m not giving up any of my leverets to save you.’
‘Not to save me, to save us all. If the older hares are all killed, the young will die anyway, because there’ll be no one to look after them. We have a duty to ourselves and the stronger leverets to survive the best way we can. It’s the colony that’s important here, not individuals. We can’t afford to be sentimental.’
Sunhare said, ‘I wish Skelter were here …’
‘Skelter, Skelter, what good would it do us if he was here. If he hadn’t taught us to make those mountain hare forms maybe the flogre wouldn’t pick on us so much, maybe we made it so mad with us, it wants to wipe us out? There are plenty of other victims to be had – lambs, geese, rabbits. Why does it always come here? Skelter was probably the worst thing that ever happened to us. He left us with a curse.’
Moonhare said, ‘Hindwalker may have a point.’
‘No, no, I can’t accept that,’ said sunhare. ‘Skelter did the best he could for us.’
‘He came out of nowhere,’ said moonhare.
‘And taught us tricks that made the flogre furious with us,’ cried Hindwalker.
Headinthemist said quietly, ‘Well, he’s gone now, and it’s always easier to blame someone who’s not here and can’t defend himself, but I must admit he was a strange creature …’
Skelter could stand no more of this.
‘What a lot of hypocrites!’ he exclaimed. ‘Not so long ago you were singing my praises. Now the first thing that goes wrong, you’re blaming me for it. Blame yourselves, or better still, get your heads together and find a way out of your troubles. The flogre is the flogre. It’s going to kill where the killing is easiest. What you must do is make it a little harder for him to get you, rather than other victims, and you, Hindwalker, you should be ashamed! To advocate sacrificing the young, so that the old may live. I never heard of such a selfish thing …’
After this speech, during which the other hares were standing, transfixed, staring at the patch of snow on which he stood, Skelter moved out onto the brown earth of the field.
Immediately, several piercing whistles went up from the husk of hares and most of them scattered, running over the fields.
Hindwalker alone was left frozen to the spot, trembling from head to toe. The fear in his face was terrible to se
e. Skelter looked around quickly for a fox or badger and seeing none, stared at the sky. There was nothing on the land or in the heavens.
‘The totem will protect me!’ shrieked Hindwalker, in quavering accents. ‘You can’t touch me while I’m by the totem.’
Skelter realised that the jack was talking to him.
‘I wouldn’t touch you with someone else’s foot,’ replied Skelter in disgust, ‘let alone my own. What’s the matter with you? What’s the matter with them?’
He walked forward a few more paces.
At this movement, Hindwalker thawed and took flight. His fore and hind legs criss-crossed each other so rapidly in his panic to get away from Skelter that he tripped himself up twice and went tumbling over. He took the low hedge in one leap, sailing over it as easily as a hunter chasing a fox.
Skelter was mystified. What on earth was the matter with them all? Surely he wasn’t such a formidable character as to frighten the wits out of them with his presence. Yes, he was angry with them, but most of them were big hares, larger than he was himself, and could box his ears for him. As a group, why they would have pummelled him into the ground with no bother at all. Had his legendary exploits grown so much out of proportion, that he now seemed invincible?
It was certainly very mysterious.
There was nothing for it but to go and find Eyebright, and find out from her what was going on.
He travelled across the fields again, occasionally sighting a hare he knew, only to have it go shrieking away, running as if a wildcat was after it.
When he reached Whinsled Lea he searched for Eyebright and found her down by the river. He approached her from behind, softly called her name. She turned, stared wide-eyed at him, then half-jumped, half-fell into the river. The current was fast and strong and it carried her some yards down the bank, where she scrambled out and took off over the grasslands.
Skelter had had enough.
‘This is ridiculous,’ he muttered, and raced after her.
He ran her to ground at the foot of a giant oak and as she cowered breathlessly, protected on all sides by the exposed roots of the tree, Skelter approached.
‘Don’t come any closer, ghost-hare,’ she said. ‘If my time has come, so be it. I’ll accompany you to the Otherworld.’
‘Ghost-hare?’ cried Skelter. ‘I’m not dead. It’s me. Skelter.’
Eyebright stared at him, looking unconvinced.
Skelter said, ‘Oh, I understand. You thought I’d been killed by the flogre, right? Well, I wasn’t. A man captured me and I’ve been a prisoner for all this time, but I’m free now.’
‘You may have been Skelter once,’ whispered Eyebright, ‘but you’re definitely a ghost now. Don’t you understand? This man, this place where you’ve been a prisoner, it must have been in the Otherworld.’
Skelter thought back over his experiences, wondering if perhaps she was right, since they were all so convinced he was dead. The more he thought about it, however, the more he knew they were wrong. He didn’t feel dead, for a start. Then there was the bearded man and Betsy the dog: they weren’t dead too were they? If they were it was a remarkable coincidence that all three of them died together.
‘Why are you so sure I’m a ghost?’ he finally asked her.
‘You look like a ghost.’
He stared down at his white fur.
‘I’m just me,’ he replied, puzzled.
‘Just your voice, but inside a white hare,’ she said.
Skelter then remembered back to when the young humans had shown such an interest in him, at the beginning of winter, and how he had been the centre of attention for a while, until they got used to his new coat. Now he understood. It was that old monster raising its head again: ignorance. It was a question of winter whiteness.
‘Listen,’ he said, gently, ‘there’s no need to be frightened of me. I’m quite normal.’
‘You don’t look normal.’
‘Maybe not to you, but I would to a mountain hare like myself. We all turn white in the winter, just like stoats, or ptarmigan. I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen ptarmigan, but you’ve seen ermine, haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then, you know that in the spring, summer and autumn, an ermine is a stoat, with a rusty coat – yet in the winter that coat turns white. I don’t see the need to change my name like the stoat does, but my coat changes, just like his.’
Eyebright leaned forward.
‘You’re not a ghost-hare?’
‘How could I be? I haven’t been deified.’
‘But you fought the flogre. Maybe that entitled you to become one of the elite?’
Skelter shook his head.
‘I didn’t fight the creature. I did what I set out to do, and got a good look at it, for all the help that’s going to give us, but I have to say if it had come to a confrontation, it would have snapped me in two with one peck of its beak. It’s a monster of a bird.’
She hopped forward.
‘So you’re just Skelter, with a winter coat?’
‘What do I have to do, to convince you of that?’
She came forward, bravely, and sniffed his fur, wrinkling her nose.
‘You smell like Skelter.’
‘Good clean mountain smell, I hope, of heather and sedge, with a whiff of glen grass thrown in.’
‘You sound like Skelter, too.’
‘Good highland timbre, proud and simply magnificent.’
‘Something like that.’
They stood for a while, together, sniffing each other and feeling the warmth from each other’s fur. Skelter began to get embarrassed by her attention after a while, but remained where he was, allowing her time to get used to his strange coat. Now he knew the problem it was not difficult to see why he had frightened the other hares. If they had never seen a hare with a white pelage before naturally they would be startled and confused – just as he would have been perplexed if he had come back to find them all with pink eyes and yellow tails. The unusual caused alarm first, and curiosity followed quite a long while afterwards.
It took some time for Eyebright to relax but when she finally did so she demanded to know of his adventures. He began by describing the flogre: how it was a giant bird with talons the size of a man’s hand and a terrible hooked beak as big as a hare’s head; how its crown had a horizontal crest of feathers running from ear to ear; how its eyes were as cold and hard as quartz.
‘It’s impossible to imagine anything that could defeat such a creature,’ said Skelter. ‘I think it could kill even a fully-grown fox with ease.’
He then went on to describe his adventures from the point of meeting with his old friend Rushie in the tomb, to his capture by the man on the spiral staircase, the yard with the concrete run, then his eventual transfer to the cottage nearby, and freedom.
Eyebright nodded, at each turn of the events, not interrupting. When it was over, however, she expressed her happiness at finding him alive and well, and added, ‘This, er, Rushie. Were you close friends?’
‘Very close. We grew up in the highlands together. No doubt we would have been mates if we had stayed together.’
‘I see,’ said Eyebright, quietly.
‘What? What’s the matter?’ asked Skelter.
Eyebright looked at the river as if it were a source of courage, and then told him.
‘I’m afraid Rushie is dead. She was taken by the flogre, who for some unknown reason did not eat her. He let her starve in his tower. She escaped and made her way back to the marsh hares and was met on the journey by Creekcrosser – he’s one of her old colony. She died right in front of him. I’m sorry.’
It took a few moments for the information to sink in.
Then Skelter said, ‘She starved to death?’
‘Yes.’
Skelter ground his teeth, and he too looked out over the swirling waters of the river. He was quiet for a long while. There was in his eye a faraway look, as if he were not on the flatlands at all but
in some other place beyond normal vision. Owls had that look sometimes, when the world was bleak and bare in winter, and food was scarce. They sat on a post and gazed into the middle distance with undisturbable firmness, and it was as if they were staring across infinity and wondering how long it would take to fly to the far side. Skelter’s look was that of a wintering owl.
Finally he turned to Eyebright and said, ‘You say it was a hare called Creekcrosser that went out to find her? Not one named Racer?’
‘Racer was interested in her as a mate, but it was Creekcrosser who went after her. I don’t know what it was all about.’
‘Thanks for telling me, Eyebright. Nothing we can do now, is there? Now, how are we going to go about telling the colony about me …?’
Chapter Thirty Eight
It was not surprising that the colony was concerned over the change in Skelter’s pelage, for the legends told of many magical hares with different coloured coats: experiments of Kicker when that first great hare began producing various species of lagomorphs to cover the earth. Perhaps the colony believed Skelter to be one of these ancients, returned to a period of time not its own, to disturb the living.
Among the first of the primal lagomorphs were the midnight hares, or jewelled hares, that crowd the heavens. This was long before the humans came out of their caves in the ground according to the hares, out of the sea-of-chaos according to the canids. This was in the time when there were giants on the earth, and when rocks and minerals were living things, before they had been frightened into immobility and their present inanimate state by the coming of men.
Frost Dancers: A Story of Hares Page 29