Frost Dancers: A Story of Hares

by Garry Kilworth

  Gradually he began to wear the field hare down, gaining in authority after every short four-cornered rest, actually feeling his potency increase as Longrunner’s energy diminished. His was a body used to circumnavigating tors on steep slopes, and his hind legs could bear his weight all day. His stamina was unmatched by any amongst these brown hares. He was the rugged hillsider, the fell runner, whose chunky form was made for durability. Longrunner might as well have been thumping away at a geological mass. If Longrunner had been the wind and rain, the field hare might have eroded the highlander in ten thousand years but that was the only way he was going to win.

  Longrunner began to lose heart.

  Poor Longrunner. By all reckoning, taking into account his length, his reach, and his experience, he should have won without too much of a problem, but how could he win against a hare with the whole of the highland country behind him, with the jill in question urging him to victory with looks if not with words? The flatlander jack fought with great vigour, with skill and determination, but eventually the tough little highlander wore him out. Longrunner came to a point where his blows seemed to have no further effect, and Skelter appeared like a half-buried boulder, impossible to knock over.

  In the end Longrunner’s spirit finally gave out when he saw how futile was his task. He fell away, conceding victory.

  At that point in time Skelter had almost had enough, and was going on blind persistence only. He was so grateful for Longrunner giving in, he almost fell on him sobbing with relief, but fortunately retained his dignity. Going over to the other jack he said, ‘A good match. You almost had me there. I think my joints must have locked, otherwise I would have fallen over.’

  Longrunner, fighting to get his breath back, shook his head.

  ‘You would never have fallen over. It was like fighting stone – all I was doing was scratching the surface.’

  The other hares, apart from Eyebright, and perhaps Creekcrosser, were not so happy with the result. Skelter was an outsider, a small blue hare come down from the highlands, and in the first round of frost dancing he had beaten one of their best boxers. It was not something that would have had them prancing among the buttercups in delight. They stared at him sourly and exchanged dour looks as he cleaned up his wounds.

  Moonhare was even suggesting that the fight had not been legitimate and that it should be fought again at some time in the future.

  ‘Skelter should have first observed the formalities and performed the courtesy dance before Eyebright. There’s been a breach of protocol here. I’m not sure we should let the result stand …’

  Fortunately, Skelter did not need to protest, for Longrunner jumped to his defence straight away.

  ‘What a load of rubbish. I’ve never heard of such a thing, moonhare. Dancing in front of the jill is just a question of manners, an old-time tradition, with nothing at all to do with the actual fight, and of course a newcomer doesn’t know all the nuances of our traditions. Why should he? This is his first frost dancing on the flatlands.

  ‘No, I’m sorry, but as his opponent I have to say the fight was fought fair and square. He’s a good boxer. You can’t take that away from him. Next year I’ll give him a better battle, because I’ve got his measure now …’ he narrowed his eyes at Skelter and nodded ‘… but this fight stands.’

  Moonhare was not used to being put down so firmly.

  ‘Well, I’m still not so sure …’ she began, but Creekcrosser said, ‘You can’t make them fight again, if neither of them wants to, moonhare.’

  After that she was quiet – sulky – but quiet.

  Skelter went over to Longrunner and thanked him for his intervention.

  ‘I have to tell you,’ he said, ‘that we actually do the courtesy dance ourselves, up in the highlands, so I should have remembered.’

  ‘Listen my white-coated intruder,’ replied Longrunner, ‘I’m not too happy with you at the moment. You come into the colony as smooth as you please, and proceed to steal away the jill I have had my sights on for the last season – don’t expect me to like you for it. It may be we can be friends at some time, but not now. As for the fight, I meant what I said – it was fought fair and square and the result stands. Don’t ask me for anything more.’

  With that the flatlander jack turned his tail on Skelter.

  Skelter shrugged and went over to Creekcrosser, who gave him the praise he deserved.

  ‘Well done, you showed that jack where his back was. I wish I’d done the same thing in my fight …’

  Skelter’s ghost-hare, from her shadow world, was highly satisfied with her little champion. Throughout the fight she had been encouraging him with whistles and grindings of teeth, none of which the living could hear, but which helped her own excitement. She was convinced that Skelter had won because of her enthusiasm for him, believing that she had put heart into him with her support for him.

  She wished, as she always did at the frost dancing time, that she was still flesh and blood, so that some fine jacks would once again stand up and box for her.

  A flatlander herself, she recalled with nostalgia the king-hares of her Celtic past, vying for her favours. How they had danced on those far-off bronzed mornings, when the frost-fire was blazoned across the flatlands, and how they had battled for her affection in the ruts left by chariot wheels. What wild redhaired days they had been. That was before her capture, before she became a stately matron, with amulets around her ankles, and a slim copper chain about her neck. Those were cloaked days, and horse days, and spear and fire days, all gone, all gone.

  She left the scene of the frost dancing and made her way along the shadowy paths which led to the Otherworld.

  During the rest of the boxing, Skelter studiously avoided meeting Eyebright’s eyes. He had won her, she was his and he hers, but now things had been settled according to the rules of society, they had to be settled between them, and he wasn’t too anxious to get to that part. Now that they were to be mates he found himself agonisingly shy with her, and this was silly, for they had been close friends and field-sharers for quite some time. He couldn’t even meet her eye, while he watched and encouraged other boxers. There was something inside him which wanted to put off that first important meeting with her, during which he knew he was going to be awkward, probably say all the wrong things, and be unable to find the real Skelter.

  In the afternoon the day greyed to near darkness and the hares had to scatter and hide in various places, as the flogre came gliding over looking for meat. Skelter watched it circling the fields and finally it dropped, coming up with a domestic cat that had wandered too far from its safe home. The cat was screeching, ‘Au secours!’, over and over again, until the sound faded into the dull heavens.

  ‘Well, that’s that for the day,’ said Skelter to Eyebright, as they both emerged from under a log. ‘It won’t be back until dawn tomorrow.’

  ‘Hopefully,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t suppose there’ll be any more frost dancing, so we might as well dig our forms under this log. It’s as good a place as any. Now that the season is here, officially, we’ll all be moving back together, won’t we?’

  ‘Yes, we will.’

  They dug their forms under the log, in positions which would make it very difficult for the flogre to force them out with his beak, even if he found them. When that was over, Skelter suggested they go down to the river, to bid farewell to their summer-autumn-winter home. Eyebright thought that was a good idea.

  Neither of them talked very much on the journey, though Skelter kept sneaking glances at his mate, and wondering how he had been so lucky as to win such a beautiful jill. Once or twice he caught her looking at him, and they both turned away quickly, in confusion, as their eyes met.

  On their way to the lea, they passed through a wood. Heavy rain had begun to fall, for the third day running, and many of the low-lying fields in the broad shallow valley down to the river were becoming flooded and difficult to cross. Gulls were circling and landing, picking
up the drowning worms and insects that floated on the floodwater.

  Both hares were soaked through, their fur sleeked back, making them look much leaner and larger-eyed. The rain was thrashing the wood’s leafless canopy, passing through the bare branches to the ground. Around them, on mossy banks, were blooming crocuses and yellow aconites, and in other places the snowdrops hung their heads. A gorse bush, forever in bloom, had crept in below the edge of the woodland. The season of the black frost had gone, and the world was now in bud again.

  Wet through, they lay side by side in a patch of crocuses, and it was now that Eyebright took him to task.

  ‘You should have danced for me.’

  ‘I know, I know. I’m sorry. I was so eager to get it over with, I forgot.’

  She sniffed.

  ‘Oh, so you haven’t even got the excuse that mountain hares don’t follow the same custom?’

  He was honest.

  ‘No, we observe the same courtesies, I just forgot. I was excited, and scared. Not that he was going to hurt me, but that I would lose to him – and lose you. I know that’s no real excuse. Can you forgive me?’

  ‘I don’t know. Let me look into your eyes.’

  He turned to face her, their noses touching.

  ‘Yes,’ she said in a soft voice, ‘oh, yes.’

  They tumbled then, in a fever of excitement, flattening the crocuses like two wanton vandals. The sky turned upside down, the earth slid away from under them, until they didn’t know which was which. The moss was soft and springy under their feet, their flanks, their rolling backs. They forgot how sharp their claws were sometimes, and when they stood on their hind legs, it was Eyebright that boxed him around the head, sometimes harder than she intended, sometimes just hard enough to pay him back for forgetting to dance for her. He tried to bat her back, but she was a strong jill, and his playful efforts were easily parried.

  Often they stopped, for breath, and a serious look would come into their eyes, and she would turn, and he would rise to her, while the rain was beating the twigs into submission, and guttering from branches onto their backs, splashing the splattered crocuses into the moss. This was their time, and no other would match it again. They were the progenitors of future hares and hare futures, and leverets would stream into infinity from their meeting on the moss.

  When it was over, she said to him, ‘You look like a drowned rat.’

  ‘You don’t look much like a hare yourself,’ he said.

  They could say such things to each other now, safe in the knowledge they were mates, together for at least a season, perhaps longer, perhaps until the death of one of them.

  They crossed the drowned meadows, sometimes having to swim in the freezing water, and finally reached the lea. There they found Stigand, down by the river.

  ‘Ah,’ he cried, ‘it is the grand hares, my excellent neighbours from the horse drinking trough. How is it with you on this glorious day?’

  ‘It’s raining heavily,’ Skelter pointed out.

  ‘Yes, yes, and how wonderful is this natural water from the sky. Now I can wander away from the stream without my beautiful coat drying coarse and uncomforting to me. Such is the supreme bounty from the heavens, that it is like a river from the cumulus, and falls upon my waiting body in torrents of ecstasy.’

  ‘We’ve already tasted of ecstasy once today,’ said Eyebright, ‘so we know what you mean.’

  Stigand’s eyes gleamed with delight.

  ‘So, already you have been rained upon by these cascading waterfalls from the welkin? Such a transcendental experience, wouldn’t you say hare? Such marvellous silvery happenings when days like this let you slide through them, almost to swim through the air to the ether above, and dance on the clouds.’

  ‘We know about dancing too,’ said Skelter.

  ‘Or at least, one of us does,’ Eyebright added.

  ‘Then you know of my talkings,’ cried Stigand, his eyes closing in bliss, as the heavens opened again and the rain gushed down from above, and all but flattened the two dripping hares by his side. ‘You know of the beautiful nature of rain.’

  They left him there with his poetry, enjoying the watering of the land. Finding their forms under the horse trough, they went to sleep, side by side, touching. Both were as content as they could be at such a time.

  Chapter Forty Two

  As the season moved into the month of scattered winds, the totem came more into its own. During the winter the petrified tree, being of a whiteness similar to frost and snow, could hardly be distinguished from its background. It melded with the landscape, like a ghostly cloud against a pale sky. Now the brown earth was showing through the frost, it became once more an imposing symbol of protectiveness. Lightning had been responsible for its death and deification, and lightning had left its mark in the split trunk. It was like frozen lightning itself, against a clear blue sky: a forked crack on the glaze of the universe. Headinthemist, the priestess of the colony, said that if you looked at the trunk of the totem for long enough, you could see into the Otherworld, but it made you lightheaded for a while afterwards.

  During the mating season couples frequently consulted Headinthemist about their futures and she spent much time in divining wych elm twigs and searching for luminescent honey fungus. Harebells were not yet in bloom, but once they were, she and other hares would begin talking to their ancestors, whose spirits inhabited the pale mauve flowers.

  Eyebright, whom Skelter considered was normally a sensible sort of jill, insisted on setting her iddab bird skulls to trap the mad idbitt spirits that wandered over the landscape. The whole colony was steeped in superstition and mysticism, a dark age that had never quite gone away, and Skelter found it difficult to come to terms with. When Speedwell told him that sycamore seeds were really the dried droppings of horseshoe spirit-bats, he openly scorned her.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ he said, ‘I’m willing to accept certain things, but this is going too far.’

  This ridicule of the colony’s ‘religious’ beliefs brought him the condemnation of moonhare, who barely made a move in her life without consulting her oracle, Headinthemist, and obtaining a few handy prophecies. Moonhare told him he must respect what he did not understand, or leave the colony. When he complained to Eyebright, she sided with moonhare.

  ‘There are some things you blue hares are very backward about,’ she said to him, ‘and one of them is the mystery of the future.’

  ‘It’s the brown hares that are backward,’ he retorted. ‘Highlanders got rid of all this dark magic stuff ages ago. It’s a load of nonsense, and I’m surprised at an intelligent jill like you believing in it.’

  She lifted her chin in a haughty fashion.

  ‘Why do you think I’m pregnant?’ she said.

  Skelter snorted, and said, ‘Well, if you want me to tell you that, I think we’re in a bit of trouble.’

  ‘It’s because,’ she cried triumphantly, ‘I buried a few corn ears under that star moss where we first … you know. I put them there in the late summer then led you to the spot so that we would have the best chance.’

  Skelter was astonished.

  ‘And you think they made you pregnant.’

  ‘Well, not made me pregnant, we both know that, but made me more fertile.’

  The mountain hare went quiet for a while and munched at the grasses round the log. Finally he looked up and said, ‘I followed you that day you buried the corn ears. It wasn’t in the spot where we first tumbled, but in another place altogether, on the far side of the wood.’

  Eyebright looked terribly unhappy at this news, and her nose twitched.

  ‘Was it really?’ she said at last. ‘Perhaps our leverets won’t be healthy then? Oh dear, I wish my memory was better. I so wanted to give us the best chance of a healthy litter.’

  Skelter, who had not followed her at all and had told a blatant untruth because he was annoyed with her was suddenly awash with guilt. She had believed him implicitly rather than trust her own memory, and
he felt terrible. He couldn’t very well say now that he had been making it up, she might not believe him, and when she did, there would be an element of distrust between them. It was a foolish thing he had done, and after all, what harm was there in these superstitions? Did it really matter that she had planned their first union so far in advance? It was flattering really.

  ‘I could be mistaken,’ he said, staring across the manicured fields, ‘my memory’s not what it used to be either.’

  ‘Oh, no, you’re just trying to be kind now. You know what a scatterbrain I am.’

  ‘No, really,’ he said desperately, ‘I could be wrong. That was the day – yes, that was the day I got a knock on the head, from a falling branch. I think I was dizzy at the time. I could very well be wrong. In fact I’m sure now, that I got my east and west mixed up a bit. You’re probably right, you did bury the corn ears below the star moss in that exact place.’

  ‘I don’t remember you being hit by a branch.’

  This was of course another lie he had so casually spun out, and he was getting into a tangle.

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t, if you were interested in ensuring that our first union place was fertile, would you?’

  Eyebright stared at him.

  ‘But I would. I remember how I was at the time, completely besotted with you, and I couldn’t take my eyes off you. You didn’t know it of course, and I’ve got over all that nonsense now …’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘it’s not really nonsense.’

  ‘I know my memory isn’t to be entirely trusted, but I don’t think I would have forgotten if you had been bashed on the head with a log.’

  Skelter savagely tore at the grass with his teeth.

  ‘Well,’ he said through a mouthful of green, ‘not a log, exactly, more a sort of heavy twig – from a great height. I didn’t make a big fuss about it because I didn’t want to upset anyone. I just remember feeling quite dizzy, especially when I followed you across the fields to the wood. I was particularly giddy at that time.’