And the stoat itself was a small fearsome thing, cold as an icicle, hot as fire. When it opened its jaws, there was that small pink-red patch with pure white points. From its small shining eyes to the tip of tar on the end of its tail it was demon. It was dark of tongue and dark of soul. Yet in the same instant it was ordinary life, a creature of the woods and fields, a carnivore fashioned to prey on herbivores.
The wind raged around them as they studied each other, each lost in his own thoughts.
Suddenly, the stoat made a slight movement towards Skelter, perhaps not even threatening, perhaps just easing an uncomfortable cramped position, and the hare’s instincts took over. His hair-trigger hind legs were sprung, and he was off, punching holes in the air with his bullet head, running breathless into the brunt of the wind. In his breast the excitement remained of having shared space with a deadly enemy, and almost touched his brother-beast’s fur.
Skelter kept to the open fields now, away from the ditches where the trees were planted, for huge branches were being wrenched from their sockets and cast to the ground. The air was full of flying objects: pieces of slate from distant rooftops, cans, wooden planks, all manner of loose implements. The mighty trees themselves were crashing to the ground, and all along the lanes the telephone poles were coming down.
It was a terrible wind, and worthy of respect. It would have respect from those in its path. Along the shoreline, it enraged the ocean, causing monstrous waves to thunder inland further than they had ever been before, sweeping aside formidable obstacles with the sheer weight of water. Domestic creatures were suffering, especially the birds. Some of the objects being blown along were chickens, whose unfirm grip on ground and whose feathery bulk made them vulnerable to the wind’s force.
Skelter kept low to the ground, several times losing his footing and being blown head-over-heels across the flattened grasses. Eventually he came to Booker’s Field, and made his way to the log under which, thankfully, Eyebright was resting.
‘I’m back,’ he said, snuggling beside her, ‘are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Oh, I’m glad you’ve come. I was worried about you. This looks as if it’s going to be a bad one.’
‘I think we’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘There’s not much can happen to us under here. Even if the tree comes down and falls across us, the log will protect us.’
‘I’m sure you’re right.’
The next few hours were hell for the creatures of the island, as the wind came screaming in with a force never seen or heard of before. It was truly awesome in its might, and even stone walls came tumbling down, scattering themselves over fields and roads. Gulls not on the water were torn from their perches and carried away to God only knew where. A tenacious owl became a bat for a while, when it refused to let go of a branch, was blown half-circle round it, and found itself upside down, staring at a world of different shape. Fieldmice went through the air like bullets, some meeting an unpleasant end.
Eyebright and Skelter waited out the fury, relatively safe under their protective log.
‘I’m not sure what the food situation will be like once this wind has died down,’ said Skelter.
‘Oh, we’ll manage,’ Eyebright said with the placidness of an expectant mother. She was content to just be most of the time and had grown round and soft and liquid-eyed. Skelter fussed over her a lot of the time, as did Longrunner and many others, and she got together with the pregnant jills to talk about the coming leverets and the hope for their future. She seemed, to Skelter, to be happy.
The colony badly needed a new generation, for the flogre had decimated them several times. One in ten hares had been taken at intervals separated by one or two months. That was the flogre’s way, to attack at every dusk and dawn for a few days, then leave them alone for a while, before returning to do the same again. He knew the value of periods of intense terror, when his attacks were relentless, followed by a period of calm when the hares sometimes came to believe they were rid of him for good. It was worse than being attacked at close regular intervals, for the respites allowed hope to flourish, which was crushed by the next series of devastating raids. It ensured that they never got the measure of their oppressor.
When the wind had finally died, the hares emerged from their hiding places. Thankfully the totem had survived intact, its single ironhard bough having no foliage on it, to form a barrier for the wind. It would have either stood unyieldingly, or been torn down completely. As it was, it had remained, its white roots locked around a large rock below the topsoil, anchoring it firmly to the land.
Several oak boughs were lying on the ground and the hedgerow was torn in places. The whole scene was very distressing to the brown hares who liked their world neat and tidy with no debris and the straight lines of the hedges travelling uninterrupted into infinity. They wandered about, looking a little bewildered, walking between the heavy branches and picking up the smaller ones in their teeth, only to drop them again a bit further on. Although they had tidiness in their veins, the hares would not dream of doing anything about the mess themselves. That was for others to do, and for them to appreciate. They were not activists, they were admirers of the art of neatness, they were the critics of the agricultural scene. Hares could tell you when it was not right, and even make suggestions for improvement, but they could not do it themselves. They wouldn’t know where to start, and if they did try, they would certainly never finish the task.
They were quite pretentious at times, about what was artistically good, and what was unacceptable. They would view a set of fields, and hedgerows, and ditches, and trees, and tell at a glance whether the arrangement was superior, or definitely lacking. They could run their discerning eye down a furrow, along a line of seedlings, and judge its straightness according to the rules they had made themselves.
They were true critics, in that they had none of the skills themselves, they decided what was good and bad according to their own ideas of taste, and the language they used to describe good and bad neatness was entirely composed of airy phrases that when examined closely made little sense to anyone outside their circle. A farmer who appeared to take little heed of the views of hares, in designing and sheering his hedges, was not necessarily dismissed as a cretin, but worse, his work would be completely ignored and if anyone raised the question of his efforts, cold looks of uninterest lasting about two frozen seconds would be the only response.
So, after the hurricane, the sensitive hares had to feed and run amongst debris that offended their very souls. It was a time which, when recalled, would invoke shudders of distaste. Their world had never been in a worse state, not since the chariots in the century of ghost-hares had thundered over the landscape, making wiggly ruts over the combed and manicured country, and weapons and dead humans were strewn from here to there, spoiling the careful lines ploughed into the earth by yeomen and villein.
Chapter Forty Five
The morning after the hurricane, when the world was still in chaos, Skelter again wandered far from home. Though the wind had died, the weather was still unsettled and simmering with anger, likely to show its petulance in some other way. Skelter was in an open field, feeding on beet leaves, when the clear sky suddenly clouded over and a storm lowered itself over the land.
Now, hares are normally unconcerned by thunder and lightning and when the dark clouds threaten they shrug their shoulders and say, ‘Oh, here comes a storm,’ and continue with whatever it is that they’re doing.
This is exactly what Skelter did, forgetting that there was a menace abroad, who came in on the backs of the storms. In the highlands a black sky like this one would rid the heavens of predators. Here on the flatlands it served to camouflage the most deadly of local terrors.
Thus the world darkened and as Skelter ate steadily the thunder crashed through the sky and the lightning crackled with brilliant displays. Skelter munched away, looking up at the sky occasionally, and thinking how magnificent it all was, when he suddenly realised what
he was doing. He was out in the open in conditions which the flogre could use to get a long distance from its martello tower and over the colony’s feeding grounds. He had to get back to warn Eyebright of the danger.
He swallowed his last mouthful and headed for a drystone wall, along the foot of which he intended to run, to use as a shield. No sooner had he reached the wall, when he heard the beat of wings and instinctively jumped for a hole between the stones. He felt the talons rake his back, just skimming the fur, but not penetrating his hide. There was a swiftly-passing odour of musty feathers, which made him wrinkle his nose.
Skelter squeezed himself, with a little bout of panic, into a small space between some stones. There he remained, his heart beating fast against a rock, hoping he was well protected. He looked up into the skies, though his field of vision was seriously impaired by the wall in which he was hiding.
There was a rolling darkness above, illuminated every so often by a flash. Kicker was up there somewhere, displaying his anger with the humans. Unwittingly, the First Ancestor had brought with him-her an enemy of the hares. As if realising this the dry storm was beginning to move on towards the sea. Skelter could not see the flogre, though he was sure it was there. He dared not stick his head out to get a wider view of the sky in case a sudden bolt of claw-and-feather dropped on him.
Then he saw it, high above, descending in circles. The lightning seemed to arc from its very back and illuminate its silhouette against the heavens. The forks of electric sprang like jagged weapons from its form, and static crackled along its shape, from wingtip to wingtip. It was indeed a mythical creature, a thunder-and-lightning bird. It had come from Ifurin, the hell of hares, to fracture the skies above the flatlands.
Skelter smalled himself as much as possible so that not a whisker was visible from above. Yet the giant kept his wide slow circle above, peering downwards, ready to drop. If it was to be a waiting game, Skelter knew he could win, but he wasn’t sure the flogre would allow that.
He was proved right a short time later, for the great bird landed on the grass and stalked up to the wall. Again, the size of the flogre was astounding, and the highlander almost swooned from absolute terror. Its eyes were cold stones in its face, and its savage-looking hook could surely tear a deer’s head from its body. The crest on its head, running from side to side, gave it an even more terrifying appearance, as if it had deliberately arranged itself that way in order to paralyse its prey with fright. Skelter knew that it was going to peck wounds in his body if he did not move and he dropped to the ground on the other side of the wall. He began running, his heart pattering faintly, along the foot of the wall.
Instantly, the flogre flew to the top of the wall, and hopped awkwardly along it, keeping pace with Skelter below. Skelter’s brain went into its hysterical mode, and in this state he couldn’t think properly. Foolishly he broke for the field, thinking he saw a rabbit hole, but when he reached it found it to be a mole hill. Now he was out in the open, the debris of the previous day’s wind hampering his movements.
The flogre took to the air again, slowly and deliberately as if it knew it had its quarry where it wanted it and was now playing with his food.
Skelter dashed for the edge of the field, leaping fallen branches, hoping to find holes along the ditch, but when he reached it there was no trench, only a wooden two-bar fence to keep domestic animals from straying onto the road beyond. He slipped under the fence, and out into the road.
Still there was little cover, except for a fallen telephone pole. The top of the pole had struck a milestone, and there was a gap between it and the ground large enough for Skelter to squeeze under.
This he did, just as the flogre was dropping, lazily to the earth, like an autumn leaf.
It was here that Skelter had his first stroke of luck, for keen though the flogre’s eyesight was it did not detect the thin wires stretched tautly between the two standing poles and running down to the top of the fallen pole’s head. The wires were like the strings of a cat’s cradle, a dozen or so, running parallel to each other.
The flogre suddenly found itself caught up in these, its winged shape cumbersome now that it was on the ground and the more it struggled in the wires, the more it became entangled. It shrieked with frustration, the piercing cry making Skelter’s frayed nerves stand on end. The hare could see the thin steel wires caught amongst the wing and tail feathers, and the legs were hampered in their movements.
Skelter felt it was time to dart away, to get out of the area as fast as he could manage, and leave the flogre to its fate. Perhaps a vehicle would be along the lane soon, and be unable to stop, thus running into the giant? It was a scenario he could not wait around to witness.
But the flogre was not so easily trapped. As Skelter stared at the enormous creature it dipped its head and clacked its beak. There was an immediate twang. Skelter was trying to puzzle this out and identify the strange sound, when the same thing happened again – the head dipped, the beak closed, and a second twang was followed by a flash of a steel strand. Twang, twang, twang. One by one the wires were snipped with that strong sharp beak. Skelter took to his hind legs, dashing along the country lane.
When he looked back, the flogre had escaped from the web of wires and had taken to the air again. It came hurtling along the lane, just above the ground. There were cottages on the side of the lane, and a man was sawing logs in his garden. His mouth dropped open as the great bird flashed by his gate. The man rushed into the house, either to fetch someone to see this extraordinary sight, or to get his shotgun.
The flogre had obviously thrown all caution away, and was determined to have Skelter, or die. This was a bad situation for the hare, who was beginning to wonder why he had been singled out for this victimisation. What had he done to be persecuted in this fashion, except climb to the belfry of the old church tower and confront the flogre in its nest?
Skelter broke away from the edge of the roadway to enter a wood not far from Whisled Lea. It was a neglected tangled place, more thicket in its centre than sturdy forest, and was there for no other reason than it was more trouble to clear than leave alone. Skelter searched in vain for a rabbit warren, down which he would have gone in an instant, but he found nothing but a fox’s earth. He even considered going down this, but the entrance smelled strongly of recent fox and to enter the hole would be to face a similar death to the one which threatened him from above. Skelter ran on.
The flogre entered the wood as if it belonged in such places. Skelter remembered what Rushie had told him of her experiences and realised that far from hampering the creature, the trees were of use to it. They were the apparatus of an acrobat and the great bird used them to swing itself around the tight spaces, its short wingspan fashioned for just such activity. It might have been born in the tangle of such an ivy-vined network of branches. It dipped and weaved beneath boughs, around the boles of the trees, through the loops of parasitic creepers, instinctively knowing which patch of foliage was easily brushed aside by its wingtips, and which was to be avoided. The tightest spaces were no obstacle and snaking tunnels of sharp thorns were traversed with ease. If it was lord of the flatlands, it was king of the forest. Brambles, briars, bracken – nothing presented any kind of barrier to the flogre as it curved and banked, looped and dived, and harassed the hare this way and that, causing it to run in circles in its effort to shake off the flier.
Skelter was beginning to feel despair. Was there nothing which could stop the creature? It seemed to have an answer to all his tricks. He was beginning to lose energy rapidly and would soon have to stop. Once he halted, he knew he would be unable to regain his feet, having run himself to a state of complete collapse.
He broke out of the wood again and took the ditch along the road to Whinsled Lea. Eyebright would be in the totem field and nowhere near this place, so Skelter did not need to worry that he would run into her and involve her in the chase.
The flogre zipped along the top of the hedgerow, keeping its quarry in sight,
waiting for the end of the ditch to arrive.
Skelter cut across the corner of the field, down towards the river. He thought vaguely that if he jumped into the river and began to swim, the flogre would not be able to get at him. It was not a sea eagle after all and perhaps the idea of water below it would be sufficient to put it off the hunt. Skelter hadn’t much hope for such a plan, but it was the only idea left to him.
Then, as Skelter ran towards the river’s edge, he saw a pair of otters sitting on the bank. It was Stigand and Sona, unaware of the drama until they looked back and up at his approach. He saw the surprise and horror in their expressions and knew he could not lead the monster to them, for it might easily take one of them in passing. They were frozen in their attitudes – sitting targets.
Instead, Skelter headed for some cattle that crowded the corner of the field. They at least were a match for the flogre, which came hurtling through the air. Skelter found himself dashing in and around the legs of the restless beasts as they bellowed their annoyance and began skittishly to stamp around, ready to stampede at any moment. Skelter was in danger of being crushed under a stray hoof, if not snatched from the ground by the enormous raptor.
The flogre could do nothing while Skelter was amongst the cattle. Once or twice it swooped down between the beasts and tried to scoop its prey from the turf, but each time Skelter dashed under the belly of a bullock and avoided the talons. Finally, the bullocks broke and thundered away towards the far side of the field, leaving Skelter exposed.
The hare was almost on his last legs now, his heart banging against his ribs and his lungs harsh and painful. He skipped across the stream which was the home of the otters and towards the cottage, hoping that perhaps Bess was around and her size and bark would frighten the flogre away.
Frost Dancers: A Story of Hares Page 34