Frost Dancers: A Story of Hares

by Garry Kilworth

  They ran across two more fields and past a stagnant pond surrounded by alders, before it suddenly hit him. He had been in this position before when he was a younger hare, and it had resulted in his exile to the flatlands. The sounds, the situation, it was a repeated pattern from the time when he had been resting on the side of a mountain and had been chased down into nets.

  ‘Eyebright!’ he yelled. ‘Stop running. All of you, everyone stop running.’

  His voice had such power of command at that moment that seven hares actually halted, paused for breath and stared at him with large wild eyes, the pupils dancing with hysteria. Behind them the clashing, yelling, whistling sounds continued, getting closer, but slowly, as if at walking pace. The nervous hares, with their twitching legs, would not wait around long to hear Skelter’s speech.

  ‘Listen everyone, I’ve been through this before,’ said Skelter. ‘We’re running into danger, not away from it. I know what they’re doing. They’re chasing us into some nets. They’re gathering hares for a hare coursing. If we keep on running, we’ll end up in their hands.’

  Just at that moment, the sound of many guns came from in front of them: blam, blam blam, blam, blam blam blam, sometimes a single shot, sometimes in bunches. The odour of spent cartridges wafted to them, over the shrubs, and there was a smell of blood in the air. Warning whistles came from wounded hares, and there were shrieks from others, who lay dying.

  The group that had stopped listened in silence, the fear spiralling within them again.

  It was Reacher who said, ‘Skelter’s right, but it’s not a netting, it’s a shoot, a hare shoot. My grandfather told me about hare shoots. There’ll be dozens of guns out on the line. The first of the hares to bolt are going down now, under a storm of shot. They must be slaughtering us out there. This is terrible.’

  Moonhare said, ‘Well, never mind what’s happening ahead of us, we’re being pressed from behind, so what are we going to do about it?’

  Eyebright snapped, ‘You’re the leader, you tell us.’

  No one moved.

  Eyebright said anxiously, ‘They’re getting closer. Look, if the beaters are to the east and the guns to the west, we only have two other options. To run south or north. Which is it to be?’

  ‘North,’ cried Reacher, and immediately took off, heading south.

  The other hares followed automatically, Skelter realising at the last moment that they were going in the opposite direction to the command, but thinking what does it matter, so long as it was down the gap between beaters and guns.

  The beaters were formed up in a crescent, and the hares ran into the tail end of the left flank of that crescent, but the men were not prepared for hares running towards them, and though there were one or two guns there, they were taken by surprise. The hares dashed between their legs, leaping high over shrubs, zig-zagging, curving, weaving, until they were all through. It was a glorious move and the hares might have appreciated it if they had not been so terrified.

  There was a dog amongst the beaters who gave chase for a couple of fields, but the hares shook him off quite easily. He was a fat retriever, allowed to eat himself to a flabby state, and though he might have been good in the water, he was absolutely useless on the land. The eight hares left him far behind, his chest heaving and his eyes misty.

  Fatigued, they all stopped in the corner of a foreign field, asking each other what they should do. They could hear another shoot going on further south and guessed that the marshland hares were having the same problems as themselves. Some keen hare sportsman had organised the humans this year and had them out in force. The danger was still acute, and there would be single guns wandering around on the fringes, waiting to pick off the stragglers.

  ‘We have to get out of here,’ said Longrunner, another of the escapees. ‘Which way do we go?’

  Moonhare visibly pulled herself together, and did what she normally did best, which was to offer leadership. She had many faults, but she did have authority, and she was not one to avoid responsibility.

  ‘Skelter,’ she said, ‘what was it we were talking about two days ago? The place of the rigid birds?’

  ‘The aircraft,’ corrected Skelter. ‘The airfield is on the mainland. I know the way. You think we ought to go there?’

  ‘I seem to recall you mentioning the fact that it’s got a fence around it, and that humans from the outside do not appear to be welcome inside.’

  Reacher said, ‘What are we waiting for …?’

  Even as he spoke, dust kicked up not a paw’s length away from where he sat, and then the blast of a shotgun followed. Three young humans with guns were running towards them, from the far corner of the field. They had large round coloured heads, with transparent face-pieces through which their eyes glared.

  The hares took off, with Skelter in the lead, and Eyebright staying close to his heels. They would have outrun the youths very quickly, except that the creatures with the guns ran back to the corner of the field, and there they climbed on motorcycles, and kicked them into life.

  The machines were track bikes, and they roared across the ploughed fields as if they were merely bumpy roadways.

  Skelter led his group over ditches, and through hedges, under gates, and still the motorbikes followed, jumping the ditches, crashing through the hedges. The youths seemed to be enjoying the pursuit, for they yipped and yelped, and let out raucous noises. The hares suppressed the desire to separate, and run several different ways, knowing they had to stay together to reach the new airfield.

  Finally, one of the three riders was taken off by the lowhanging branch of a rather strong hawthorn, and Skelter glanced back to see him somersaulting through the air.

  ‘Break your neck,’ he whispered breathlessly.

  The young man crashed to the ground in a nettle bed, and he lay still. Even before the wheel of his crashed bike had stopped spinning, he sat up and removed his helmet. The two remaining motorcyclists halted for long enough to see that their companion was not badly injured, before taking up the chase once again.

  Now that the hares knew their enemy, and were no longer confronted by a hellish noise that had no shape or form, they were less terrified. The nameless dread had gone, to be replaced by a genuinely frightening but identifiable situation, and though they wished themselves elsewhere, they at least had something to bend their minds around.

  They reached the causeway, and began dashing along a wet road to the mainland. The ocean was in a frenzy, on both sides of the causeway, and waves crashed around them, washing and churning through the great rocks that formed the hardcore base of the causeway. The wind was high, running through the narrow channel between the two pieces of land, and the sea was being lashed into a state of anarchy. It sent up tall nebulous growths, which fell slapping onto the roadway, spraying the hares as they ran. Their coats sparkled with salt water, and their eyes stung them, but not a hare paused in flight. They had to run the gauntlet of the white arcing waves, if they were to reach safety.

  Now that the motorbikes were on a flat smooth surface, they were more easily handled and could be driven much faster, but the riders needed to keep both hands on their grips in order to steer their machines, due to the state of the sea. They could not afford to ride one-handed and use their guns.

  Suddenly one of the hares was swept away by a larger than normal wave thundering over the causeway. It was the jack Fleetofoot. He was dragged by the wash of the giant wave, into the booming ocean. The last the other hares saw of him, he was attempting to swim through mountainous seas towards the beach.

  A motorbike too, came to grief, when its front wheel skidded on a wet patch of road, and the bike went from under the rider. Both machine and man went spinning crazily through the running hares, the metal showering sparks, and actually ending up some distance in front of them, but the rider was too shaken to take advantage of the situation. He sat up and dazedly inspected his leathers, worn to the skin at the elbows and knees, the waves breaking over the roadside
rocks and drenching him with spray.

  The hares zig-zagged around him as he finally looked around for his gun which had gone spinning on ahead. Skelter leapt over the weapon, as it lay gleaming wetly from the spray of the spume that leapt and danced around the causeway. The second rider paused for his friend, and helped him onto his machine, which gave the hares time to reach the mainland. Then the chase was on again, over the fields, through the woods.

  The hares weaved between the trees. The motorcycles weaved between the trees. Rabbits out for feeding scrambled for their burrows, yelling at each other that they were under attack from hares and humans. The bikes roared and coughed, throwing divots at the trees, churning the moss and grass with their thickly treaded tyres, their slewing acrobatics. For a time, as the hares and rabbits mingled, everyone was confused – then the rabbits were gone, down their holes, and the hares would like to have followed but the instinct was to keep running on the flat, and in any case the rabbit holes were full of retreating rabbits.

  The motorcyclists barked at the hares, as they chased them over the fields, not in anger or frustration, but with the sheer exuberance of the chase. It seemed the shotguns had been forgotten, and it was now a case of the bikers trying to run down the hares. The hares had less speed, but more acceleration and manoeuvrability. The smaller creatures could turn on a blade of grass, while the bikes took a much larger turning circle. The hares bucked, leapt, telemarked, rotated, skidded, jumped and somersaulted in their efforts to avoid the machines, and the meadow was churned to mire.

  Finally the hares broke away and continued their journey towards the airfield, managing to traverse a wide ditch near a pond. Their destination was now in sight, for they could see a windsock flying in the distance. Soon a tall green-glassed building came into view.

  One of the motorcyclists took a run at the ditch, to get his machine to leap across, but failed. His front wheel struck the far bank of the channel, and sent him flying through the air to land in the pond. Scum and spray showered the hares as they scampered past the pond, out into a field of cabbages, neither amazed or concerned by the flight of the human, for they were too intent on escape. A green chickweed monster crawled coughing and spluttering from the slime-covered pond.

  The third and last rider, having seen his two friends come to grief, seemed determined to get at least one of the hares. He took the ditch slowly, rolling his machine down and up while out of the saddle. When he mounted on the far side, the hares were some two hundred yards from the airfield fence, and tiring rapidly. The creatures had had a long run, and they were exhausted, and close to dropping.

  The final machine and rider went hurtling across the field, sending cabbages like severed green heads splattering this way and that, fountains of mud arcing from the rear wheel. He stopped and jumped off his bike just thirty yards from the fence, and unslung his weapon from his back. The youth was now between the hares and the chainlink fence. They veered away from him, some of them stumbling in their fatigue.

  His shotgun was an old .410 with a three-penny bit single barrel, and an external hammer which he cocked with his thumb. It was a short range weapon, nowhere near as powerful as the mighty 12-bore the tractor-man had owned, and the youth had enough sense to wait until the hares were almost in line with him, to the east of his position. He aimed the shotgun at the hares, but probably made the mistake of the amateur hunter, in not picking a specific target. No doubt he was excited, and the several hares presented a confusing group, and so he fired into the middle of running prey.

  An innocent bystanding cabbage was blasted to smithereens, wet bits of green showering the area, some pieces landing on the backs of the fleeing hares.

  The youth broke the smoking weapon, ejected the spent shell, and fumbled in his pocket for another cartridge.

  Skelter began running alongside the fence, away from the danger area, looking for a suitable place to dig. His lungs were almost bursting, and his legs felt as if they belonged to someone else.

  Finally, he found a patch where the earth was soft and began frantically to scrape out the soil. Almost at once he had a tunnel big enough to scramble underneath.

  One by one the hares bolted down the hole he had dug, until all of them were on the other side of the fence. The youth came running alongside the fence, inserting his second cartridge, his face a mask of determination. They could see he wanted to shoot a hare, even if it meant that he would have to leave it to die on the far side of the barrier.

  The shotgun was fired again, and this time many pellets struck the wire fence, pinging off in all directions. Several hares, including Followme and Reacher, felt sharp stings as small round pieces of lead penetrated rumps and thighs. With their energy flagging, the hares made one last effort, and dashed across the neatly trimmed airfield, to where a man was riding a sit-on mower across the perfectly flat grasslands.

  When the hares scampered past the mower, the man stopped his noisy machine, and turned to see the dome-headed youth with the gun. He shook his fist in the boy’s direction, and the would-be hunter was soon on his bike, and roaring across the field of cabbages, sending the roundheads flying again.

  The mower-man stood by his bright green machine, as it idled and chuntered, his hands on his hips. He watched the youth disappear into the ditch on the far side of the cabbage field, and then he shrugged, and climbed back onto his mower.

  The hares were resting not far off, some of them licking their superficial wounds. The man regarded them for a while, and then showed his teeth the way humans did when they felt good, and started his mower rolling again. The hares watched as needles of grass filled the air in clouds, and the smell of newly-mown meadowland mingled with other pleasant odours of the morning.

  The hares had their new symbol of happiness, a green machine that chuntered and chattered.

  The tractor-man was dead, long live the mower-man!

  Late in the evening another bedraggled hare arrived at the airfield. It was an exhausted Fleetofoot. He had been washed up on the beach, half-drowned, and had crawled to the dunes. There he had lain, all the rest of the day, recovering from his ordeal. He still felt sick and dizzy, and it was doubtful if he would feel better for days.

  ‘I swallowed so much of that stuff, I never want another drink. It tasted awful. My mouth is terrible, even now. I ran out of energy, but a big wave took me and threw me up the beach, where I lay in the wash for a while, until I could summon the strength to crawl. I thought I was dying. If a fox had come along, well, that would have been it, but the sound of the guns must have kept them in their earths today. Anyway, here I am, what’s left of me.’

  His coat looked awful, covered in dry salt, and he could hardly see through his stinging eyes.

  But he was alive, which was more than could be said of the rest of the colony, back on the island.

  Skelter fussed over Eyebright, hoping against hope that the terror of the day, and the subsequent flight, had not hurt the leverets in her womb. Eyebright was resting now, but she told him not to expect too much, for she knew the leverets were not in good condition. Some of them, she was sure, had not survived the run, but they had to wait to discover whether any at all would be born alive.

  Skelter, never a good waiter, wore out large patches of the airfield with his nervous energy, before the birth.

  Chapter Fifty

  Only one of Eyebright’s leverets was born alive. This hybrid, a jill, she named Scootie. Skelter thought she was the most beautiful leveret that had ever entered the world, and hardly stopped talking about her for a minute during the first few days of her life on earth. Eyebright had to tell him that he was boring all the other hares in the end, and that though she agreed with him, they had better just talk about Scootie between the two of them for a while.

  Skelter was surprised and said he couldn’t see how anyone could possibly be bored with the subject of his leveret. However he quietly accepted Eyebright’s advice. She was usually right about the field hares, though Skelter consi
dered them a strange bunch of lagomorphs, and certainly poor judges of beauty in the young. If he were one of them, he told Eyebright, he would find Scootie just as attractive as he did, and would want to know everything about her. She was after all an extraordinary creature. Eyebright nodded and said of course he would.

  Life on the airfield was noisy but safe, with humans going about their business, not bothering the hares in the slightest. They worked in, on and around the aircraft, though they occasionally pointed out the hares to one another, for there were over a hundred of them, and more coming each day.

  The hares gathered on the short grass of the land on either side of the runways and watched the mighty aircraft taking off and landing, until they were used to them and lost interest. The roaring of these great metal birds lost its excitement after a while, though the hares never failed to enjoy the man-made thunder.

  For the brown hares, the scenery was perfect. Straight lines everywhere, cultivated fields just beyond the perimeter fence, manicured grasslands mowed in dark and light stripes. It was Otherworld on earth. The tractor-man had indeed been replaced by the mower-man, his green machine becoming the symbol for hare happiness. The great hangar of hangars, the largest structure in the universe, became the hare symbol for health, taking over from the big red barn. They mourned the loss of the five-barred gate, and chose instead for the symbol of longevity the glass tower, about and within which the humans buzzed and bustled in frantic activity, yet the green-tinted glass remained unruffled, all-seeing, unaffected. It just was, and always would be, which was right for a symbol of longevity. As for the symbol of fertility, nothing was able to replace the many-eared corn, and this remained as it was, for fortunately the airfield was surrounded by fields of wheat, barley and oats.