The Woodwitch

by Stephen Gregory

  him.

  Two new noises then erupted simultaneously.

  One of them was sudden and brutal. It came and went in a matter of seconds. The other was a pervasive layer of sound which seemed to have been switched on by the brutal suddenness of the first. A single gunshot rang out from somewhere just ahead of Andrew and Phoebe, less than fifty yards ahead, and that was the brutal noise which stunned the man and the dog into immobility while the forest rocked with the explosion. At exactly the same moment, that steely sky unleashed a hail storm, rattling the trees with a torrent of icy pellets.

  Andrew dragged the dog from the path. Together they huddled close to the shelter of the plantation. Looking up through the dense cover of branches, he saw the sky turn black and muddy like a wash of charcoal, as though the gunshot had wounded it and pierced it to release the fall of ice. The forest grew very dark. The trees groaned under the sudden bombardment. There was no sound of the hounds, but, as he strained to hear through the rattle of the hail, Andrew thought he caught the tramping of human footsteps higher up the track, from where the shot had come, and a cry which was answered by another, gruffer shout. The hounds had been in the forest, wherever they had gone now, and there were people shooting and shouting. The hunt was all around them, somewhere in the heavy cover, moving up to the crater . . . Now the place was a blanket of shadow. It rang with the drumming of ice.

  He pulled the hood of his jacket over his head. ‘Let’s go, Phoebe! No, this way!’ and he tugged her on to the track and continued upwards. Head down, he felt the volley of hail striking his hood and his shoulders, he saw the ice firing into the grass at his feet, he heard it clatter into the trees. The dog wrapped her tail between her legs, her ears were flattened for protection tightly against the sides of her head. She growled meanly and hugged the slapping boots. In this way, determined to retrieve his glasses even if it meant stumbling into the very centre of the hunt, his mind set on the proximity of the kennel-maid and her brother, he struggled higher into the darkness of the forest.

  He stopped dead, as did Phoebe, when a tiny white creature shot out of the trees to his right and confronted him with its mask of teeth. It was a terrier, very sturdy and bow-legged, completely white apart from its black ears, which now barred the way, emitting a high-pitched growl.

  ‘Jesus . . . Who are you?’ Andrew said, surprised to meet the fierce little beast so deep into the plantation. ‘Where have you come from?’

  In answer to this, and reacting to Phoebe’s equally persistent growl, the terrier backed away from Andrew’s boots and wheeled to the edge of the track. There, in the longer grass, while the hail continued to fire its salvoes from a blackening sky, it made its stand and would no more retreat from the oncoming man.

  ‘What’s that you’ve got there? Let’s have a look . . .’

  Ignoring the terrier’s threats, Andrew moved closer. Phoebe bristled and made herself look almost twice her usual size by standing erect, raising her hackles into an impressive black mane. She increased the revolutions of her chain-saw snarl. She revealed a mouthful of teeth. Her lips quivered, black and tight and flashing a fleck of foam. And Andrew saw that she was not so much threatening the terrier, as the prize which the tiny dog was guarding.

  Slung into the long grass, there was a dead fox. It was quite small, smaller than Phoebe, with a lovely, very red, very warmly coloured pelt. It was the only warm thing in the forest, where everything else was black or grey with the overwhelming gloom, or silver-white with the shards of ice. Lying there, the fox was like a flame, dead now and slowly cooling, but reluctant to be quenched by the lifelessness of its monochrome surroundings. Andrew ignored the terrier, which danced away, yapping, as he knelt to the fox. He held Phoebe from the dead animal. He stroked the fox’s coat and found it as warm as Phoebe’s­ would have been, as hot as the life which had been extinguished only seconds before. The fur was thick and almost orange on the animal’s flanks and back, fading into the palest ochre under its belly. A vixen, he saw, turning her gently over, and as he did so, a jet of hot golden urine ran from her and into the cold grass. She had gleaming black ears and the loveliest, finest black feet he had seen, feet which a Siamese cat would have been proud of. A bright wet button-nose, eyes of amber, very long sharp teeth and a pink tongue awash with blood, blood which welled from her jaws and dripped hotly on to Andrew’s hands . . . He inspected her paws and pads, again and again he ran his fingers through her coat, just as though she were a fireside dog, and expected her almost to turn her delicate head and lick him or nip him. She did neither, having a wound the size of a saucer behind one shoulder where the single concentration of shot had struck. She was mourning the loss of her brush . . . it had gone, the fine orange flame of her brush, to leave a raw stump and a blossom of blood.

  Andrew stood up straight. The terrier moved in again to reclaim the prize for itself. It snickered into the vixen’s mask and nipped her black ear-tips, it dodged the imagined threat of her frozen snarl and flew to her back, ripping out tufts of russet fur, scattering them across the path. ‘No, Phoebe, not you! You leave her alone!’ He pulled the dog away from the fox. The hail eased. The clatter of it on his hood became a patter. The trees shrugged off the grains of ice as nonchalantly as a bride shrugs off the grains of rice. Only the track remained whitened, a trail of silver which wound onwards and upwards through the black forest.

  It was twilight. And into it, lower down the path, briefly illuminating the black and white scene with a brilliant orange spark, another fox appeared. Bigger and darker than its dead mate, it flew out of the trees on one side of the track and halted for a second, branding the half-light with the flame of its redness. It dismissed the tableau of the man and his black dog, of the hysterical little white dog and the mutilated vixen . . . it melted silently into the trees on the other side of the track. As it disappeared, only seconds behind it and now filling the silence with their baying cries, six hounds burst from the cover. They were big dogs with heavy coats, with long powerful legs and wide shoulders, and they came crashing out of the undergrowth. The effect of this blundering appearance so hard on the phantasmal silence of the fox was explosive. Andrew felt his heart pounding. The blood rose instantly to his

  face.

  And Phoebe did what she had only done once before. She writhed somehow from her collar, twisting and slithering in a blind panic at the intrusion of the hounds. She fled wildly up the trail.

  ‘Phoebe! Phoebe!’

  Andrew’s voice cracked as he bellowed the word, again and again. But he was powerless to stop her. She vanished like a shadow, just as the fox had flickered like a flame. To his horror, he saw that the hounds had veered from the flight of the fox as it faded into the thickness of the trees and were dashing with their fluid, easy, loose-limbed strides in the direction which Phoebe had taken. They sped past him, cream and brown and black and tan, their shaggy coats thick with mud, their tongues flying and flecking the hail-strewn grass with foam. The last hound hesitated beside Andrew, distracted by the scent of the vixen. Paralysed with terror of what was happening, he gaped as the beast thrust its broad head forward and licked at the vixen’s blood with which his hand was stained. It spun away in pursuit of its companions, in pursuit of the little, dark, fox-like dog which had arrested their attention and had become the focus of their lust for blood. A second later, he was alone with the slender orange body of the vixen, for the terrier too had gone tearing up the trail. His mind went blank at the idea of what might soon be happening higher in the forest. His head was pounding with blood, his short-sightedness was compounded by the claustrophobic gloom which the sky continued to inflict on the mountainside. He started to scramble after the dogs. He slipped on the hailstones. He slithered with his clumsy boots on the wet rocks and the mud. Cursing the darkness, encumbered by his jacket and its suffocating hood, he clambered on. When he found some pocket of breath remaining within him, he panted that single, hopeless word, ‘Phoebe, Phoebe, Phoebe . . .’ so that its sylla
bles became a part of his laboured breathing. The lead and the collar dangled uselessly from his wrist. Ahead of him he saw the thinning of the trees which meant he was nearing the edge of the plantation, and above the line of trees the slabs of the crater rose sheer, glistening and black into the pall of cloud which enshrouded them. The belling of the hounds swelled up. He stumbled to his knees on the sodden ground, hardly able to breathe. Every part of his chest strained to find more air, his thighs cried out for him to stop his blind assault of the mountain . . .

  There, while he lay in the mud and saw nothing but stars before his eyes, while he tasted the welling of vomit in his throat, he heard the hounds go suddenly silent. They were silenced by the explosions of two more gunshots.

  He lay still. He listened to the echoes of the shots which clanged from wall to wall of the crater. Then there was utter silence. Not a hound whimpered. No raven panted in the mist. Not a jackdaw chuckled on the slippery slabs. The hail had stopped.

  Painfully, his hands cold with the mud and the ice and the drying blood of the vixen, Andrew struggled to his feet and went up the path. The cloud was right down. His wet blond head felt the chilly cobwebs clinging. He forced back the hood of his jacket, breathing deeply to quieten his giddiness. Twilight had hardened into the darkness of a November afternoon.

  He reached the edge of the forest and stepped over the remains of a barbed-wire fence which separated the trees from the marshes of the crater. The first thing he saw was the dim shapes of the hounds, their pale tails erect and twitching. They drifted silently in the long grass, shifting away in twos and threes, dispersing but always returning to the same spot, to drop their heads and sniff, to shake their heads and worry something which did not move except when they moved it. Time and again, as Andrew waited at the fence and watched, the hounds limbered easily to that place, where something in the grass drew them back. And then they would turn the thing over, pull it this way or that, fold it or stretch it or wring it. Once, they lifted the thing up, clear out of the grass, so that, even in the gloom, Andrew could see it was something black and very wet and twisted like a piece of rag.

  His boots squelched through the quagmire. As he drew closer to the hounds, they turned to him, wagging their tails and grinning with pleasure. They nuzzled his hands, expecting his approval, eager for his congratulations. One of them brought a gift, to show this man that it had done the job for which it was usually rewarded. In its jaws it carried a long black flag of fur, wet and very muddy, which it nuzzled into Andrew’s hand. But the hound did not expect the reward it received from the man who took the gift so gently from its mouth.

  With a roar of rage, Andrew lashed out with one boot and caught the hound heavily in the ribs. The animal squealed and sprang away, whimpering like a child. As the man whirled from dog to dog with his boots, they fled from the thing to which they had gathered so fondly, they drifted dumbly over the marsh and faded like spectres in the mists. Andrew trod forward. He was holding the flag of fur in one hand, dangling the lead and the collar from the other.

  The thing was Phoebe. It hardly resembled the creature he had known and loved. Now that it had no tail, for he was holding that in his hand, the dog looked very small and slight. And, being tossed and turned and trodden into the icy mud of the marsh, its form was blurred by the water into nothing much more than a fragment of torn black fur. Its face had been crushed. There were teeth and ribbons of its tongue where he had never seen them before. One of its eyes dripped a string of mucous pearls, the other stared wonderingly into the grass. Where the gunshots had ripped, its entrails tumbled like strange, ripe fruit. Quite altered, quite different, the Phoebe he knew from this broken thing. He knelt to it, just as he had knelt to the dead vixen, but this time he could barely bring himself to touch the dead animal. His hand recoiled from it. ‘Phoebe? Is it really you?’ He knelt in the water of the crater and bowed his head, suddenly overwhelmed by the realisation of what had happened. Over and over, he then caressed the bedraggled pelt of the dog, he bent his head to kiss it but could find no part of its head which had not been disfigured by the teeth of the hounds or remoulded by the mud. He felt tears flooding his eyes, he saw the hot tears drop from his face and fall on the dog’s mangled throat. He heard footsteps coming closer, the sucking of mud on boots. But he did not look up, only listening to the approach of the boots through the bog of the crater.

  The footsteps stopped, very close to Andrew and the dead thing. There was silence, then the sharp metallic sound of a shotgun being broken open. Two spent cartridges fell into the mud beside the body of the dog. Andrew remained still, head down, intent on the neat clean tubes which had landed there, shocked by the contrast between their compact simplicity and the ragged formlessness of the dead animal. With his fingers, he flicked the tears away from his eyes. Slowly, silently, he raised his head. Two sets of boots . . . The twin barrels of one shotgun, black and lethal in the drenching darkness of the mountain . . . His eyes followed the line of the gun, from its dumb muzzles to the breech from which the cartridges had been ejected and which now exhaled a plume of acrid smoke. It was the kennel-maid holding the gun. Beside her, her brother stood grinning inanely, his vacant expression compounded by the thick black lines of Andrew’s glasses which rested crookedly on his nose. The girl smiled faintly and the tip of her tongue glistened between her little pointed teeth. There was a sheen of sweat on her face. She couched the gun comfortably in the crook of her arm, inhaling the smoke from it with a narrowing of her eyes and the flaring of her nostrils. Her brother held the bright red brush of the vixen in one hand, with the little white terrier clutched under his arm.

  Andrew straightened up, the terrier began to growl. Brother and sister exchanged a few rapid words in Welsh. They stopped smiling. Somehow, without the grin, the boy was more grotesquely comic behind the lenses of Andrew’s glasses. He spoke, very quietly, before Andrew had formed any idea of how he was going to express his outrage.

  ‘You know what? You should keep your dog on a lead, that’s what . . . Told you once before, didn’t I? Didn’t you hear us hunting? Eh? You must’ve heard the hounds from down at . . . what’s it called, your place? Cockerel Cottage?’

  He turned to his sister and chuckled, but she was drained of expression, the sweat shining on her pale face. She said nothing, only watching Andrew’s eyes and waiting tensely for some reaction from them. The boy went on.

  ‘And didn’t you hear us shooting? Eh? We got a fox in the forest, you know, a pretty little brant-vixen. Look . . .’ and he thrust the brush of the fox close to Andrew’s face, ‘look, here’s a bit of it I cut off! You must’ve heard us! You got to be daft letting your little dog go running off without a lead. Eh, Shân?’

  Once more he turned to the girl, the grin as crooked and as ill-fitting as the black spectacles. She whispered, ‘Daft, yeah. You must’ve heard us . . .’ and her voice trailed off. She licked her lips and swallowed, her mouth too dry for more than a few unoriginal words.

  ‘It’s like this, see,’ the boy was saying. ‘What we always do is send the hounds through the cover,’ indicating the forest with a wave of the vixen’s brush, ‘and we just wait nice and patient here in the . . .’ He rattled a couple of words in Welsh which clearly meant the bowl of marsh and steep slabs that Andrew had always thought of as simply the crater. ‘Got pretty dark this afternoon, didn’t it, specially with the . . .’ The boy groped for the English word. Andrew heard himself say it for him. ‘Hail.’ The girl jumped at the sound, not expecting to hear him prompt her brother. ‘Hail, yeah, that’s it,’ the boy continued, ‘and the hail breaks up the scent too, makes the hounds lift their heads for a minute . . . So it gets pretty dark, doesn’t it, and we wait here, her with the gun ’cos she’s better with it than me. Sure enough, the hounds break cover, bit confused by the hail, and go tearing after your little . . . Well, it all happens in a second, doesn’t it? In the dark and the hail and all that, my darling sister lets fly at the first thing that comes out, the fi
rst foxy little thing to come streaking through all this long grass. Same size, same sort of shape and tail flying like that . . . Sort of all happens in a second.’ By now, embarrassed by the sound of his own voice, hampered by his clumsiness in expressing himself by having to translate in his head before speaking, uncomfortable in the face of the Englishman’s continued silence, the boy began to fidget. He twirled the brush in his fingers and clutched the terrier more closely to his side. ‘Well? Don’t just stand there . . . Was an accident, see? If you kept the thing on a lead and kept out of the way, it wouldn’t have . . .’

  Andrew’s hand shot suddenly forward, so fast and unexpectedly that both the boy and the girl flinched from the shock. It flew at the boy’s face. But there it stopped, in mid-air. It plucked the glasses clean away. The boy was so surprised, clearly expecting a blow, that he stumbled backwards, recoiling from Andrew’s fist. He tottered for a moment and sat down heavily in the marsh. The terrier wriggled from his grasp, sprang from tuft to tuft of the tough grass and in a second was gone into the thickening blackness of the winter evening. The girl spat some vicious expression at her brother. Andrew put on his glasses and now saw clearly for the first time since Hallowe’en. Before the boy could extricate himself from the pool of mud in which he was sitting, Andrew stepped forward and stood over him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, no more loudly than the boy had spoken. ‘An accident.’ He leaned closely to the boy’s face, speaking through gritted teeth. ‘In any case, you’d better have this. Add it to your collection . . . !’ And he brought round his hand to lash the boy as hard as he could, first on one cheek and then on the other, with the mud- and blood-soaked whip of Phoebe’s tail. The boy pulled away, cursing, rolling more deeply on to his back and his side in the icy water, but too late to avoid the blows. Welts of blood and mud stood up on his face. While he struggled to his feet, Andrew tossed the length of tattered fur at him. Turning to the girl, he snapped at her, his mouth very close to hers, ‘Take him home, you poor little witch-bitch, before I knock some of his teeth out! I thought you told me he was supposed to be the trigger-happy member of the family . . .’ He felt his anger start to ooze, as though he had been grazed and wounded and had had to wait a while for the blood to well through the raked-over flesh. Now, having surfaced, the anger was ready to run hot and fast, to fly anywhere. The girl saw this. She must have seen the renewed definition of Andrew’s eyes, that he was about to erupt and expend his rage as quickly and as violently as possible, for she hissed something at her brother and moved athletically out of range of the Englishman’s reach.