Common Ground

by Rob Cowen

  Later, once warmed up by toast and tea, I’m up a ladder painting a ceiling. The radio smacks about the bare walls, rebounding off windows still unsoftened by curtains. There is an interview with an art critic talking about how paintings supply the mind with an important ‘fix’. Perhaps, but the edge-land provides a mental and physical transcendence greater than I’ve felt in any gallery. Merely the thought of it changes me.

  I am drifting around the viaduct, frozen-breathed, following fox tracks. He must have been running: there are two prints, one in front of the other, then a gap and then two more. They lead down a gully to a scratched hole under a piece of corrugated steel, the sort my brother and I used to hollow out and commandeer in war games as kids. Fox holes. I lift the steel cautiously, then crouch inside. I’m aware that loneliness and the starkness of January are sending me ever inwards, into my mind and my memories. There is something about the stripping away of nature’s decoration at this time of year that induces this kind of self-reflection. There is a trade, however; the earth exposes its inner-self too. Different perspectives are revealed each time I search for him. Buried things. New dimensions. One pre-dawn I sit and yawn and wait, close to the mouth of the holloway, down-wind, by an oak, under an intense tangle of branch, pylon and cable. It is the silent window between night and day, that slow shift in state. Liquid air. Freezing. The dark shrinks and disappears into the silhouettes forming in the west. My consciousness widens, rising with the night air, broadening with the dawn. Eastwards the sun, weak and rheumy as an old man’s eye, hauls itself above the black trees firing the frost-fields into molten gold. The morning assumes a fragile blue hue, almost crackable, as transparent, triangular clouds freeze across the sky. Patterns appear on the surface too: the soft-focus haze of hedges blurring north and the corduroy shadows of tractor-combed earth. The edge-land is confessional, hiding nothing from me, revealing that which lies unwritten in books and libraries, unknown in the minds of those still asleep in bed. Those that have never seen this.

  I watch the monotony of our constrained time unravel. The trees of the wood change colour with the rising light and trick my eye. Breaking out from the river gorge, their brown froth spills over the rolling curves of field and consumes the town. The spot where I am, the highest point in the fields, is suddenly an elevated mound in the heart of a royal hunting forest. Hoary old oaks shoot up shoulder-to-shoulder, sprouting dense canopies that turn the ground black with shade. Matted blackthorn, bramble and hazel unravel and twist in impenetrable lattices. Down through the woods, the Nidd licks at swooping branches of willow and alder. Heath and fern spring from its slopes; birch, holly, rowan and yellow-flowering gorse conceal fox, wolf, boar, grouse and deer. Huntsmen are here. They cut swathes through the virgin wood to the east using the edge-land’s undulations and beck valleys filled with wild garlic to hide their human outline and cowl scent. I see all of this in a second and then, with a changing breeze, I am left with the glinting fields, pylons and the bare tunnel of the holloway again. The hunting tracks reform into Bilton’s cul-de-sacs and estate roads – Meadowcroft, Tennyson Avenue, Knox Chase, Bilton Chase – the word ‘chase’ being the only indication of what came before. A young oak marooned in the centre of a farmer’s field stands like a lost child after some natural disaster. When I get home a note in my book reads: I love this place. It’s the best place I’ve ever been. Next to it is the scribbled drawing of the fox. I don’t remember doing either of them.

  I rattle around our Victorian terrace. I gloss cupboards, strip and coat walls and wonder at the histories I’m exposing and covering up. Where was the nail made that hammered in these floorboards? Whose were the hands that wore these ebony cupboard handles smooth? What did the mute, paint-splattered servants’ bell by the bed sound like? Ghosts are filling the emptiness. These worlds of the dead and the living. Occasionally my mind drifts and I hear what sounds like the footfall of children running about upstairs or I’ll turn and the half-light and my tired eyes conjure the shadow of a woman, hunched and carrying coal to the stove. I cook, eat dinner and call Rosie. I wish you were here. When she does return, fleetingly, she is exhausted from travelling and we are granted an all-too-brief window to fall back into our happy, human patterns. As each weekend draws to a close we take to bed like one of us is leaving for war, pained by separation and seeking comfort. After she leaves I rise early and run to the crossing point before the world stirs. Passing the empty, spectral forms of buses on one dark morning, I read 2B: Bilton glowing on their LED destination boards. ‘To be’ indeed. I’m surrendering to the edge-land, and it to me. My time is determined by the dusk and the dawn, by these fleeting moments of suspension between day and night when I feel most fully and wildly alive.

  Another heatless, open-sky morning. I see no one, not even the buttoned-up mirages of dog walkers on the old railway in the early mist, driven from warm beds by the bowel habits of their pets. The meadow’s grass is brittle, covered in a fine white dust and fresh with fox prints. They lead off in a trail so easy to follow it’s as though there is something he wants me to see, something beyond the old railway and the mills, past the histories of huntsmen and the deer herds.

  The last of the cathedral-deep glaciers melted here 11,000 years ago, but today ice sculpts the edge-land again. Trees are black lines scratched in blue and the air smells of wet, cold iron. White mountains of cloud are indistinct from the hill-line. Pylons twinkle top to bottom like vast river icicles. I hear the quiet waves of cars stirring on the main roads and see the moving chrome and glass shine in the distance like wet stone. There is a sacred calm and I imagine I am at this land’s beginning, that very moment thousands of years ago when the great ice finally cracked and shrank back further north. I shut my eyes and let the sound of traffic morph into that of a flood river, breaking out from the glacier along a path of least resistance, tearing channels through the soft sandstone and carving out the river gorge ahead. The evidence is that humans reached here soon after the ground was released, conquering the rich, fertile earth as it burst with colonising seeds and spores after 100,000 years of incarceration. For so long there has been an unbroken line of eyes looking out across the gorge as I do now, seeing the skeleton tree canopies tinge with evening sun. The rift remains an open tear.

  If you plumbed deep enough, you’d find foxes bound up in every layer of this land. Remains have been discovered in Warwickshire’s seams of Wolstonian glacial sediments dating their presence here to between at least 135,000 and 330,000 years. Data reveals that when the great ice came again, some were driven south to more temperate climes – Iberia, Italy, southern France – others curled up in caves and dens and slowly turned to stone. But the margins were always in their blood. The species returned from exile as soon as the climate permitted, repossessing the fringes of the habitable. Their post-glacial remains have been found at several sites in Britain, evidence of a swift reclamation about the same time as humans. The crossing point for both of us was Doggerland, an earth bridge that once connected this country to Germany and continental Europe. Perhaps foxes were our guides then too and we followed them into this new realm. Certainly the flooding of Doggerland 3,500 years later isolated us both. We were trapped here together on the edge of the world.

  It’s been a few days since I saw him. The air doesn’t help. It is a clinging curtain of cold, wet wool, clouding sight. Disjointed noises of machines and trucks rattle from the roads. My breath blows thick as a sea fret. I hear muffled shouts and, inexplicably, sheep. Closer is the clatter and chatter of jackdaws. All around is the feeling of confluence, of things happening just outside my vision. We’re always told that time is linear, yet in this kind of atmosphere it feels more like a ball of string where points touch for the briefest moments and coexist in the same space. An overweight sheepdog sniffs at a gap in the undergrowth by the old railway siding before being pulled away. ‘Leave it. It’s dirty,’ shouts a man, yanking the lead. ‘Fox.’

  I think nothing of ducking down and follo
wing the hole through the bushes. A squashed Fanta bottle lies by a torn clump of hen pheasant’s feathers. An unusual dinner. Soft down is scattered everywhere, caught in cobwebs and brambles, but three or four beautiful, mottled, russet-brown wing feathers are still attached to a bony stump. Slightly curved inwards at the edges, it looks just like a little baseball glove.

  The crossing point is shrouded in fog, which forms an impenetrable wall behind the houses, deadening distance. It creates the illusion that the world is only a single street deep, a wood-backed Hollywood stage-set in an American desert. But from the viaduct, a different vista. The view stretches twenty miles in one direction, revealing open country in an astonishing collage. The nearest fields are a British military green, then come the smudged lines of grey-purple trees and hedge. Furthest is a blurry ochre where division between land and sky can only be discerned by the crimson glow of evening. It blushes the low cloud as though a great fire rages over the horizon.

  As the days pass I sense a thin, alarming energy rising within, like when you get a nosebleed and, head back, you swallow blood. All this time out here in the cold brings an extraordinary clarity; I have bursts of intense awareness where I can almost hear, see and feel too much. But still no sign of the fox. And no fresh kills either, or none that I can find. I wait nightly, though, camped down in the seams of undergrowth between the old railway and the meadow. As the hours fall away I feel no urge to return to the empty house. Instead, I sit and watch my hands changing shape in the falling light, my nails turning an iridescent black. There is a notion in the back of my head that if I can just stay here long enough, catch a glimpse of him again, follow him where he leads me, then I might attain a better understanding, a common consciousness with edge-land and animal. There is a noise and a movement across the meadow. I feel adrenalin flood my stomach as a breeze blows cold into my opened mind.

  He senses me from the wood edge and freezes. I am shapeless, blurred by darkness and vegetation, but something. Something large. Something wrong. Disorder speaks: the way the misted tops of dead willowherb have been parted, a solidity among skeletal stems. Hide, it all says and he obeys. Dusk has passed swiftly, the last light flashing by. High-pressure sodium vapour flares through the town but only throws the surrounding land into deeper shadow, too dark to discern what lies on the far side of the meadow. He tastes the air. Scents swirl – bark, pine sap, rotting leaves – then a stronger taint, mine: chemicals and sugar. He knows it immediately; any wild fox would – man.

  A hundred breaths later and we haven’t moved. We are eye to eye, aligned under a sky flecked with stars. The ground between us is crisp with hoar frost, to my ears stilled but to his alive with the scratch of tiny claws. Wood mice trickle like rivulets through the under-grass. I sense the starvation that hangs about him like a cloak. The sound of scurrying stokes his hunger, but he remains concealed – hair raised, back rigid, body twitching. His heart beats with a fear passed from nose to nose for 3,000 years, greater even than the sour ache of his empty gut. Nose and black-tipped ears work to range smells and sounds. There is meat and garlic on my hands. To the east, a boar badger has blood on its snout as it defecates into a shallow hole, marking territory. A staccato fart from the town, the bucket exhaust of a souped-up Vauxhall Astra accelerating towards a red light, then slamming on its brakes. Somewhere a door opens, releasing the muffled beat of a stereo. At the same moment, the fox picks out the imperceptible brush of wing on branch as a tawny owl leaves its roost to fall on a shrew. These noises do not disturb him, though. It is the unfamiliar that breaks the deadlock. Across the meadow, cramp means a shift in my position, sending out the strange swish-swish of a waterproof brushing against itself. Swish-swish. Oddness, anathema to the fox. Enough. He slips backwards until his hind paws feel the incline of a steep gully behind. Then he turns and bounds down it.

  A flash. And I go with him. We move, conjoined and flame-like, over the fetid leaves, dashing past an oak and into a holly thicket. A blackbird huddling on a low branch explodes in an upward flurry, chastising with a shrieking spray of notes. The leaping bite is instinctive but it catches only the waft of tail feathers. The fox grubs up a worm, chews it and waits for the wood to still again. After a moment, stealth re-forms like a membrane around us and we slip back into the trees.

  Impossible, but I am following him still. An exchange, a fusion, has occurred. I suddenly see and understand. I know that it’s seven years since his slippery birth under a gorse beside the river. I know that his mother and father were killed soon after his weaning, his father shot through the spine by a farmer; his mother’s brilliance crushed by the glancing blow of a lorry taking sheep to slaughter. I see her laid out like a hearth dog among the silverweed at the road’s edge, her tail wagging in the slipstream of passing vehicles. I watch him as a young fox foraging for beetles and shrews on fearful trips from the den. I see him grow in the summer that followed, becoming strong enough to fight off the foxes that came prospecting the edge-land as his father’s musk faded from its fences and bushes. And I go with him now. I share his elemental possession of this ground, his mapping and claim via snout and gland.

  From the Nidd to the old railway, the fox’s nose bow-waves through field, hedge, meadow and wood. He knows all 320 acres by sight, scent and sound. He knows it when fat with mallard and basking in arbours of grass and rat’s-tail plantain, the pineapple tang of mayweed astringent on the breeze. He knows what it is to forget the fear and doze among tufted couch strawed by heat, bees lumbering, pollen-laden, between the white funnels of bindweed as swifts sear through the blue above. But he knows it in winter too when all is hard earth, bleached air and burning bones.

  Heels lifted, he paws through the wood to where it joins the holloway, rising south, uphill. Its hazel walls are blasted back by cold. Trunks look glazed with ice. Puddles pit the earth but their water has been robbed by cold, frozen into panes and smashed. He touches his nose to ghosts of plants, to cindered earth, bracken and bramble coated with rime. Only the hollies and goosefeet ivy have escaped this salt curing, their leafy pelts hanging glossy and green.

  Halfway up he picks out a scent from an old run cutting over the fields. He takes it, heading west, over the plough ruts, bobbing, sniffing, detecting. A roe deer print is gouged into soil beside a rusted door hinge. He investigates three, four, five more, the last splayed where the deer broke into a run and its hoof took the weight of muscle. Further along is the dark stain of frozen blood. Rabbit. He gobbles a severed foot and the skin and head of a young buck killed the night before by a badger. Then he scratches around a slab of stone, a fallen gatepost for a path long forgotten, scrounging beneath for chrysalides and seeds.

  At the edge of a field the ground swells to greet a boundary hedge. Bare hawthorn and blackthorn comb his coat as he twists beneath, sweeping for fruit, but mice have raided the last of the larder; even the frostbitten clusters of rose hips and haws are gone. The thinnest twig tips tremble and squeak against each other – cheep-cheep – anticipating the calls of warbler chicks that will explode from these hedges in spring. The fox rests in a clump of hogweed, unaware that it was once a Neolithic knapping point; two metres below, Kentish flints pepper the ground. Above, stars spin around a new moon. Breath freezing on his snout, he blinks, sniffs and scans fields awash with pearlescent glow to the west. Hemmed by dark hedge and wood, they fold into one another before succumbing to the sprawl of the town, a black sea flickering with phosphorescence. He sees a million eyes: street lamps and headlights, the yellow, maggot bodies of commuter carriages screeching, hissing and rumbling back from Leeds and York. It is an ever-respiring beast that puzzles him. He fears it; he craves it too.

  Lean, hunched, he roams along runs that resemble the eroded ditches of dry rivers. All these tributaries loop eventually back to the meadow edge where, cautiously, he sniffs for me. He trots over the icy tufts, springing a bank vole from stillness and capturing it by the legs. There is the jerky snap and click of sharp, yellow teeth through b
one. Then he drops it, puts his paw on its head and tears it in half. Somewhere deep in town an ambulance flicks on its siren.

  Haow. Haaaooow.

  A different call. Animal. Close. It’s warm and wide-throated and, head raised, vole wobbling in his jaws, the fox feels it more than hears it. Vixen. His ears twitch and range. She’s young and in his territory, down by the viaduct. Over the old railway the fences of the housing estate reverberate with a volley of barks. A single German shepherd triggers the half-forgotten instinct of the wolf pack, sending a ripple of snarling and barking through the houses. Claws scrabble at kitchen doors and garden gates. The vixen ignores them and sings again – haaaaoooow. The sound pierces double-glazed windows, stopping forks halfway to mouths, wondering at the scream outside. It fires the urge to mate between the fox’s thin hips. If he’d been stronger, perhaps he would have sought her out, but not now. Haaaaaoooooow. Others will be coming soon, young dog-foxes with only three summers under their pelts, slipping out from fields and the wastelands behind the playing fields, warehouses and paint factories to come here and search for her. The fox knows to encounter them as he is, flower-frail with hunger, would be dangerous. His patch could be taken. Or worse.