by Rob Cowen
Territory is everything in winter. To be forced to roam in the open would be fatal. The fox hobbles off and sprays the brambles around his gully. All must be marked. From his position on its ridge the trees below seem to collapse inwards, caving in on the winding watercourse running along the little valley’s bottom. Bilton Beck rises here and burbles over a silt bed strewn with black stones all the way to the Nidd. In places plastic bottles spin endlessly in the eddies; in others, ice sheets join the banks, roofing the stream. It rarely freezes completely, though, and he knows this. No wild fox would dig a den where there wasn’t a pond, marsh or stream within a few hundred yards. Not that he dug this one; it is the remains of a badger sett hollowed beneath a beech a hundred years ago. Floods and landslips have exposed the tree’s roots, leaving them clutching at the soil like a sparrowhawk’s talons. Behind there’s a scrape where the fox lies on warm days surveying the gully, but with the air sharp as a thorn in the nose, he disappears into deep earth, ducking along a root-draped passageway towards the furthest chamber where the ground is soft, black and nitrogenous. His copper fur parts to reveal a pure white undercoat as he flexes his body into a curl.
The soil is a repository of old smells and they come to him, given life by warmth and movement. The strongest is his vixen. For a moment he remembers licking, the wilful submission of mating and the sweet tang of kits. The den has known many such balls of brown fur squirming in its earth for heat and milk. In his drowsiness, time past and present combine and soft, clawless paws clamber over his face. Blind liquid eyes push up to his. His fur stirs with the hot, sweet breath of pink, mewing mouths. Then he is alone again. He dreams of root, burrow, earth and blood.
The fox’s mate abandoned the den two years before, just as tender goose grass and nettles began to carpet the under-brambles. He watched her trot to the horizon at the top of his gully. Pausing on the ridge she became a silhouette under stretching arms of an ash then disappeared over the edge. The kits bounded after, scrabbling up the slope in pursuit, white-tipped tails flicking, fur only just fawned, all barely thirty days old.
The foxes had mated together before, raising litters that grew fat, first from her milk, then from the rabbits, wood mice and pigeons he’d hunted. But hunger came often in that last winter together. Sixty years earlier, farmers had thrown rabbit corpses infected with myxomatosis into the burrows that edged the wheat fields to the north. The infection spread ruthlessly, decimating warrens that had been tunnelled under the wood for a thousand years. It was a grim plague that still haunted the survivors’ descendants, flaring into epidemic proportions during hot summers when the breeding conditions were perfect for the virus-carrying rabbit flea. That year it had thrived, spreading from coat to coat so that by the time the beech over the foxes’ den had shed its last leaves, the prey they relied on was in sharp decline. The fox hadn’t even needed to hunt the few rabbits he came across swollen, shivering and foul with disease. Eyes bulged red and bloody from skulls, sightless, scratched out. Blind, dumb and disoriented, they dragged their useless hind legs in pathetic crawls for cover; he felt none of the joy of execution when stooping to break their necks. Even the meat tasted poor, the flesh corroded.
The foxes hungered, a pain compounded each night by the smell of food drifting over the meadow. Sickly thin, hunting in the frozen, misty margins, the fox bit at the scents – chicken bones, meat, hot marrowfat, rotting vegetables, baked wheat – and scrabbled violently at the earth in his search for worms and insects. Once he dug up a squirrel’s cache of acorns and ate them all, carrying none to his mate. But despite the gnawing in his belly, he kept to his territory, never straying beyond the old railway. Being a wild fox, the smell of man triggered received fears, memories that had passed from fox to fox via trembling whisker and womb. His were blurry visions of The Bramham Moor Hunt, founded in 1740 by the improbably named MP for York, George Fox-Lane. Although long since merged and moved to more respectable pastures, it had once been a regular sight through these fields and woods. The fox half-remembered things he’d never even seen: spectacular horses, duns and greys, gleaming horns and gentry in blue velvet jackets thundering along the treeline, driving piebald foxhounds up the gully’s sides; thick winter fox pelts skinned from pink carcasses left to rot in snowy fields. His vixen had been different. Littered in an old construction pipe behind the sewage works at Bachelor Gardens, she’d scavenged discarded takeaway polystyrene and bin bags since weaning. She’d learned to wait from the cover of parked cars until closing time brought the rush for takeaways that would be spilled onto pavements by drunken hands. The smells of man compelled something different in her: Leave. Feed. Mate again.
The fox had waited for her return, the freshness of rubbings around the den keeping her alive in his snout. Each night he patrolled, marking trees, leaving his twisted black coils on stumps and surveying the meadow from below the same ash tree his ancestors had. A favoured spot, its bark had been worn smooth by generations of foxes drawn to rub there by a usefully positioned nail. This was an unintentional memorial, hammered into the trunk in 1914 by Lieutenant Thomas Watson before leaving for Egypt with the Leeds Pals, with a vow to his fiancée, Elizabeth, that they’d remove it together when the war was over. That benediction never came. The fusion of bone and mud they salvaged from a shell hole three years later was spaded into the earth at Tyne Cot Cemetery, Belgium. The nail was left to the tree and over the years became almost consumed by bark. It stuck out just enough to snatch a few hairs whenever the fox scratched against it, forming a tuft that was foraged every spring by blue tits to line their nests.
Moons passed, five in all, but with no sign of his mate. As dusk heralded the sixth, the fox prowled along the river past the collapsed bank of his birth den and surprised a young rat, devouring it in seconds on the crescent of a small muddy beach. He cracked its skull with his back teeth and swallowed the tail. Strength surged through his limbs and he lollopped up the gully side following her trail as a flare of sun sharpened the horizon into a clear line. The day had been numb and grey and he trotted towards that fading frequency of warmth, weaving, nose to ground, tracing her scent through the fallen branches and infant snowdrops. The meadow was growing then and among a swathe of grass and sprouting dandelions, a cock-pheasant poked up. The fox sank to its haunches but the wind changed; a breath lifted his hind fur and the pheasant rattled off in a volley of clucking that echoed through the wood.
The fox crept along the treeline until he reached the old railway. His mate had paused there to wait for her kits, in the same spot where a signal box had once stood. He smelled them on the corner of an old brick poking through the mud. At this distance the town looked different, like an open mouth. Houses loomed. Behind them, the blurry amber curve of street lights. Power lines crackled off south-west towards a groaning electricity substation. Metal smells. New patterns and shapes. Drizzle began and he knew it was the dark precursor of a storm. He smelled man. Then, with a step, he left his territory for the first time.
Breaching a privet hedge, he paused halfway through the orange wash of a rainy cul-de-sac. Its reeks disoriented: oil, tobacco and mint smeared into pavements. Rain drummed on street-lamp casings, swirling down from a sky the hue of blackberries. He felt the tarmac tremble and turned to see moving lights closing at speed. A screech and a long horn-blast sent him scampering along a ginnel between two houses. Leaping over a wall, he slipped down a bank and into a scrappy wood. The storm was growing, awakening the earth; wind stirred the trees. The foot of the slope blew with plastic bags and bottles and a line of elder bushes entwined a twelve-foot security fence. On the other side lay a railway, a dull bronze line that thrummed under a row of arc lamps. The hissing whip of a train ran along its length, metal against metal, an unfathomable weight approaching. The fox slunk away, trotting southwards, his black paws splashing through run-off. It was then he saw it and his body jerked and froze: fur flashing. Red-brown fur. And that smell. His mate.
The vixen pushed through the
wispy curtain of old man’s beard across the railway on the opposite bank and, lit up by the corollas of light, slipped onto the tracks to chase a crisp packet. The fox’s ears flicked at the noise growing louder, a sawing sound like a gull’s shriek that shrunk him down into a crouch, yet his vixen stood her ground, watching something with a foreleg raised. Hunting. Then she pounced on a rat as it fled a flooded hole. Suddenly that moving wall of sound and weight and light was upon them, over them, part of them. A terrible flare and scream.
The fox ran, his legs a mess of speed, a force pushing him onwards along the fence and into the edge-land. He ran down that wild corridor and over the crossing point until his strength gave way and he curled up beneath the last elm on the river to sleep. By the next evening his heart had slowed.
He wakes now, disturbed by a vole scampering to its tunnel in the den wall, and stretches stiffly in the dark, legs numb from being too long motionless. With a yawn he tastes disordered air. Through the rooty aperture of the entrance, silent, feathery flakes swirl this way and that, aimlessly, diagonally. He blinks again, nibbles his fur and sniffs. Nothing. All scents are buried now. Even the voices of birds are quietened by blizzard. Pain swells in his arthritic legs. He has never been hungrier but he knows that hunting would be futile in falling snow. Covering his snout with his brush he lies awake, waiting, weakening.
By dusk the next evening the world has become monochrome. Lines of rooks huddle in the fields searching for a gap in the white crust. The fox is at the holloway, stalking a crow as it smashes its beak into a chalk-hard drift. With every strike it sinks a little until it raps impenetrable earth and draws out a rattling, krah-ah-aahhhh. The fox slinks on his belly, but the crow hears and hops, skips and vanishes into grey air. High above, the drone of a great metal bird whines and throbs, retracting its landing gear to begin its migration south.
Despite the snow, moisture in the air carries sound and scent: a foggy hum of lorries and cars and smells pumped from industrial vents. A Chinese takeaway on Bilton Lane is deep-frying pork. The fox’s ears twitch. He snaps at the air, retches, coughs and yawns. Disturbed, the rooks rise from the fields and throng the wood. Woodpigeons flying in pairs fold back their wings and come in to roost. He knows birds are beyond him now and he resorts to his clump of dead hogweed at the field’s edge as the street lights of town begin to shimmer in the darkening mist beyond. After twenty breaths, he rises and limps towards them.
Behind the old railway, down the siding bank, his territory finishes by a clutch of garden-escaped hellebores. They are a purple marker among the ermine snow. A rotten garden fence blown outwards lies semi-buried by earth piled into mounds from rabbit excavations. Moving from hole to hole he thrusts his head in and tastes the faint air of a warren. Memories flash: fur against his tongue and teeth, flesh, the breaking of bone. The scents are faded though and the warren collapsed. A Staffordshire bull terrier killed the last breeding doe a year earlier as its owner stopped to light a cigarette. The clutch of pink infants left orphaned in the burrow was a feast for a pregnant rat. The fox smells it all and moves on.
Crossing the collapsed fence, he crawls up a bank and under a laurel into a long yard thick with snow. The crystalline layer has turned plant pots into giant puffballs. A wheelie bin is on its side, lid open and overflowing with rubbish; the stench fills his nose. It is this that has drawn him. But there is another – dog. It’s weak, though. There’s been nothing in here for days save for a pair of blackbirds investigating another long-empty feeder. Only their spidery scrawls flaw the snow’s luminescence. The fox creeps, body tensed, each boot barely shifting the surface. Pad, pad, pad, he creaks towards the square of the house looming, cliff-like, at the end. A blind in an upstairs bedroom glows yellow. That’s all. He pauses. No. There is another, an intermittent flashing like sunlight on the river. It is coming from around the corner of the wall, near the bins. Suddenly the house wall erupts with a gurgle of steaming water swirling down a drain. He smells something familiar – elderflowers. He hurries into a trot and rounds the house, bringing a bright conservatory into view, a television blaring at its centre. In a heartbeat he is down on his chest, ears back, baring his teeth. Every sense tells him to flee. Here is all he despises: uncertain ground and dangers, but his hunger is like an animal eating him from the inside. He darts for the wheelie bin and tears opens a plastic bag like a rabbit’s stomach spilling wet cardboard, eggshells and half-eaten vegetables. Burying his snout deep inside, his teeth clamp on a chicken carcass, which he drags onto the snow to crack the cartilage and swallow the pale, forgotten under-meat.
Desperation has lowered his guard and he doesn’t notice the young dog stirred from bed and walking to the conservatory window. Outraged by his wild form, it slams its paws against the glass, barking sharp violent rasps. The sudden scream from upstairs sounds like a rabbit caught by the neck and the house explodes with yellow. The fox bolts the way he came, running hard, oblivious to the burning pain in his bones and thinking of nothing but reaching his territory, his earth. Yet he doesn’t run in its direction. His instinct is to lose enemies on foreign soil and so he doubles back, turning west along the old railway, dashing through borders, over fences, up bramble banks and through scrappy undergrowth strewn with fly-tipped glass and metal. Under a hedge he smells another dog-fox – young, strong – but presses on, past an allotment’s drunken fencing, flushing woodpigeon as he runs. A hundred yards further, behind the slide and swings of a children’s playground, a snowy belt of woodland leads down to the river. Scenting open water, he slows to a limp and skirts a shallow pool frozen and flecked with litter, ringed with the prints of moorhens.
Watching him unseen from the brow of a bank is a two-year-old dog-fox who tracks the bony shape panting beside his water source before emitting a high-pitched whine of warning. Surprised, the old fox jumps, spins round and retches back a gekkering call. His eyes are wide, muscles tensed, but the younger fox has no urge to fight him; he knows the intruder is too weak to contest ground. He stinks of fear and of death. But he carries another smell too, something familiar – dens and warm earth. The young fox lets out an ululating noise and lets his father pass, following his hobbling shape until he becomes invisible in the trees.
Moon renders the Nidd’s surface polished silver. The fox breaks it with his tongue and laps. There is no other sound than the continuous, indefinable whistle-hum of the sewage works, a noise he has never heard so close before. Instinctively his senses orient him and he turns east towards his territory. Mist haunts the river edges, skirting the alder and snow-dusted pines. Nosing his way downstream, the fox creeps through the cover of dead vegetation until his own faint scent drifts over a low woody rise. As he crests a trackless path the night-veiled land beyond begins to resolve into the recognisable shapes of viaduct, wood and meadow. A sniff. Close now. He quickens his pace, limping through a thicket of hawthorn and up to a leaning fence covered by an impenetrable wall of creeping bramble. Rather than retreat, he darts through the narrow gap between a fence post and tree, landing in a ditch on his front paws. Immediately he knows he’s been bitten.
There is a scratch and the feeling of being gripped. Sharp teeth hold his back legs. He yelps and coils round, snapping and hissing, fearing badger or dog, but his jaws clamp on something worse. Old discarded wire, barbed and twisted into loops, is buried deep into the flesh of his left hind paw and noosed around the other, suspending both in the air. He pulls and chews at the wire, dragging himself across the ditch, yet only deepens the wound. He tries jumping back and forth, then scrabbling over the fence from the other way, but the noose tightens and twists with the efforts, soaking the snow with blood. Eventually, exhausted, he collapses onto his side, ribs heaving, too weak to move.
The little ditch is massed with night when a robin breaks the silence – twiddle-oo, twiddle-eedee, twiddle-ee – a downpour of notes that wakes the fox. He blinks up at the song as it ripples through the wood. The robin is anointing the earth from a branch of a near
by crab apple, legs braced, fiery breast puffed and facing the red edge of the rising sun. Another sings, faintly, from the housing estate across the meadow. The edge-land is stirring. Slowly, trunks and branches become etched in a cream sky; light blooms in the east. Starlings settle again on the pylon cables. Rooks pace the fields. The wish-wash of cars rises in a thin line.
There is no pain, only numbness, and for a moment he forgets his bonds and tries to stand. His yelp frightens away the robin. Licking, pulling and biting the wire again agitates the cut further, for the old post it is nailed to is crooked but strong, a creosoted chestnut pole driven deep into the ground by a farmer who believed a job worth doing was worth doing well. More fretting flares the wound; it boils up with fresh blood until it’s too tender even for his tongue to touch.
A frozen puddle a yard away half-melts in the midday sun, maddening his thirst, but all through the changing light of the mauve and silver afternoon he can only scratch at the ground and bite at the snow-topped brambles. Soon every breath is a wheeze. As the sky bruises, he hears the continuous exhale of cars returning. The puddle thickens and solidifies again. A rabbit kit appears at the top of the ditch. Curious, it approaches the fox and becomes confused by the absurdity of its trussed legs. The fox blinks; the rabbit has changed into a rook, assessing him, preening under a wing, cocking its head and letting out a loud kro-aa-ak. Even hisses and snarls don’t scare it; then the fox finds he can neither uncurl his lip nor lift his head.