… they all sang the same song,
Not in our time.
So O-ha and the other creatures of Trinity Wood and the surrounding countryside did not concern themselves with the warnings brought in by outsiders. They confined their interests to the subtleties and vagaries of the winds which carried the scents and sounds necessary to everyday living, to the changing seasons, to avoiding contact with humans. The wood mouse, surrounded by predators, had enough to worry about without thinking of future catastrophes that might never come to pass. The swifts and swallows were too busy gathering insects over stagnant pools. The moorhens stuck their heads under leaves when such dreadful thoughts entered their minds, believing they were totally hidden from the world, but soon forgot why they were doing it and went out into the pond to feed again.
Life was already quite fraught enough without having to heed something about which they could do nothing. O-ha’s main anxieties concerned getting enough food for herself and her unborn cubs and evading the hunt.
One night she rose from her bed leaving A-ho fast asleep and staggered outside. She felt sleepy and failed to observe the rituals of leaving-the-earth: something she was never normally careless about.
Above the wood was a hunter’s moon, casting a light over the scene that filled the world with shadows. The shadows moved and danced as if they were alive.
O-ha set off across the hav, feeling quite strange. It was as if she were not herself but some other vixen moving across the moonlit landscape of the slope below Trinity Wood. All around her were the sounds of other creatures in the grasses, going about their nightly businesses. Then, suddenly, all went still. There was the smell of danger in the air.
The moaning note of a huntsman’s horn floated over the fields.
O-ha’s heart picked up the sound before her brain and she was already moving rapidly through the thickets of blackthorn before she was conscious of what she had to do. Her feet kept getting tangled in the network of shadows though, hindering her progress. She wished there was no moon, no hunter’s moon, for the human beasts to see by. Yet, they had their hounds and horses to see for them, to smell her out and run her down.
The human barks grew louder and she could hear the thudding of horses’ hoofs on the turf. The hounds were screaming at each other, urging each other on. Shadows grew like brambles around her, catching in her coat, holding her back. It was as if the black shadows of the briars had sided with man and were acting like snares and traps to slow her down, cage her, until the hounds caught up with her.
She ran until her heart was bursting. On the top of a ridge, in the full light of the hunter’s moon, the hounds caught her and fell on her. She screamed for mercy as canine teeth crunched her leg bones and tore the joints apart. The pain was incredible as pieces of flesh were ripped from her live twisting body and her blood splattered the faces of her killers.
The eyes of the hounds were bright with bloodlust, and they changed as their jaws broke her bones, stripped her coat from her flesh. They changed into white human faces, the lips curled back and that ugly barking which only humans made, coming from their throats … ‘HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA …’ relentlessly. Dogs with human heads, and coats and caps, insane with the pleasure of tearing a living creature to pieces. Human heads with dogs’ bodies, ugly with the excitement of death and its younger brother, pain. All the while she cried for mercy, for herself and her unborn cubs, but there was none to listen. All ears were deaf, except to the sounds of the kill.
Then, strangely, she was outside her body, and looking on. And she saw that it was not herself in the centre of those frenzied human hounds, but A-ho, her mate. She screamed at them to stop, to leave him alone. She could see his body contorting in agony and his eyes pleading for her help. Yet she could do nothing but watch him being torn to death.
And when he was dead, one of the riders lifted him up, one of the riders with a human body and dog’s head lifted him up and bit off his tail, wiping the bloody end over his face. ‘HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!’
Then, as he dangled there, from the human hand, a wasted empty skin with no tail, the head flopping this way and that, she could see it was not A-ho, it was not herself, if was just another fox, only another fox, anonymous, unknown. It was another fox, not just another fox, it was the fox, it was all foxes. It was her, it was A-ho, it was her grown cubs. It was her mother, her father, her kin and kind.
She woke up in her earth, A-ho beside her, saying, ‘What’s the matter? Are you having the nightmare?’ and she realised she was whining in her sleep. Her noise, her twitching body, had woken him.
She nuzzled into him.
‘Yes, it was the nightmare.’
It was the bad dream of all foxes, the chase over the landscapes of the mind, and the gory end that was never an end because it would come again, and again …
Chapter Two
The winds are gods. Without them, survival would become a nightmare. They carry the scents and sounds necessary to fox awareness of all things: danger, food, rain, love, trees, earth, landscape – all things. Each individual wind is a deity with a secret name, to be whispered by the rocks and trees, to be written on the surface of the rivers and lakes. More important than the sun or the moon, the wind is the breath of life. Somewhere, seasons out of time, is a mythical land known as Heff, where a shapeless form breathes through a series of hollow tree trunks full of holes of different sizes. This is the palace of the winds.
The time was Ransheen, the white wind, when darkness grew like horns, deeply into the ends of the day. Soft things had become brittle and the landscape had taken on sharp edges. Ransheen brought with her a belly full of flints and lungs that burned.
It was night and O-ha prepared for the ritual of leaving-the-earth with unhurried precision: an elaborate procedure which tested for dangers outside and ensured the secrecy of the earth’s location.
She licked her nose and poked it out into the cold path of Ransheen, getting Her strength and direction. A thousand scents were out there, each one instantly recognisable. The smells of men and dogs were absent, however, and after some time O-ha was satisfied that it was safe and gradually emerged from the earth, to stand outside.
The world was a block of stone with a frozen heart. After the mating, the real winter had set in, almost as if their coming together had been a signal for the ice to advance. Around O-ha the trees of Trinity Wood were sighing in the moonlight. She moved her head from side to side, slowly, testing the odours that Ransheen carried in Her unseen hands, the sounds that She bore.
Then the swift dash to put ground between herself and the earth, through the edge of the thicket and out into the hav, the open heathland.
There was a stalking moon, throwing its pale light over the landscape. When she was a cub O-ha’s mother had told her that the moon was the detached soul of the sun. In the beginning, not long after the world was formed, there had been no night or day: world-shapers like the great fox A-O, and the wolf Sen-Sen, moved through the Firstdark using scent and sound, and had no need of light. This was at the time before humans came out of the sea-of-chaos. However, the giant Groff, sent by humans to prepare the world for their invasion, had been instructed to provide light for the humans to hunt by. He plunged his hand deep into the earth and came up with a ball of fire. He called this molten ball the sun, but when he tossed it up into the sky, he threw the sun so hard its soul became detached from its body. This ghost of the sun was called the moon, and followed a similar but separate path in its circuit of the world.
The wolf and fox knew that the reason Groff was providing the bright light of day was so that men could more easily find and kill them, and they tried to destroy the giant. But Groff could not be hurt, since he was made of nothing but belief, and the only way he could be destroyed was for men to doubt their faith in his existence.
O-ha used the ancestral highway from Trinity Wood to Packhorse Field. Other fox and badger byways criss-crossed this main artery but she ignored these, for none of them led to
water, her present objective.
Her tread was delicate, and from time to time she paused to look over her shoulder, not to see, but to listen, for like all her kind she was unable to focus on a stationary object for more than a few seconds. She passed by a cottage, using the ditch at the end of its long garden as cover. She could smell the iron fence posts, and the steel wires that ran between them. Her ears picked up the sound of the clock, ticking in the bedroom of the house. Somewhere, out on the road that ran by the cottage – perhaps half a mile distant, a man was walking. His scent came to her on the back of Ransheen.
She lay in the dank ditch, watching the cottage for a while, her body tuned to the night. All remained still. It was wise just to wait sometimes, if for no other reason than some faint, distant sound had disturbed her mental attitude. Or perhaps nothing at all that could be seen, smelled or heard? Perhaps just a feeling? Survival did not depend upon knowing everything but on following instinct. If the feeling said ‘stay’ then she stayed. Her thirst could wait. Unlike humans, O-ha did not invent reasons for continuing normal activity. There were no chores which could not wait. She was quite willing to do nothing, be nothing, for as long as her mental state remained unsettled.
Eventually she resumed her journey to the pond.
O-ha was a very conventional fox, and even as she walked she carried out certain rituals. There was one set of these which were rarely referred to or spoken of in any society, even between pairs, though it was carried out religiously on all occasions: the marking. Almost subconsciously, O-ha marked certain areas of the highway with her urine, so that if A-ho came by that way he would know she had recently been there.
As she walked along the ancestral highway O-ha felt the frosted grasses brushing her legs and she thought wistfully of Melloon, the Autumn wind, and of the fruits and mushrooms that had since gone.
At one of the fox byways she heard a familiar tread, as delicate as her own, and smelled an odour which always sent a shiver of delight down her spine. She waited, poised, and soon another red fox came out of the tall white grasses.
‘A-ho,’ she said. ‘I didn’t hear you leave the earth. Why didn’t you wake me?’
A-ho stopped and scratched his muscled body with the fluidity of a cat.
‘You were sleeping too soundly. Seemed a shame to disturb you.’ He flicked his head. ‘Been down to the orchard, looking for rats, but all the windfalls have gone. Nothing to get them from their holes. What about you?’
‘Just going down to the pond.’
‘Well, you be careful – in your condition …’
She was three weeks pregnant now and a warm glow was in her belly.
‘I’ll be all right.’
‘Be careful,’ repeated A-ho, and then he was gone, his dark coat moving along the ancestral path, towards their earth.
O-ha continued her trek through the moonlight. In the distance a tawny owl hooted, Ransheen carrying the sound over the fields.
The man she had smelled earlier, out on the road, had now cut across the fields and was walking towards the animal highway. She could hear the crunch of his boots on the hard ground. The lumps of frozen soil were hampering his progress. Occasionally he lost his footing and barked softly.
O-ha slipped into the grasses and lay still, waiting for the man to pass. His direction crossed her path and among all the other scents which he carried around him in a cloud was that of a shotgun. While there was darkness to protect her, and the fact that the man appeared to be ill in the way that men she encountered in the early hours were often sick, she did not wish him to fire the weapon. There were noises and smells associated with guns that were reminiscent of storms, of thunder and lightning and trees blasted into black charred stumps. It was always difficult to think, to keep a clear head, under such circumstances. It did not matter that one survived without being hit: these were enough to turn a fox’s head and make it do something stupid.
The man came within a few feet of her, smelling strongly of smoke. His tread was unsteady, with much stumbling, and once he fell over and lay still for a few moments. His shotgun clattered against a stone and O-ha held her breath, expecting it to belch flame, to tear a ragged hole in the night’s stillness. Nothing happened, no fire, no noise.
The man gulped at the frozen air, his breath snorting through his nostrils. He growled softly and heaved himself to his feet. Then he swayed forward, as if searching the ground. O-ha heard him pick up the shotgun before barking harshly at the moon. His head began weaving about as he regained his stance. He slapped at his clothes, yapped again, then continued his meandering over the fields.
O-ha’s encounters with humans were not infrequent, though it was rare for them to be aware of the meeting. Humans had the sharp eyes of a predator which could not rely on smelling the prey, but they had lost the instinct which went with such vision. Many times she had held her breath, thinking that a human was aware of her, only to have the intruder pass by. She had decided that most humans were preoccupied creatures, whose anxious minds were on things which were outside the considerations of a fox. Why else would solitary men wear such strange expressions, walk around with eyes fixed on some point far beyond their range of vision, smell constantly of one kind of fear or another? And when there was more than one of them, they were usually so busy barking at each other that the world could turn upside down and they would not notice. As for killing, humans sometimes killed not for territorial reasons, nor for food, but for reasons which foxes had never been able to understand. There were times when humans made a great spectacle of killing foxes, and there were times when they did it slyly, secretly, while no one was watching.
O-ha was no stranger to death, even to slaughter. She and A-ho had once entered a chicken coop and slaughtered the whole population. For several minutes she had been able to see nothing but a hazy red cloud before her eyes, and her heart moved to her head, pounding there. Her coat overheated and she just snapped at anything that moved. This was not a blood lust. This was good husbandry. Afterwards the pair of them had carried away and cached as many chickens as they were able, before the farmer arrived on the scene.
O-ha understood about killing, even in numbers, so she did not think humans unnatural, only unreachable.
O-ha came to the pond and found there was a sheet of ice covering its surface. It shone frostily at her. She tested its strength with her paw. It remained firm, and she knew she would have to lick away at the edge. First, she muttered the ritual chants. ‘Water, preserver of life, body of A-O the first fox of Firstdark, cleanse my spirit …’ Then, while her senses were tuned to the world around her, she licked steadily at the ice until she was satisfied. Never for a moment did she relax. She had to be constantly on the alert, for the one sound that spelled discord, for the one smell that meant danger. To survive, a fox must be invisible, a thread of cotton on the wind, and must know all things at once.
In the centre of the pond, beyond the stiff reeds, was a small island. On this isolated piece of land stood a house-shaped coop which O-ha knew contained sleeping ducks. Well, they wouldn’t be sleeping for long! She cocked her ear in the direction of the farmhouse, swimming out there somewhere in the darkness. She could smell humans – hear them breathing in their earth. She was not alarmed. There was no tension in the air.
She stared at the hut again for a few seconds before it swirled mistily before her eyes. The dark side of her soul slid forward and she walked out on to the pond, the ice crackling around her feet. Farmers believed they were protecting the ducks by putting them on their little islands, but a fox is a superb swimmer. And of course, they forgot that the ice provided a flat path for any predator.
In the middle of the pond, O-ha stopped, and looked down. There was something under the misty ice, a shapeless shadow, that stared up at her. She shivered, but was unable to move for a few moments. The thing would not let her. It held her gaze, locked by its own. It was a thing from a time not now. A distant form, unable to reach her because it was too far
ahead, or she was too far behind, but it promised a meeting. The promise was in its stare.
It let her go and she hurried on.
Once she was on the island the ducks began to stir, sensing her presence. She padded softly all around the coup, checking for the slightest crack or chink which might mean a loose board. She could hear them talking to one another, in their own language, as she checked the roof, investigating each part of it thoroughly. Not one square inch escaped her attention; she was methodical, her hunger honing her senses to a keen edge. A dark, red cloud was in her head, covering her eyes, filling her nostrils, and an urgent desire burned from deep within her belly to the tip of her tongue.
Just let me find a split in the boards, to get my nose inside, she thought, and the rest of me will follow.
Her mouth was awash with saliva. Her brain was alive with bloodflies. Her breath was as sharp as the edge of a blade of grass.
The ducks began to get alarmed and started to kick up a din, but still O-ha did not worry. She had an ear on the humans, her nose to the wind. And the old farm dog, Gip, was in his last few months on this world. He was sixty seasons old. His hearing had all but gone, and his sense of smell was tuned only to canned meat.
She made a long and painstaking examination of the coop. She worried the bolt on the door for some time, knowing that this thing was somehow connected with sealing the entrance to the coop, but was unable to understand how it worked. Eventually she abandoned the enterprise.
‘You get away tonight,’ she whispered, the red cloud lifting. ‘I’ll be back. Sometime the bolt will be forgotten, or a rotten plank left too long before replacement – then we’ll see.’
Hunter's Moon Page 2