A car came around the bend and its driver, on seeing O-ha, skidded to a stop. O-ha hesitated for a few moments. Her encounters with cars were limited. She knew them to be dangerous, because foxes, hedgehogs, rabbits and even birds had been struck and killed by these machines. The smells associated with them were unpleasant. However, she knew from her experience with tractors that the fumes which clouded them were able to mask an animal’s scent.
The driver of the car was a female human and she was staring at O-ha with a strange expression on her face. O-ha made a swift decision, and jumped up, on to the bonnet of the car, up again, across the roof, and down to the roadway on the other side. She caught a glimpse of a startled face during the operation but smelled nothing but car fumes. They would help to scatter her own odours over the landscape.
She continued along the middle of the road and a little later was rewarded for her courage. The sound of confused voices reached her ears, as the hounds milled around the car. The vehicle itself was trying to edge forward now and force a passage through the dogs, one or two of which had better noses than the others and were attempting to clamber up on to the bonnet, their claws skidding on the paintwork. Another car came from the opposite direction and became entangled with the hounds. Then the riders caught up with the pack and the car drivers began sounding their horns. O-ha gained valuable rest minutes as dogs, horses, people and machines tried to extract themselves from each other. Humans howled and the hounds cursed, shouting obscenities at the cars and their occupants, and swearing at the horses who threatened to trample them. The horses, themselves, having difficulty in keeping their footing on the slippery road surface, flung a few oaths in to the mêlée in a language rich in expletives. O-ha was not entirely familiar with Equidae, but she had been the target of enough horse curses to recognise harder forms of the word ‘dung’.
The hunting horn was sounded, the dogs urged onward with barks and whips. Soon they were in full pursuit again.
O-ha came to a roadside cottage, leaped up on to the fence and with remarkable poise, travelled along it to the gate, where she jumped down into the garden. There was a stone bird-table shaped like a church font, in the middle of the small lawn. O-ha smelled the water and jumped, balancing precariously on the edge of the bowl. As she drank, quickly, the bird-table rocked under her weight. Sparrows shouted insults at her from the eaves of the cottage. A human was doing something in the corner of the garden and had not even noticed her, but around the corner of the house came a small dog which immediately shouted: ‘Ha, fox! Ha, fox!’
The bird-table came crashing down and the figure in the hat and gloves dropped its trowel in fright. It turned and barked, its eyes round, as it backed towards the cottage door.
O-ha bared her teeth at the mutt and then leaped the fence with an agility that had the dog looking vexed and angry.
‘Stupid beast,’ she muttered to herself. The water had given her new heart and energy, but now the hunt was very near. The dogs would surely clamour in and around the garden for a while, and hopefully the human in the house would detain the riders with vocal abuse, but O-ha could not hope for more than few moments delay.
A sudden noise behind her told her that she had been spotted by a huntsman who had unwittingly overtaken the pack, and the hounds were screaming now in a frenzy of excitement.
Too close, she thought, panting, as her heart hammered in her breast. They’re getting too close. I’m going to be caught. Oh, A-ho! Oh, my poor cubs. How am I going to throw them off now?
She did a circuit now, crossing the road again, and set off, over the fields. She ran and ran until her heart was bursting within her and her brain jangled. There was a thought in her head that she could lead the hounds on to where she had left A-magyr. He would have gone, but the rabbit would still be there. It may delay them long enough to enable her to get back to her earth.
She reached the field of cows and ran in and out of the animals, hoping their presence would help in throwing the scent, but the lead hound was only a dozen yards behind her now. He was calling in a voice short of breath, ‘I’m here, I’m here. Don’t look back, fox. You’re about to die. I am Breaker, lead hound of the hunt. Breaker will run you to a standstill. Breaker will tear your throat, spill your fox-blood. Breaker, Breaker, Breaker …’
The other hounds took up his cry behind him, screaming, ‘Breaker, Breaker, Breaker – follow him close – follow him close. The kill is only a nose away.’
Waste your breath, she thought, but the misery and terror of death was on her, and she had to fight the pain in her body to force it onward. While she still ran, there was hope. Many a fox had escaped in the nick of time, at the last moment, through some fortuitous action.
The cows began running this way and that, slowing the riders but not the dogs. The dogs were still there, right at her heels. She found a thicket of blackthorn and hurled herself into it, not caring about the sharp spikes that tore her coat. Out the other side, and into another patch. At the end of the field was an encampment of travellers’ caravans. She ran right through the centre, narrowly missing a sleeping lurcher dog, lean as herself, as it slept by an open fire. It leapt to its feet, was about to give chase, when it was bowled over by the impetuous Breaker, who seemed to care nothing for gypsies or their animals.
The travellers themselves cheered the fox through the encampment and even made an effort to prevent the hounds from following, until the huntsmen came up and began barking at their fellow humans, and laying about them with riding crops. One or two fights broke out, but Breaker was still on her tail and she knew that most of the other hounds would follow his determined lead.
She reached the edge of a copse and just as she entered, she heard a voice she knew well.
‘Quick, up on to that branch. I’ll take over.’
It was A-ho, her mate.
She needed little encouragement. She leapt from the ground, up into the tree, and balanced there against the trunk.
A-ho showed himself briefly to Breaker, who came crashing into the undergrowth, and then the brave dog fox was away.
‘Don’t worry,’ he called, ‘I’m as fresh as a daisy. I’ll get rid of this one, and then see you at the earth!’
Oh, run, run, she thought, gasping for breath and hardly able to maintain her position on the branch. Several of the hounds began milling around the base of the tree, looking up at her, but on hearing Breaker’s full-blooded, throaty cries, they continued the chase. The hatted and coated riders swept by, urging any slow hounds onwards, unaware that the quarry had changed and that a relay had taken place. Soon the sounds of the hunt drifted into the distance and she was able to think a little more clearly.
To say that she was concerned was an understatement. She was still terrified but not now for herself – for A-ho, her mate. Although his voice had been full of bravado, when he had told her to jump into the tree, she had smelled his fear-sweat, and knew he would be in the same turmoil of fear that she had been herself, not so long ago. She was in an agony of apprehension for him, but she told herself he was no fool. If anyone could outwit the hounds, it was A-ho. He was a clever fox among clever foxes. He knew the tricks, knew the parish. He would have some idea in mind, of how to rid himself of Breaker and the hounds, and he would apply that, no matter how frightened he was. She told herself all this, as she waited for the tiredness to abate from her limbs, so that she could be on her way back to the earth.
Some time later, she jumped to the ground, and padded to the top of a rise beyond the copse. She sniffed Ransheen for any scent of the hunt, but there was nothing. No sounds fell on her ears either, and she was beginning to feel something of relief, that the nightmare was over. A-ho had said he would see her back at the earth and she began to make her way across the hav towards Trinity Wood. Around her, the world had returned to normal, as if there had never been a horde of savage creatures on horseback, sweeping across the countryside like the barbarians they were, intent on gorging their lust for blood.
As she approached the wood, there were warnings on the wind. She moved slowly, and deliberately, until she could hear certain sounds: clinks of metal on stones. She went no further. There were humans around her earth, with digging implements. Sometimes, before or during a hunt, they filled in the earth to stop foxes from returning to relative safety. She imagined that was what was going on at the moment.
‘Do your worst,’ she said. ‘A-ho and I will dig another earth.’ She remembered it was winter and that the ground was hard. ‘Or find an empty one,’ she added. The home was not important. The home was just a hole in the ground and could be abandoned without regret. Winter was a difficult time to find another earth, but there were two of them to search.
She went back to the tall grasses, where she could lie and be aware of the people digging, without being seen herself. Although her poor eyesight did not permit her to observe the activity in detail, she could use her other senses to tell her what was going on.
After a while she realised the digging was going on too long for the men to be filling in the earth. Besides that, they were hacking away on the spot itself, and she could smell fresh clay. With a start she came to the conclusion that they were not filling the hole, but digging it out. The only reason they would bother to do that was if they believed there was a fox inside.
Her mouth went dry at the thought that A-ho was in the earth. Could he have returned so quickly? She realised with a sickening feeling that it was possible. Still, that did not mean he was in there. The men could have found the earth and assumed it had a fox inside. They were not the most intelligent creatures on the earth and would work at something like this on little or no evidence, simply because they had nothing else to do.
Suddenly the chinking of metal against flint ceased, there was a moment of quiet, then a great howl of delight went up from the men. O-ha stood up, careless of being seen, and witnessed A-ho being dragged from the remains of his earth by his tail. He dangled on the end of a strong-looking arm, trying to turn and bite at the wrist. She could smell the fear in him.
Oh, A-ho! The odour of his terror almost drove her crazy. She ran back and forth in the grasses, knowing she was helpless to give him any kind of support. There was a vague thought that if she could get to the man who held him, he might have a chance, but it was against her nature, the nature of a wild thing, to launch a direct frontal attack on humans. Were she cornered, she might fling herself forward in desperation, but the instinct to run away was powerful enough. It was all she could do to remain within listening distance. Her frustration, the misery she experienced in being so close to A-ho’s tormentors, was overwhelming. Finally, she could stand it no longer and began to run. In her frenzy, she was not sure in which direction, but in any case a sound went up from A-ho which stopped her in her tracks again. She saw one of the men raise a spade above his head and swing downwards. Immediately afterwards there was another, more horrifying sound. It could have been a metal blade striking turf, except that O-ha knew it was not. No more sounds came from her mate after that. She smelled blood and slunk away, bile rising to her throat.
She spent the rest of the day in a daze of disbelief. Her rational thoughts were blanked by a buzzing in her brain, which did not allow her to sort through the events she had witnessed in order to come to a conclusion. The idea that A-ho was dead was such a terrible one that unconsciously she put up a great resistance towards it. She had seen sights, heard sounds, smelled odours, but fitting them together and using them to reach a conclusion was not possible for her at that point in time. For the rest of the day she lay in the grass, resting and getting her strength back to normal. She chewed at frozen grassroots to while away the time and satisfy a growing hunger. The rabbit seemed so long in the past, it might have been a week ago.
When evening came, she returned to Trinity Wood. There was not scent nor sound of human activity, and she walked up to her earth.
It was a scene of devastation. The tunnel had been torn open, the soil scattered in all directions. Clods of frozen turf lay amongst the dried leaves of last autumn, and a gaping hole was in the place of the narrow entrance. There was a brown stain on the scarred root of the oak.
A hard cold lump formed in O-ha’s stomach. At last there was an acceptance of what had happened. Grief flooded through her.
‘A-ho!’ she called, frantically.
The wind soughed through the trees.
‘A-ho – please answer me. Please don’t play jokes.’
Two pigeons left the edge of the wood, noisily.
‘A-ho, A-ho …’
She called and called, knowing then that she would never receive an answer. The men had executed her mate. They had not even left his body, but had carried it off somewhere for their own purposes.
Then she had the wild thought that maybe he had escaped, wriggled out of their grasp. Perhaps he was hiding somewhere, waiting for her to return? The blood on the ground meant nothing. It could have been any creature’s blood. Maybe A-ho was out looking for her, thinking that she had not returned because she had herself been caught?
‘It’s all right,’ she called, out into the darkness, ‘I’m alive. They didn’t get me.’
She lay down and waited. It was no use running all over the country. One of them had to stay put, while the other found.
All through the long night she waited, the hope barely alive in her breast. When the twilight of dawn came, she had lapsed into despair, knowing that he had gone. A lone hawk flew over the wood, then it descended, but never reached the ground. It stooped, several times, over the slope where O-ha lay, but it seemed that the world and the bird of prey were flung apart, each time they tried to come together. There was a force on the land, repelling the hawk’s attempts.
As a red sky began to emerge above, a fox came to O-ha from out of its half-light: an insubstantial fox with a pure white flame hovering a few inches above its head. The flame did not flicker but burned steadily. An eternal flame.
The fox-spirit paused by Trinity Wood, and then continued its journey.
O-ha climbed wearily, morosely, to her feet and followed it, across the fields, to the manor house beyond the farm. There, hanging by his neck from a piece of wire, was the shredded body of her mate A-ho. He swayed gently in Ransheen’s unseen hands. They had left him on a corral fence, like a piece of gubbins, to warn all foxes that the gamekeepers of the manor house were people to be reckoned with.
‘The hunt – he evaded the hunt. He was a clever fox, my A-ho,’ said O-ha, to the fox-spirit.
Vacant eyes were turned on the vixen.
‘Yes, he evaded the hunt. I think you are aware of what happened. He was seen by some stableboys, returning to earth, and they dug him up, killed him with spades. They brought him here, threw him to the hounds.’
‘And his tail?’
‘They took that first. They have a word for it. A brush. It’s their word, not ours.’
O-ha stared at her mate, at the ragged fur that used to lie beside her own, full of warmth, full of vitality. Now it was an empty thing, full of holes, covered in black, dried blood. Glazed empty orbs, more vacant than those of the fox-spirit, were in the place of those hot, bright eyes she was used to seeing, looking into her own. It was not A-ho. Nevertheless, she asked the fox-spirit, ‘Does he have to stay there?’
‘Can you get him down?’
‘I don’t think so. He’s tied too tightly.’
‘Neither can I. We are made only of mist and light, of dreams and visions, of songs and memory – I have no power over physical matters. You understand? I am the fox-spirit that leads the living to the dead. Another will come to guide your mate to the Perfect Here.’
O-ha watched as the cloud of mist scattered before her eyes, and the flame, the bright white flame, drifted away over the grasses.
O-ha then began the ritual for which she had been led to A-ho’s corpse by the fox-spirit. She chanted sacred and secret rhymes, at the same time she traced symbols on the ground around the han
ging body. To anyone but a fox these marks would be incomprehensible scratches in the dirt, but to Vulpinae they represented the four main winds: Ransheen, the Winter wind; Melloon, the Autumn; Frashoon, the Summer; and the most erratic and unpredictable, the wind-from-all-ways, the outsider, the crazy, wildwind Scresheen, who came during the month of birth and created turmoil amongst the trees. After this the ground was marked in a special way, which to humans would be nothing but an offensive smell. Then O-ha walked from the three corners of the trinity towards the body of her mate, but from Scresheen’s corner, she walked away from the carcass, and kept walking, drawing the unpredictable one away from the corpse, to allow the remaining trinity to attract the fox-spirits to her mate’s soul, and so carry it to the Perfect Here, the fox heaven where no human spirits reside, and the Unremembered Fear does not exist. The Perfect Here is the fox’s own parish, with all its familiar woods and fields, coverts and streams, grasslands and hummocks, but in the otherworld beyond death. A safe, mystical shadow of a beloved landscape, without the terrors found in the world of the living.
A-ho was at peace, but she was alone.
She took one last backward look at her erstwhile mate, and then made her way back to Trinity Wood, pausing only to savage some winter cabbages in a field on her way. Outside the wood, she took stock of her situation. She had no earth to go to and no mate to help her find another. She was homeless. All she had left, was herself, and her cubs.
‘It isn’t enough,’ she said fiercely, the pall of grief for her mate heavy on her spirit. Then the fear for her cubs came through. ‘I have to have somewhere to rear my cubs.’
She first went looking for the mystic fox, A-konkon, famous for his wisdom. It was her hope that he could offer some practical advice on finding a new earth in the middle of winter. Instead, when she found him, which was not easy for he had no permanent home in the wood, he gave her a lecture on the spiritual joy of death.
Hunter's Moon Page 4