‘Not at the moment,’ said Camio. He studied her carefully. She was meaty and middle-aged, and was losing her fur rapidly. That did not mean very much. He was not a cub himself and his own fur had begun to moult. By summer they would be both poor-looking specimens – along with the rest of the fox community.
‘Neither have I. Last one ran off with a …’ she swore. ‘He was pretty useless anyway. Tends to be a little bit like that in the face. I come from the country like you …’ He was about to protest and then decided it would only confuse things more. ‘… and there we used to find a mate and stick with them. Happens in the face too, of course, but since there’s more foxes here, more opportunity to change partners, so relationships are not as stable. I like the look of you …’
‘Thanks,’ said Camio, feeling uncomfortable for some reason. This vixen was a little too sharp-featured and cynical for him. Maybe he was old fashioned, but he preferred foxes that were less jaded. His own mate had escaped the net that had caught him, back home, but she had not been as knowing as this one. She had just been bright and alert.
‘You going to hang around for a while?’
‘For the day at least. I want to learn a little more about where I am and what the rules are.’
‘I know what you mean.’ She came up beside him and settled down so that they were touching. He was not offended, even that she was invading his body space more than was comfortable, and stayed where he was. They lay like that for about two hours, each warming the other.
‘You know,’ he said, dreamily, as they lay there, ‘I once heard of a land where the trees are tall and wide at the top – not bushy, but flat, so they throw out a large area of shade. And the sky is big there – really big – and always blue. It rains, of course, but all the water comes down at once, and fills the rivers until they rush in torrents over the land. Brown rivers, full of crocodiles and hippos …’
‘Full of what?’
‘Oh … creatures of that land. You don’t get them here, except in the zoo. That’s where I heard of this place, from the jackals. It’s The Land of the Lions, and the air is full of mountains and dust, and there’s hardly a human to be seen. It’s a lazy land, touched by dreams, but there’s excitement around every bush. The jackals said you could smell the excitement in the atmosphere … and no humans. Well, very, very few. Those that are there are only interested in the elephants and rhinos …’
‘The what?’
‘The … oh, never mind. You wouldn’t understand unless you’d been where I have. And they all go mad. So would I if I’d been taken from such a wonderful place – a place where you can run and run and never reach a town or city. I’d like that, I think, though food’s easier to get in areas where the humans collect like ants …’
‘The face,’ she said, breaking his reverie. ‘Talking of food, let’s go get something to eat.’
‘Right,’ said Camio, realising he was hungry again.
She walked languidly towards the hole in the fence, saying, ‘My name’s O-tasso by the way – what’s yours?’
‘Camio,’ he replied.
‘A-camio?’
‘No – just Camio.’
She turned and looked at him closely.
‘Funny name. Where did you say you were from?’
‘The country,’ he said, not wanting to get into one of those confusing conversations again. ‘Now, where do we eat? I had a bad experience last night – got trapped in a bin. I don’t want that to happen again.’
She bared her teeth.
‘No – stealing from bins is easy. We’ll have some fun, you and me. There’s a place not far from here where humans collect hot food and carry it home. We’ll go there …’
She slipped out into the street and Camio followed her, his stomach doing flip-flops at the thought of warm food. He preferred it to cold, but getting it was another thing. It cooled off very quickly in the bins. But then she had said they were not going to steal from bins …
He followed her through the near-deserted roads to a cobbled street with posts at each end. In the middle of this small street was a take-away restaurant, where humans did not stay to eat, but carried their meal home with them. Camio knew of such places and they often had delicious hamburgers covered in sauce.
This place smelled a lot different from others he had known, though. The scents were sharp and spicy and the meals were carried out in shiny metal-foil containers. O-tasso motioned for him to crouch down, in the shadows of a shop doorway, and wait there. She did the same, her bright, keen eyes on the take-away door, directly opposite.
‘Hot, hot, hot …’ she kept muttering. ‘Deliciously hot.’
‘Are we going round the back?’ he whispered after a while, but she glared at him, indicating that he should be quiet.
Behind the glass-fronted take-away Camio could see brown-skinned humans hard at work, the steam billowing round them like hot mist. The decor was dark red cloth, with pictures of waterfalls on the walls. Of course, Camio could not focus on these things for very long, especially the stationary ones, and he concentrated on the smells which were among the most exotic and pungent he had ever experienced. He could not imagine what was in those metal-foil boxes.
Still O-tasso waited, as couples and threes went into the take-away and came out laden with goods. Then, finally, a single human went in on its own, and O-tasso stiffened, and seemed to make ready for something.
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘this is it. I’ll make the snatch and you act as decoy. When I say now, you follow me out, but take a different …’ She stopped, because the man was leaving the restaurant.
‘NOW!’
She flew forward with amazing speed, and instinctively Camio followed, though he had no idea what was going on.
As if she was mooncrazy, O-tasso ran straight at the human, leapt into the air, and snatched the package out of his hand with her teeth. Then she hurried away, down the alley, leaving Camio running in her wake.
The human gave out a sharp bark and kicked at Camio, just catching his flank, but not hard enough to bowl him over. Then there was a short chase, as two other people came out of the restaurant and joined the man in trying to run down Camio. O-tasso was nowhere to be seen.
With his heart thumping in his throat, Camio wheeled around a corner and eventually managed to evade his pursuers. Then he retraced his earlier passage and got back to the boarded place with the hole behind it. A spicy aroma was in the air and Camio was sure every human for miles around would know exactly where to look for the stolen goods. Down below, in the pit, O-tasso was eating, wolfing down the contents of the box.
‘Come on,’ she said, as he approached her, ‘I’ve left you half.’
This was not quite true. When he looked into the box only about three mouthfuls remained, but these he was determined to have since he had risked his life to get them. The vixen was obviously as mad as a weasel with a worm in its brain. There was nothing wrong with thieving food, but to steal directly out of the hands of humans was insane. There was no other word for it.
He took a mouthful of the yellow-juiced, greasy-looking slops in the bottom of the shiny box – and the next second felt his brains spurting through his ears and nostrils! HOT!
HOT! HOT! HOT!
Not only did it burn his sensitive mouth, throat and gullet, but the stuff numbed his tastebuds with an eloquence of spicy fire which had his eyeballs starting out of his head and water pouring from the sockets.
‘HAAA!’ he cried.
O-tasso nodded. ‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’
Camio ran to the nearest puddle and drank a bellyful of water before returning, to find that she had finished off what was left in the bottom of the box.
‘Sorry,’ she said, as if she had just noticed what she had done. ‘We’ll go out to another one. This time you can make the snatch and I’ll be the decoy. We make a good team, don’t we?’
‘What is that stuff?’ he said, huskily.
‘Oh – food, you know. You hav
e to get it fresh from their hands or it’s not the same. The waste they throw out at the back goes cold very quickly. This is the real thing. Hot, eh? I love it. Can’t get enough. I won’t eat anything else now. Mind you,’ she said reflectively, ‘it plays the devil with your guts, but you get used to that after a while. It’s a matter of acquiring the taste and getting your gut to accept it – but once you’ve mastered it, there’s nothing to equal it. I love it. It’s the hot spices, you see.’
Camio was beginning to see why her mate had gone off with another vixen. This one lived very dangerously, and was hooked on food that would burn through solid stone. He would not call himself a coward but if he did something brave there had to be a reward at the end of it, not a punishment.
‘I think I’ve had enough,’ he said. ‘Ate very well last night. We’ll go out again tomorrow, shall we?’
She looked disappointed, but settled down on the rags again.
‘All right. Wake me up when the men come. Once they start those machines there’s no rest for the wicked. You’ll soon get used to life in the face, Camio, and I’ll teach you all I know. When we have our first litter, you’ll have to go out and get the food on your own, you know.’
‘Won’t – well, ordinary food do?’
She looked shocked.
‘Oh no! It has to be the real thing. Just think what strong cubs we’ll raise. The real thing – or nothing.’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘The real thing.’
Once she was asleep, he slipped away quietly, thinking that city life was not quite as agreeable to life in the suburbs. He would have to find a way of getting further out, on the edge, where food was cooler and sweeter to the taste.
He trotted through the evening streets, occasionally coming across another fox or a cat, but very few humans. Apparently the city was very different from the suburbs on this, the seventh day. In the suburbs humans were out on their lawns, washing their cars or weeding the garden. In the suburbs there were dogs all over the place and people dressed up in white clothes and hats, walking along the sidewalks towards churches (which were safe, empty hiding places on most other days) or visiting other houses. It seemed that on the seventh day in the city everyone went underground, which was all right with Camio.
The thing to do, he mused, was to find another one of those gerflans. He liked the idea of places where humans came only infrequently and in small numbers. They had had such areas back home, of course, like the railroads, but foxes there did not have special words for such places. There was just safe and unsafe. ‘Is it safe?’ was all a fox would ask of a raccoon or coyote. And it was the one question which all wild urban creatures were obliged to answer, regardless of feuds or traditional wars between species. You might battle to the death with the animal who posed the question, but after you had informed him or her that it was safe from human intervention.
‘Funny world,’ he said to himself.
Competition for food did not seem to be so fierce here, either. Back home he would have been running into another animal every twenty yards, but then there seemed to be more food available in the old country. True, he had seen a lot of feral cats in the city, ghosting by his vision, and pretty mean-looking characters they seemed too. Some of them looked as though they had been mangled into a ball and then knocked roughly back into shape again. There were ears and eyes missing, and lumps of fur, and the ends of one or two tails. Yes, there were some tough individuals around.
He trotted on, through the windswept streets, looking for a new home but feeling that perhaps the city was not the place for him. Feral cats warned him away from dank-smelling alleys with their cold, electric eyes. Other foxes glared at him when he entered parklands, hurrying him on with hard looks and the righteousness provided by home ground. Mangy-looking dogs threatened him with their diseases if not their teeth. The city was quite different from what he had expected.
Chapter Nine
Camio was not at all sure that the city was the place in which he wanted to spend the rest of his life. It seemed that survival in the busy streets was far more complicated than he first imagined.
For the three days following his encounter with O-tasso he went hungry. His wanderings took him into parts of the city where food was either at a premium or not in evidence at all. On the first day, he found himself in a disused dockland, which was fine for avoiding the human race but all other creatures had also vacated the area. Not even rats had remained on the stark, clean concrete. Here the wharfs still tugged on the leashes of tame, rusting ships, but the goods had long since ceased arriving and departing. On the second day, he re-entered the area of tall, glassed buildings, also very clean, where men and women dashed from one doorway to another, looking as if they had been carved from obsidian. They did not seem to eat the whole day long. On the third day, Camio was beginning to wish he had stayed with O-tasso, despite her penchant for pepper-hot food. He had walked into a poor district where the humans had hardly enough to feed themselves, let alone itinerant foxes. He found small scraps on the waste lots but nothing of significance. His stomach felt as if it had been turned inside-out and dragged along the ground beneath him.
That evening, walking past prone bundles of rags that had humans inside them, he went down an alley and found the knob end of a mouldy loaf. He was half-way through chewing it when he was aware of the corpse of a fox lying at the end of the alley. Camio went up to it and sniffed around it. A glassy eye stared into his own. A strange feeling went through the live fox as he stepped around the dead one. He found it difficult to come to terms with the stiff meat which was not food. Had it been any other dead animal, he could have eaten it. But it was a fox, and though he was almost starving, he could not bring himself to touch the corpse. There was a severity in the dead eye; a sternness around the dead mouth; a harshness in the dead face. Camio found he was looking at himself. He was just a puff of wind away from that poor creature on the alley floor. His lungs were full of air, the other fox’s, empty – that was all – just a puff away. It worried him, coming face to face with his own mortality. Camio left the alley.
A few moments later, he was vomiting the crust. He knew the smell of the rat poison, once it had mixed with his stomach enzymes and he had brought it up again.
Later that night he stumbled across a railroad depot and met a friendly fox called A-lobo, who on seeing he was starving, offered him some food from one of his caches. Camio was as grateful as any hungry animal could be on finding such generosity in a strange land. He thanked the dog fox profusely, as he gobbled down the food.
A-lobo was a nervous, neurotic fox who had abandoned the streets for the relative safety of the gerflan which ran in long strips over the whole country. Of course, there were still vehicles to avoid, but you could hear them coming along the rails from a long way off: the metal vibrated and hummed before the thunderous arrival of a mighty machine. You learned, he told Camio, the busy times, when the tracks were in almost constant use, and the quiet times. There were mice and rats to be had, when there were no packets of sandwiches or half-eaten pies by the tracks, and though the scenery was a little boring, the smell of oil and grease made up for that.
‘You like this stink?’ said Camio. They were lying on the bank beneath black cables that looped from post to post for as far as you could see.
‘I adore it – ab-ab-absolutely adore it,’ stuttered A-lobo. He filled his lungs, through his nose, to prove it. ‘N-n-not stink – a wonderful s-smell. And when they b-burn it in their fires – oh, sweet Perfect Here …’
A-lobo was not pretty to look at. He had once been struck by a train and the left side of his face was badly scarred and he had lost an eye and an ear in the accident. He was very friendly though and enjoyed, as O-tasso had done, teaching Camio all about the railroads (which he called ‘railways’) and life near the depot.
‘Switter is here – so spring isn’t far away. G-g-good to get rid of the cold w-weather.’
‘Switter?’
‘You kn
ow. S-small breezes.’
‘Oh.’
Camio was beginning to wonder whether there were any normal foxes in this city he had to make his home. There was O-tasso, hooked on food that sent steam spurting out of your ears, and now A-lobo, who could not breathe clean air without longing for the stink of burning oil to satisfy some acquired craving.
A train thundered by, interrupting their conversation. Sunlight flashed on its many windows, which had a dazzling, mesmerising effect on the foxes. It was true that at such times, an enemy could walk right up to them and grab them by the scruffs of their necks without them being aware of anyone. The noise was overpowering, the smell of diesel oil blotted out any other scents, and their eyes were fixed on those blinding panes of glass.
When it had gone, A-lobo asked Camio if he had ever played ‘the game’.
‘Game? I haven’t played games since I was a cub. Foxes haven’t got time for games, have they?’
‘T-this game is a li-li-little different. You want to try it? It adds a b-bit of spice to life. Otherwise, it’s the same boring old th-thing – eating and sleeping. There’s got to be more to life than eating and sleeping, hasn’t there?’
‘Well, I suppose so – I don’t really know. When I was in the zoo I used to think that there should be. Now there’s a place where you do nothing else but eat and sleep. Out here, the excitement is in finding the food and a place to rest your head without fear of disturbance. Just staying alive is pretty exciting, isn’t it?’
‘N-no,’ said A-lobo bluntly. ‘It isn’t.’ He twitched his head, nervously, as a group of humans passed by on the path running adjacent to the railway lines. Camio had been by railways before and he knew that humans never climbed the fence to get to the rails. Sometimes they walked along it, wearing bright jackets and doing things with tools to the tracks, but such visits were reasonably rare and you could always see them coming in time to hide in the long grass.
Hunter's Moon Page 9