This was not Melloon though, and the noise was louder than cars or even cross-country vehicles made. She decided to investigate.
She took one of the byways across the hav to a network of drystone walls which enclosed the havnot in that area. She travelled along the top of these walls and reached the remains of an old windmill of which only the stone tower remained. She climbed fallen stones as agilely as a cat, finding paw-holds in the crumbling crevices of the stonework, where the mortar had turned to dust. At the top, she looked out, towards the sound.
Her poor eyesight defeated her though, because she was looking directly into the morning sun, and could only see a haze of light sparkling on some objects in the distance. Just as she was about to go down, a jay landed on the far side of the tower, well away from her. It eyed her suspiciously.
She said to the jay, ‘You know what’s going on over there?’
‘Bitte?’ said the jay. ‘Ich verstehe nicht.’
‘The noise – that over there – the machines …’
The jay refused to glance behind it, but said, ‘Maschine – oh, ja – maschine.’
‘What? What are they for? What?’
‘Was? Oh, fur ausgraben.’
Then the bird flew off, still keeping a wary eye on this fox which asked so many questions. She saw the flash of blue on its wing as it dipped down and disappeared near to the place where the shiny vehicles were rumbling along. The Corvidae – the jays, magpies, rooks, crows, jackdaws, ravens – appeared to be a sinister lot, full of intrigue, but they knew what was going on and they were harmless enough. The birds to watch were the gulls – now there was a vicious lot of villains and thieves! The bird world had a saying: I’d rather trust a housecat than a seagull. Seagulls would steal the food out of your mouth, or the young out of your nest.
Ausgraben? What did that mean? Well, there was only one way in which she might find out. She climbed back down from the tower and went straight back to the sett, to find Gar. She tracked him down in his chamber and he was not pleased to see her, but this time she was not going to be put off by his gruff manner until he deigned to see her. She said, ‘Do you know the language of the Corvidae?’
‘What – eh? – oh, little. Crows, eh? What crows?’
‘Look, this is important, Gar, or I wouldn’t disturb you. There are some machines coming down the road – big ones by the sound of them – and a jay told me they are for owsgrabben, or something like that. What does it mean?’
‘Owsgrabben, owsgrabben,’ he said, scratching his head in irritation. Then, ‘Oh, you meaning ausgraben – what we badger do, and fox. It means to dig – to dig up land. Now, you go away like nice fox and let me be miserable, eh? Sometimes Gar enjoy being unhappy, like today.’ He did not mean he liked being unhappy, exactly, but that he did not want company. He wanted to be alone. It probably came of living with others, a clan, and because privacy was at a premium.
‘To dig? To dig up the ground? But they didn’t sound like farm machines.’
‘No? Then maybe, to make road, eh? Dig road, or make house?’
‘Houses?’ A cold shiver went through her. ‘You mean, they’re going to put some face around here? There were a lot of machines – they wouldn’t have all those for one house. I don’t like this, Gar. I don’t like it at all.’
‘No? But what you going to do, eh?’ He sounded irritable. ‘You can do nothing – nothing is what you can do. The humans build house, they build house. Who can stop them? Maybe they only build one? Maybe only new road, no house? Anyway, they not come here, in the wood. Too much work, chop, chop down tree. They maybe put up new farm – old one falling down anyway. You see – no worries. Now, Gar will be unhappy …’
But, as subsequent events proved, it was to be more than just a farm. Over the next few weeks the machines were all over the landscape, their noises loud enough to wake beetles buried deep in the bark of trees, their lights bright enough at night to bring a second day to the world. They chugged and hummed, they clattered and scraped. Flints saw the light of day for the first time and clumps of chalk appeared like the backs of giant white fish swimming through the clay. Soon a pattern of roadways began to form around the Trinity Wood, marked off by posts and string, with coloured tags hanging from the loops.
Flattened against the ground, in the cool shades at the edge of her covert, O-ha felt the tremors drumming through the clay and wondered why the earth did not scream out in agony as its green skin was flayed open to reveal the raw, brown flesh beneath. She watched great steel-toothed jaws biting into the ground, coming up with huge gobbets of clay which were then spat on to an ugly, gathering mound. Deep, musty wounds were everywhere: open sores covered the backs of the slopes. The machines were like brittle, giant predators, tearing apart a live creature. Heavy, shovel-nosed, jerky brutes crushed the bushes and shrubs to pulp, charged the spinneys and herded the trees before them, until they cracked and splintered like old bones, ending in a heap of skeletal remains and, finally, burned. At night, she lay and watched the fires crackling and flaring, lighting up the wasteland which was once tall with grasses, wild flowers and shrubs; populated by myriads of electric insects; policed by thousands of busy voles, shrews, mice; patrolled by hundreds of birds of many varieties.
The swiftness with which this destruction of the living landscape was carried out astounded the vixen, who clung to her own patch of grass, bracken and trees, afraid that it might be destroyed in a day: that she might wake one evening to find her home-place bared to the dark, churned clay and not a blade of grass remaining.
And everywhere, the smell of men and machines: the sounds of destruction.
There were men all over the place, gesturing, digging, grunting. It was almost impossible to avoid being seen, especially since the lights never went out, but to O-ha’s surprise, these new men seemed quite delighted by the sight of her. Whenever she got caught out, slinking past their little encampments, without rising from their seats or putting down their steaming drinks, they would point to her and exclaim, and their barking had none of the animosity or bloodlust in it that she was used to detecting.
Still, it was a troubled time, for her and for the badgers. Each day they expected an invasion of the woodland, which never came. O-lan and A-lon had to move out of their earth in the ditch beyond Trinity Wood, but they made themselves another by digging out O-ha’s old earth, and re-establishing it: something she had been intending to do herself, now that the ground was soft and easily moved. The other animals that lived on what used to be the hav either prepared to evacuate the area and set out on expeditions, looking for pastures new (the rabbits did this, and a few others), or they moved into Trinity Wood. There was a concentration of animals in the ten acres of woodland which had everyone confused for some time, and tripping over each others’ tails. Some fights occurred, over territorial rights, which resulted either in a shrinking of an animal’s hunting zone or the expulsion of the newcomer. Occasionally, the immigrant would get the better of a longstanding resident, but that was seldom, since the established members of the wood felt they had right on their side and fought to keep their ground with a ferocity which could not often be matched by newcomers hoping to settle. It was easier for the latter to move on. Though there were some fuller larders than was usual, in the carnivore and omnivore camps, there were no deaths as a result of territorial disputes.
By midsummer, and Frashoon, most of the battles had been fought and settled, and there was only the activity around the wood to worry about.
‘Things will change,’ remarked Gar. ‘Ya, things will change round here.’
‘Will you and the other badgers move on?’ asked O-ha.
‘We wait – we wait to see what happens. I think we stay for a while. What about you?’
‘I have nowhere else to go. It must be nice at times like these to have others to talk things over with. I must make the best of it.’
She surprised herself by getting used to the new face of the landscape fairly quickly
. Although many points of reference had changed, and there were new landmarks to learn, it did not take very long before these were in her head. One thing was certain, there were plenty of earthworms to be had.
The new landscape played havoc with the ancestral highways and byways, of course. Just because the humans were building themselves new roads did not mean the animals were prepared to alter their ancestral highways. On one of her walks, O-ha found that a new road had been built, cutting one of the animal highways in half. She did not hesitate to cross it, even though vehicles were now moving along it. Her highway had been there for thousands of seasons. Why should she change direction simply because humans had decided to lay tarmac across the country?
Another time, she came across a wall that had sprung up, overnight. At its base, glaring up at it, was a badger. Again, the wall had been built right across an animal pathway. The badger could have gone round it, since the wall only extended a few feet beyond the highway, but it stubbornly refused to do so. Instead, it sat there swearing oaths in its gravelly voice, calling down all kinds of terrible events on the heads of those humans who had had the audacity to block its path.
When she discussed it with Gar, one evening, the elderly badger nodded thoughtfully, and said, ‘If we go round things every time guman build it, we would change highways every day. Best to ignore. Some seasons go by, then all things change again. One day we get our highways back.’
One night, when most of the workmen had gone home, leaving only one or two nightwatchmen, O-ha went down the slope to inspect the diggings. There were deep trenches everywhere, the red clay sliced away to reveal its smooth subsurface walls. She tested the bricks, sand and bags of cement with her nose. She walked away from them, unimpressed. However, she did at one point find a pile of wood shavings, where the carpenters had been at work, inside an unfinished house. O-ha pushed her nose into these, and inhaled deeply. The heady scent of sawdust made her brain revolve in a delicious way, but some toadstools had once done it better. She rolled in the shavings, getting them caught in her coat. They fell away from her like snowflakes. Later, she patrolled high up on the scaffolding, looking down on the world. It was easy. Finally, she marked several of the empty rooms in the house, tore open a black bag with her teeth and scattered the contents around the floor, and rolled a bottle with her nose. Then she went home, feeling she knew all about what was going on, down below. The face was not the most fearsome nor the most wonderful place in the world.
Despite the invasion of the countryside, and the displacement of millions of insects, hundreds of birds and thousands of mammals, life in Trinity Wood tried to move into summer much the same as always. The froghoppers left their ‘cuckoo spit’ on the hedges that remained intact; the woodbine and the honeysuckle drugged the moths with their heady perfumes; in amongst the many kinds of different grasses of the havnot – timothy grass, Italian rye, quaking grass, cocksfoot, fescue – grew the common herbs, yarrow, ribwort, plantain, dandelion and chicory, the seeds blown into the wild from fields cultivated by man. Ferocious and aggressive mother shrews led their strings of babies through tunnels in the grass, each one holding on to the tail of the next with the smallest, at the end, being dragged and bumped along as the mother hurried from one place to the next. Hawker dragonflies patrolled the ponds and buzzards circled the fields and woods, both levels of flying predator having awesome weapons at their disposal. Otters cruised the rivers and inlets of the wetlands, and coypu were busy digging up the beets and bulbs planted by the humans for whom the rats with South American ancestry had no regard whatsoever. Kingfishers flashed like blue darts along the banks of streams and crested newts put colour amongst the roots of water-lilies.
Life and death went on in the old ways, where the ground remained untouched by the digging machines, but gradually the process of stripping the land forced more and more creatures to abandon the area for other places, which they often failed to reach alive. Soon the population of Trinity Wood and its surrounds were a fraction of what they had been the previous summer. Many species would never be seen again in that part of the world.
Three nights after visiting the building site, O-ha had a dream. It was a dream in which fear rattled in her throat, and her legs were weak with terror.
She dreamed she was in a bright place and struggling to walk. Suddenly, black bars …
Chapter Eleven
A hot summer sun lay heavy on the fields, like a huge invisible weight pressing evenly on the land. Flies buzzed over ditches whose marrow was dry and brittle. Animals that were out on business constantly blew hot air through their nostrils, to rid themselves of the feeling that there were cobwebs up there. The earth was parched and crisp as old reeds.
Over the dusty stretch of hav between the site under construction and the manor house came a red fox, a fox that appeared just a little different from the others which lived in the area: a dark fox with a jaunty step and high head. He walked across the land below Trinity Wood as if he knew the whole earth intimately and no place was strange to him, no place was not home. Those animals that had any interest at all in the coming of this new fox could have been forgiven for thinking that he was a rangfar, an itinerant fox. However, if they had bothered to study him closely they would have seen that he stared about him keenly, gathering impressions, as if looking for something. He was in fact seeking a place to stay, to remain, to become part of. Camio was not a rangfar or, in his own idiom, longtrekker, by choice, but by circumstance. In his heart he was a fox who wanted to make his mark on a square mile of land and say, ‘This is my parish. Here I shall live, and die.’
Camio passed by the large manor house, which was outside an area being devastated by men in shirtsleeves and hard hats. There was a set of wrought iron gates at the beginning of the driveway to this country mansion, behind which paced a dog as large as a tiger. Camio stopped and regarded this beast, the like of which he had not seen even in the zoo. He was terribly impressed. It was a giant among dogs, and on seeing Camio its jaws slavered and a sound came rumbling up from the depths of a hard-looking, muscle-ridged belly. The American Red Fox decided that he had seen enough and slipped away into the hedgerow before the monster threw itself at the gates, bursting them. Camio decided that such a dog could swallow him whole.
A hound from the dark side of the moon, he thought. There was no sense in antagonising such an enormous beast. Camio was no coward, but a fox is only a fraction bigger than a house cat in body size and only two pounds heavier. In comparison, an Alsatian dog was twice the height, while a St Bernard weighed fourteen times more. The hound behind the gates was an Alsatian and a St Bernard rolled into one. For Camio to face such a monster it would have been like a cat meeting with a lion. A fox, after all, is no taller than a daffodil. He slipped through the workmen, as they toiled on the grounds surrounding the wood, and entered the coolness of a covert on the north side. No sooner was he within the woodland’s shades than he encountered another dog fox, an elderly one, who barred his way. Camio sighed inwardly. He knew from experience that he was trespassing, because he could smell the dog fox’s marks from where he stood, and he was going to have to turn round or fight. Normally he would have respected another fox’s area, but he only wanted to pass through unmolested – the code of right of passage – and he had come a long, hot way. He was tired and irritable and, consequently, feeling stubborn.
They regarded each other for some time before Camio broke the silence.
‘Is there a problem?’ he asked.
‘There might be,’ said the other. ‘It depends on where you think you’re going.’
Camio said, ‘You have a name, I presume – mine is Camio.’
‘They call me A-magyr. I’m the toughest fox in the parish, and one of the oldest – though don’t get the idea that my strength is ebbing – I’m as strong and hard as any you’re likely to meet.’
Though grizzled, he did indeed look like a gritty, mean character and Camio decided that he might prove a nasty opponent in
a fight. But another fox was a different proposition to the hound he had slipped away from, and he did not like to be told where to go or what to do by one of his own kind. He certainly was not going to lie on his back with his paws in the air in some act of submission, just because this local dog fox wanted to add another victory to his list.
‘So,’ said Camio, ‘you want to stand here all day, or are you going to let me pass? I’m reasonably patient, but I’ve come a long way and I need a place to rest.’
‘What’s wrong with where you’re standing?’ asked A-magyr.
‘What’s wrong with it is I didn’t choose it. You did, and while I’m a peaceful type of fox, I like to pick my own bed.’
A-magyr narrowed his eyes.
‘No one has spoken to me like that in a long time. I’ve torn the tails off bulldogs and walked away unmolested. I could chew you and spit you out.’
Camio shrugged, and then crouched, ready to spring.
‘Right, let’s see you do it, A-mouthy – I’m ready if you are. I came into this wood seeking nothing but friendship – something I got from the city foxes without asking – but if I have to fight to get it here, I will.’
A-magyr made a rush at him, but he leaped neatly aside, turning in the air so that he faced his opponent again.
‘That’s a clever trick,’ snapped A-magyr, ‘but it won’t work twice.’ He made another dash. This time Camio jumped to one side, still keeping his head towards his combatant, and managing to nip A-magyr on the haunch as he passed. A look of disbelief and pain crossed A-magyr’s face.
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