The streets were still being patrolled by a killer. Hunting for food was an essential task and Mitz saw the need for them to do that. Seeing that the dead were sent peacefully onwards, towards their destination was, to her mind, a luxury which could be foregone in times of emergency.
She did not want to lose one of her parents now. They were all she had left, especially since that insubstantial-looking creature out there had brought a message that needed no words.
The fox-spirit stayed for some time, and all the while its shape was gradually diminishing, pieces drifting from it like smoke from a dampened fire on a still day. After a while, and before Camio or O-ha woke, there was nothing but threads of mist hanging in the air. Then these too were gone.
Mitz fell asleep. She dreamed fox dreams of her cubhood which now seemed so far in the past. She dreamed of her siblings, rivals then, but now …
Mitz was awakened by some instinct which told her that she had heard a sound not so far away, amongst the scrap. She listened hard. Since the winds in the tunnels of junk could not be trusted to bring her a scent, she waited, her heart pounding softly. In the dimness she could see her mother’s eye. They were open and full of concern. Her father had risen from his resting place and was lifting his head, cocking it to one side, testing the atmosphere with his nose for more definite information.
‘Is it he?’ whispered Mitz. ‘Is it?’
There was no answering sound from either of her parents, only a warning from O-ha’s eyes, which narrowed very slightly. Mitz knew she was to remain silent. She waited, licking her lips, wondering if there was great danger and from which direction it would come. She hated surprise attacks. She hated it when dogs came out of nowhere with snapping, vicious jaws and blazing eyes, like Sabre that day she and A-cam were on the wall of the manor house. Was that kind of thing going to happen now?
Mitz half rose, nervously looking for a bolt hole, only to be glared at by O-ha.
She resumed her former position.
Then she smelled the scent. It came drifting down the main tunnel and into the earth. She could hear scrabbling sounds out in the scrap where an animal was slipping as quietly as possible along the metalways. She smelled the scent and wondered whether her parents had caught it too.
Mitz looked towards her mother and the sign in O-ha’s eyes said that she too was aware of the scent.
Camio remained by the exit, ready.
PART SIX
The Time of the Dispersal
Chapter Twenty Nine
Inside the boot of the car it was dark. Although he was lying on something soft, A-cam felt himself being bumped and tossed, and his tail-stub was extremely painful. There was still blood leaking from it. He reflected miserably on his present state. He was a captive, he was probably bleeding to death, and he was alone. It was extremely distressing for a young fox for whom a little earlier the world had seemed a bright, promising place, but he was determined that he should not go down easily. Camio had always taught him to fight until the last ebb of strength, and O-ha had more grit than a dozen other animals. His parents would not approve of him whining about his condition while doing nothing to improve it.
He set to work to try to gnaw his way out of the boot, starting with the fabric liner.
He was just starting to make good progress, when the feeling of motion ceased abruptly and then, after some bangs which rocked the car, the prison door was flung open. The man with the thick gloves on reached inside and grabbed him, and again he tried to bite his attacker.
He was then carried through a door and into a room full of humans holding other animals, mostly dogs and cats. Pandemonium ensued. Humans started barking at the tops of their voices; dogs were shouting and straining at leashes; cats were crying and spitting, their fur on end. One small terrier was the most vocal, yelling, ‘Let me get at him! It’s a fox. Let me just …’ the rest of the words were choked-off by an alarmed owner who jerked at his lead. A white rabbit, its eyes bugging, had shrunk to the back of its box and was trying to bury itself in the plywood panelling. An elderly budgerigar fell off its perch and lay still on the sandpaper, either feigning a heart attack, or genuinely scared to death. A boxer dog, whose owner had immediately turned its face to a corner and was holding it there, was crying, ‘What is it? I can’t see. Who is it?’ A-cam was hurried out again and round the rear of the building. Then another door was opened and he was in a room with another human: a woman wearing a white coat. Without any regard for his dignity, he was stretched out on a table and his rear end inspected and prodded.
‘Let me bleed to death in peace,’ he yelled.
They growled back at him in strangely sympathetic voices.
The smells in the room were appalling. A-cam had never in his life experienced such sharp unpleasant odours and he began to wonder whether he was indeed already dead, and in the Unplace. He was trembling from nose to tail – or to where his tail used to be – and to his consternation they began to run hands through his fur, the growls softer and even less alarming. Surely they were trying to lull him into a state of complacency before blowing his brains out? He could think of no other explanation for their bizarre behaviour.
White fluff was applied to his wound, followed swiftly by a stinging sensation. The soothing tones from his captors continued the whole while. Finally, some sweet-smelling paste was applied to the injury and then he was held tightly while the two humans barked at each other.
A little while later he found himself in the back of the car again and the sense of motion returned. This time the journey was a much longer one. The pain in his rear had dulled somewhat and he was able to fall asleep. When he woke the vehicle was still moving and he felt sick. He urinated quietly into the bedding and then concentrated on his sickness. Once he had vomited, he felt much better. He was able to chew a bit more of the boot lining after that.
The car stopped, the boot was flung open again.
The daylight hurt his eyes but he sat up and sniffed. Country smells hit his nostrils, overpowering the petrol and oil. The human staggered back holding his nose. Then he returned and gingerly lifted A-cam out and placed him on some grass. The blanket and remains of the boot lining was then removed and flung into a ditch. As A-cam staggered away, the car door slammed again and the vehicle roared away.
He was alone again.
Still very unsteady on his feet, the little fox made his way across some havnot to a spinney on the far side of a field of shire horses. They he lay down in the fallen leaves to recover his strength, allowing other leaves to float down upon him. In the meantime, he chewed grass.
Night came and the leaves continued to cover his body. He could smell chestnuts all around him and only had to nose a little to find some. He crunched them and swallowed. They tasted good. He staggered to his feet and searched the ground, finding many more. Soon, he had taken the edge off his hunger.
A-cam inspected his tail-stub as well as he was able. He licked at the ointment the woman in white had smeared on it. It tasted good. And the pain was bearable. He was going to live. As he tried to walk around, he found that his balance had been impaired. His tail obviously had a use which he had not considered until its loss. The best he could manage was a lopsided stagger for a while. He hoped it would not take long to adapt.
The next thing was to find some water. He sniffed the air and then followed his nose around the copse, licking puddles from root hollows and bowls in malformed trunks. The spinney was one of those overgrown deciduous woodland remnants which foxes often talked about but few had seen. It was a delightfully dark and dank-smelling place, with rotten logs, balls of ants and thousands of woodlice. There were tree fungi low enough to gobble while still standing on the ground, and edible toadstools around the base of the trees. Pigeons made a racket in the tree-tops when he passed beneath a roosting bough, but apart from that it was a quiet place – not silent like the new conifer forests – quiet, soft, mossy, with a spongy humus for a floor and lots of small holes which must have
held interesting meals.
He had absolutely no idea where he was.
The humans, though they had been kind to him (he could see that now), had dumped him far from home. No doubt their intentions had been good. They had found a wild creature and naturally thought it had come from the wilds. Therefore, they had returned it to the wilderness, not realising that he was a town fox, born and bred.
So, where did he go from here?
The thing to do was rest and concentrate on becoming used to having no tail.
He spent the whole of the next day in the wood. The owners of the horses came, took them away for the day (allowing A-cam to drink at their field trough in comfort) and then brought them back in the evening. A party of human walkers went through the copse. They caught a glimpse of him lying amongst the leaves and stopped to twitter to each other, pointing at him as if he was not aware of their presence. Then they tiptoed away.
Evening came and he was back on his feet. He took a quick drink at the trough, while the horses munched in the far corner of their field, and then set off. At the corner of the wood a partridge whirred out of hiding, its wings almost swivelling in their sockets. A-cam was too slow to catch this bird, but at the bottom of the hill on which the trees stood there was a dairy farm. He crept under a fence and found an area where chickens roamed. The hens scattered on his approach and he was just about to chase them, wondering which one looked the fattest, when he discovered some eggs in the grass. Still feeling weak, he settled for the eggs, which was just as well because a human came out not long after and A-cam only just managed to slip back under the fence before a dog was released.
He struck out, across country, often faltering because of lack of balance and dizziness. Eventually he reached a river. There he drank and ate some watercress. He realised that he had become a rangfar through circumstances, and he wondered if it happened to many foxes that way. Perhaps few of them started out on the road from choice, but once they had, they got the taste for travel and could not give it up? He could see why it was attractive. Each hour brought a different perspective to the land. There were ploughed, empty fields; fields of stubble; coverts and woods; rolling pastureland and hilly steeps. It was all very exciting and addictive. He felt as if he were seeing something of life: the world had opened up before him. So far too, apart from the farmer, he had not run into any humans. He felt it possible that one could walk and walk and not run out of hav or havnot, both more delightful than the face, though his life was easier in the last area.
Once, he caught the smell of another dog fox and paused to sniff the breeze, wondering where the creature was hiding. A voice from a bramble bush said, ‘Keep walking,’ in a casual but firm tone, and it brought home to him that he was probably crossing parishes already marked and with established hunting rights for local foxes. They did not mind him passing through, so long as he was out of the area quickly. When he concentrated, of course, he could smell their marks on posts around the area and apart from snapping up the odd fieldmouse or shrew, he was not going to be allowed to hunt.
That morning he reached a rise from beyond which came a constant rumble, like deep, rolling thunder, muffled by an earth bank. He went to the top of this escarpment and looked down in wonder on a roadway which was thick with fast vehicles; two roadways in fact, running parallel, each with three lanes of traffic. He wanted none of that. He could see the crows taking advantage of gubbins, but it looked an extremely dangerous business, dashing out and grabbing the remains of some creature that had refused to acknowledge that its ancient highway had been severed by an impassable river of traffic. Some animals were just too stubborn to change their habits. If their old paths went that way, then that way they were going, instant death or not.
Those birds that were not feeding on gubbins were finding worms on the verges, in the short grass, where incidentally it was easy for the kestrels to see mammals intent on travelling across country. Once or twice A-cam saw a kestrel swoop and rise with a meal in its talons.
He turned from this madness on wheels and retraced his steps for some way before striking out southwards.
He spent that day by a large lake which looked too uniform to be natural. Though there were no obvious signs of man-made banks, there were leafless trees sticking up from the water like skeletal hands grasping at clouds. It was an eerie lake: too quiet, too lifeless. The still waters went beyond calmness and tranquillity, into a state of deadness which made A-cam think of the Unplace. Such a stagnant atmosphere, he had been told, was to be expected in the Unplace, where the trees and grass were like stone and the waters were dark with no tides, currents or eddies. Only the blind mists drifting by islands of black mud provided any movement.
He drank the water but its taste was dust and increased rather than slaked his thirst.
When night came back again, he continued his journey.
He found a road and travelled along the verge, ignoring the cars that flashed past him occasionally, their lights stabbing away the darkness for a few moments. When he eventually reached a village he passed through it without encountering any other foxes, or indeed dogs. Some instinct told him he was moving in the right direction. When he felt he was close to home he would seek out a fox and ask it for directions, though he had no idea what to ask for. He had some idea that if he mentioned names – Camio, 0-ha, others – the listener would say, ‘Oh, yes, just over the next rise you’ll find the marshes. Once you get across those, you’ll know where you are.’
As the sun cast its rays across the countryside, he came to a wayside cottage with a small shed in its garden. The roof of the shed looked warm and inviting and he jumped up on to the wall, and thence to the top of the shed. There he fell asleep in the soft warmth of the autumn sun, with Melloon gently ruffling his fur.
He was awoken abruptly by the rain which fell in torrents. It was around noon and he shook himself and climbed down from the shed, back to the edge of the roadway. There was a deep ditch running alongside the road and he slipped down into this gulley and walked along it, snapping up beetles and whatever came into his path. With the wet came the cold, and he shivered constantly as he walked, a fever coming over him which made him giddy. At one point he felt he had to stop and rest and he lay under the hawthorn bush that followed the ditch and tried to sleep.
Perhaps the rain was responsible for blanketing the scent and sound of the man and the first A-cam knew of the human’s presence was when hands gripped him and he was lifted from the ground. He turned and bit the fingers, causing the man to bark loudly and drop him. A-cam walked away, feeling very aggrieved, looking back once to see the man sucking his fingers and with a puzzled expression on his face. Then the vision blurred, as the human remained standing still, melting into the scenery.
It occurred to A-cam a little later that the human was probably someone out for a walk, and seeing a fox lying on the ground in the pouring rain, had thought him dead.
The downpour became torrential and hampered A-cam’s progress as it splashed up from the ground, constantly spraying his face, getting in his eyes and nostrils. He found himself wading through deep puddles and getting his paws clogged with sodden clay. The only recognisable smells were those of musty, churned earth and wet grass. Visibility was down to a nose.
A-cam decided to leave the highway for woodlands, where the rain fell in large gobbets and was immediately sucked into the humus. He found such a wood in the middle of some havnot and spent the rest of the day there.
That night, when he woke, he found the rain had stopped. The soft sweet scents of autumn were back in play. There was the smell of rotting crab-apples nearby, and he made for these, but overriding this odour was the scent of foxes. Not just one or two foxes, but hundreds, perhaps thousands of them. This was both alarming and puzzling. He could not think why so many of his kind had gathered together in one place. Was it a meeting of some sort? If so, it was unprecedented. Foxes prided themselves on the fact that they were not pack or herd creatures. They might live in
small groups, of four or five, but these groups never gathered in one spot. It was too dangerous. Not only would they be vulnerable because of their numbers, the humans would become alarmed too. They would ask themselves what it meant, all these foxes who never gathered in large numbers, collecting in one place? They would suggest the worst possible reasons to each other, for such an unnatural phenomena, and deal with it the way they did other things which were not understood. They would gather themselves together, there would be a lot of barking and cross-country vehicles roaring over the fields, and then the guns would begin to cut down the foxes.
So, A-cam ate his fill of crab-apples and then walked to the edge of the wood. He looked down the slope. At the bottom was a large piece of land surrounded by a high, chain-link fence. Beyond this were some long wooden huts. They looked ominously dark – the kind of darkness that prickles the senses – and A-cam felt a chill of apprehension go through him. The place below stank of evil.
This was where the scent of the foxes was coming from.
So, what was this place? A zoo, like the one his father had told him about? But zoos were not full of foxes. The whole idea of a zoo was to have lots of different animals and birds which the humans could come and stare at. They would get bored looking at a thousand foxes. Perhaps it was a kind of prison, where they took foxes prior to killing them? That too seemed unlikely though. Men were more fond of shooting or running down foxes with dogs in their own environment. There seemed to be more excitement from the chase and kill that way. Perhaps it was a home for foxes, provided by kindly humans, who were unaware that wild creatures did not like to live in huts like themselves? That seemed the least likely idea.
A-cam gave up on his speculations, and was about to turn away and head out in the opposite direction, when he saw a chain of lights moving across the distant landscape. After a while he knew what it was and he became excited. It was a train, racing along a track. He knew that a railway track passed quite close to his own home, and though he knew from his father that there was more than one of these steel roadways running across the land, he considered it a strong possibility that this was his way home. After all, the vehicle could not have taken him that far from his own face. The human that had helped him would have wanted to get rid of him as soon as possible, and no doubt had done so in the first piece of real countryside.
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