A Black Fox Running

by Brian Carter

  The lurcher enjoyed browsing through the trapping gear, where there were enough smells to fuel his madness. The blood-smell always made his own blood sing behind his eyes and he liked nothing better than to be among the conies, wrenching the life out of them. ‘Kill-killy-kill,’ he crooned to himself as the warm blood flowed. ‘O Killy-killy-killy and Jacko do cracko the old coneyo!’ How the moments blurred in the humming ecstasy of deeds which liberated him from the agony of thinking. Sometimes ideas burnt like acid into his brain, but chopping a rabbit or, better still, a lamb brought glorious release. Only as a pup burrowing into his mother’s warmth had he known such peace. Jacko’s kingdom was full of victims, who waited for his coming and welcomed his embrace.

  ‘I come from sky,’ Jacko thought. ‘My head full of fire.’

  He had looked into a pool once and had seen his eyes twinkling among the stars.

  ‘What you thinkin’ about, dog?’ Scoble said. He went to the nine-gallon barrel by the window and drew off a pint of scrumpy, the real farmhouse rough cider of Devon. The lurcher’s tail thumped the floor.

  ‘You’m a prapper ornament – damn me if you idn,’ Scoble said. ‘But you knows yer trade, boy. You’m like a four-legged gin.’

  He sat down again and ate his beef dripping, while twigs crackled and blazed on the fire. Jacko stared up at him, strange images churning in his skull. The primrose-coloured scrumpy vanished into the trapper’s face. He would drink nine or ten pints before crawling off to bed, but often he drank more. It had been so since 1918 – cider and whisky, occasionally at the pub but usually alone. He was fifty-eight but looked older. His face carried the blotches of burst blood vessels and across his rutted baldness he had laid a few strands of grey hair. On his right cheek was a mole as black as an ash bud. There was about his shabby bulk a suggestion of real strength but alcohol had sapped his stamina.

  During the First World War Scoble had fought on the Somme where he had been wounded in the legs. The memory of lying in long, wet grass beside a dead mule for a day and a night would return on a wave of nausea. Poor old Charlie the mule. It wasn’t his war. The shell seemed to explode under the animal and spill out its tripes. Scoble emptied his tankard and fetched a refill, and the apple log spat and flared white, like a Very light. That was when the foxes came, in the darkness, under the arcing flares, three of them, snapping and growling and worrying the mule’s carcass, there in that ditch in France. ‘Christ!’ Rifleman Leonard Scoble of the Devonshire Regiment cried. ‘Christ, it’ll be me next! The bastards are goin’ to eat me.’ And he yelled obscenities at the foxes but they just kept on gnawing at the mule. All night they were at it. Gradually he had slid into unconsciousness and when he came to he was in a field hospital. For the rest of the war he dreaded the lonely death and the foxes who always seemed to be lurking on the edge of darkness.

  ‘They idn animals, Jacko,’ he said, fishing between the cushion and the arm of the chair for his tobacco tin. ‘They’m bleddy vermin. And that black bugger is the maister of ’em all. But I’ll have him. Blackie will take a vixen and bring ’er to they old rocks. Then us wull have him – won’t us, boy. Yaas, you’m a good dog.’

  He lit the Woodbine and sighed smoke. Above the muslin half-curtain of the kitchen window he could see the moon edging into the sky, rising slowly from the trees.

  VIXEN

  Just before dusk Wulfgar left Hook’s Copse, walking with his customary soft step among the oaks and ashes. Red squirrels were busy in the treetops where there was still enough light to give the plum-covered twigs a sheen. The branches bent under the weight of the squirrels who flung themselves across canyons of shadow to flit through one tree after another until the dreys were reached.

  For a little while Wulfgar sat and watched the small, dark shapes sailing overhead. The treetops rocked against a cloudless sky, then settled into stillness. Trollgar the brown owl crooned gently to his mate from his perch in the tallest ash. His flat face glared down at nothing in particular and his talons closed like a vice on a dead vole. Using the tip of his hooked upper mandible he tenderly preened the breast feathers of the hen bird while the faint, bubbling notes caressed the silence.

  Wulfgar ranged over ground that men had once mined, and below Owlacombe Farm, in one of the tiny wooded valleys that Devonians call goyals, he killed a rat. The rat came from a ruined linhay buried under a tangle of elderberries. Wulfgar ate it down to the scaly tail and sat among the vole runs in the hedge beside the Sigford Road. The waxy greenness of the first celandines smelt of cat, for the farm tom had recently been out watering his territory.

  Cattle slithered and stumbled down the lane, harried by a labourer with a stick and a couple of dogs. Fear brimmed the animals’ eyes, for they were treated as things, not creatures. From birth to death they bowed to Man’s tyranny and were used carelessly as if such mute calmness could not house a soul.

  The dog fox ran up the tree-dotted hill with the last dregs of sunset on his left shoulder, over ground called Owlacombe Beams. The crisp pallor of frost lay on the fields. Dusk bloomed and a huge golden moon lit the sky above Bur-changer Cross. Flocks of redwings and fieldfares dropped into the copses, and the Dogstar twinkled from constellations paler than the frost.

  Wulfgar carried an emptiness in his stomach that had nothing to do with hunger. For nearly a week the ache had grown, pulling him out of sleep and disturbing his thoughts. He had covered a lot of countryside trying to shake off his restlessness, and a black fox had been seen at places as far apart as Two Bridges and Holne. Once he had even taken a pet rabbit from the lawn of Mearsdon Manor in Moretonhampstead.

  He came over the hedge of ivy, granite rocks, holly and ferns and glided down the Bagtor Road. In the coombe where Lansworthy Brook was a thread of moonlight beneath alders and hazels he caught a moorhen, and before eating it clipped the pinion feathers tight to the base with his teeth.

  The night was clear and the frost too slight to stifle scent. The reek of wet swedes lifted from the fields of West Horridge. Sandwiched between the hedgerows was the warm shippen smell of cattle and to the south-east the land slipped away into the vast plain of South Devon. Blackness, blurred here and there with yellow lights, was seen from grass level, from loops and snarls of bramble.

  He stood on the bracken bank above the roofs of West Horridge’s barns and the vixen’s scream tore the darkness. The weird owl-like screech rose and fell and trailed off into silence. Wulfgar trotted forward and paused for a moment, and again the cry rang from the moonlit distance, three screams long drawn-out and shrill. Wulfgar gave a yelping bark and sounded like a tomcat going into battle. From the surrounding coombs and hills came the answering cries of other dog foxes on their way to the clicketing. Deep in Wulfgar’s gut the vixen’s scream corkscrewed and he cruised along on the floodtide of his lust, the shrill insistent keening passing through him like a knife.

  Beyond East Horridge he overtook a noble dog fox named Briarspur, but no words were exchanged. Briarspur’s lips were drawn back in a silent snarl and his brush swished from side to side.

  Soon the brakes of ash and alder gave way to a hanger of ancient beech trees, where the vixen’s music was loud and the barking of dogs seemed to rise from the shadows all around.

  She was there, ghosting through the trees into his senses, no flesh and blood creature but a phantom of soft fire. The dog foxes circled her cautiously, giving off a strong musky odour. The screaming stopped, but the suitors continued to bark insults at each other while the vixen rolled on her back in the dead leaves. Seven foxes had obeyed her call.

  Among the younger dogs was Wendel the chicken-killer whose arrogance and stupidity were well known. He strutted up to the vixen on stiff legs.

  ‘What do they call you?’ he said.

  ‘Teg,’ she replied.

  ‘Well, Teg – I’m Wendel the Fearless. My name is spoken with respect from Black Mere to the wide road. In combat I’m unbeatable. Before the hounds I’m smoke. Grown foxes are like cubs
when they come up against me.’

  ‘Cluck, cluck, cluck,’ sneered Brackenpad. ‘The Terror of the Chicken Runs isn’t fit to eat the scats of real dog foxes.’

  ‘I disagree,’ said Briarspur. ‘Wendel is welcome to my scat anytime he fancies it. But if I were Wendel the Fearless I’d get my arse out of here – now, while it’s intact.’

  Brackenpad sniffed and pretended to nip a flea from his belly fur. He had seen Wulfgar and was in no hurry to fight for a prize he could never hope to win. Of all the dogs who knew Wulfgar only Wendel was reckless enough to challenge for the vixen. He was two years old and had never mated.

  ‘I don’t run,’ he said, puffing out his brush and expelling his breath across his teeth in the clicketing sound.

  ‘He flies – like a hen,’ Briarspur said.

  The dog foxes were still restless and noisy but although they snapped at each other the tomcat growling lacked malice. Teg sat on her hindlegs and gazed about her. Beyond the jostling males she saw the black, motionless shape of Wulfgar. The blaze of her eyes held the moonlight.

  ‘Wendel,’ Wulfgar barked. ‘You have the heart of a rabbit and the brains of a mouse. The night is a big place. Go and hide in it.’

  ‘Make me – Scat-eater.’

  A surge of anger lifted Wulfgar’s hackles. He trotted forward with murder in his belly, nursing a hatred too thick for words. The vertical ovals of his eyes were full and dark, his tail twitched and his lips were screwed back in a terrible snarl. The explosive firework noise climbed to a venomous yaraow of passion. Wendel came in sideways, his teeth bared, and Wulfgar savaged him with a frenzy born of an emotion more profound than hatred. The last leaf broke from the tree above them and before it reached the ground the contest was over. Dazed and bleeding Wendel crouched at the great dog fox’s feet. His whimpering roused pity in the hearts of those who watched.

  ‘Get him out of my sight,’ hissed Wulfgar, and Ashmere helped Wendel into the trees to lick his wounds. The other dog foxes stared at Wulfgar as they would have stared at an immortal animal who had descended from the Star Place. Moonlight flickered about his swarthy body so that he looked like a true creature of the night. His ears were cocked and his nose quivered. The beauty of the vixen’s face played on his senses and the painful hunger of wanting her cut off his breath. But before he could lead her away another challenger entered the glade, large and reddish-grey and moving lazily in the manner of a seasoned veteran.

  ‘Thornblood will fight all present for the vixen,’ he said. The words came out in a chattering torrent, which to human ears would have sounded like the staccato screeching of a jay.

  ‘She is mine,’ said Wulfgar.

  ‘I’ve come too far to chat, friend,’ said Thornblood. ‘This is fang and claw business. Talk’s cheap.’

  ‘Then let’s do a little business,’ Wulfgar grinned.

  They circled each other, humpbacked and bristling. Puffed-out brushes swished and twitched and the peculiar clicking sound punctuated the caterwauling. Many of the onlooking dogs joined in and the hollow depths of Bagtor Woods amplified the chorus. Thornblood was braver than most of his kind but he had never met an animal like Wulfgar. They fought in the classic manner of the Hill Fox Nation – darting under the opponent’s jaws to snap at his throat. There was no holding or worrying, but whenever the fangs struck they drew blood. Wisps of hair danced around their heads and the pungent smell of their bodies lingered for a week afterwards.

  Gradually Wulfgar’s ferocity wore Thornblood down but he refused to give in. Sometimes the snarling animals stood on their hindlegs and tried to deliver the good clean bite that would end the contest. Wulfgar bled about the nose, his upper lip was torn and his forelegs were injured, yet his strength seemed limitless.

  Dismay registered in Thornblood’s eyes. He carried a dozen bad wounds and had lost his nimbleness. Only pride kept him snapping at the black shadow that swelled from the smoke of their bodies and breath to deliver pain in sharp spasms.

  ‘He’s had enough, Wulfgar,’ said Brackenpad.

  ‘Well, Thornblood?’ Wulfgar said, sitting back on his haunches.

  ‘The vixen is yours,’ Thornblood gasped. ‘Fighting you is like grappling red-hot barbed wire.’

  His lips were drawn back in a grin of exhaustion. Brackenpad and Briarspur went over to him and started to clean his wounds with their tongues.

  ‘Look after him,’ Wulfgar said. ‘And now if there is no more of this fang and claw business …’

  The dog foxes lowered their eyes.

  ‘Good,’ he said, and turned his back on the gathering and walked slowly down towards the road.

  Teg followed him with short, swift steps, and when she drew level she said, ‘Are we to go together?’

  ‘Yes,’ Wulfgar said gently, and the little vixen leaned against him as they went out into the moonlight.

  COURTSHIP

  He had taken many vixens before but had never loved one as much as he loved Teg. Quietly they ran through the tiny hamlet of Bagtor and on down the lane, and the starry night broke around them in sweet-smelling waves. The River Lemon falling from pool to pool under the trees of Crownley Parks was part of the silence and never disturbed it. Sometimes she spoke but they were words that soon faded from the knowing. The joy of living within the moment took them beyond themselves. For there is a state of grace that all wild creatures discover where the spirit makes its secret assignation with the seasons.

  None of this belongs to us, Wulfgar thought. We belong to it. We live with it and in the end it claims us.

  The river rushed under the bridge and on past the mill. Teg’s coat had been groomed by the wind and the rain and seemed to spark moonlight. He drew his tongue along the warm white fur of her chin and the shift of their blood was a surf-sound in the night. Coming out of her love he wondered where time had gone. To curl into warmth while she licked his head was fine. Their sleep was unclouded by bad dreams or pangs of conscience.

  The ash tree moving across the sun made the light flicker. For several days Wulfgar and Teg had ranged over the moors and the in-country and the bond between them had strengthened. At the shippen by the road at Kelly’s Farm they had eaten rats and mice. The rats had whispered across the beams and Wulfgar had scattered them for Teg to catch. A farm labourer setting snares near Yarner Wood had seen a big dark fox and a small red-grey vixen creeping round the keeper’s gibbet. Wulfgar had stood on hindlegs to sniff at the corpses that swung gently in the wind. Two sparrowhawks, a kestrel, a pair of stoats, a weasel, crows, magpies, jays and a feral cat hung from the strand of barbed wire. The labourer had tried to shoot the foxes but fumbled the safety catch.

  ‘He was as black as coal and as big as a pony,’ he told his mates that evening. They stood at the bar of the Rock Inn and drank scrumpy. Scoble sat by the fire, stroking Jacko’s ears with a twig.

  ‘He had a vixen with ’im,’ the labourer went on. ‘They was closer to me than that dartboard, but before I could blast ’em they’m off.’

  ‘Blackie was down round Mountsland back along,’ someone else said. ‘My uncle seen un cross the sheep field below Halsanger.’

  Scoble lidded his eyes and bent the twig slowly until it cracked.

  A flock of hen chaffinches broke across the morning. Stormbully had shot his mutes on the gatepost at Holwell before sailing above the roof of the wood. He watched the foxes with interest, for their stealthy progress along the drystone wall meant rabbits.

  The buzzard’s globose eyes were eight times keener than a man’s and from three hundred feet he detected the small group of feeding conies. He fell in a swift rush and hit the doe from the rear, putting her burrow-mates to flight and halting the foxes in their tracks. Then Stormbully was lifting again on long, broad wings whose tips were splayed-out like fingers, with the dead rabbit hanging from his talons. In great flaps he flew into a beech tree and butchered the carcass.

  Teg sat back on her haunches and growled.

  ‘Do you ever g
et the feeling that Tod is poking fun at you?’ she said.

  Wulfgar could not help laughing. She looked so comical with her tail whisking and the tip of her tongue hanging over her bottom teeth.

  ‘I’ve never thought of Tod having a sense of humour,’ he said.

  ‘Why not – he’s fox, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, but very special fox.’

  He smiled at her and licked the fine inner-hair of one of her ears.

  ‘He’s supposed to loosen snares and trick the hounds and perform all sorts of miracles,’ Teg said.

  ‘Cub stuff,’ Wulfgar said. ‘Stargrief says it’s too simple.’

  ‘How does Stargrief know?’

  ‘He has visions.’

  ‘Anyway, Holy Tod let the hawk snatch the coney from this vixen’s jaws,’ Teg sighed. ‘And he didn’t loosen the wire that choked the life out of my mother.’

  ‘It’s a daft idea, Teg. Tod speaks to foxes like Stargrief in dreams and visions. He doesn’t interfere with individual lives. Loosen one snare and you’ve got to loosen the lot.’

  ‘My mother said we just had to pass through the seasons and we would come to the Star Place without any fuss. I’m not sure I want all the answers before I get there.’

  ‘Maybe there aren’t any questions,’ Wulfgar said.

  Teg frowned. ‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ she said. ‘Loving is enough.’

  A mysterious felicity burnt in her eyes. Trotting beside her onto the heath of Holwell Down he was aware of how her moods and emotions affected his life. To be alone now seemed unimaginable. This was living in the sacred manner, and surely Tod understood. Even he had loved a vixen. Wulfgar glanced at Teg. She had such delicate features: slender muzzle, chocolate-brown eye patch sloping in a line to the corner of her mouth, white bib. His whole existence centred on her being; nothing else mattered. That night as he slept with his chin on her neck he felt the world rolling under him.