by Brian Carter
The days passed and dog and vixen became bolder and more mischievious. It was bright spring morning in Wulfgar’s heart. He felt he could jump up and catch the stars that hovered above Hay Tor like moths. When he stood on his hindlegs and twirled around Teg, the tomcat yell of love pouring from his gape, she laughed helplessly and lost her breath. Then they would lie together and nibble each other’s fur in the bliss of mutual grooming.
And often he was weak with happiness, scampering over Hamel Down behind her. His yikkerings and barks were heard in the village of Widecombe, but they were the sounds of Dartmoor winter nights and caused little comment. Other dog foxes avoided Wulfgar. Suddenly his territory had become dangerous. Only Stargrief, whose mating instinct was as blunt as his fangs, was permitted to roam within sight of Hay Tor. Teg’s blood-chilling screech kept vagrant dogs on edge, but Wulfgar’s spoor was enough to douse the fiercest desire.
The moors belonged to the kestrels and buzzards, to the merlin and the lark; they were in constant attendance. Foxes came and went, rarely lingering. The grey smell of the twilight hills would often make them whimper like cubs with the ache to journey to far horizons. Distance promised so much and there was always the chance that something amazing lay under the skyline.
One evening while they waited in the heather for darkness to mantle Blackslade Mire, Mordo the raven brought his mate Skalla to a nearby rock. The cawing of rooks carried up the cleave and at Chittleford woodcocks darted and twisted in courtship flight. It was a soft, Westcountry evening. Coltsfoot had pushed through the frail skeleton of the shrew Wulfgar had killed at Bagtor Cottages, and deep in the goyals of the Webbum Valley alder catkins hung motionless above the river.
Mordo caressed his mate’s neck, the great wedge of his bill lifting black feathers to reveal grey down. With strange purring cries he urged her into the air, and called his deep ‘cronk-cronk’ and rolled and swooped. Side by side dog and vixen leapt the stream at Grey Goose Nest and read the darkness all the way to Emsworthy. The aerobatics of Mordo and Skalla continued against the stars. It was not yet Candlemas but the mild weather brought a touch of spring to the uplands.
A fieldmouse eating haws it had stored in the last year’s nest of a blackbird nearly fainted as it peered down through the cracked mud into Wulfgar’s eyes. The dog fox was sniffing a wisp of black fur left by a gone-wild farm cat. The fur was hooked on a twig near the base of the hawthorn. Steelygrin, the tom who had deserted the kitchen range of Whisselwell Farm for a swashbuckling life, had nearly caught the fieldmouse half an hour before but Trollgar had intervened. Cat and owl had quarrelled briefly and departed to hunt elsewhere, so the fieldmouse lived.
Wulfgar and Teg killed a hare on the slopes of Rippon Tor. The dog fox chased the animal along its favourite run to a gap in the wall where the vixen lay in ambush. Despite the swiftness of her pounce and bite the hare had time to scream before it died. The foxes carefully skinned it and ate all except the pads and head.
‘I’m still hungry,’ Teg said, cleaning her face with a forepaw.
‘There are rabbits at the rocks by Four Ponds,’ Wulfgar said. ‘They aren’t easy to catch. Their burrows go under the stones of a ruined house.’
‘Rabbits are stupid,’ Teg said.
‘But some aren’t so stupid as others,’ Wulfgar said patiently. ‘Their tunnels are narrow. It would take ages to dig them out.’
She grinned and showed her small white canine teeth.
‘Dog and vixen can do anything, Wulfgar.’
Foxes are creatures of few words, like most hunters. Moving silently up the sheep path they came to the newtake wall of Emsworthy. Rabbits scattered and fled, and a slight breeze set the blackthorn squeaking.
It comforted Wulfgar to hear the Becca singing from the invisible valley bed to his left. He stopped and drew a cold draught of air. The rabbits had left a little of their fear on the night.
‘Fitch,’ Teg said, wrinkling her nose.
‘Yiss,’ said a thin voice. ‘Fitch – and a fitch wot’s not too happy because a couple of bloody foxes have ruined his work.’
Chivvy-yick the stoat spoke Fox with the odd nasal accent of the mustelid tribe. He darted out of the drystone wall then back again, peeping at them from a chink.
‘Maybe you’re just too thick to chop conies,’ Wulfgar smiled.
‘Sod off! I’ve forgotten more about drummers than you’ll ever learn. You’re as nimble as that bloody tor.’
‘Why don’t you crunch him, Wulfgar?’ said Teg. Her brush twitched.
‘Because he can’t catch me, maggot face,’ the stoat hissed, retreating deeper into the Crevice.
He had spent the best part of the evening lulling the rabbits into a stupor, so from the safety of his labyrinth he mocked the foxes and cursed them. But Teg and Wulfgar being wise to the ways of a fitch in a drystone wall left him and climbed the hillock to Saddle Tor. A farm labourer came whistling along the main road on his bicycle into darkness that swam away below them to the far-off sea and the flash of Berry Head lighthouse.
‘Bloody foxes,’ Chivvy-yick fumed. He jigged up and down in rage and spat through his fangs.
Several stoats rippled along the wall towards him.
‘Foxes,’ he hissed. ‘We’ve been robbed by stinkin’ foxes. O I hate ’em. I hate ’em.’
His relatives exchanged baffled looks and licked their lips.
‘OK, you worm brains,’ Chivvy-yick snarled. ‘What about our grub? Sittin’ on your butts gawping at the stars won’t grab us a drummer. Git into them burries – sharpish.’
Teg and Wulfgar took the pony track to Four Ponds and drank at their leisure. The water broke from the biggest flood pool in a silver lip and tinkled across the night.
TWO GREEN LEAVES
The mild weather showed no signs of breaking. A little after St Valentine’s Day Teg discovered she was with cub. Dog and vixen were still joyful wanderers but their hunting games had become serious exercises in cunning. Twice they had robbed Scoble’s trap lines and on one memorable occasion Teg had snatched a guinea fowl from the roadside at Canna while a couple of labourers were hanging a gate less than twenty yards away.
‘It’s not worth taking so many risks,’ Wulfgar said.
‘But it’s fun,’ Teg replied. ‘Men are like rabbits.’
‘They’re not,’ said Wulfgar firmly. ‘Start believing that and you’re dead. Your mother taught you to fear Man above all creatures. She didn’t tell you to watch out for rabbits.’
‘I meant they’re stupid.’
‘I know what you meant, Teg, but once they decide to destroy you they don’t give up. They come after you with dogs and guns or they set traps. Stay invisible and live. Leave Man’s things alone.’
‘We’ll find a safe den for the cubs, won’t we?’ she said.
‘The safest place there is.’
‘The only really safe place for foxes’, Teg said, ‘is death.’
‘You’re beginning to sound like Stargrief.’
‘It’s your fault. You’ve always got to poke around under the surface of things.’
She smiled to soften her words.
‘Come on,’ Wulfgar said. ‘I’ll race you to the top.’
He led her to the broad summit of Conies Down Tor. Flocks of starlings and lapwings darkened the sunset. The valley head where the Cowsic River began was a reedy bowl streaked by narrow streams, and on the opposite side of the river a herd of almost a hundred Dartmoor ponies cropped the thicker grass among the hut circles. The air was full of the music of water running off the hills.
When Tod trotted into the first dusk of creation the Dartmoor wilderness was as it is today. Wulfgar and Teg could cross vast tracts without glimpsing a human being. The moors were not old with Man’s history. Civilisations had come and gone, but little of their glory remained. A few hut circles, some megaliths, pounds, lynchets, terraces and the odd Clapper bridge did not add up to much. All were weathered down to anonymity. Stargrief understood such
things. On those special occasions when he had emerged from his meditation he had spoken to small gatherings of the Haytor Clan, using the bardic phrases of his ancestors. He was the great survivor. Foxes regarded him with reverence and few doubted that he was under the personal protection of Tod.
Wulfgar and Teg sat in the lee of a boulder. Masses of pink cloud blotted the sky behind them. The vixen pressed a forepaw on her brush and cleaned the tag, while Stargrief’s words sang behind Wulfgar’s eyes:
‘I speak of the Now and the What Has Been and the What Will be, to the foxes who will go through death to the Star Place. I think of the time before Man came and I look to the time of Man’s going from the beloved country.
‘We are no more than shadows flickering briefly on the moors. But the flickering is beautiful. Through falls of hawthorn blossom we pass. We drink the seasons and the seasons take us. The seasons are hounds. No earth or clitter can keep that pack at bay.’
At night the hunting kept him busy, for he could think with his body in the thrill of pursuit and capture.
They left the North Moor late one afternoon and trotted over tilting fields to Cator Court. There was a sudden gleam of lamplight in an upstairs window that checked the foxes for a moment. The moist smell of watercress bruised by the hooves of cattle lofted from the ford.
‘I was chased by a dog near here when I was no more than a cub,’ Teg said. ‘Didn’t he give me a fright! He was all legs and teeth – like the bogeywolf my mother used to go on about.’
‘Sounds like the lurcher,’ Wulfgar said. ‘How did you get away?’
‘I climbed a tree and hid in the ivy. The dog made a lot of noise.’
‘Dogs always do. The lurcher’s mad. He’s killed foxes. Last summer he took a piece out of Wayland’s ear.’
Teg shivered.
As darkness fell the countryside became silent and the barn owls appeared. Although they swept with a noiseless beating of wings down West Shallowford goyal, they screamed to scare small creatures into movement. The rustlings in the hedge betrayed voles and shrews. Sometimes earth dribbled over dry leaves. The night was prickled with faint squeaks and screams, many of which ended abruptly.
The sun was lifting a little higher above the southern hills every day. Wulfgar and Teg crossed a countryside of apple-green coombs and brown hills. The drystone walls were held together by gravity and they marched into the haze of high ground, and where they joined in right angles there were sheltered pockets of bracken. On warm afternoons the foxes slumbered here, burrowing into the dead fronds while the larks sang above them and gnats danced round their heads.
With day crumbling into smoke they talked of love and the good life they shared. Fox is a raw language, wrung from rock and heather, but for Wulfgar and Teg it was a musical celebration of their togetherness. They flickered on the margins of dusk above the farmsteads, and their cries set the work dogs whimpering,
A rising easterly wind brought a cold snap and there was a brief, vicious return of winter with light snowfalls on ground above a thousand feet. Running over patches of whiteness dog and vixen left a double line of small oval prints that other foxes noted. At Hedge Barton the sparrows pressed tightly together against the barn wall, behind the ivy. The earth became firm again, but not with the killing frost that breaks a gardener’s heart.
Wulfgar and Teg enjoyed walking over white fields. The ponies had retreated from the heights to coombs where water always flowed even under the thickest snow. They lay in field corners nibbling the grass thawed out by their body warmth and their breath climbed into the air like mist from the bogs. With the coming of the foxes they knelt and got up in a strange, clumsy way as if the cold had stiffened their muscles.
The snow lay for a couple of days and vanished. Rain fell gently and calm mornings became warm afternoons. Blackbirds and thrushes sang in the village gardens at sunset. On the lawn of the Moorland Hotel were drifts of snowdrops, and beneath the rosebeds chrysalides and caterpillars waited for the real spring. In the banks of the deep lane by Easdon Farm the celandines were full and golden, and among the roots primroses were budding. The grass was very green along the ditchside.
‘Why the old cottage?’ Teg said.
They had journeyed to the Leighon Ponds at the end of a day spent dozing in a copse.
‘Pride, I suppose,’ Wulfgar said. ‘I’ve never been able to take a rabbit from that warren.’
Teg narrowed her eyes.
‘You mean there’s such a thing as a clever coney?’
‘Lucky coney,’ he said. ‘A lucky animal doesn’t need brains. Anyway, what would a rabbit do with intelligence? They lead such dull lives. If they thought about it it would drive them crazy.’
‘It’s all that grass,’ said Teg, mysteriously.
Beside the Becca Brook they found a dead trout. Romany the otter had killed several that evening and he had taken a single bite out of the fish’s shoulder. Wulfgar let Teg eat the trout and afterwards they climbed up to Holwell Tor and made their way through twilight to Quarryman’s Cottage.
‘O no!’ Teg whispered. ‘Not fitch again!’
They clapped down in the furze and lifted their heads to read the wind. There was enough light to reveal what was going on below in front of the ruins. A gang of stoats, including Chivvy-yick, were wrangling over a coney. Chivvy-yick had one forepaw raised and the other resting on the carcass, his lips twisted back to show the tiny white thorns of his fangs.
‘Will you leave off!’ he snarled. ‘I eats first and when I’ve had enough Shiv can get stuck in. It’s fitch law.’
‘Me and Flick-Flick caught the bloody drummer,’ Shiv said. ‘We should get the first helping.’
‘Mind you don’t get my fangs in yer throat, dung beetle,’ Chivvy-yick said, glaring at him.
‘There’s four of us,’ Shiv said.
‘But it’s your throat I’ll go for, my bucko. So why not join the queue? There’s plenty for everyone. This is a very plump drummer.’
‘OK – OK,’ Shiv said. ‘Just make sure you don’t scoff the lot.’
‘You’re family,’ Chivvy-yick grinned. ‘Would I cheat my own flesh and blood?’
‘Yiss,’ said Flick-Flick. ‘You’d eat granny if she smelt like a drummer. And you wouldn’t share ’er either.’
Chivvy-yick laughed through his nose and sounded like a wet blade of grass being drawn between forefinger and thumb.
‘Keep laughing, fitch,’ Wulfgar snarled. ‘But get your paws off my rabbit.’
The dog fox leapt from the bracken and confronted the stoats. He was humpbacked and bristling, and his puffed-out tail spoke volumes.
In Chivvy-yick’s vocabulary there was no word for fear, but he understood the meaning of discretion. A dog fox weighing twenty-four pounds and standing sixteen inches tall at the shoulders is worthy of respect, especially if you are a seven-ounce mustelid. Chivvy-yick withdrew, swearing horribly, and chivvied his relatives.
‘Five fitches could chop a fox,’ he hissed. ‘Now if Flick-Flick and Shiv was to come at old Canker Head from this side, and Slickfang and Snikker did likewise from the other side, yours truly would be free to attack that bit of fur under Canker Head’s chin.’
‘And this vixen would crunch the funny little fitch like a dry stick,’ said Teg.
She had crept up behind the fitch patrol to within easy pouncing distance. Chivvy-yick squeaked. There was a flurry of snakelike bodies and the stoats shot down the nearest burrows where they lingered to toss insults. Five pairs of tiny green eyes pinpricked the darkness.
‘Maggot Face and old Canker Head will regret this,’ Chivvy-yick yelled. ‘I don’t forget. I never forget. Never. Stinkin’ foxes! Never!’
Wulfgar carried the rabbit to the top of Holwell Tor and they ate it under the rowan trees beyond the reach of the stoats’ yikkering.
There were dark days and days of great luminosity. All along the Becca yellow tassels hung from the hazel bushes. A thousand feet above the valley Stormbully me
wled on his thermal. He had taken another mate. She had come from Hexworthy and was called Fallbright. The bulky nest of twigs and sticks in the oak tree in Mill Wood had received her approval. With wings angled against the wind she carved her own circle in the sky and called to Stormbully like a cat speaking to its kittens.
Wulfgar glanced up and three clear drops of water fell from his chin into the Becca Brook. The stillness of the afternoon made him uneasy. The trapper’s smell clung to the docks beside the path and Wulfgar’s nose quivered as he picked up the rich scent of rabbit. He looked for Teg but she had gone a little way ahead and in a flash he understood.
‘Teg,’ he barked. ‘Teg – stay where you are.’
He darted over the stone bridge and followed her trail down the Becca into scrub oak.
‘Teg,’ he cried again.
‘Over here,’ she replied. ‘There’s a dead coney.’
His mouth went dry and like some garish episode from a nightmare he heard the clang of the trap snapping shut. Then Teg was screaming. He breasted the ferns feeling her agony clenching in his stomach. The gin held her by the front paw. It was one of three Scoble had tilled around the rabbit carcass. Teg’s eyes were big with fear. She fidgeted and twisted in the gymnastics of her terror.
‘Teg, please keep still,’ Wulfgar said. ‘I can’t help you if you don’t keep still.’
The screaming stopped. Teg crouched and licked the mangled paw. She gazed at him from some distant, private world of pain. Her ears were flattened to her head and her brush swished and jerked. A stong acrid odour escaped from her fur.
‘What can you do?’ she gasped,‘ – kill me? Well, do it – do it.’
