A Black Fox Running

by Brian Carter

  The strength seemed to drain from Teg. She heard the lurcher growling as he flattened under the pointed boulder at the earth’s entrance. Then the dog gave full, savage tongue and gulped the smell of fox. His belly dragged the ground until he blundered into the den and collided with the vixen.

  Teg surfaced from her misery and showed him her teeth, but he brushed her aside, cracking his head on the roof. She gripped his cheek and bit through to the gums. Jacko yelped and screwed around, shaking her off with a twist of his neck, but the cramped space hampered his style. Blindly he seized a leg and jerked. Teg screamed and tried to reach the dislocated joint with her tongue. The lurcher closed his teeth half a dozen times on empty darkness. The situation was new to him and he was not happy.

  As he crouched there swallowing his own blood, the fox clawed up his spine and ripped one of his ears. He tried to wriggle backwards out of the earth, leaving Teg free to take a neckgrip on Dusksilver and break away. The cubs were whining now. ‘I’m not deserting you,’ she wanted to say but the words caught in her throat. ‘Trust me. Trust me.’ She limped up the corridor to the nearest bolt-hole and suddenly Tacker’s breath was on her face. The dog barked and sprang at her but she was squirming down again into darkness. A pure, shivering thrill of fear lifted the hair on her shoulders and back. She tightened her hold on Dusksilver and all at once the terror left her.

  Jacko was wedged in the main hole, struggling between pain and rage. The vixen ignored him. With a damaged hindleg and a front one missing her movements were slow and deliberate. Up ahead of her was a small patch of moon-silvered sky. Using her back legs she pushed through her pain into the night where the breeze droned in the oak twigs. Sanctuary was close at hand, a deep hole in the clitter, and a vixen and her cubs could lie up on the dry leaves and face any dog. ‘Yes,’ she sang from that serene inner self that hope illumined. ‘First Dusksilver, then Oakwhelp and – ’

  The trapper rose from the shadows and pointed his gun at her. Teg stared fearlessly into death, sorrowing through her quiet anger for the cubs. Dusksilver fell from her mouth and she snarled at the giant figure. Then there was a great noise and a searing explosion of pain and she felt the world slipping away from her. At the point of death her eyes glowed, but only for a little while.

  The cub cowered beside her mother’s body and buried her face in her paws. Scoble smiled. His fists clenched on the barrels of the twelve bore until the knuckles gleamed white.

  The gun swung downwards and the whimpering stopped.

  ‘That’s better than chopping off Blackie’s front legs,’ he said. ‘I’m danged if that idn better than killing ’im.’

  ‘I’m glad you came this way,’ said Stargrief.

  The dog foxes confronted each other on the ridge path. The shrillness in Stargrief’s voice disturbed Wulfgar. He dropped the Leghorn and narrowed his eyes.

  ‘The trapper has been to your earth,’ Stargrief continued.

  ‘Teg?’ said Wulfgar.

  ‘Dead. He killed her and the cubs.’

  ‘All the cubs?’

  Stargrief nodded.

  ‘And I ignored the crow omens,’ Wulfgar said. ‘Tod sent me a sign and I did nothing about it.’

  He raised his head and the pain burst from his gape in a long howl.

  ‘My heart is breaking, Stargrief, and I’m … lonely.’

  The old fox bowed and Wulfgar rested his chin on the grey neck. To touch his friend somehow made the misery bearable.

  ‘We must go to them,’ Stargrief said.

  They waded through the grasses to the wood and approached the flat boulder where the vixen and cubs lay. Scoble had stretched them out neatly, like trophies.

  Wulfgar stood over Teg, looking down at the cubs, unable to believe his eyes. They sprawled as if asleep, soft and beautiful in the moonlight. And Teg’s eyes were two green tears. Tenderness welled up into a sharp ache, and his own tears broke and slowly plodded down his muzzle to splash onto the little vixen. He nudged her with his nose but she would not stir. Then he licked the bodies of his dead mate and cubs, trying to bring them back to life. All through the night he worked, whimpering low in the dreadful loneliness of his grief.

  At daybreak he climbed to his feet and Stargrief helped him drag the bodies into the den.

  ‘He has made things of them,’ Wulfgar said.

  ‘They are with Tod,’ said Stargrief. ‘You believe that, don’t you, Wulfgar?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His face was screwed up with misery.

  ‘O Teg, Teg, sweet Teg.’

  ‘Tod helps us into death,’ Stargrief said. ‘We are never alone. He has many helpers.’

  ‘Tod has cut out the living thing that was inside me,’ Wulfgar said.

  The marsh tit began to sing and he hated it for being alive.

  ‘I killed the fat white hen for her,’ he said absently.

  But Stargrief had returned along some faint bardic trail to a past that was visible only to fox seers.

  ‘She was like autumn,’ he crooned, eyes closed, body swaying.

  ‘Leaf-fall brightness

  she took from the sky.

  From the wind

  the sun-sparkle she borrowed.

  She has gone.

  The leafing trees weep

  on bare hillsides.

  Leaf-fall brightness

  gone with the sun

  to the Star Place.’

  ‘Words,’ Wulfgar snarled. ‘Come and bite the pain out of me, you old fool. Your words are like dead leaves.’

  The morning swelled warm and giddy with insect chirr and lark song. Through the haze he ran, but his senses were still busy despite the pain. Despair pursued him like a shadow, and soon he was panting in the heat, drawing deep breaths of dry, windless air. Hunger and thirst were welcome, for they increased the emptiness.

  And while he ran he thought he had dreamt her death and would wake up to the squeaking of the cubs. The barren North Moor echoed his distress. He had no love for the shapes and colours and sounds of life. The racing scream of hills ended in a gasp of rock piled on rock. The moan of grass slanting away on the wind was a threnody for Teg.

  Part Two

  ‘He who catches the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sunrise’

  William Blake

  LONE WANDERING

  Clouds had gathered and as he swung onto the path the first drops fell in a patter. The distant hills stood grey and silent on the edge of a different world, then a sheet of rain was hiding the rowans. It grew darker and the sky roared. The path to the tor was lit by lightning flashes. He climbed at speed, easily keeping his footing on the wet stones.

  And the running brought moments of oblivion. But the heart does not know how to stop loving. The voice of Teg would call back the pain as the landscape returned. Truly there is something that comes from beyond self to dull misery. Days fall and blur the moments of distress and joy, but the greatest love incurs the greatest grief, and to relinquish pain seems a betrayal of the dead loved one.

  Yet Wulfgar belonged to the wilderness and he had to be on the move, running, taking food warm and alive. His ferocity was quenched by the act of killing, but only for a while. Teg was always waiting to step into his thoughts. The rabbit died silently in the manner of most wild creatures and he saw her breaking it up for the cubs. Sadness went through him and he squirted a mess of scats onto the heather.

  The thunderstorm was spent, the clouds opened and the sky became huge. Rain powdered away in the south, leaving a glitter all down the valley. And beyond the Tavistock-Moretonhampstead road night was fretting like the sea.

  He lay in the furze, waiting for darkness to take him.

  Deserting the stream he cut across to Higher White Tor, but he was still tempted to go back to the earth and Teg. She is dead, he thought. The impossible had happened. He stood in the path of moonlight between two rocks where the scent of grouse and lapwing was strong. The bumble dors had taken wing to feed on cowpats and pony dung.
He ate a dozen and left their shards in his scats.

  But the running was a drug, and settling within himself he could float through time. Yet it was unacceptable to think of never returning to the wood.

  ‘Teg,’ he cried, seeing her lying cold and alone in the darkness beneath the boulders.

  The wet weather passed and the east wind blew, drying the moors, making the hills good places to kennel. Soon Devon was enjoying a heatwave and nights were warm and scented. From dawn to dusk the drowsy hum of insects masked the heather and cotton grass, butterflies brought colour to the countryside and the rattle of dragonflies could be heard over stagnant ponds.

  He went to the water and lapped slowly. For the first time since Teg’s death he was aware of the evening’s splendour. A bunch of ponies trotted along the ridge. Without raising his head he took the air, waiting for the ache to swell …

  Mayflies were dancing over the river. They had laid their eggs and would die of starvation after dark. At daybreak they had emerged from the water without mouths. For three years the larvae had lived in the bottom of a pool under Hartland Tor waiting for the sun and the brief fulfilment of egg laying.

  Wulfgar teased the odd furze-spike and bits of bracken from his belly fur, using his teeth. The grooming was meticulous, but all the time his yellow eyes with their narrow, brown pupils held the scene, and nose and ears completed the picture.

  Skyglit the kingfisher and her mate Lazuli had their nest in a hole in the crumbling bank beside the East Dart. The hen sat on her hunting branch. She was lovelier than a sapphire, her plumage a subtle, greenish-blue and her throat white. The minnow darted through the shallows and she belly-flopped and caught it in her beak, then she flipped back onto her perch and beat the fish against the bark before swallowing it head first.

  The cockbird killed another fish and took it to the branch near the nest hole where five young kingfishers sat. He was teaching them to hunt, and although they cried for the stickleback he dropped it in the water and coaxed them to retrieve it.

  Wulfgar stretched and walked on with his careful cat tread.

  The moors were as hushed as an ocean and a red sun shone from the mist. He came to the farm below Whitehorse Hill and killed a duck. The duck had been sleeping near the stream that falls down Great Varracombe. Its death was silent and left its companions undisturbed.

  Pipistrelle bats dodged and twisted around the farmhouse. He trotted up Mango Hill with the duck in his jaws. A dog yelped, a door opened and closed, and presently there was just the sound of his own quick breathing.

  Sometimes grief clogged his mind and she would come running across the snow towards him, never to arrive, fading back into his dream of winter. Then he would push his nose into his brush and whimper until sleep washed everything away.

  During the day he woke many times thinking she had returned. Larks sang and perhaps a raven would croak overhead. But he was always alone and sleep was the only refuge, and the nightmares were easier to live with than the truth.

  One day with the rise of the sun he wandered down to the East Dart a little above Sandy Hole Pass. Marshes enclosed both banks of the river and walking was uncomfortable. It was a landscape of quaking bog where cotton grasses, rushes and asphodel flourished. Cross-leaved heath grew in patches amongst liverworts, sundews, lichens and mosses on the surrounding hills. The wet, acid soil was unkind to both wild flowers and creatures. Lizards and frogs could be detected by an animal with his nose close to the ground, and there was no shortage of dragonflies, dors and bumblebees. But rabbits and fieldmice were scarce, and the snipe were very alert.

  Wulfgar ate carrion, sharing the carcass of a sheep with three crows. A welcome coolness fell upon him, and he glanced up and saw a cloud blotting out the sun. Then it was raining in one of those inconsequential showers that quickly give way to sunshine again. He trotted along the riverside while the clouds dispersed and the sky reached down to the horizon, clear and blue. Above the remains of the tin streamer’s cottage the air was chilly, and the water sang through the wastes over a bed of rocks and pebbles.

  As a yearling Wulfgar had come to Cranmere Pool in the company of Stargrief and they had lain on a peat hag and watched the stars gather round the top of the world. The old dog fox had found Tod there in his first vision and the Hay Tor Clan called it Stargrief’s Mire. Even on a sunny day in late spring it was dreary. Many of the hags were taller than a man. They poked out of the maze of peat channels and where they had collapsed and crumbled away there were big ponds of black water.

  After dark the lambency of the Star Place raised his spirits. He felt he was in the sky sharing Teg’s happiness, warmed by a love too deep for his understanding, and he was ashamed of having doubted Tod’s existence. The golden fox fell through the night with a blazing tail and vanished below the curve of the North Moor.

  Wulfgar suddenly noticed he was not alone. Another fox sat on the hag across the gut.

  ‘What do the stars tell you, Wulfgar?’ the stranger asked.

  ‘You know me?’ Wulfgar said wearily.

  ‘Wulfgar of the High Tor Clan of the Hill Fox nation.

  Who does not know you?’

  ‘And you are – ?’

  ‘I have no name. But I know what it is to run from despair. Once, long ago, I lost a vixen who was with cub.’

  Wulfgar nodded but the pain of wanting Teg held back the words.

  ‘I’m looking for Stargrief,’ the stranger went on.

  ‘Yes, Nameless,’ Wulfgar said. ‘You’ll find him on the tor against the sunset above Rocky Wood.’

  ‘I’m sorry I intruded.’

  Wulfgar lifted his muzzle once more to the stars.

  ‘There is no destiny without heartache, Wulfgar,’ Nameless said.

  ‘Words again,’ said Wulfgar. He clenched his eyes. Starlight twinkled on his canine teeth.

  ‘You’ll get on with the old dog,’ he added, heavily sarcastic. ‘He has a brilliant way with hot air.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Nameless said. ‘Someone to lick your muzzle and croon you a lullaby?’

  ‘I want to be left alone,’ Wulfgar snarled and he tensed to jump the gut. But the stranger had vanished and there were no tracks in the peat and no tell-tale stink on the air.

  Wulfgar shuddered and ducked away and ran from Cranmere, bounding from hag to hag while the dream blazed at the edges and Teg’s pain fed his body with a kind of explosive energy. Over folds of darkness he galloped, on to Cut Hill and Devil’s Tor and the Cowsic River’s source.

  Through breast-high mist he ran chuckling at the memory of Stargrief’s ‘Tod Soliloquy’. Scraggy old fox! But he could rake up sermons better than a rickyard fowl scuffing up worms – and it was well meant.

  He crossed Holming Beam giving a wide berth to the stacks of cut peat and raced on down to the Black Brook River, and followed it to the outskirts of Princetown. The huge, featureless lump to the west of him was Dartmoor prison. Tiny squares of light gleamed from the main block, but Wulfgar was among newborn lambs, burning with blood lust.

  The ewes bleated and fled before him. He was snarling now and the lamb leapt sideways in blind terror. Wulfgar pulled it down by the shoulder and transferred his grip to the neck. Strong canine teeth crushed the cervical vertebrae and the lamb died.

  Wulfgar hauled the carcass to an ash grove and skinned it before sating two hungers.

  RIVER’S END

  The old man who lived in the cottage on the leat at Tor Royal came to the slopes of Royal Hill to cut peat for his fire. He used a triangular shovel called a budding iron. The turves were trimmed with a long knife after being lifted from the ground on the prongs of a turf iron. They were scattered along a terrace the length and width of a cricket square. Each day the old man carried several loads down to his stack. The ‘vag’ or top layer of peat burnt cleanly on a fire of furze and the smoke from the cottage chimney carried the tang of Dartmoor to Wulfgar’s nose.

  He watched the old man toiling up the slope of moo
r grass and bell heather, then he yawned and urinated on the nearest lump of peat. By the time the man had reached the turves Wulfgar was trotting through the bog cotton towards Foxtor Mires.

  Hill foxes have a wide range, but Wulfgar was to wander further than any of his kind had dreamed possible. The good life was found in the pursuit of prey, in the running between sunrise and sunset. ‘Living in the sacred manner’, Stargrief called it, and he simply meant resisting the heresy of letting the mind lope ahead of the body.

  Yet Wulfgar often felt a presence beside him as he ran, something more than his shadow, but he no longer looked over his shoulder to see if she was there.

  At Foxtor Mire he stalked a green plover who kept a little ahead of him, dragging a wing. Whenever Wulfgar pounced the bird jumped out of reach. She had a nest full of chicks and was deceiving the fox. He snapped at her and rolled onto his side and pretended to groom the hindleg he had thrust into the air. He was embarrassed but had no intention of betraying it. He worked casually, clacking his teeth on imaginary ticks, eyes closed, ears and nostrils quivering. The green plover kept diving at him until he was sufficiently rattled to move on across blanket bog that quaked and oozed underfoot.

  The merlin tiercel had spotted him but only as an unimportant peripheral object. The little falcon came corkscrewing low along the sinewy thread of water and overtook the meadow pipit. Neither bird made a sound in the death tangle. The merlin killed neatly and flashed Wulfgar an arrogant glance before hurrying upstream, the pipit in its talons.

  Dartmoor rippled and trembled in the heat. Wulfgar drank the bright water as it glided over bronze-coloured rocks. The merlin was a quarter of a pound of feathered dynamite lost in a vast landscape. Among the cotton grass near his nest he had a plucking post and birds were brought to this stump of granite and butchered. The tiercel’s name was Merelord. After decapitating the pipit he presented it to his mate in flight and sped over the sedges to search for more living snacks.

  Wulfgar stood in the stream and let the water wash round his chest. The merlin cried kik-kik kik-kik from a blur of slate-blue, white and black. The morning paled. Midges enveloped his head, and he left the stream and crackled through a scimitar of reeds, his paws squelching into the sphagnum moss and lichen. He moved lightly and quickly, scattering meadow-brown butterflies from the grasses.