A Black Fox Running

by Brian Carter

  ‘That’s it – crawl, Long Scat,’ Wulfgar scoffed. ‘Crawl. Hug the dirt and go quietly. If you disturb me I’ll bite off your head.’

  His jaws slammed shut.

  As soon as he was out of sight the stoat undulated away to the burrow by the drystone wall. He was quivering with rage. Next time he found Mange-Bag in a wire he would have his throat.

  Shiv’s head popped out of the rabbit-hole.

  ‘Did you get a drummer?’ he said.

  ‘O yes,’ Chivvy-yick said sarcastically. ‘I got a drummer and a pheasant and a duck and a hen and a grouse and a hare and a bloody great turkey from the farm in the valley; and a goose. Take your pick.’

  ‘Sorry I spoke,’ said his cousin.

  Chivvy-yick ground his fangs together.

  The evening was hooded with rain. Out of the darkness rushed more flocks of birds. Wulfgar heard them calling low in the sky. At first light a thousand fieldfares covered the hawthorns of Bagtor Down. Then the rain was spent but the clouds looked ominous. Tawny oak woods and the rust of bracken sparkled. An underwater clarity and stillness prevailed. Cattle, sheep and ponies stood motionless.

  The fox trotted up the headwaters of the River Lemon to the road. He was famished. The night had yielded half a coney. The rest of the animal had been eaten by a badger. Wulfgar’s nose told him he was safe, but he ran up a road that led to Beckaford remembering the fowls of Yarner Wells. With Wendel long gone the old lady had grown careless and Wulfgar had seen hens scratching the wayside mud. His mouth watered at the thought of the warm, white flesh busy under wispy chicken feathers.

  He caught the sound before he smelt the trapper. Darting off the road he clapped down under a gorsebush. The adrenalin jolted through his system. The piggish grunting continued. It was coming from the furze about thirty fox-lengths up the road. Wulfgar crept forward on his belly, ready to bolt at the first hint of danger.

  Scoble was sprawled on his back, sound asleep. He lay on a mattress of heather and pony dung. His mouth was wide open and he was snoring. He was also soaked to the skin. Somehow he had managed to drink nineteen pints of rough cider at the Rock Inn from teatime to chucking-out time. It was a personal record. But the walk to Yarner’s Cott had proved too much of an ordeal. He had staggered through the wet darkness with the uncanny homing instinct of all drunks, then he had stopped to empty his bladder and that was that. Etherised with alcohol he had crashed into unconsciousness, and if it had rained six-inch nails he would not have stirred.

  The fox sat in the road and gazed down his muzzle at Scoble. The trapper twitched and mumbled and threw out an arm. How easy it would be to rip open his throat, Wulfgar thought. His guts constricted but he was mindful of Stargrief’s warning. Killing a man would mean certain disaster for the Hill Nation. Yet he felt he could do it. The ghosts of Teg and the cubs cried out for Man blood. Maybe Tod had arranged this happening. Should he act as Wulfgar or as the leader of the clan? O Tod, he cried to himself. Send me a sign. Help me.

  The trapper’s stench curdled into nausea and Wulfgar vomited a mess of partly digested coney. Then he cocked his leg on one of Scoble’s boots, but again fear of the ancient enemy held him back. His excitement threatened to ooze out in scats. Yes, he would go through his cowardice and grip that hateful throat. He would remain true to himself, true to Teg and all the other murdered animals.

  The yell sent him hurtling down the slope to Yarner Wood and the relief of letting instinct take control. Behind him he heard pony’s hooves on the road and wondered if it was Tod’s sign.

  The postman had rheumatism. He groaned slowly out of the saddle and hobbled up to Scoble. God, you’re in a state, he thought, staring into the unshaven face.

  ‘Leonard,’ he said.

  The drunk coughed cider fumes and rolled onto his side.

  ‘Leonard.’

  ‘Wha’issit?’ Scoble gasped. The bed was sprouting toadstools and bracken. It had turned into a cold, wet compost heap. O Christ! he thought. I’ve pissed myself. The mattress would be ruined. On dilating ripples of giddiness the sky advanced and retreated. Why was it there? What had happened to the roof and the ceiling? Things tilted and squirmed, slowly, changing shape and colour like petrol stains in a puddle.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ the postman said.

  ‘Where did you come from?’ Scoble frowned. ‘What you doing here? How did you get in?

  ‘Get up, Leonard, or you’ll die of pneumonia.’

  ‘Never oldmonia,’ Scoble wheezed, raising himself on his elbows. He growled up phlegm and spat.

  ‘I thought the fox was going for your throat,’ said the postman.

  ‘Fox? The only foxes in my house are dead buggers.’

  ‘You idn in Yarner Cott,’ the postman said. The agony of his rheumatism made him grunt out the words.

  ‘You’m on the moors. And by the look of ’ee you’ve been here all night in the pouring rain. I’d get out of it if I was you.’

  ‘The fox?’ Scoble said coming rapidly back into himself.

  ‘Him they call Old Blackie.’

  Scoble’s teeth started to chatter.

  ‘He was here,’ the postman went on. ‘He piddled on your boot and then –’

  Scoble stroked his wart.

  ‘Then he crouched down and started to move towards you ever so steady, like an old tomcat after a mouse.’

  The last dregs of colour left the trapper’s face.

  ‘If you’re lyin’,’ he whispered, ‘I’ll boot your puddens up round your neck.’

  ‘I saw it. If I had’n yelled you’d be dead. Look – there’s his marks in the mud.’

  Scoble felt the life draining from his body. The postman’s words had pulled out some sort of stopper in the bottom of his spirit and as his strength escaped darkness seeped in. He struggled to his feet. Hot and cold flushes swept over his skin, his head and eyes were on fire and he had a sharp pain in his right lung.

  ‘Get on the pony, Leonard,’ said the postman. ‘You idn fit enough to walk to Yarner.’

  ‘How long ago was the fox here?’ Scoble said, and he coughed up more phlegm.

  ‘Just now. But you ought to get home to bed with a hot water bottle. I’ll phone the doctor.’

  ‘No you bloody won’t,’ Scoble said. His teeth would not stop chattering and his kneecaps seemed to have melted.

  ‘Look, Walter,’ he added quietly. ‘You done me a good turn and I won’t forget it. But I’ll be all right now. I’ll make me own way home.’

  ‘God, Len! – you’re like death warmed up. If you don’t hit the sack you’ll be fillin’ a box.’

  ‘That’s between me and the devil,’ said Scoble with a grim smile.

  He watched the postman canter away on the back of his New Forest mare. A cloud of rain rolled off Hay Tor and the horror rose in Scoble. What if the Yank was right? What if Old Blackie wasn’t a fox at all but some sort of diabolical creature sent from hell to tear out his soul? The devil will get you, you little sod, his father had roared. He had dropped the basket of eggs, in the rain, in the winter long ago. The knuckles had pulped his nose. Yaas, the devil’s got his eye on you, Leonard Scoble. Then another blow and another curse.

  The trapper went down the road with the dawdling footsteps of a simpleton. The future gaped like a dark November evening and he had never really looked into it before. He groaned. The pain in his chest throbbed hot and insistent, like toothache. He was very cold, but the more he tensed his body the more he shivered. Yet the fox hadn’t got him, and they old foxes didn get me on the Somme, he thought. Something was watching over him. His dark eyes blazed. If the devil was on Dartmoor he’d have to work hard. O yes!

  He piled his wet clothes on the hearthrug, then he lit the fire and boiled a kettle. The tea soothed his sore throat but he had no stomach for tobacco. He was shivering now in spasms and found it difficult to pull on his wellingtons and knot the baler cord round the waist of his greatcoat.

  ‘Foxes run in circles,’ he muttered. Old
Blackie would go through Yarner. The Bovey would probably turn him and he’d come up Trendlebere, Beckaford Woods way, to Leighon. Scoble would hide by the bridge down from Aish Cottage. The fox had a choice of hugging the stream or using the lane. In the bank by the entrance to Leighon was a fox run that was well trodden. A man could sit among the trees and get a sniper’s view of the whole scene.

  The BSA bolt action .22 was wrapped in oiled sackcloth. Scoble had bought it second-hand, sacrificing precious scrumpy money. He kissed the butt.

  ‘Dang me! – if you idn a little beauty!’ he whispered.

  He loved the feel and the balance of the rifle. And a good shot would bring down a roe deer. Rain rattled on the window. He coughed violently.

  The cranking left him light-headed and weak, but a different sort of fever gripped him as the van sizzled along the lane.

  With bouncing, catlike strides Wulfgar chested the rain that swirled along Trendlebere Down. The haunting desolation of the plains reached up to him. A hare broke cover and galloped off. Birds glided out of the gloom and flashed silently away.

  In Beckaford Wood the hypnotic fall of oak leaves had him thinking the trees were on the move. He examined the air. It smelt of leaf mould, wet earth and flood water. The gap where the fox path began received his special attention. A wire or a gin might have been hidden there to take a tired animal, so he went cautiously, his nostrils crinkling at every step, his head constantly moving to the right and left.

  Scoble squeezed the trigger. His eyes were watering and his hands were unsteady but Wulfgar was a big target. The crack of the rifle coincided with the zang of the bullet ricochetting off the rock. Wulfgar became a dark flare weaving among the brambles. The lead had scored a diagonal groove in the front of his left foreleg and blood seeped through the fur. He stopped briefly and licked it. The roar of the brook obliterated the sound of the bolt being drawn back. Scoble sent another bullet into the branches of the scrub oak.

  Keeping low the fox sprinted up the cart track to Leighon, leaving only his stink behind him; and a couple of farm workers saw him run into rough ground below Hound Tor.

  THE 11.35

  He slept uncomfortably through the rainy night in a hollow under a rock. Whenever he woke he licked his wounded leg. Just after dawn the weather brightened and hazy gold smeared the grey. He plashed down to the barn on the edge of the wood overlooking Leighon House. Fieldmice were scarce and another fox had disturbed the conies. He made a few half-hearted attempts to stalk partridges before returning to the rock and his couch of dead bracken, and it was here that Lancer ranging ahead of the pack found his line and put him up two hours before noon.

  The hound running by sight threw his tongue and was answered by a deep clamour. Above the music of the pack the yelp of the horn tailed away on a string of little notes.

  ‘You saw him, sir,’ said the huntsman, opening the gate.

  ‘Yes – and I think we’re in for a hell of a good run,’ Claude Whitley said.

  The news travelled back to Hound Tor and the foot-followers.

  ‘They won’t get un,’ said Scoble. ‘There idn a hound in Devon that can master Old Blackie.’

  His face, turned to the light, was gaunt, pale and bristly. He planted his fists in the pockets of his greatcoat and began to cough, the tears streaming down his cheeks.

  ‘He carried the undertaker’s brand,’ George Lugg told his cronies later. ‘His clothes hung off un like a scarecrow’s rags and he smelt like a polecat. I reckon it’s T.B.’

  As morning shrugged off the mist Wulfgar cruised into the wood. He was lithe and self-assured in his passage from sunlight through blotches of shadow and back to light again. At the deserted farm he ran along the top of the wall, jumped down and walked around the yard, and went into the shell of the barn before departing by way of the meadow.

  For a while the hounds were in check, but Lancer had a nose capable of deciphering nearly all Wulfgar’s tricks. He had bolted a huge breakfast of porridge and beef broth and was ready for anything. Quivering on tense hindlegs he sniffed the air. His arching back delighted the master who saw in him the perfect engine for hard going. The sloping pasterns of his feet gave him extra purchase on steep, difficult ground.

  ‘Leu in – leu in, wind ’im,’ cried the huntsman.

  Dashwood the babbler was crying wolf amongst the trees but Lancer suddenly found the line and ran mute, so intent was he on getting his fox. The huntsman sounded the Gone Away and the pack spoke and came on the surge of their music. A wedge of hounds drove into the woods where Wulfgar had sought the path up the Becca Brook.

  The fox quit the oaks without haste and climbed Black Hill. Drops of water flew from the bracken to bejewel his fur. Slowly a feeling of detachment stole across his thoughts. The living world was curiously indifferent to his situation and the starlings settling on the furze hardly noticed him passing.

  ‘There he goes,’ said George Lugg quietly.

  Stray closed his eyes. Not Old Blackie, he prayed. Not today, God. Not now. The foot-followers, who had gathered on the eastern side of Greator Rocks, saw the pack roll out of the covert led by the badger-pied Lancer and swarm up the hillside throwing their cries. Then the silvery carping of the horn brought on the field in an untidy cavalry charge.

  Wulfgar sprinted but Lancer closed the gap. His powerful, lolloping gait saw him swiftly across ground that was lumpy and bramble-snarled. Sweat splashed from his tongue and each breath captured the stink of warm, hard-running fox. Ahead Black Hill curved darkly against the sky and for a second or two Wulfgar was visible among a scribble of thorns on the horizon. The music of the hounds filled the valley below him. He heard the thump of Lancer’s feet and the distant rumble of hooves, then the horn again, higher and more piercing than a vixen’s cry.

  Sunlight exploded in his face. He raced over the hilltop and down towards the road through furze and hawthorns. A flock of bramblings swooped low across Yarner Wood. Now Wulfgar’s heart was punching out blood in loud blows. On the open heath he was much slower and weaker than the hounds. A train hooted, and gazing across the distant treetops he saw steam rising in white puffs.

  The pack came over the skyline at full cry. Wulfgar crossed the road and traversed Trendlebere, running at times through the trees on the edge of Yarner Wood. The Manaton-Bovey Tracey road was crowded with Galloways and Wulfgar ran among them, back and forth, up one verge and onto the other. Then he made a loop, dashing in from the road and returning to it twenty yards further down to enter the wood. A zig-zag course brought him to a pond that he swam before trotting down through gloomy copses to the River Bovey at Pullabrook.

  The hounds were breathing heavily as they quested below Yarner.

  ‘Leu in, leu – wind ’im,’ the huntsman cried, trying to lift them.

  Dashwood gave immediate tongue and was rated by the first whip. The lemon-coloured dog Camper ran wide, making urgent but meaningless noises in the scrub, and there was a short-lived clamour when Lancer, Tickler, Trimbush and Witness showed the pack round the loop and back to the road. The cattle stumbled up the verge and galloped off, bellowing and tossing their heads. The hounds checked and feathered until Lancer nosed Wulfgar’s line and belled. A swift, noisy run brought the pack to the pond and a sudden blank.

  The huntsman took half a dozen couples to the far side and they found the line and their voices again.

  ‘Old Blackie is a marvellous animal,’ Jenny Shewte said in the breezy tone of a convent school girl. She had no trouble in handling her bay with its plaited mane and oiled hooves.

  The Colonel’s mare was less lively but she kept slugging her head straight out. He made little clucking noises with his tongue and tried to soothe her.

  ‘You won’t be going to America, I take it?’ he said, smiling at Jenny.

  ‘No.’ She stood up in her stirrups. The field was moving off. ‘I couldn’t say goodbye to all this. I like Richard immensely and we’re the best of friends. I suppose I’ve grown up a bit since
the war. There’s no question of marriage.’

  ‘Has he proposed?’

  She coloured and shook her head.

  ‘He writes nice letters and says he’s coming back next year. That’s all.’

  ‘Different worlds,’ said her father.

  The Bovey was a fluorescent strip of light between two high slabs of shadow. Wulfgar crossed the river and trotted up the path under the bridge to Houndtor Wood. He was still in no great hurry. His paws kicked up the damp smell of decay from the ground under the trees. It was good to run into silence, leaving the din of the hounds subsiding on the field beside the Bovey where he had forded it.

  Cutting up through the trees he laid another loop, broad and far flung, running almost to the outlying cottages of Lustleigh and back once more to the river a quarter of a mile upstream. An old widow collecting acorns for her pigs saw Wulfgar pause to drink and trot on like a dog out for a stroll. She had seen scores of foxes but never one so big and dark. When the carrier bag was full she stepped briskly for home and presently met the pack as they were about to head up Wulfgar’s loop. Her news enabled the huntsman to whip the hounds along the bank until they picked up the fresh line and gave tongue in a fierce clamour.

  From Nutcrackers up Lustleigh Cleave to Foxworthy Copse the ground was tussocky and treeless. Lancer burst from the wood and caught a glimpse of Wulfgar a long way off. The heavy reek of fox clogged his nostrils and he threw a deep note that raced ahead of him to lift Wulfgar’s hackles.

  For the first time that morning the fox felt uneasy.

  A jay scolded him and harassed him through Foxworthy out into the sunshine again. Tightening his muscles he sprang to the right and repeated the ruse every dozen or so strides until he had laid five false lines. The hounds were in the copse now but he was climbing the hill, keeping low among the boulders. On the summit he dropped scats inside the remains of a prehistoric fort, ran around the grassy mounds, which had once been earthworks, and set off for Barnecourt Spinney in the coomb below.