She stopped complaining then, and stared at him for a moment, before saying, ‘I don’t know.’
‘I go off all the time,’ said Skelter, ‘and so do you. I might have been out in the fields, feeding. What made you so anxious this time?’
She shook her head vigorously.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I just… something made me worry, about us, as a family. It doesn’t matter now. The feeling’s gone. We’re safe – aren’t we?’
‘As safe as we’ll ever be. There are always the foxes, but then, there always have been.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘as safe as we’ll ever be.’
Skelter, like some fathers and mates, sensed this without really understanding it. So he said nothing about the flogre, not wishing to raise terrors in the young, who knew nothing of such things. So far as Eyebright was concerned, the flogre had gone some time ago, and was almost forgotten. Why cause the air to buzz with it anew, creating nightmares for his leveret? Why fashion a ghoul out of a handful of feathers floating on the breeze? Let them fall to the ground, be swallowed by the dust, become part of the earth.
The flogre was dead, long live the hares.
Afterword
This short afterword is for those readers curious as to the identity and origins of Bubba. He is in fact a harpy eagle with a metre-long body: the largest eagle in the world. His natural home is tropical South America. His normal diet, in the rain forests, would include monkeys, sloths, opossums and parrots. Harpy eagles usually live beneath the rain forest canopy, rarely venturing above, but Bubba had to adapt himself to the environment to which he was brought by the man who captured him as a chick.
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Also By Garry Kilworth
Novels
In Solitary (1977)
The Night of Kadar (1978)
Split Second (1979)
Gemini God (1981)
A Theatre of Timesmiths (1984)
Abandonati (1988)
Cloudrock (1988)
The Voyage of the Vigilance (1988)
The Street (1988) (writing as Garry Douglas)
Hunter's Moon (1989)
Midnight's Sun (1990)
Frost Dancers: A Story of Hares (1992)
House of Tribes (1995)
A Midsummer's Nightmare (1996)
Shadow Hawk (1999)
Angel
1. Angel (1993)
2. Archangel (1994)
Navigator Kings
1. The Roof of Voyaging (1996)
2. The Princely Flower (1997)
3. Land-of-Mists (1998)
Collections
The Songbirds of Pain (1984)
In the Hollow of the Deep-Sea Wave (1989)
In the Country of Tattooed Men (1993)
Garry Kilworth (1941 – )
Garry Douglas Kilworth was born in York in 1941 and travelled widely as a child, his father being a serviceman. After seventeen years in the RAF and eight working for Cable and Wireless, he attended King’s College, London University, where he obtained an honours degree in English. Garry Kilworth has published novels under a number of pseudonyms in the fields of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Historical Fiction and Children’s Fiction, winning the British and World Fantasy Awards and being twice shortlisted for the prestigious Carnegie Award for Children’s Literature.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Garry Kilworth 1992
All rights reserved.
The right of Garry Kilworth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11432 6
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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Frost Dancers: A Story of Hares Page 39
