A Job for All Seasons

by Phyllida Barstow

  That will be the moment when, as the fluffy bodies begin to stir among her feathers, Rattus will insinuate himself beneath her, hoping to abstract a chick stealthily, silently, without the hen becoming aware of his presence. It is a risky manoeuvre. The smallest cheep of protest from his victim will bring retribution in the shape of a furiously stabbing beak. He and Ratta, working as a team, have managed it many times, but never without danger. Tonight, though, Ratta is busy with her new family and anyway, it is too early to attempt a raid on his own. While the chicks are still encased in their shells, he would not get away unscathed.

  On, then, to the compost heap, which often provides enough decomposing vegetables to fill his gnawing belly, and after that it might be worth a visit to the dustbins. Loud voices and laughter accompanied by the chink of bottle on glass come from the house as he scuttles along the wall outside the kitchen but, despite the noise inside, Jacko registers his passing with a volley of barks which earn him a sharp reprimand.

  ‘Quiet, Jacko! Get in your basket!’

  From wall, to flowerbed, to tree, to wheelbarrow. A high, frosty moon has risen, and for a moment, Rattus crouches in the shadow of the slatted compost bin before clambering to the top. There a pungent, feral whiff assails his sensitive nose. Someone is sorting through the contents before him, nosing through the debris, snapping out choice morsels – someone else the terrier would very much like to meet.

  Wait and eat later, or risk a quick nibble? Rising on his hind legs, Rattus considers the scavenger, noting the sagging line of belly, the narrow neck and sharply angled shoulders. A gravid vixen, near whelping, probably too slow to catch him, though foxes are unpredictable: if hungry enough they would certainly crunch up a rat as big as himself. She has found the tufted crown of a pineapple and is delicately gnawing the fruity end while avoiding the spikes. The pared core may be close by, and that would be a prize worth eating.

  He may be safe if he moves carefully without attracting the vixen’s attention. Just to his right lies the hollowed-out skin of an avocado, for which he has a particular liking, plus one overripe specimen which has been thrown out untouched.

  Too good to miss. Keeping the vixen’s lowered brush towards him, Rattus creeps over the rotting cabbage leaves and potato peel and crouches down to nibble the greasy, succulent flesh inside the avocado rind, gradually relaxing as the vixen, too, continues to hunt for half-covered titbits. In preparing tonight’s dinner, Mrs Twolegs has been extravagant, discarding nearly a bucketful of old vegetables, including half a basin of coleslaw coated in mayonnaise, grated carrot, blackened bananas, even a scattering of mildewed grapes…

  Nosing back and forth, absorbed in his feast, Rattus is jerked from pleasure to sudden terror as a leggy, muscular dog-fox leaps lightly over the wooden slats surrounding the compost bin, landing almost on top of him.

  For an instant he freezes, then scuttles frantically for cover, but Tod’s reactions are too fast. Two slashing snaps, and Rattus’s single long-drawn-out squeal is cut short by an expert, neck-breaking upward shake. Five seconds later the King Rat lies dead among the kitchen scraps, a bumper portion for two hungry foxes.

  This change in Tod and Vixy’s luck comes just when they need it most. A den – hidden, dry, and well secured – has been prepared among the rocks of the old quarry above the farm’s top gate, and two alternative hideouts have been scouted in case the coming family has to be moved in a hurry. Knowing the birth was imminent, Vixy had been reluctant to hunt that night, lying panting in her favourite sheltered spot among the brambles as the sun went down, and lagging behind her mate when he trotted purposefully towards the farm buildings as dusk began to shroud the valley.

  Pearly dew is on the pasture, and young rabbits already venturing out of the hedges to graze, but the usual thick fringe of nettles stood blackened and bowed after a dose of selective herbicide, and Tod’s attempts to ambush rabbits by getting between them and the hedge have been frustrated again and again. Aware that in this condition she is too heavy to catch even the youngest, Vixy has lain watching at a distance, her laden belly stretched to the ground, yawning from time to time, stretching her long narrow jaws to the limit, and uttering small moans of frustration and impatience as hunger twinges. Apart from earthworms and a nest of blind, naked mouslings, she has eaten nothing that day and needs fresh protein urgently.

  Again she has lain watching from behind the low-hanging skirts of a yew-tree while Tod explored the haybarn, then bounded lightly on to the breeze-block partition separating the stables, and from there to the top of the wall beneath the roof. A maverick pullet had chosen to roost nightly on the girder supporting the A-frame, but she had prudently selected the very middle of the span, and after tiptoeing a couple of yards towards her, Tod decided that the girder was too narrow, the drop too great for it to be worth risking a twelve-foot fall onto concrete, and cautiously retreated.

  By then it is nearly midnight, and as he crouches on the top of the wall, considering where to jump down, the porch door creaks open and light streams into the yard. A little unsteadily, Bill Twolegs comes out, followed by another man.

  ‘Bed-time, Jacko. Here, Shep,’ he calls. ‘Come on, boys, into your kennel.’

  Both foxes keep completely still. The old sheepdog would never bother to hunt them, but the busy terrier is an ever-present menace.

  Paws patter and shoes scrunch across the gravel. Points of light from two cigars glow in the darkness.

  ‘Beautiful night,’ says the visitor. ‘Just look at those stars. That’s what we miss in London.’

  ‘Here you are, good boys. Biscuits.’ Twolegs shuts the kennel door and posts Bonios through the bars.

  ‘When do you start lambing?’ asks the stranger.

  ‘Oh! Well, pretty soon. Officially they’re not due for a week yet, but we’ve brought the ewes close to the house already, so Jenny can keep an eye on them. Keeps her binoculars on the windowsill, because she says they’re just as likely to be early as late.’

  ‘Well, I suppose that makes sense. People are, after all,’ says his companion, laughing.

  ‘Besides, the weather’s always chancy in April,’ grumbles Twolegs. ‘Never know where you are – temperatures in double figures one day and hailstorms the next. We’ve built the pens, anyway, and I mean to bring most of them in on Monday.’

  Presently the porch door slams behind them and, to annoy Jacko who is growling impotently from behind the bars, Tod sprays urine on the kennel wall then saunters across to the game-larder near the farm gate, where the drain often yields scraps of meat or congealed blood. Nothing doing tonight, however. The drain has been hosed down and the acrid smell of Jeyes Fluid overlays any aroma of animal blood or guts. Nevertheless, Tod deposits a neat cylindrical dropping with a jauntily twisted tail on the smoothly mown grass outside the larder as evidence of his passing, before moving on to investigate the compost heap…

  When nothing remained of Rattus but his scaly, truncated tail, Vixy’s energy revives, and she leads the way through the garden hedge into the steep, narrow lane behind the farmhouse. Cow parsley, with leaves just beginning to uncurl, fringes its banks, making a deep, defensive shelter for the hen pheasant who sits statue-still on her camouflaged eggs not more than a yard away from the foxes’ keen noses, but Nature has so concentrated her body temperature beneath her abdomen that she gives off no scent to attract predators, and they trot past without winding her.

  Nor does the badger who bundles down the steep bank into the lane, her mouth stuffed with white plastic netting from inside a silage bale, which she intends to use for bedding. Protected as she is by law, she has no cause to fear humans. Indeed, her decision to excavate a commodious sett under the floor of Mrs Twolegs’s summerhouse might have been seen as deliberate provocation of the species which persecuted her family so cruelly in the past.

  ‘Bloody badgers!’ Twolegs mutters resignedly, as he trips over the ever-increasing heap of spoil. ‘Why can’t they build their houses in the w
oods and leave my garden alone?’

  When the clumsy, lolloping figure of Mrs Brock disappears into the docks on the other side of the lane, the foxes shrink into the undergrowth as a car full of late revellers roars past them, its stereo system sending shockwaves through the still air. A hundred yards further on, they slip under the bottom bar of a stile into a narrow spinney, where their own threadlike trails weave between tall tree trunks and among young brambles which are just springing up, and will soon overwhelm the withering daffodils.

  Their regular nightly round encompasses most of a neighbouring farm, where ham bones, deer carcases, or the remains of fallen stock can sometimes be found in a deep, illegal flesh-pit covered with branches, but tonight there is nothing worth eating, so they continue through the wood and across two fields, keeping in the shadow of the hedge.

  From time to time Tod pauses to mark a tree or stone, warning off interlopers. This is home ground, well away from humans, and he threads his way confidently through the herd of bullocks lying on the edge of a low bank, and into the hollow channel between two boundary fences, only slowing to a belly-down crawl under the bare branches of an ancient oak, in front of which a semi-circle of brambles fringes close-nibbled turf to make a perfect nursery for rabbits.

  Old and young, large and small, they bob in and out of the extensive bury on its edge, some with quick, lively movements, while others hop languidly, their eyes swollen with the onset of myxomatosis.

  Softly as a shadow, Tod moves towards the nearest, freezing every time the rabbit looks up, stealing forward again when its head bends to the turf. One slow, stealthy step, legs bent, belly to ground, ears almost meeting… Another… Another, and he is within pouncing distance, his victim still nibbling unconcernedly, unaware of his presence.

  Tensing his muscles, the fox springs, but his jaws close on empty air. In a single silent, deadly swoop the barn owl who has been sitting on the bare branch above drops on the baby rabbit, talons outstretched. Gripping securely, she glares round, mantling her kill with hunched wings, daring Tod to challenge for possession.

  His brush droops as the adrenalin drains from him. He turns away, knowing he is beaten. There is no point in lunging at the owl: she will simply carry her prize back to the hunting roost and devour it there. Already her fierce beak has begun to tear the rabbit apart, and her leavings would hardly amount to a meal for one, let alone two. He looks around for his mate and gives a low call.

  Vixy has taken no part in stalking the rabbit. Instead she has lagged behind in the sheltered paddock where Two-legs’s thirty ewes are spending the last week of their pregnancy. Like huge powderpuffs with udders already tight and bellies spreading either side, they lie sheltered from the night wind by a stand of lime trees, propping their backs against the rough trunks, and take no notice of the vixen nosing round their trough in search of any stray high-protein cube they might have missed. Two-legs doesn’t believe in wasting feed, however, and nothing at all remains of the carefully-measured ration he doled out at dusk.

  The moon has set and a faint lightening in the east is announcing the approach of a misty, murky dawn when Vixy pauses in her scavenging and cocks her ears at a familiar sound. Jenny Twolegs was right: in the far corner of the paddock, under the hedge and as well away as she could get from the rest of the flock, one of the ewes has just produced a lamb, and it is the soft, eager slurping and grunting with which she is cleaning up her firstborn and urging him to rise that has attracted Vixy’s attention.

  Both foxes draw nearer and crouch, watching, but the ewe is far too absorbed to notice them. She is a first-time mother, guided by instinct rather than experience, and instinct is bombarding her with conflicting impulses: lie down, stand up, stand still, whirl round, look after this importunate white scrap that has appeared behind you, don’t allow it to touch you…

  He is a strapping lamb, quickly up on his wobbly legs, and he has a clear idea of what he is looking for, though less certainty about its location. For long, frustrating minutes he nuzzles blindly, too high, too low, at the wrong end, while his mother skips and pivots in small circles, sometimes urging him on, sometimes knocking him over.

  The foxes lie immobile and intent, watching for their chance.

  Five minutes pass before the ewe stands still and at last the lamb fastens on one of her small, rubbery teats, whisking his tail as the warmth flows into him. In response his mother nudges his back and haunches, helping him to bond, uttering little grunting rumbles, deep in her throat.

  He loses the teat, finds it again, suckling more confidently, and finally sinks down between her forelegs while she licks and licks, drying the lanolin until his small fleece becomes white and fluffy. He tries to suckle again, but now the ewe is becoming restive once more, moving a few steps away, lying down with her lips pursed, nose raised to the sky and then standing up again, anxiously checking that her lamb is still close by.

  Lying down, she heaves and groans. With every minute that passes, her whole being becomes concentrated more fiercely on expelling the second lamb, but however much she struggles and strains she makes no progress. At last one sharp little hoof emerges, then the nose and most of the head, but the second foreleg is tucked back, preventing the lamb’s smooth passage to the outside world.

  The foxes move nearer, but she ignores them. To and fro she threshes, groaning with effort, her struggles churning up the grass into mud, but to no avail. At last she stops fighting and lies panting. She tries to rise and collapses again, uttering an exhausted bleat.

  The ram lamb bleats in answer. He gets up from where he was lying and begins to totter towards his mother, but with smooth, synchronised movements the foxes intercept him. Lowering his head, he stares at them, aware of their menace, then turns to flee.

  Too late. A brief flurry of snapping jaws end his life almost as soon as it has begun. Each carrying a leg, the foxes drag the still-quivering body to the fence and force it through to the other side, their lips drawn back to tug and jerk as it snags on the squared wire, leaving giveaway tufts of curly fleece. Not until they are a couple of hundred yards away, out of sight of the farmhouse, do they pull the limp body under a hawthorn bush and begin to tear it apart.

  Oblivious of her loss, the ewe strains again and again, but with each contraction her strength is ebbing, while the protruding head of the second lamb begins to swell and turn blue. Her struggles become intermittent, with longer and longer intervals between them. At last she gives up trying.

  When the alarm goes off at six, Jenny Twolegs slides out of bed and flicks back the bedroom curtains. Sweeping her binoculars slowly over the recumbent flock in the Home Paddock, she breathes a sigh of relief. All lying together. All well – and today she will bring the ewes into the barn. Her husband may complain that it is too early, no lambs are due for a week yet and what is the sense in feeding them expensive hay when there is still plenty of grass in the paddock? But from her point of view it is too nerve-racking having them out in the open any longer. At least she is in control when the ewes are in pens. She is about to put down the binoculars and get dressed when she catches sight of a whitish hump under the hedge in the far corner of the paddock. Even at this distance the trampled mud all round shows clear signs of a struggle.

  ‘Oh, God!’ she murmurs, adjusting the focus and staring intently.

  Pausing only to pull rubberised trousers and smock over her pyjamas, she grabs the bucket of lambing essentials from the chest in the porch and runs out into the misty field…

  With her hunger properly satisfied at last, Vixy feels an urgent need to return to her den, and starts alone up the line of hedge towards the wood. Tod sniffs around for a soft patch of earth, which he digs up and buries the lamb’s telltale remains in the hole before urinating nearby. The cache will probably be found and eaten by badgers, who care nothing for laws of property, but instinct warns Tod not to leave anything above ground. Then he follows Vixy into the wood, angling across the slope through the leaves of wild garlic unt
il he strikes the path, rutted with quad-bike tracks, that runs all the way round one of the large release pens, which have been built along the edge of the field at the top of the wood. Constructed of tall posts and wire too high for any predator to jump, each pen is guarded with one or two high seats built into the first major fork of suitable trees, which reinforce the impression of a concentration camp.

  At this time of year the pens are empty, shooting having closed in February, but in a month from now each of the regularly spaced coops will house a sitting bird, and already the gamekeeper and his sidekick are busy strengthening their defences, laying water-pipes and scouting for holes in the wire.

  Having once experienced a terrifying jolting shock, Tod knows better than to touch the low electrified wire carefully strung between the path and fence, but like many wild animals he uses human paths where they suit his purpose.

  Now he trots quietly along it to join Vixy, who has paused to sniff at the rotting carcase of a rabbit at the side of the path, her russet coat glowing in the sun’s early rays as they filter through a network of budding beech-leaves. After a moment’s investigation she lies down and rolls in it, squirming luxuriously as she works the pungent stench well into her shoulders and ruff to mask her own scent. Tod sits down and yawns widely, awaiting his turn.

  Metal gleams dully in the branches above. Phut! hisses the silenced .243. An instant later, phut! again.

  Grouch, the underkeeper, is a dead shot. After a moment he climbs stiffly down from the high seat where he has been watching for roe.

  ‘Two on ’em,’ he mutters, turning the dead foxes over with his boot, looking for signs of mange. The vixen is near whelping, her coat in poor condition, but the dog fox is in good nick. His pelt will be worth a bit, though he thinks there is no need to mention it to his boss, old Skint.