by Rob Cowen
Standing there on the margin, listening to the faraway chatter of swarming corvids and watching the spectacle of night drawing a veil over the river, time and space seemed to slip and reel. All at once, I was on top of the viaduct; down by the fire and among the feathery swarm of rooks. Although it had appeared to reach its end, the long, straight track of the old railway had derailed me into a multiplicity of time, body and space. The air was thick with the sour-sweet tang of slurry, leaf-litter and pine. Then a more urgent, sweaty-smoky reek clamped over my nose and mouth, that rancid but unmistakable coming alive of irrepressible earth and animal. Fox.
Where? I wanted to see it. I wanted to glimpse the creature I shared this timeless twilight with. Keeping out of sight, I scanned the woods from my position high in the canopy, before clambering back over the shutters to search among the brambles, finding nothing. A few days later, though, it found me.
The smell was there when I returned at dusk to carry on plotting the next side of the perimeter, the edge-land’s northern boundary. Turning right at the viaduct, I took a rough track leading east along the edge of the meadow’s curtain of trees and down into the wood. Despite the onset of night, I followed the Nidd downstream, guided by the weak circle of a head torch, past drowned trees and along a muddy edge. The water tricked and teased, appearing still, not even a ripple giving away movement. I noticed a branch and a plastic cider bottle held in its surface overtaking me. The sudden presence of the fox was just as bewildering. Its scent, strong and sharp as cut lemons, crowded, pressed and pushed me, as though the animal was dancing between my legs, mocking my cumbersome, slithering progress. At moments I was sure it must be right behind or beside me, but each time I turned, my beam only emphasised the wood’s emptiness, silvering briefly the bars of beech and oak bristling the banks.
I fell back to the task in hand: making notes on distance travelled, cross-checking my location with the old OS map and striking a rough outline of the edge-land in my notebook. The next human mark wasn’t far away: the large weir I’d found on New Year’s Eve and, in my drawings at least, the region’s easternmost point from where it rose up and headed south in a final continuous track all the way back to the crossing point. The weir announced its position first, roaring with the previous night’s rainfall. My torchlight touched the long raised hump that spanned the river; water broke over it into a spumy waterfall that seethed down its cobbled slope. Lurking in the shadows of the far bank was a building whose small windows set in a solid, strong wall gave the impression of a scowl – the architectural expression of industry. Newly rendered stonework and posh cars parked in its drive suggested a private house, but the weir was a giveaway of its origins. Mills had once mirrored each other on opposite banks. One had crumbled, one survived; now the water held the only reflection. The ground where I stood still had the ghost of foundations, a muddy clearing pocked and chipped with roots and buried stones. Nearby, presumably set up to take advantage of the view of the Nidd’s continuing journey east, I found the stone-ringed blackened ground and ash of an old campfire. It had been lit about the same place as the ruined mill’s hearth would once have been. Here the smell of the fox was strongest. I rounded the trees and breathed its musty trace, trying to discern a route, stepping, pausing, sniffing and moving again until I lost the trail near an uprooted beech. Some way off to my right I heard the fleet-footed scarper of animal through brush. It’s marking territory, I thought. Just like me.
One final pencil stroke needed drawing: the eastern border. It was the connecting line of the perimeter and, fittingly, the way I’d first entered the edge-land. Now it would take me back the opposite way. I headed up a set of steps and then on to a track called Milner’s Lane – most likely a derivation of ‘Miller’s Lane’ – which rises south through the woodland to where the trees funnel, telescope-like, into the holloway. In places the interwoven saplings and shrubs squeezed in so closely that they felt like hands holding my shoulders. I pushed on with the sense I was swimming for the surface from too deep in a dark sea. Red aircraft warning flares winked from turbines on far-off moors. Closer was Harrogate’s nebula of lights flashing like a zoetrope through the black stems and twigs. Then I was out and breathing. Behind me, the aperture of the holloway shrivelled as I strode towards the crossing point over moonlit fields, descending through a last few hundred yards of wooded tunnel rank with the stink of fox. Over the crossing point, at the street lights of Bilton Lane, I closed my notebook and looked back. The dots were joined; I had navigated some form of the edge-land’s limits. But even as I traced that final line with my pen I knew all attempts at fixity were an illusion. Scratching the surface had already revealed far more than I could hope to contain in a cartographic triangle.
I see the fox for the first time on the same day I lose my job. It is an amicable split over lunchtime beers but no less worrying. ‘The business is downsizing. Last in first out. I’m very sorry.’ His hands are shaking so I make it easy. Besides, there is a catch in his voice, a fear for his own future. Well-founded, as it turns out. Everywhere is talk of cuts, job losses and economic turmoil the likes of which the world has never seen. Across my own industry, in writing and journalism, fees are being dropped and positions slashed. Writing, it seems, has gone from a profession to a luxury, an aside indulged in by those who have a ‘real’ job too. I heard a minister talking on the radio yesterday saying: ‘Given we are in a recession, anything that cannot justify its existence financially has to go.’ What, like education? I wanted to shout. Like libraries? Like a reed warbler? Like love? And go where exactly? Out to the shed with a revolver? Do the honourable thing and leave the world to those who think solely in economic terms? How did we ever get this far, confusing what is necessary for life with what living is about? To make it worse, I couldn’t shake the image of him slinking off the mic, taking a congratulatory call from the party whip and letting his thoughts turn to an upcoming two-week break in Tuscany or somewhere. It seemed such a removed existence, so unreal.
I call Rosie, my wife, who is still working most of the week in London, and she falls quiet when I tell her the news. ‘It’ll be OK,’ she says, even though we’re both thinking the opposite. We bury our fears about moments like this but it’s only ever a shallow grave. The profound uncertainty of it all is dredged from our unconscious as we sleep, manifesting as a strange 4 a.m. panic, a cold world that (you hope) melts away with the daylight.
After leaving the pub I forgo the quietness of our empty house for the edge-land and wander along the lane up into the fields. I need space. I’m vexed by an earworm: the words ‘recession bites’ – currently in every strapline and news VT – bounce around my head. It is a curious, irregular verb ‘to bite’, but it feels appropriate. Almost the first thing I find is a crow, an offering, headless, its chest open and the keel of its breastbone picked clean white. It lies back in the mud with its wings spread as if it has fallen out of the sky. I know this is the fox’s work. I can smell it everywhere. Chances are it was disturbed and marked its prey, intending to return. Nearby I find a torn hole pushed through the vegetation, a gap in the fuzz where new growth has been restricted by regular passage. The tatty circle promises open field beyond and, crouching, I can make out a shallow trench disappearing up and over the dirt. Half-pissed and growing sick of my human skin, I push through.
A pink-grey film of sunset behind pylons reflects in puddles between the dark, ploughed peaks of soil. Shards of sky shine in a hundred tiny fjords, briefly turning earth to heaven. Pressed into the churned ground between my feet is a single deer print. Inspection reveals it is a decent size with dewclaws visible, a roebuck’s. I search around but see no other, only this single hieroglyph lifted out of context months ago by a farmer’s plough. Ahead, a fat woodpigeon settles and bobs into a cluster of holly; I follow and find the indentation of a deer’s laying-up point scattered with white hair. Around it are clumps of badger-dug earth tilled by its bear-like paws on the hunt for a rabbit nest. It is darkening but
I’m drawn further by the fox’s scent, west, tracing prints, walking deep into the heart of the edge-land. Waves of brambles as high as my head catch my clothes. Each tug on jacket or trouser works free a thread and unpicks a layer in me too. Moving through this terrain it becomes impossible to hold onto the cares and concerns of town: my worries about money and work. Through the saplings and brambles, the changing light and sounds, my attention cannot rest for long on anything; all things rush up and are absorbed in a second – the dry rattle-caw of a crow concealed in a black ash, the sour reek of fox sprayed on the frigid earth.
My eyes adjust. As the fields swallow the last of the day I crawl under a hedge and trudge across soil as thick and dark as chocolate cake. There is a little wooded valley ahead and, from within it, a barking. The fox? No, it’s more dog-like, a hoarse rasp, a smoker’s cough. I slip down an escarpment to a beck where it echoes again, followed by the crash of undergrowth. A flash of white rump bounding into inky brush – deer. It was a roe throating a warning. I’m standing still, wondering what other creatures are moving about me in the darkness, when I realise I’m sinking. Ankle-deep sludge drowns my shoes, forcing me to wade quickly forward in blind, belching steps until, leaping a stagnant pool, I land face-first on a muddy bank.
The fox manifests as I kneel there trying to catch my breath and work out where I am. I begin to right myself when a tree’s shadow morphs into an ebony silhouette, a shape from another realm trotting, head raised, along the treeline, fifteen, maybe twenty metres away. It is large, full-grown and winter-pelted, with a thick tail that it drags semi-submerged through the scrub like a rudder, scenting its wake. Seconds pass and I realise I’m holding my breath, immersed in the smell, the stillness, the sheer immediacy of it all; I’m willing it to drag me under, entranced by its indifference. There, look, I want to say, there’s your proof of another world, an earlier world, a greater world beyond economic justification. There tiptoes the counterpoint. And I want to join it. Follow it. But just as quickly and quietly as it appeared, the fox slips away. The door closes. When I reach the outline of town again, the street lights stab my eyes into streams. I’m numb with cold, caked in mud, shivering with the thrill of encounter.
The red fox (Vulpes vulpes) has endured a long and abusive relationship with our species, much like edge-lands. However, unlike many rural mammals in the UK, which have seen a sharp decline brought about by hunting, modern farming methods and the privatisation and monoculturalism of land, the fox has adapted to whatever environment we have thrust upon it, sticking for the most part to its own set of territorial rules. This adaptability – which experts term ‘biological plasticity’ – has kept fox numbers steady, in spite of our attempts to destroy them and their traditional habitats. In fact, paradoxically, there has been a proliferation. They are common. Relentless. Elusive. They have forced themselves upon us, and us on them. When you look into it the figures suggest that the UK has 225,000 foxes alive at any one time, a number that almost doubles during the breeding season. As much as 14 per cent of that population is thought to inhabit our towns and cities, although given their ghostliness I’m not sure how we’d ever know for certain. Regardless, the fox is probably now more an enmeshed part of the urban experience than that of the lone walker in a field; it possesses a wildness that shocks twilight streets, a feral face that flashes across parks and patios, effortlessly slipping between worlds.
No doubt because of our begrudging coexistence over millennia, the fox has come to symbolise many things in human art and literature. As I lie curled up in bed, my skin zinging and red after a hot bath, I read of how many Far Eastern cultures once recognised this animal as the embodiment of the shape-shifter, able to move between realms and bodies, neither fully human nor animal. In other societies, the fox is a shamanistic talisman, the animal form of ‘psychopomp’. I feel a twinge of excitement, for I know this word. Psychopomps are guides on spiritual journeys or rites of passage, the beings responsible for escorting souls to the afterlife. Based on this notion of the transitional creature, psychologist Carl Jung appropriated the term in the 1930s to refer to the mediator between unconscious and conscious realms. I switch out the light and listen to heavy freight rumbling a downstairs window in its frame. A low hum, like a chant. It all seems portentous, foretelling.
Finding the fox again is no easy business, but it feels imperative. As the last of my pay rots away and living suddenly alone, with no work to contain me, I turn away from town, beyond its jurisdiction, and spend whole days rooting through the overgrown hedges searching for tracks, kills and bone-filled twists of black fox shit. The house grows messier, but I don’t mind. I’m too busy peering down the tunnel-vision perspectives of lanes over fields that look as though I’m viewing them through the wrong end of a telescope. The edge-land is overpowering at times. Consolatory, cold, late afternoons before rain are painted a beautiful duck-egg blue and pink and sweetened with drifting woodsmoke. Rooks blow across the narrow aperture of my vision like the wind-blown ash. With no foliage to subdue it, light blooms and burns in the wood, sending shadows of trees creeping down the slopes, over me, towards the river. It is as though their spirits have slipped from the trunks to drink. Along the lane or down by the Nidd, saplings caught in a rising breeze quiver and clatter in woody notes against each other. At night I listen to their xylophonic sounds in distinct octaves, their tunings dependent on each tree’s thickness. They gather and crack, knock, creak, groan in communion. One second their bone beats are echoing far away, the next they are shockingly loud and right behind me, as rhythmical as falling footsteps. Walking alone in the dark, I suddenly fancy I’m being followed by a long-dead cattle drover leading his longhorns to market, a weather-cracked face under a rough hat, teeth clamped around a clay pipe. When I summon the nerve to look, he is gone; his white eyes are just holes in a holly hedge.
I find the fox beneath a pine. Actually, if I didn’t know better I’d say he sprang out of the tree, one of three Scots pines that grow where the wood joins the meadow. In man’s hierarchies of timber, pine is a commoner. It is the cheap stuff, the material sliced down and split for flat-pack furniture; the very name maligned as the fragrance of toilet cleaner and taxis. Compared to mahogany or walnut, the alluring cedar or the majestic oak, pine is plantation fodder, plentiful and useful but with no class. This centuries-old tree begs to differ. With its resplendent poise and beauty, it is the very essence of wildness and craggy moor, a poster boy from the ancient Caledonian Forest. Winter fiddles with colour filters dragging down tones, desaturating until the landscape takes on the drab hues of a 1940s cine film. In contrast, this tree’s bright trunk glows copper, rising over a tangle of bramble to bend gracefully at the top where it is persuaded eastwards by the prevailing wind. Its lowest branches are snapped short, spiky, bristling, without bloom and with little more than a haze of ochre, but higher up the thick branches that meet its circular core are sculpted arms. Just like a waiter carrying a tray, each fawn limb holds up a nest of needles that range from silver-green to a jade green-blue. A wind stirs them into life so that the whole canopy suddenly resembles an animal rising, the mist of needles shoaling and shimmering in the way fur ripples over muscle. As the gusts build, these coalesce and then separate, kaleidoscoping the darkening steel sky behind and creating a swirling vortex of green, silver and rust. It is magnetic. A passing magpie, caught by a blast of wind under its wing, is consumed by the whirlpool and disappears into its depths. At that moment the fox is birthed below, into the meadow. At first indistinct from the reddish trunk, he trots down to the frosted grass, eyes screwed tight, blinking in the last light. When he turns back, I follow him as far as I can. True to his mythical function, the fox is escorting me into this land.
Out there my hands freeze and thaw as notes are made obsessively, messily. Rain, when it falls, blots the ink. I record where I see the fox, where he moves and what he shows me. New spidery lines are required and scribbled over my ordered maps. The rough courses of his runs are b
umpily drawn, approximated, often while walking. And he is a he, I’m sure of it. Although differences between the sexes are fairly indistinguishable at a distance, there are certain telltale signs when you get close enough, with size being the obvious one. I estimate he is about seventy centimetres in length, a figure I arrived at by measuring the space between two twigs on a fallen pine that he crossed near the weir. Halfway along he turned and looked straight in my direction. I had time to memorise his face, its broad head and long, narrow snout. He looked thinner. Haggard. Only those baleful eyes remained a roaring furnace of defiance.
Another day I find a blackbird limping on the ground with its eyes shut. It lacks the strength to take to higher branches and hops feebly away from me along the old railway into wiry caves of bramble, as if seeking refuge from the very air. Another scolds me and hurls past, diving beak-first into a moss-grown elder thicket. There are no melodies past the last line of gardens on Bilton Lane. Birds camp by feeders like refugees around cooking fires, hunched and hungry. Across all the fields and down the holloway I hear only one rusty chip of a solitary great tit. It is late afternoon under a high lead and gold sky and everywhere is bleak and empty, the temperature is the sort that robs your lungs of breath. Tundra air. Frost sparkles the spiders’ webs between stems of dead cow parsley. Weather forecasters predict –10 tonight and the trees seem anxious. In the deepest part of the wood their trunks are starting to crawl with frost and they reach for each other with long, trembling branches. They know what’s coming. Hardest hit are the insect-eating birds. The usual morsel-filled cracks and holes in bark are swollen hard with ice and yet it is a leaf- and seed-eater, a woodpigeon, I find dead on its back beneath a pylon. Ice has already softened the grey of its feathers into white and its face is a blur, like old fruit sagging with mould. I only notice it at all because of its two comically curled, pink feet, frozen stiff and sticking up in the air as though struck down in bed mid-prayer to the steel giant above. What I first mistake for a rook taking flight turns out to be a shredded black bin bag caught in the pylon’s struts, tirelessly lifting and settling. I watch it for a while flapping in the wind until the cold becomes too much. In the backyard, cutting firewood for the stove, the axe tings uselessly off logs as though they are steel.
