The next time she saw Gar, however, he was as grumpy as he had been on their first meeting, and she guessed he was one of those animals that needed to be in the right mood for a conversation, and those kind of moods came very seldom.
One evening, when she was out hunting, she came across an old disused shed in a copse not far from a human dwelling. She noted this and checked around the rotten timbers for footprints or recent signs that men had been there. She found nothing to arouse her fears. Inside the shed were some metal implements, all rusting away and joined to the shed walls by the lacy traps set by spiders for their prey. Tufts of grass were growing through the floorboards and a shelf hung down like a slide from under the glassless window. There was a blackbird’s nest, tucked high up in one corner: a good indication that the place was not frequented by humans.
It had been worrying O-ha for some time that she would be exposing her cubs to danger by having them in the badgers’ sett. Possibly the badgers would not harm them, but a fox likes complete security for her young and O-ha was no different from any other vixen. This shed might be a good place to have the cubs. The grass between the house and the shed, which stood at some three hundred yards distance, was high and had not been trampled. Perhaps some old humans lived in the house: people too frail to use their shed any longer? Whatever, it did not seem as if the hut had been visited for a long time. Another good thing in its favour was that the door was still secure. She could only enter through the small window. A dog would have great difficulty in following her through that high hole. Only squirrels, birds and bats could enter, and she was not concerned about such creatures.
So she set her heart on using the small shed.
Until the time came, she would continue to live in the sett. It was convenient to be in a place where others could guard her stores of food, even if they did not realise they were doing it. Like all her kind, O-ha was a great hoarder, which made her an untidy creature to live with, but since the badgers left her to her own part of the complex, there was no one to complain. O-ha marked her chamber frequently. She scattered the feathers of birds, the inedible parts of vegetables, the bones of her prey all over the chamber and outside, around her personal entrance to the sett. She heard some rumblings about this from some of the badgers, but though she promised herself to become tidier, she never put such promises into action. A fox has far more important things to think about than cleaning up around the place.
The days slid into weeks. Iron grey skies were broken only by the occasional day of weak sunlight. There were no heavy snowfalls, but rain and sleet lashed down quite often and made life a little easier. The smaller creatures were washed out of their homes and hunting was not as difficult as it might be. The humans stayed inside their houses when the rainstorms were sweeping across the land, and in any case, the ground was too wet to hold much of a scent.
One day, when Scresheen was screaming across the fields, blowing rubbish in all directions, and snapping the branches from trees; when the hares were doing silly things out in the fields and weasels danced in front of stupefied rabbits, before flying at their throats; when hawks dropped out of nowhere on unsuspecting mice – on such a day O-ha felt strange things happening inside her. She made the briefest goodbye call on Gar, telling him she was leaving.
‘Where you going?’ he asked, surprised.
‘To see the world,’ she said.
‘Ha. Well give it some kick from me,’ he said.
‘I will,’ she said. ‘And thank you for the kindness. You took me in when I was at my wits end.’
‘Pah. You look to them cubs, vixen. I see you someday. Gar see you when he nosing around that big old world, and you come back full of great things. Ha.’
She left the sett with a few misgivings, but these were soon dispelled when she reached the small shed. There were no indications that anyone, dog or man, had been near it since she was there last. She jumped through the window and settled down on some old sacks in the corner, to give birth to her cubs.
It was a painful business.
Chapter Six
Once upon a time, there was no hav or havnot for the wind-walking foxes. There was no face, which is the word for land now covered in concrete, brick and asphalt, and consequently, no gerflan, which is land not usually frequented by humans, such as military ranges. For a long time after Cle-am, the Long Hot Wind, shaped the world, the land was just the land, consisting of earth and sky, and after A-O, rivers and ponds. The immediate descendants of the first heroes and heroines had no need to give areas special names because it was all one and the same. In those days when the world was still warm underfoot, and the rocks were living things that moved ponderously over the landscape like giant snails, there were no humans. There were wolves, deer, tree martens, wildcats, but no men. There were forests then, stretching into infinity, and the universe was green from end to end, from top to bottom. Birds carried mouthfuls of seed – cow parsley, primrose, ragged robin, restharrow, vetch, coltsfoot, dandelion, tutsan – scattering them over the new soils. Then the first rains came, and the earth smelled good, the plants smelled green.
In the beginning, before the animals learned the effects of different fungi and herbs, they had to taste them all. Some became sick, some became addicts of hallucinogenic plants and wandered the world in a bemused state, some died. Gradually, they learned the good and the bad. Foxglove and deadly nightshade were to be left well alone. Chives, wild horseradish, tansy, ground elder, chicory, were good. Mugwort and wormwood, bitter and pungent smelling, were to be avoided. Amongst the fungi, parasol, chanterelle, cep, deceiver, wood blewitt, grisette, were good. Devil’s boletus, yellow-stainer, fly agaric, death cap, destroying angel, were bad. Once the experiments were over, the plants identified according to use or non-use, then the information went into chants and songs, which were passed down the generations. This was after the creatures of the earth had found their voices.
The first sound had come from a grasshopper, rubbing his legs together in delight, following a good meal. The noise stunned the rest of the animals and birds, since until that moment the world had been utterly silent. A blackbird found its voice and told the grasshopper to quieten down. A jackdaw yelled at the blackbird to watch the noise. A wolf told the jackdaw to mind its own business. Pretty soon, all the animals and birds were calling to one another, and many have not stopped since that time.
Only the rocks and stones refused to add to the cacophonous choir, as the animals and birds found their voices and practised with them. These solid members of the community were dense in more ways than one. In those early times even the mountains were as gentle as moths.
When the first humans arrived they frightened the timid rocks and stones so profoundly that they froze in their tracks and never moved again. The new two-legged animals began cutting down the forests and clearing the land until it lay bare and cold under the moonwatch. All things became their prey. The fox-spirits roamed the land, creating sowanders, or holy places, where the ground had been soaked in the blood of martyrs, killed not for food but simply because they wore red coats, walked on four legs, and refused to capitulate like the dogs and cats. One by one many other animals fell under the tyranny of man, some resisting, some too timid to put up a fight. The horses fought and went down early. Many of the pigs held out for a long time, in the remains of the forests, but they too were overcome eventually. The wolves, cousins of the foxes, refused to give ground and were exterminated. Foxes themselves changed to meet the new circumstances: they went underground and took to using the night, instead of the day. They survived by wit and guile, by stealth and determination. They became ghosts, fleeting wraiths that men only caught sight of out of the corners of their eyes.
One of the reasons for the successful survival of the foxes was that they elected no leaders to follow blindly into hopeless battles. There were, and are, no king-foxes, or chief-foxes, or shamans, or tribal elders. They did not form packs, like the wolves, or herds, like the deer. They recognised no
oligarchies or heads of any kind. Each dog fox was his own leader, relying only on himself. No vixen followed any instructions or orders from any other fox. They had no totems, nor sacred stones, which could be used to trap them in certain places. They had no organisation to bind them to specific actions. They remained as individuals, able to adapt to circumstances as external changes took place. They did not howl at the moon, or turn the sun into a deity. Even the sowanders were merely places where a fox could cross but not remain: in other words, areas in which it was forbidden to stay rather than places where they would gather, like the wolves around a sacred tree, or overhang. There was no spot which man could point to and say, ‘That’s where the foxes gather – we can wait there and ambush them.’ The foxes took notice of, but did not worship, their ancestors, the fox-spirits of the Firstdark.
Since those times foxes have managed to keep to their solitary ways, living in small groups that meet up with other groups only occasionally and never by design. They use many voices, from a cold bark to a banshee scream, to fool any listeners. They use the darkness as a cloak. They never rush or hurry, knowing that such feverish activity might be fine for other creatures, such as the shrew or hare, but for them a cool, clear head and calculated movement is more likely to keep them alive.
All this, O-ha was prepared to tell her cubs once they had grown to an age where they could understand. There were six in the litter and she licked them clean with an air of contentment. They were hers and she was prepared to defend them to the death. On the first day, she managed to catch a rat that came into the hut, but she now realised she had a grave problem. There was no dog fox to hunt for the family while she stayed and kept the young warm. At the bottom of the garden to the house, she found a sack of rotten potatoes which had been thrown on to a compost heap, but when these ran out she knew she had a problem facing her.
As it happened, she was seen from the window of the house by one of the occupants, and to her surprise food was left for her about half-way down the garden. Gar had mentioned this strange behaviour by some of the humans – how they would leave food for wild creatures and watch them eat it from behind their windows – and she could not believe her luck in having found such people. They did the same for the hedgehogs which became alarmed by the presence of a fox and were constantly rolling into balls on O-ha’s approach. Had she been starving, she might have attempted to get at the creatures, but the food was sufficient to sustain her and she knew from her days as a cub that hedgehogs were almost impenetrable. Certainly she had never met a fox yet who had managed to make a meal out of one of the prickly beasts.
When the cubs were eight days old, the food source suddenly disappeared. The house appeared empty and it seemed the occupants had gone away temporarily. They had done so without realising how much O-ha relied upon their generosity, possibly thinking that they were merely supplementing her diet, rather than keeping her alive. She was bereft of support and had to wander further afield in order to keep herself fed and her milk flowing.
The next human dwelling, beyond the small cottage, was a great manor house where the man who led the foxhunts made his home. The cottage was in fact the gatehouse at the entrance to the long driveway which led to the manor itself. It was a house of many windows: a large, foursquare, cold-looking dwelling of grey, stone blocks. The lawns around it were kept short and neat, with shrubs and evergreens placed at appropriate intervals and box-gardens enclosing rectangular concrete lily ponds. It was not a place which attracted foxes.
O-ha kept as far away from the manor as possible, in her short forays for food, but one night was attracted to a gazebo at the bottom of the lawns. Some human had been there during the day and had left bacon sandwiches balanced on the white woodwork of the hexagonal structure. She could smell the bacon from the safety of the unkempt grasses, and eventually climbed the ivy covering the redbrick wall which encircled the estate. She made the short journey to where they lay. She walked quickly, but without rushing, went up the steps and hopped on to the rail next to the sandwiches. After a quick look around to see that she had not been observed, she snatched up the package and began to chew, greaseproof paper and all.
At that moment a shape came hurtling out of the darkness: a huge hound with a savage face. O-ha’s instincts were ahead of her heart, and though afterwards she felt the latter organ thumping in her chest, she was by that time on the roof of the gazebo and out of range of the hound’s snapping jaws. Strangely enough, this giant beast from the Unplace – most definitely the largest dog she had ever seen in her life – was not shouting at her. Doubtless it did not want to attract human attention and have them spoil its fun. It tried to reach her by leaping high off the ground with its powerful hindlegs, but when it was apparent that she was too high to get at, the dog lay on the grass and watched her through narrowed eyes. The great bone head lay on massive paws, waiting for her to make her move.
She said nothing and quickly assessed her chances of escape. They were almost negligible.
‘You can look around all you want,’ said the hound. ‘You don’t stand a chance. I’m going to break your neck, fox.’
She shivered on hearing the rich timbre of this beast, which was full of confidence.
‘Why would you want to do that?’ she asked, playing for time. ‘I mean, we’re both canines – cousins, in fact – we speak the same language. The only difference between us is …’
‘That I live with men. That’s more than a small difference, fox. I know what you think of dogs. We’re the traitors, the weaklings, the pampered darlings, the slaves – you’ve got all sorts of names for us, haven’t you? Well let me tell you something. I would kill you if you were another dog – another ridgeback hound – one of my own kind. I was trained to hunt lions in the hotlands beyond the sea. You know what a lion is, eh fox?’
Ridgeback? She had never heard of ridgebacks. She noticed a dark brown ridge of hairs running counter to the normal, backswept hair of his tawny coat. This strip of coarse hairs growing the wrong way obviously gave the breed its name.
‘No, I don’t know any lions.’
‘You wouldn’t, you ignorant bitch …’
‘Vixen,’ she interrupted.
‘I don’t care what you call yourself, you’re dead meat. I enjoy killing. It’s my reason for living. It’s what I’m here for – to kill. I’m not one of your mamby-pamby foxhounds. I can snap a fence-post in two with these jaws. I’m one of the world’s biggest breed of dogs and I recognise no such word as compassion. There’s not a spark of cowardice in my body – only a need for blood. I have killed a human in my time, in that land I was telling you about … oh, you can look around while I’m talking. Don’t think because I blow off at the mouth that I’m any less attentive. I’ll bring you down within a few feet and rip your heart out …’
O-ha was beginning to get worried about her cubs. She had already left them too long and they would be cold and mewling for her warm belly fur. Still she did not show any signs of frantic activity to this ridgeback. Instead, she sat on her haunches and began to scratch her ear with her hind leg, as if careless of his presence.
‘I can stay up here all night,’ she said.
‘And I can stay down here just as long. I could of course yell for assistance, bring the men out here, but I’m not going to. I want you for myself. They’ll only shoot you. That’s too quick, and it wouldn’t satisfy this internal craving, now would it? You stay there all night. I’ll stay here all night. We’ll see who weakens first. I’ve tracked a lion over several days, without sleep. It’s the thrill of the kill, you see. The thrill of the kill for Sabre the ridgeback.’
‘I’m not one of these lions,’ she said. ‘You might be trained to catch those, but you’re not trained to get foxes. We have our own ways of getting out of trouble.’
‘I’ve seen jackals and hyenas, pi-dogs as well. I know your kind. You’re all the same, you skinny wild scavengers. You think you’re clever, crafty, sly, but I know all the tricks, see. You
can talk as much as you like. You’re going to die, painfully, and that’s that.’
‘No,’ she said, simply.
The baleful eyes were on hers.
‘What do you mean – no?’
But she refused to answer, she lay on the roof of the gazebo, her heart in her mouth, awaiting the slightest chance. She was no good to her cubs dead, that was certain, yet her anxiety for them outweighed any personal concern for her own safety. Just a chance, that’s all she wanted.
For a long while they’ just stared at each other, the night growing into itself. An owl came by, silently observed the scene, then left quickly. Gradually, the light went out in different rooms of the house as the occupants settled for the night. Finally, the whole place was in darkness, save for one small room on the ground floor. This single light remained on well into the early hours of the morning. O-ha remarked on it, hoping to distract the hound, but Sabre refused to turn his head.
‘My master,’ he said, ‘in his study. He’s at his desk – be there until morning. Don’t you worry about that, vixen.’
Silence fell between them for a few minutes.
Then O-ha had an idea. She stood up on the roof of the gazebo and began screaming at the moon. Her voice went out, clear, cold and ugly – her banshee shriek.
‘Quiet,’ growled the hound. ‘That won’t do you any good.’
She continued to scream. Just as the hound was about to speak to her again, a human bark came from the direction of the house. The dog’s instinct was to turn towards the call from his master and in that instant O-ha was down from the gazebo and racing for her life, zigzagging across the stretch of short grass between her and the undergrowth. The ridgeback was swift in following, and twice he almost had her in his jaws, but she evaded the large beast by leaping sideways. She hit the tall grasses and brambles, jumping over high objects that he had to race around, until they reached a wall. With supreme effort and agility she managed to spring to the top and down the other side. The dog could not follow. She heard him calling, in a voice cold with rage: ‘You haven’t seen the last of me. I’ll hunt you down, you skinny bitch. These jaws will crack your skull …’ The sounds faded into the distance, as she ran through the garden of the gatehouse, to reach her precious cubs. One final leap and she was through the small window and inside the shed.
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