A Black Fox Running Read online

  A BLACK FOX

  RUNNING

  To every fox who ran before the hounds and to my children, Christian and Rebecca, that they may know and love the wild places.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Fiction

  Lundy’s War

  The Moon in the Weir

  Jack

  In the Long Dark

  Nightworld

  Non-fiction

  Where the Dream Begins

  Dartmoor: The Threatened Wilderness

  Yesterday’s Harvest

  Walking in the Wild

  Carter’s Country

  A BLACK FOX

  RUNNING

  BRIAN CARTER

  With a foreword

  by Melissa Harrison

  CONTENTS

  By the Same Author

  Foreword

  Part One

  Wulfgar

  Moonlight and Fog

  The Boxing Day Meet

  The Trapper and His Dog

  Vixen

  Courtship

  Two Green Leaves

  Wistman’s Wood

  Jacko Running

  Confrontation

  Early Spring

  Stargrief

  Almost A Fox Shoot

  A Woodpigeon Crooning

  Shadows

  When the Whimpering Stopped

  Part Two

  Lone Wandering

  River’s End

  Conspiracy

  What the Stars Said

  Haymaking

  Beast of the Earth

  Treacherous Contrivances

  A True Animal

  By Fox Craft

  Thundery Weather

  Killconey Again

  Changes

  Old Blackie Did It

  The White Vision

  On Hay Tor

  Dartmoor Autumn

  A Wet Morning

  The 11.35

  The Year Turning

  Beckaford

  Blizzard

  Knowing the Ice Lurcher

  The Great Ammil

  Late Sunlight

  A Note on the Author

  FOREWORD

  A Black Fox Running is not a children’s book, but I first encountered it as a child. I must have been seven or eight when my mother first read it to me, the Devon landscape it so vividly described thrillingly familiar to me as the beloved country of our summer holidays. The story of the Dartmoor hill foxes entered my imagination and put down roots far deeper than anything else I’ve since read about the natural world, and its unsentimental depiction of both animals and humans and rhapsodic, protean prose has become a yardstick for all other descriptive writing, and a beacon for my own.

  Since then I’ve reread Black Fox at least a dozen times – probably more. I took it with me to university, and then to a series of rented London flats; when at last the pages fell out of my copy I tracked down a replacement online, and was delighted when it arrived signed. In my early twenties I wrote to its author, the Devon artist, poet, columnist, children’s writer, naturalist and broadcaster Brian Carter, telling him how important his book was to me; sadly, it didn’t reach him. Now, though, to be able to introduce his extraordinary novel to a new readership feels like the fulfilment of a promise, and the repayment of a long-held debt.

  A Black Fox Running opens in medias res, with a simple exchange that encapsulates much of what is to come:

  ‘Yes, I can smell him,’ said Stargrief. The old dog fox raised his muzzle.

  ‘And the lurcher,’ Wulfgar said.

  Wulfgar is the black fox of the novel’s title; Stargrief his friend, a seer at nearly nine winters old. ‘Him’ is the trapper Leonard Scoble, fifty-eight in 1946. ‘His face carried the blotches of burst blood vessels and across his rutted baldness he had laid a few strands of grey hair. On his right cheek was a mole as black as an ash bud. There was about his shabby bulk a suggestion of real strength but alcohol had sapped his stamina.’ Carter writes with a subtle mixture of pity and disgust that persists throughout the book. Far more than the red-coated riders of the South Devon Hunt, Scoble and his dog Jacko are the foxes’ true nemeses, and Carter’s novel tells the story of their conflict, and of their lives – which are one and the same thing.

  Scoble is a man who kills not just for food or even for sport, but in anger. His hatred of foxes is absolute, a function not only of his view of them as ‘vermin’ – a different category to ‘animal’ – but rooted in genuine nightmare: a dead mule, three foxes and a ditch near the River Somme. He suffers from what we would now call PTSD, and the horrors of the Great War, not to mention his violent and deprived childhood, bleed uncontrollably into his present, feeding his misogyny, misanthropy and cruelty in a viscerally believable way. His lurcher, Jacko, is no better, a dog deformed by madness, a creation entirely of Scoble whose bloodthirstiness and unpredictability – now loving, now vicious; a tragic mirror of his own father – has fatally unmoored his charge. Carter paints Jacko as irredeemable in a way that Scoble is not; he is the darkest side of the man made flesh.

  We are less used, these days, to novels in which wild animals talk, although in 1981 when Black Fox was first published they were, of course, hugely popular. But Carter takes great care not to further anthropomorphise his subjects: they kill everything from beetles to baby rabbits to lambs frequently, bloodily and with no compunction; urinate and leave scats; mate, groom, and suffer sometimes from worms, ticks and mange, Carter inhabiting their unfamiliar vulpine bodies – their sensitive noses, the pads of their paws, their brushes – with shamanistic ease. The sounds they make, when overheard by humans, are the sounds foxes really do make, and there is something deeply convincing about Carter’s side-note that when stoats or otters communicate in what he dubs the ‘canidae argot’ it is with the ‘unpleasant nasal twang’ common to all mustelids.

  But the fact that the animals in this book speak serves a deeper purpose than it does for the rabbits in Watership Down, for example, or the moles of Duncton Wood. A Black Fox Running is unique in being just as much a story about humans as it is about animals; people are neither centre-stage, as they are in most writing about the natural world, nor banished to the sidelines in favour of wild creatures, as in most talking animal books, and glimpsed only as some kind of inexplicable force for destruction. In Black Fox, humans and animals are named and treated equally, as highly differentiated subjects, each individual the centre of its own universe. It is necessary to this even-handedness that the foxes speak; to have made them mute, as Henry Williamson did Tarka, would have allowed only the humans in the book to demonstrate their agency and destroyed what is, for me, the most important aspect of the novel: the creation of a world in which the utterly divergent viewpoints of mankind and animals co-exist for us as readers, challenging our anthropocentric point of view and extending our imaginative sympathies. Here, Dartmoor is neither the foxes’ flawed paradise, a trapper’s grim larder nor the Hunt’s fiefdom, but all those things at once; similarly, humans are not selfish and harmful, nor benevolent custodians, but both, because our nature is motley and complex. Indeed, Carter’s writing insists on complexity, however discomfiting it is – and in that subsists the moral truth at the heart of this wise and compassionate book. For any conclusion we draw or decision we make about our relationship with the natural world is flawed and unsustainable if it insists on simplicity where there is none.

  To the foxes, to be killed by the Hunt is ‘the good death’: challenging to some modern sensibilities, perhaps, but understandable when you consider that the alternatives are Scoble’s snares, poison bait, buckshot or gin traps. Although he never reconciled himself to the hunting of wild creatures for sport, in his beguiling childhood memoir Yesterday’s Harvest
– part Cider with Rosie, part Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog – Carter writes:

  My sympathies like those of the other children I knew were with the fox, and I was deeply suspicious of those well-breeched men and women braying over my head in light saloon bar accents. Wherever they gathered I smelt violence of a dark, pagan kind … I could not understand why posh grown-ups were allowed to hunt an animal to death. Later … I learned that the hounds dealt death swiftly, not like the snare, the gin or the badly aimed buckshot. I shed many prejudices when I got to know Claude Whitley, Master of the South Devon Hunt ... but at the age of nine everything registered in black and white. The sleek, red fox was born to freedom and I loved him … his enemies were my enemies and because they came from another class they were easy to misunderstand and dislike.

  The boy Brian, with his deep love of Dartmoor and fascination for the natural world, has a cameo in Black Fox as ‘Stray’, a fair-haired child sent to Dartmoor to recuperate from illness, who roams the moor collecting birds’ eggs, opening the moorland gates for tips and tracking the foxes and other wildlife. Brian suffered from bronchial pneumonia as a child and the illness, and its then-rudimentary treatment, left him with night terrors and St Vitus’s Dance (now known as Sydenham’s chorea). Kept home from school for long periods and encouraged to spend as much time as possible out of doors, he took to the moors and found healing in nature, becoming, in adulthood, a robust and inveterate hiker and rock-climber, a walk leader and talented footballer, as well as an artist, novelist and poet.

  The partial model for Scoble the trapper can also be found in Yesterday’s Harvest, as well as a wealth of other details from Black Fox: we meet Carter’s larger-than-life father, shades of whom are surely to be found in the ‘thicky girt romancer’ Bert Yabsley; there’s the ‘great ammil’ of March 1947, when the record-breaking snows of the previous winter partially melted and then refroze to cover the moor in verglas; a visiting snowy owl with ‘a beak like a five-ton grass hook’; a fox dancing on its hind legs at sunset, snapping craneflies from the air – all incidents that found their way into Black Fox. I suspect that the sense of a lost arcadia that imbues the entire book – even underlying its most shocking and brutal passages – is due not only to the fact that Carter was writing about the world of forty years before, one which had, by the early 1980s, changed a great deal, but because in writing A Black Fox Running he was inhabiting again the golden years of his own boyhood and experiencing again ‘the glory and the freshness of a dream’. ‘Sure, the kid would change but childhood was a separate lifetime anyway,’ Richard, the American visitor to Dartmoor, thinks of the boy Stray in Black Fox. ‘It wasn’t just the stifling of the pastoral instinct that dulled the vision. You couldn’t endure that intensity day after day.’

  In Carter’s memoir, too, can be found the seeds of the richly mystical landscape of his novel: the Celtic mythology his Welsh mother teaches the young Brian, taken straight from the pages of the Mabinogion. The foxes’ deity is Tod – which means ‘death’ in German – and they believe in an afterlife in the Star Place. There are hints that their religion has passed through varying stages of practice and belief, but as it’s experienced by Wulfgar, Stargrief and the rest of the High Tor Clan of the Hill Fox Nation it has more than a touch of Zen Buddhism and even existentialist philosophy alongside its Celtic flavours, charged with immanence and saturated with the sanctity of living things. It’s clear that this sense of transcendence – beyond cant, beyond empty ritual – was central to Carter’s own experience of nature, and while it’s not something I share, the spiritual passages in Black Fox have, for me, an unarguable depth and sincerity.

  They’re also leavened with earthiness, humour and the exacting observations of a true naturalist, and at every re-reading I’m bowled over anew by the facility with which Carter can switch register – not just in terms of dialogue (the rich Devon dialect of the working men contrasted with the upper-class tones of the Shewtes; the naturalistic speech of the foxes set against the spivvy slang of the stoats) – but in tone, perspective and subject-matter. Again and again he undercuts an elevated passage with something much more down to earth: a fox twisting irritably to nip fleas from its fur; a buzzard shooting its mutes onto a gatepost; labouring men making blue jokes over pints of rough cider. Passages of limpid, matchless description break up more straightforward sections focusing on Scoble, Stray or Wulfgar, while the narration slips between the third person and free indirect speech with ineffable fluidity. In Carter’s hands the point of view, too, can shift in a single passage from fox to human to sparrowhawk in a way that should be disorientating, but never is. This isn’t simply a stylistic trick but a cornerstone of his imagination, for the world he creates is one in which everything that is occurring at any given moment has equal significance, whether it’s a leaf drifting downstream or a man setting a snare.

  Passages like this occur every few pages, and the way they enlarge the imagination made me fall in love with A Black Fox Running, and are the reason I love it still:

  The harvest had been sung home in village churches all over Dartmoor: Widecombe, Ilsington, North Bovey, Holne, Chagford, Lustleigh, Manaton, Peter Tavey – names like a peal of bells. Gifts had been brought to the Barley Man. Bonfires burnt in cottage gardens and the smoke climbed softly blue into thinner blue. Across the in-country the shires plodded, dragging the plough through dark soil. Browns and golds had crept into the woods, and rowan and silver birch were at their loveliest among the heather by the brook where Wulfgar lay.

  He tested the breeze with his nose. The night was brilliant under the Hunter’s Moon. A tawny owl hooted and received a sharp reply from his mate. The fox ran with the stream to the Manaton-Beckaford lane and singled out a strong thread of coney scent. He killed the buck swiftly on the lawn of Aish Cottage. There were no lights on in the building, for the American had gone home. While Wulfgar skinned the rabbit he dozed in the airliner high above the Atlantic.

  Or:

  The tawny owl dropped off the crag called Lover’s Leap and released a tremulous cry. It sailed over the river and flopped down into the nettles and gripped the vole, pinching the little creature’s scream into silence. Then it entered the darkness beneath the oaks and winged off to the Iron Age fort on the hilltop. A star left the Milky Way and slid across the sky.

  Throughout the book Carter’s focus is simultaneously close and universal, and although in Black Fox he tells one story, we’re never allowed to forget that there are other animals, other perspectives, other stories playing out at the same time – like the merlin tiercel hunting a meadow pipit that spots Wulfgar, but ‘only as an unimportant peripheral object’. Each change of register and viewpoint, each switch from macro to wide-angle and back is a reminder to us that the world is various and teeming – incorrigibly plural – and most of all, that humans are just one element of an interconnected whole. This challenge to our habitual, egocentric perspective anticipated twenty-first-century intellectual movements such as post-humanism and object-oriented ontology by more than thirty years, and has never been more vital than it is today.

  But more than all of this, A Black Fox Running is a book about place. Carter fell in love with the wild beauty of Dartmoor when he was a boy growing up fifteen miles or so away in the seaside town of Paignton, and he came to know it with the overwhelming intensity of childhood, tramping its windswept moors and sunken lanes, exploring the newtake fields with their drystone walls, climbing tors, catching butterflies, following rivers and streams and always, always, watching its wildlife. Animating every passage of his novel is a deep cartographic and ecological knowledge of and tangible love for ‘the good unspoilt place’: an intensely sacred landscape, the landscape of his childhood.

  Much has changed in Devon since the 1940s when A Black Fox Running was set. Traffic has increased, while rural poverty, agricultural modernisation and second home ownership have hollowed out many communities; upland and farmland birds have gone into steep decline; hunting wi
th dogs was banned in 2005 and wildflower meadows have all but vanished, hay no longer being made the traditional way but wrapped in plastic for silage. But Dartmoor itself endures almost unaltered, and visitors to Hound Tor, Wistman’s Wood, Trendlebere Down or the Becka Brook will find themselves even now walking through the luminous landscapes of the book. It is an extraordinary feeling.

  In 2005, A Black Fox Running was nominated as one of the classics of British nature writing by readers of the Guardian. “I couldn’t believe it when the book appeared on the Guardian list,” Carter said in an interview. “It is an honour to be among those other writers.” It came as no surprise to me to see Black Fox on the list, and when I became a writer myself I took every opportunity to mention it, surprised to find that it wasn’t better known; in 2015 I wrote about it in a piece for the Guardian, and was thrilled to receive a letter from Brian’s widow, Patsy.

  Brian Carter – ‘Bri’ – died in 2015, at the age of seventy-eight, having contributed to every edition of weekly West Country newspaper the Herald Express since the early 1980s. As well as Patsy, he left two children, Christian and Rebecca, and three grandchildren. Sadly, he and I never met, but to me he remains a true inheritor and disseminator of the passionate love of wild places that has animated so many of this country’s greatest writers on the natural world.

  ‘Now, again, I was in the good unspoilt place alone, crouching in one of twilight’s blue hollows. A full and golden moon was rising out of Torbay, cutting a furrow across the meadow. What I absorbed then was not built of words. The shaping of it would come later as the need to write grew out of despair for the vanishing splendour,’ he writes in his memoir. ‘How long the summer of my ninth year seemed but that Friday dusk beside the stream has never faded. I find echoes of it in Wordsworth’s poetry and in all the great verse whose beauty has been harvested from the human spirit and the open air.’

  It’s my hope that this new edition of A Black Fox Running will inspire more lovers of the natural world to find their own echoes, just as I did, in Carter’s breathtakingly beautiful book.