A Black Fox Running Read online

  After he had eaten the hedgehog Wulfgar came up through the beeches to a drystone wall. With the light of the new day brightening the fog, he leapt the wall and landed in the wet grass. It was good to be among the rabbit runs, gulping the exciting smell of conies. The fog thinned and the world emerged from darkness; trees walked out of shadow, cattle grew legs, and a slow flood of colour brought things alive. But for the rabbits leaping in the wires the fox-smell added a new dimension to their fear. Since dusk of the previous day they had fought the snares, sinking through exhaustion and despair to a place where misery whirlpools.

  The trap line ran from the field towards the crossroads under Bonehill Down. Wulfgar killed the first rabbit he came to and left only a foot in the snare. He skinned and ate the carcass on rough ground surrounded by ponies who were rising from beds of heather. The morning was opening up, but fog in a milky mass covered the river, which threaded noisily through the valley bottom. Rain began to fall and the wind freshened and veered north-westerly, carrying on a gust the faint cry of the vixen. This time Wulfgar made no reply for he had smelt man.

  The fox showed his teeth and broke cover. Halfway across the patch of cotton grass he put up a flock of lapwings, and the birds pursued him, wheeling and keening until he was among the gorse and scrub rowan. Wulfgar trotted on at hunting pace, down into the valley bed, over the Becca Brook and up through the bracken to Holwell Clitter. Among the boulders the wind spoke in slow, deep hoots … .

  The trapper loosened the wire and tossed the rabbit’s foot into the trees, while the lurcher danced around his legs.

  ‘Down, Jacko – you bleddy fool,’ he snarled.

  Jacko laid back his ears and whimpered. His master stared absently through his thoughts and dropped the snare into the sack.

  ‘Fox,’ he said. ‘Smell him, Jacko? We missed him, but only just.’

  He rammed his fists in his pockets. Along the shoulder of downland the lapwings darted and called. Breasting the sere grasses Wulfgar stood out like a dark, heraldic device.

  ‘It’s that sly black bugger,’ the trapper said quietly. ‘You had a couple of fowls from Yarner Wells last night, didn’t you, boy. But I’ll have you – by Christ I will. I’ll have you if it’s the last thing I do.’

  As he reached down and fondled the dog’s ears, the lurcher yawned and raked its belly with a rigid hind foot.

  THE BOXING DAY MEET

  Wulfgar was born in the earth at Mountsland Copse with the sound of gunfire in his ears. For nine seasons he had passed along the picket lines of tent encampments and had heard the convoys of lorries on the moorland roads while he came and went like a cloud shadow. Towards the end of the war the army had been busy around Haytor Rocks, but few men had seen the dark fox slinking to the garbage heap at dusk. Now the war was over and the soldiers had gone, although there was still the occasional crackle of rifles from the Rippon Tor range.

  Time passed as imperceptibly as a face ages. Wulfgar came often to Black Hill in search of Stargrief but the ancient dog fox had retreated into his dreams and did not seek company. Alone on the hilltop in the twilight, which Devonians call dimpsey, Wulfgar would catch the flicker of Bovey Tracey’s lights and hear the trains puffing up to Lustleigh. Then the owls would send their cries floating on the stillness and the stars would tremble and wink around him. The Plough, the constellations of the Great Bear and the Little Bear, the bright cluster of Cassiopeia, Capella and Vega, Sirius and Orion danced in the margins of his consciousness, and sitting there drinking the night sky he thought about the countryside that lay beyond death. All foxes knew of the place where creatures were absorbed into god’s love. Here light was made magnificent, a spiritual aurora borealis beyond the reach of men.

  Stormbully was alone. His mate had died hideously in a pole trap set by the man who kept the lurcher. The pole trap was a kind of circular gin that the trapper had placed in the fork of a pine tree on the edge of Mill Wood when the North Eastern moors were red with rowan berries. Swart the crow had tried to take the bait of rabbit flesh but the old hen buzzard had driven him off. Caught by the legs she had hung upside down throughout the night until the trapper ended her misery at daybreak. Stormbully’s grief endured after the last leaves had fallen from the birches in the goyals close to Bag Tor, and even now as he tacked across the great westerly storms of year’s end he sometimes felt her winging beside him and heard her cat-call rising from the spring of their first mating. There was little joy in his flight. He disliked the rain that rolled off the hills like smoke from an oil fire. Planing down through scudding cloud, he circled Haytor Rocks and windsurfed over the horses and riders who were congregating outside the Moorland hotel.

  Dartmoor is not easy country to ride over but the Boxing Day Meet at Haytor Vale was popular among hunting folk. Despite the rain a good field had assembled to follow the South Devon. For nearly a century and a half packs of mainly black and tan hounds had chased the big, tough hill foxes who were as wild as the country they ranged over. In 1892 several horses went in a bog and almost perished before they were dragged clear.

  The mastership of the South Devon pack had been in the hands of a Whitley since the outbreak of the First World War. Claude Whitley was a tall man with craggy features and a wry sense of humour, and he wore the hunting pink that had belonged to his father. He could read the countryside almost as well as the fox he hunted and loved.

  ‘Well, Scoble,’ he said to the trapper. ‘I hope you’re not bagging any of my foxes. I’m told they’re fetching seven and six a pelt these days.’

  ‘You know me better than that, maister.’

  ‘The pheasants are keeping you busy, then.’

  ‘Rabbits, maister. Me and Jacko’s playin’ ’ell with the conies. Wouldn touch a pheasant – no zur.’

  Claude Whitley smiled and tapped the side of his nose with a forefinger. Scoble gazed blankly up at him. Last night’s rough cider broke from his face in beads and mingled with the raindrops.

  ‘Mind you keep that animal on a leash,’ the master said in parting.

  Scoble touched the peak of his cap and unclenched his fist for Jacko to lick the nicotine-stained fingertips.

  Returning from Strelna and Yarner Wood early in the morning of the meet Wulfgar had smelt man. The rain was falling in grey swaths but the taint of the trapper and his dog had soured the air coming off Holwell Quarry. Heavy fox gins had been tilled near the clitter but remained empty.

  The episode was enough to disturb Wulfgar, who took himself off to kennel in the hawthorn scrub of Seven Lords Lands. Torrential rain had fallen throughout the night and continued unabated as the first horseboxes rattled through Emsworthy Gate. The River Dart burst its banks at Salmon’s Leap weir under Buckfastleigh and at Hoods Bridge further downstream. The Bovey also rose and flooded the railway line at Bovey Tracey. It was poor hunting weather, for heavy rain can kill scent.

  Wulfgar would have been content to sleep among the woody stems of heather and whortleberry all day. From his hiding place he heard the sparkling song of a blackbird, which seemed to be singing at the storm from the top twig of a rowan tree. Wulfgar curled deeper into his thoughts and recalled the wise things Stargrief had said during their last meeting. Stargrief had survived eight winters and although he could never have matched Wulfgar in combat he was as brave as he was sagacious. All foxes are valiant but there are degrees of valour. Stargrief was small and slight but he had more heart than Wendel and Ashmere put together. And he understood the world. He had told them about the all-loving Tod and the Star Place, and had explained the desires and tastes and instincts that had flowed down generations of blood into Wulfgar’s veins. The law was kill or be killed, but behind it lay the summer country and the comradeship of the foxes who had gone before him into the golden haze.

  ‘Yoi – yoi, leu-in, leu-in.’

  The cry whipped Wulfgar to his feet, and he left a warm pocket of air in the hollow, rank with the odour secreted by his anal scent gland and the glands on his pad
s. The dog fox snaked between the furze clumps until he came to a tributary stream of the Becca. His ears and nose had located the pack. They were feathering the lawn at Quarryman’s Cottage where Wulfgar had run after Scoble’s visit to the clitter. Then the hounds spoke and above their cry rose the cavernous belling of Lancer, the greatest hound to come out of Denbury kennels. The pack had found Wulfgar’s line and thirty couple of dogs poured down the slope towards Saddle Tor.

  The horn sang out and the field came at the burst over one of the few places on the North Eastern moors where riding was not really hazardous. The huntsman who had told the pack to ‘leu-in’ – which was his way of encouraging them to smell out the fox – stood in his stirrups and watched the animals with pride. To find so quickly in foul weather was a good omen.

  Wulfgar ran in the stream where it glided amongst bell heather into the Leighon Valley. He was swift but not as fast as a bolting rabbit, and there was about his dark, graceful form an aura of confidence.

  The thrushes hit the trees like bullets. The noise of the wind and water blended in a dull roar, and to the east and west cloud fumbled the hilltops. Distances were dark under rain. Wulfgar ghosted through the scrub birch and sedges, and plashed along the Rookery path. The rain hissed through branches that writhed and flailed. The ground heaved in places as the beech roots lifted. He was still running flat-out, carrying his fur close to his body, wet and spiky.

  The pack lost the scent at the brook and ranged about the undergrowth. Lancer and Captain – a tan-coloured dog – took to the water. The huntsman regarded them placidly and walked his horse downstream until he gleaned a whiff of fox.

  ‘Leu-in, leu-in,’ he cried. ‘Yoi – yoi. Come on my beauties. Leu-in, leu-in.’

  The pack settled on the line and gave tongue. Their body-steam mixed with the spray raised by their feet. Lancer was in the forefront, his great lolloping stride gobbling up ground. He was unaware of the excitement and confusion behind him. A horse slipped and crashed on its side, then other horses fell, but the rest of the field surged irresistibly into the neck of the valley.

  Wulfgar trotted with a flock of sheep until they huddled under the newtake wall. He jumped the wall and crossed the Becca Brook. His heart had slowed and his nostrils no longer gaped but he was releasing a sharp, heavy smell. Although he did not take the hounds for granted he moved with a kind of arrogant unconcern down the river to the ponds.

  Wind exploded in the tops of the trees, bending the dead flags and reeds, lifting the water in waves. The stinging rain filled Wulfgar with joy and he ran swiftly again, the world blurring around him, along water-bright ditches, runnels and guts onto a rough stone track. He had taken the line of least resistance, giving a virtuoso performance of cunning for its own sake. Where he paused to drink, a little downstream of the stone footbridge, he left his print in soft mud beside the Becca. The river was brim full of flood water.

  Wulfgar traced the shape of his lips with his tongue and walked briskly up the hill. On the wind the belling pack sounded as remote as yesterday. He loped into the wild sky, pressing under the gate to breathe the air of real moorland again, and the sweep of turf brought him to a hollow littered with the debris of a medieval village. Instinct took over and he fled for Thorgil’s sett, but a party of farm labourers out ferreting turned him and he ran along the treeline to the scattered buildings of Great Houndtor. Emerging from a copse of young oaks he stood making up his mind which way to go. Then he departed leisurely, leaving in his wake, a long way behind, sixty dogs and a field of drenched, grim-faced riders.

  The hunted fox who knows his ground runs in a rough circle, but being wise to his game the foot-followers had parked their cars and vans on the roadside with a clear view of Hayne Down. Rain, driven horizontally by the gale, rattled like grit on side windows and bonnets.

  Wulfgar was among the boulders behind a thirty-foot column of granite called Bowerman’s Nose, where he squelched over sumptuous brown mosses and dull green lichens that completely covered many of the rocks. In the crevices ferns and rowan saplings grew, and pipits found shelter. The fox ran low onto open ground, crossed the Manaton Road and turned by Blissamoor Cottage. Scoble switched on his windscreen wipers and made sure it was the ‘black bugger’. A woman in a headscarf and oilskins tapped on the side door.

  ‘Which way, Mr Scoble?’ she said.

  ‘Natsworthy, ma’am. I’d bet money on it.’

  As the fox crept out of Heatree Plantation, a woodcock whirred up from the brambles and the wind smacked it away. Behind him a pheasant alarmed and sounded like a fat man choking on a plum stone. He crossed to Hamel Down pursued by the cry of the pack.

  Lancer led the rest of the hounds past Ford Farm, holding the weak line marvellously with his nose. Wulfgar bounded up through furze and bracken to the head of Woodpit and the clouds. The rain drove hard into his back. When he breasted patches of ling there was a remarkable change in scent, a pungent muskiness that the deluge could not obliterate. Slithering down the steep slope of bearded thistle into the brush and bristling stumps of a felled larch wood he remembered Fernsmoke. Among the tangle of brambles and branches he rested and groomed his chest. He could smell Lancer half a mile away. The hound had checked where a herd of Galloways had foiled the line. Huntsman and master watched him work and once it was necessary for the whipper-in to stop the pack from running back over ground they had already covered. While they cast, the hounds moved their sterns quickly to and fro. They were feathering.

  Wulfgar pushed deeper into the thicket. Under a larch bough he discovered the tiny brown body of a wren and ate it in one gulp. The bird had been killed by a clap of thunder two days before.

  Near the centre of Bagpark he encountered the faint stink of fox. His nose brought him to the root tangle of a fallen tree. Large green eyes stared back into his own.

  ‘So I did hear the hounds,’ said the stranger. ‘Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m dreaming or not.’

  Wulfgar went up to him and sniffed his face. The old dog fox’s nose was warm and dry. He had a belly full of tapeworm and had not eaten for three nights.

  ‘My name is Runeheath,’ he said. ‘I live in the woods where the two great rivers meet. The pain in my gut is giving me hell, so last night I walked with the storm and finished up here.’

  ‘Where are you heading?’ Wulfgar said, as if he did not know.

  ‘The Star Place,’ Runeheath grinned. ‘I’ve had it. Still, to live through six summers is enough. Are the hounds pushing you?’

  ‘Tod no!’ Wulfgar said. ‘They couldn’t run down a three-legged hedgehog on a straight road.’

  ‘What about a sick old fox?’ said Runeheath quietly. ‘Would they do for him?’

  ‘It’s not necessary,’ Wulfgar said. ‘I could take them round in circles till dark and leave them chasing moonbeams.’

  ‘Would you deny me the Good Death?’

  Wulfgar shook his head.

  ‘No more words, then,’ said Runeheath, and he got to his feet and stretched.

  There was a heavy coldness in the air. Wulfgar turned and left the old dog fox to his destiny. The hounds spoke again, and above the din of the storm Lancer’s baying filled the valley. Wulfgar came out of the ruined larch wood and ran down to the River Webbum where it was narrow enough for a horse to jump. He let the current carry him to the spinney by Stouts Cottages, and was climbing the hill to Chinkwell Tor when the hounds, running at full cry, saw Runeheath.

  Though I may die

  the grass will grow,

  the sun will shine,

  the stream will flow.

  Runeheath recalled the first time his mother had chanted the prayer in the earth under the ash saplings. He felt curiously weightless, and it was not an unpleasant sensation. The hot ache in his stomach had vanished and he ran easily with the suppleness of a yearling. Brown horizons swam out of the rain that darkend the sky, while his past dropped behind him and vanished in mist. Then the sky tilted and the hills were flying in slow di
sarray, and it was as if his nerve-ends fused and all the power rushed inwards to charge the spirit for its release. Numbness cancelled out the sudden flash of fear and beyond the black silence of Lancer’s jaws the country of abundant game and eternal summer moonlight opened to receive him. The crash of hound clamour ended as the beasts milled around the body Runeheath had left behind.

  THE TRAPPER AND HIS DOG

  The woodpeckers wobbled away like green flares in the coppice oak. Scoble stood at the kitchen door and lit a cigarette. Jacko whined briefly from the centre of a yawn and sniffed the frosty air. Beyond the vegetable garden of Yarner Cott glittering hedges wandered into dusk. There was a whisper of ferrets in the straw of the hutches down by the chicken run. Scoble let the smoke drift from his nostrils. A fortnight of driving rain had at last given way to brighter weather, and the evening smelt faintly of rotting leaves and soil. It was a good time, when all the noise of living was turned down and a man could put his thoughts together.

  Dragonflies’ wings of ice covered the hollow parts of the turnip leaves. A blackbird said chink-chink! and shook the cold out of its feathers, and behind the ferret hutches the teazels bent under the weight of goldfinches. Daylight leaked from the sky that showed over Haytor Down. The treetops were black against the stars. Vega twinkled with blue fire. From the depths of Yarner Wood the tawny owls began to cry and that saddest of all evening sounds, the hooting of a steam train, echoed along the cleave.

  ‘Get in, dog,’ Scoble said, and Jacko returned happily to the warm kitchen.

  The darkness came suddenly to life as fieldfares skirmished in the trees for roosting places. Scoble shut the door and settled the fire with the toe of his boot. He had scrounged a wagonload of logs from an old cider apple orchard that had been grubbed-out at Liverton. The cheerful flames made orange puddles on the hearth and flickering shadows on the walls. Scoble flopped down in his armchair and worked at the wires for a new batch of snares. All over the kitchen were many engines for taking wild animals, but he had hidden the pole traps in a chest under the table. The big, heavy fox gins lay beside the cabinet where Scoble kept his guns. These gins had served him well. Three fox pelts were pegged to the stretching board, good pelts that would soon be ready to join the bundle in the bedroom, and nailed along the oak beams were the tails of squirrels and foxes. Smaller gins used against rabbits and wildfowl, net-traps for crows, a couple of claptraps, long nets and snares stood in a heap near Scoble’s chair.