A Black Fox Running Page 6

  Wulfgar moved cautiously, stepping in her footprints. He sniffed at the gin and tugged at the chain with his teeth. Teg was whimpering now.

  ‘Forget that,’ she said, ‘I can’t go round with this thing on my leg.’

  They stared helplessly at each other through their misery.

  ‘You must bite off her foot,’ said a calm voice. ‘It must be done quickly. The trapper will return at sunset.’

  ‘But a three-legged vixen …’ Teg said in horror.

  ‘Three-legged vixens have cubs and some have been known to live to my age,’ said the voice.

  And Stargrief appeared like a conjurer’s trick in the bramble thicket. He was gaunt and grey and his brush was no longer bushy, but he had the brightest eyes Teg had ever seen. Very gently he licked the trapped paw.

  ‘Is it bad, Teg?’ Wulfgar said.

  ‘No – there’s hardly any pain now. Please get on with it, and do it quickly.’

  ‘Look into my eyes, Teg,’ said Stargrief. ‘Forget everything else. Come – do as I say.’

  In the pool were the bright unmoving reflections of green leaves. The cub vixen peered down from the alder root. ‘Teg,’ her mother cried. ‘Where are you, Teg?’ Like underwater flames the leaves blazed and winked at her. Her body had floated away. She was merely an idea in someone else’s mind. Was death like this? Was this death? Now there were just two green leaves and her eyes printed upon them. Numbness spiralled into peace …

  ‘It’s done,’ Wulfgar said.

  Teg lay on her side and Stargrief and Wulfgar licked the stump of her leg until the bleeding had stopped and the wound was clean. Then they helped her to her feet and supported her body with their own, one each side of her.

  ‘O Tod,’ the little vixen panted. ‘I can’t hobble around like this. I can’t.’

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ Stargrief said. ‘Wulfgar will look after you. Everything heals in time, Teg. You mustn’t give up.’

  But the unborn life stirring inside Teg had already strengthened her resolve.

  They took her to Thorgil’s sett and laid her in a chamber deep under the oak wood.

  ‘I’ll wait outside,’ said Stargrief.

  Once they were alone Wulfgar curled up beside her and made her snuggle into his body. Tenderly he licked the wound while she tried to sleep.

  ‘You will court another vixen,’ she whispered. ‘What use am I? You’ll get fed up looking after a cripple.’

  ‘Please, Teg – don’t hurt me,’ Wulfgar said. ‘I love you. How can you talk like that?’

  She fetched up a long, shuddering sigh and let exhaustion sweep everything out of her mind.

  Wulfgar left the sett several hours later but Stargrief had gone; so had the rabbit carcass and the gins. The trapper’s taint fouled the night air. A brown owl spoke, but the fox found no beauty in its cry, then coming to the Becca to drink he discovered Thorgil grooming himself on a rock.

  ‘How is Teg?’ said the badger.

  ‘Very ill,’ said Wulfgar. ‘She left a paw in the trap.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Thorgil in his deep, quiet voice. ‘You are welcome to use my sett for as long as you like. The entrance under the boulders by the dead tree is safest. It’s hard to hide gins there.’

  ‘I’ll remember this kindness,’ said the fox.

  ‘We are friends, Wulfgar. If you find a gin near here let me know and I’ll roll on it. Gins I can deal with. It’s the wires that bother me. Last spring I lost a cub in a snare.’

  Wulfgar sealed his eyes and lapped the dark water.

  ‘The lurcher doesn’t come here very often,’ Thorgil said a little later, sensing the fox’s anxiety.

  ‘He had a go at me once, but I left my mark on him. Didn’t he yelp! He went over Black Hill like the wind, his tail between his legs. He may be mad but he’s not mad enough to bother me twice.’

  The dog fox went to the vole runs at Hedge Barton and hunted mechanically. There was a bleakness round his heart that persisted until Teg hobbled out into the sunshine on the morning of the third day.

  WISTMAN’S WOOD

  The harrows were raising red-brown clouds of dust in the lowland fields. A chill wind blew from the North, bending the crocuses and unopened daffodils from Haytor Vale to Trumpeter and on to Stover Park. In woods all over Devon cock pheasants were gathering their harems.

  Teg lay up for a week in Thorgil’s sett. She refused food and when she was not sleeping she spent hours licking her maimed leg, but every so often she struggled down to the brook and ate grass and drank the pure water.

  ‘It’s a dead loss,’ she sighed after a longer trip to the ponds. ‘I couldn’t chop a sleeping frog. I’d be better off dead.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Wulfgar said. ‘Hunting’s not everything. I can easily catch enough for us both, but you are really very good on three legs. Look – do you feel strong enough to make a journey?’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Rocky Wood. It’s not exactly just over the hill but if we take it easy we could be there in three or four sunsets.’

  ‘Why is it so important?’ said Teg.

  ‘Well, you can’t have the cubs here. Foxes have been dug out of this sett before and in any case it’s not fair on Thorgil. Rocky Wood is safe. I’ve never smelt gin steel anywhere near it. The trapper isn’t likely to bother us there.’

  ‘When do we start?’

  ‘Tonight,’ said Wulfgar. ‘Stargrief has promised us a full moon.’

  ‘Stargrief is a beautiful old animal,’ said Teg.

  Even on three legs she was a nimble creature, but she could not execute the fox pounce that ends with the forepaws clamping the prey to the ground. It galled her to have to lie under cover while Wulfgar ranged around for conies and mice. She ate sullenly, making sure there was more than enough left for him. But his love and kindness gradually won her over and the old passion for life returned. The moon was still the moon and night the true, thrilling place of labyrinthine scents.

  The foxes followed the pony paths over Hameldown Tor to Challacombe. March showers made the high ground glitter. The sheep huddled together wherever there was shelter, for lambing time was near and they were nervous. Crows were in constant attendance, waiting to feed on misfortune, and they craarked at Wulfgar and Teg. Light glinted blue on their plumage. Wobbling on the air they looked like black rags, but when they flew too close to Teg she leapt and snapped a mouthful of feathers from the hen bird’s tail.

  Wulfgar’s pace was slow, but moving as they did between sundown and daybreak the foxes never had to hurry. Below Pizwell Cottage the Walla Brook crept through a marsh where curlew nested. In the mud of the flood pools common frogs had buried themselves, absorbing oxygen through their slack skin. They were more dead than alive. Herons came to the marsh to feast on them when the warm weather made them kick for the sun.

  ‘Oor-li, oor-li,’ sang the curlews, adding their own melancholy to the sadness of twilight. The cock bird flew in circles, dropping chains of short notes, and whenever the hen settled among the reed clumps he pursued her in a curious hunchbacked walk. They were the colours of dusk and their song was as soft as the evening air.

  Through lengthening shadows Wulfgar and Teg crossed the clapper bridge at Bellever and wandered up Lakehead Hill. Teg was very weary, her tongue was flopped over her chin and only courage kept her on her feet. Wulfgar sniffed out a kennel where the ling was tall and bushy, and the foxes lay side by side watching the lights of Powdermill Cottages twinkle in the clarity of early night. A bus crawled along the road towards Postbridge, boring into the blackness with its headlamps, but when the silence returned it was profound.

  ‘I think I’ll wait here while you hunt,’ Teg yawned. ‘I’m so tired I could sleep till summer.’

  ‘But will you be all right?’

  ‘Of course – go on, you must be hungry.’

  She smiled but her voice was sad.

  ‘Am I much of a burden?’ she asked.

  Wulfgar sw
allowed his misery and licked her muzzle.

  ‘Whenever I look at you,’ he said, ‘I see a countryside where there are no men like the trapper. There are no guns turned on us and no traps set to crush our limbs and no hounds to worry us into the Star Place.’

  ‘That sounds like the Star Place,’ Teg said.

  ‘No – it’s closer. It’s this side of death.’

  ‘There’s no such place, Wulfgar.’

  The dog fox sat up and scratched his side.

  ‘Maybe not,’ he said. ‘But lately I’ve had glimpses of a land that looks like the moors. The same bit of countryside always fills my dreams. And it never changes.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  He gazed down at her from unseeing eyes.

  ‘The hills are much higher than the tors. Their peaks are like knives poking into the clouds. Great rivers rush down the hillsides in rapids and falls. And there are huge birds in the sky, and the valley is carpeted with rabbits.

  ‘Where the snow lies on the high ground the hares are white and there are white grouse. The hunting is good and no man wants to kill us.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I can feel it as strongly as I feel your love.’

  ‘It must be very comforting to have such dreams.’

  ‘Perhaps they are visions,’ Wulfgar said.

  Her eyes widened.

  ‘But you’re not like Stargrief,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe I’m becoming like him. Does that sound conceited?’

  Teg shook her head.

  ‘You are Wulfgar,’ she said, as if it were sufficient.

  From Longford Tor the sunset was too magnificent merely to be looked at. Religions are born out of such experiences – beginnings and endings, dawn and sundown. His thoughts swept and danced across the deathless countryside, ideas swooping into despair.

  Wulfgar turned away. The vixen raised her eyes to meet his own.

  ‘It goes beyond love of fox for fox, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘But why must we grope around in darkness?’

  ‘There’s Rocky Wood,’ he said stiffly, and she felt she had trespassed on some forbidden area of his being.

  Below Beardown Tors, the West Dart passed quickly over shallows of rock and grit. Moonlight shivered on the water like beads of mercury vibrating on a drum. The reef of oaks known to men as Wistman’s Wood and to foxes as Rocky Wood lay on the hillside at their feet, and the sound of the river grew louder as they descended.

  From a great jumble of boulders the dwarf oaks grew close together, gnarled branches entwined. Moss, lichens and ferns sprouted from the bark, and bracken clogged the roots where the leaves of many seasons were rotting down to humus. The wood had come into being as a handful of acorns spilled from the crop of a pigeon. The bird had fallen victim to a peregrine falcon, long before the men of bronze had made their lynchets and terraces. Teg’s nose quivered.

  ‘Songbird, rabbit, mouse, squirrel – but no trapper,’ she said.

  ‘We aren’t the first foxes to use Rocky Wood,’ Wulfgar smiled.

  They trod gingerly on the dead leaves and twigs, and wherever it was possible went over the low branches for fear of snares. Wulfgar let Teg lead and waited patiently for her to select the earth.

  ‘This will do,’ she said eventually, poking her head out of a hole that was partly concealed by a boulder. ‘There are two bolt-holes at the back and a den big enough to raise a dozen cubs. I like the way it’s hidden by the ferns and brambles. No man could dig us out, it’s solid rock. When the trees come into leaf we’ll be invisible. A buzzard wouldn’t know we were around.’

  Wulfgar ranged as far afield as Huntingdon Warren in the South and Cranmere Pool to the North. Around Dunnabridge Farm on the West Dart there were good pickings – fieldmice, conies, rats and chickens. When the sheep dropped their lambs there was afterbirth and the odd stillborn scrap of wool and mutton. Close to Crockern one dawn he found the bodies of a sheep and two lambs. The ewe had successfully dropped the first but had struggled and died having the second. Wulfgar buried the heavier lamb for future use and carried the other back to Teg.

  For long hours he ran wild with the hunting fever. Full of bravado he stalked a cock red grouse in the heather above Huntingdon Warren and killed the bird as its mating call crescendoed to a harsh ‘go-bek-bek, go-bek-bek’. On the outskirts of Holne he was spotted with a baby rabbit in his jaws. A boy with fair hair, who had cycled all the way from Paignton because he loved Dartmoor and its creatures, saw Wulfgar lope off into the furze. The boy had spent the afternoon opening and closing the moorland gate for tips, but he valued the sight of the dark fox above the coppers and threepenny bits that bulged his trouser pocket.

  Along the stone walls blackthorn was in blossom, its frail white flowers traced against a cloudswept sky. The glare of sunlight gilded the grassmoor. Wulfgar drank at the Wheal Emma Leat and ate a salmon that he found wedged between rocks below the weir on the River Swincombe. A ring ouzel flew away crying ‘tac-tac-tac’. The bird’s bib was whiter than the water that rushed past the round, polished rocks to feed the pools under the Old Gobbett Tin Mine.

  JACKO RUNNING

  Scoble came home drunk from Newton Abbot market. His face was redder than usual and he breathed heavily through his mouth. The cider barrel tap squeaked as he turned it on and the level of the scrumpy rose to his thumb. Scoble swayed and took half a dozen swift backward steps to regain his balance, like a lunatic learning the tango. Jacko regarded him apprehensively from under the table. Cider gushed out of the barrel to form a golden puddle on the floor.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ roared Scoble, fumbling with the tap. The eyes of dog and master met, and Jacko licked his lips and tried to look lovable.

  ‘What you starin’ at, bone bag?’ Scoble said. ‘I’ll beat some sense into your thick head. Yaas – I will.’

  He staggered to the grate and reached down to pick up a stick. Scrumpy slopped over his trouser front. He collapsed on his knees and found his mouth with the pint pot. By the time he had finished drinking he had forgotten what he was doing. Like a child surrendering to weariness at the end of a long day, he curled up and laid his head on the fender and passed dizzily into unconsciousness.

  The door rattled gently, swung wide, and let the remains of a sunny afternoon flood the kitchen. With hardly a click of his claws Jacko departed, taking the garden wall in his stride, running elegantly down the road to Yarner Wells. The ruddy sky drew all the soft inner parts of his head up tight against his skull. At first there was a churning agony of heat, then numbness and light-headed bliss.

  ‘Jacko run the red race,’ said a voice very similar to his own. Sheep broke away from him in sumptuous panic and he rolled a mad bloodshot eye at them.

  ‘Too close to home,’ said the voice.

  He sniggered.

  ‘Jacko sly. Jacko know all tricks. O kill-killy-kill, but over the hill. Yes yes O yes! Over the hill.’

  Another shock-wave of sheep, ewes fat with lamb, eyes like fear-tinted marbles. He smashed into them, nipping a leg, tearing out a tuft of wool, blindly, playfully, holding the throbbing desire in check. At Yarner Wells some chickens were scratching the gravelly wayside. He killed two and would have had a third, but an upstairs window flew open and a woman squawked. It was old Mrs Lugg whose sight was failing.

  ‘What be it, mother?’ her daughter called up the stairs.

  ‘Fox, I think,’ said the old lady. ‘It’s after they fowls.’

  But Jacko was streaking up the hillside out of sight, spitting small feathers from between his teeth. On the top of Black Hill he lay panting beside the cairn and gazed westward. There was rain in the air and distances were clearly etched. Jacko’s chest heaved. His eyes were redder than the sun. Thoughts quaked like lava and he whimpered, waiting for the pain to pass. Slowly the sunset opened and admitted him to the gold and scarlet kingdom, where golden sheep paraded before him in glorious slow motion. A river of blood flowed into golden ponds, and blood-red birds
and black birds sailed silently overhead. Then the sun was gone and the magic was draining out of the landscape as swiftly as the pain faded from his mind. The ground seemed to tilt and fall from under him. He closed his eyes and somersaulted into blackness …

  There was a late rising of the moon above the trees. Jacko woke up shivering. It was a windless night with sound carrying immense distances, and clouds moving low across the tops of the western tors. The lurcher struggled to his feet and lifted his muzzle and howled. The goods train that was gathering speed below Pullabrook answered with a long drawn out hoot.

  ‘Night belong to me,’ Jacko growled. ‘I kill other dog. Yes yes! Killy killy killy.’

  And he ran off to find the goods train dog.

  The dark, decaying wood was haunted by owls of Trollgar’s family. Whenever they screeched Jacko showed his teeth and lifted his hackles. The merciless light of the moon was splintered by the branches of Yarner’s trees. Needles of light pierced his brain. He ran hard to drive the pain out, down the stream past Reddaford Water and on to the River Bovey. The train had gone. His body quivered with madness and the need to kill set his nerves on fire.

  ‘Jacko great. He come from stars. Stars love Jacko. They say, “Send us animals to play with. We lonely, Jacko. Send us sheep, lambs, rabbits, foxes, squirrels. Kill ’em quick and they fly up to us.’”

  The lurcher stopped babbling and lapped at the stars that dappled the surface of the river.

  ‘Drink stars. Put out pain. Fire go out in my head.’

  He went through the sepulchral coombs of the cleave, beneath roots shaped like gargoyles. But he was too noisy and did not encounter any victims until he reached Parke. Here he stumbled upon a blind rat who was crossing a woodland ride gripping the tail of a companion. The blind rat died and its friend lived.

  Jacko ran on. The stars sang to him and when they suddenly fell silent he looked up and saw clouds filling the sky.

  At Bovey Tracey he took the road that brought him once again onto the moors. By Kiln Brake the pain drove through his head in a fiery wave, and he crawled into the ash trees and blacked-out – almost on top of a fox. Wendel sprang up from his kennel of brambles and ran very quickly from the spinney. The lurcher had fallen on his brush and Wendel had dribbled scats in his haste to depart. Darting across the road he nearly met death under the wheels of a motorbike. Lacing the air with the musk of fear he headed for the oak coppice on the edge of Haytor Down, wondering why he was still alive.