Common Ground (7 page)

The vixen pushed through the wispy curtain of old man's beard across the railway on the opposite bank and, lit up by the corollas of light, slipped onto the tracks to chase a crisp packet. The fox's ears flicked at the noise growing louder, a sawing sound like a gull's shriek that shrunk him down into a crouch, yet his vixen stood her ground, watching something with a foreleg raised. Hunting. Then she pounced on a rat as it fled a flooded hole. Suddenly that moving wall of sound and weight and light was upon them, over them, part of them. A terrible flare and scream.

The fox ran, his legs a mess of speed, a force pushing him onwards along the fence and into the edge-land. He ran down that wild corridor and over the crossing point until his strength gave way and he curled up beneath the last elm on the river to sleep. By the next evening his heart had slowed.

He wakes now, disturbed by a vole scampering to its tunnel in the den wall, and stretches stiffly in the dark, legs numb from being too long motionless. With a yawn he tastes disordered air. Through the rooty aperture of the entrance, silent, feathery flakes swirl this way and that, aimlessly, diagonally. He blinks again, nibbles his fur and sniffs.
Nothing
. All scents are buried now. Even the voices of birds are quietened by blizzard. Pain swells in his arthritic legs. He has never been hungrier but he knows that hunting would be futile in falling snow. Covering his snout with his brush he lies awake, waiting, weakening.

By dusk the next evening the world has become monochrome. Lines of rooks huddle in the fields searching for a gap in the white crust. The fox is at the holloway, stalking a crow as it smashes its beak into a chalk-hard drift. With every strike it sinks a little until it raps impenetrable earth and draws out a rattling,
krah-ah-aahhhh
. The fox slinks on his belly, but the crow hears and hops, skips and vanishes into grey air. High above, the drone of a great metal bird whines and throbs, retracting its landing gear to begin its migration south.

Despite the snow, moisture in the air carries sound and scent: a foggy hum of lorries and cars and smells pumped from industrial vents. A Chinese takeaway on Bilton Lane is deep-frying pork. The fox's ears twitch. He snaps at the air, retches, coughs and yawns. Disturbed, the rooks rise from the fields and throng the wood. Woodpigeons flying in pairs fold back their wings and come in to roost. He knows birds are beyond him now and he resorts to his clump of dead hogweed at the field's edge as the street lights of town begin to shimmer in the darkening mist beyond. After twenty breaths, he rises and limps towards them.

Behind the old railway, down the siding bank, his territory finishes by a clutch of garden-escaped hellebores. They are a purple marker among the ermine snow. A rotten garden fence blown outwards lies semi-buried by earth piled into mounds from rabbit excavations. Moving from hole to hole he thrusts his head in and tastes the faint air of a warren. Memories flash: fur against his tongue and teeth, flesh, the breaking of bone. The scents are faded though and the warren collapsed. A Staffordshire bull terrier killed the last breeding doe a year earlier as its owner stopped to light a cigarette. The clutch of pink infants left orphaned in the burrow was a feast for a pregnant rat. The fox smells it all and moves on.

Crossing the collapsed fence, he crawls up a bank and under a laurel into a long yard thick with snow. The crystalline layer has turned plant pots into giant puffballs. A wheelie bin is on its side, lid open and overflowing with rubbish; the stench fills his nose. It is this that has drawn him. But there is another –
dog
. It's weak, though. There's been nothing in here for days save for a pair of blackbirds investigating another long-empty feeder. Only their spidery scrawls flaw the snow's luminescence. The fox creeps, body tensed, each boot barely shifting the surface. Pad, pad, pad, he creaks towards the square of the house looming, cliff-like, at the end. A blind in an upstairs bedroom glows yellow. That's all. He pauses.
No
. There is another, an intermittent flashing like sunlight on the river. It is coming from around the corner of the wall, near the bins. Suddenly the house wall erupts with a gurgle of steaming water swirling down a drain. He smells something familiar –
elderflowers.
He hurries into a trot and rounds the house, bringing a bright conservatory into view, a television blaring at its centre. In a heartbeat he is down on his chest, ears back, baring his teeth. Every sense tells him to flee. Here is all he despises: uncertain ground and dangers, but his hunger is like an animal eating him from the inside. He darts for the wheelie bin and tears opens a plastic bag like a rabbit's stomach spilling wet cardboard, eggshells and half-eaten vegetables. Burying his snout deep inside, his teeth clamp on a chicken carcass, which he drags onto the snow to crack the cartilage and swallow the pale, forgotten under-meat.

Desperation has lowered his guard and he doesn't notice the young dog stirred from bed and walking to the conservatory window. Outraged by his wild form, it slams its paws against the glass, barking sharp violent rasps. The sudden scream from upstairs sounds like a rabbit caught by the neck and the house explodes with yellow. The fox bolts the way he came, running hard, oblivious to the burning pain in his bones and thinking of nothing but reaching his territory, his earth. Yet he doesn't run in its direction. His instinct is to lose enemies on foreign soil and so he doubles back, turning west along the old railway, dashing through borders, over fences, up bramble banks and through scrappy undergrowth strewn with fly-tipped glass and metal. Under a hedge he smells another dog-fox –
young, strong
– but presses on, past an allotment's drunken fencing, flushing woodpigeon as he runs. A hundred yards further, behind the slide and swings of a children's playground, a snowy belt of woodland leads down to the river. Scenting open water, he slows to a limp and skirts a shallow pool frozen and flecked with litter, ringed with the prints of moorhens.

Watching him unseen from the brow of a bank is a two-year-old dog-fox who tracks the bony shape panting beside his water source before emitting a high-pitched whine of warning. Surprised, the old fox jumps, spins round and retches back a gekkering call. His eyes are wide, muscles tensed, but the younger fox has no urge to fight him; he knows the intruder is too weak to contest ground. He stinks of fear and of death. But he carries another smell too, something familiar – dens and warm earth. The young fox lets out an ululating noise and lets his father pass, following his hobbling shape until he becomes invisible in the trees.

Moon renders the Nidd's surface polished silver. The fox breaks it with his tongue and laps. There is no other sound than the continuous, indefinable whistle-hum of the sewage works, a noise he has never heard so close before. Instinctively his senses orient him and he turns east towards his territory. Mist haunts the river edges, skirting the alder and snow-dusted pines. Nosing his way downstream, the fox creeps through the cover of dead vegetation until his own faint scent drifts over a low woody rise. As he crests a trackless path the night-veiled land beyond begins to resolve into the recognisable shapes of viaduct, wood and meadow. A sniff.
Close now
. He quickens his pace, limping through a thicket of hawthorn and up to a leaning fence covered by an impenetrable wall of creeping bramble. Rather than retreat, he darts through the narrow gap between a fence post and tree, landing in a ditch on his front paws. Immediately he knows he's been bitten.

There is a scratch and the feeling of being gripped. Sharp teeth hold his back legs. He yelps and coils round, snapping and hissing, fearing badger or dog, but his jaws clamp on something worse. Old discarded wire, barbed and twisted into loops, is buried deep into the flesh of his left hind paw and noosed around the other, suspending both in the air. He pulls and chews at the wire, dragging himself across the ditch, yet only deepens the wound. He tries jumping back and forth, then scrabbling over the fence from the other way, but the noose tightens and twists with the efforts, soaking the snow with blood. Eventually, exhausted, he collapses onto his side, ribs heaving, too weak to move.

The little ditch is massed with night when a robin breaks the silence –
twiddle-oo, twiddle-eedee, twiddle-ee
– a downpour of notes that wakes the fox. He blinks up at the song as it ripples through the wood. The robin is anointing the earth from a branch of a nearby crab apple, legs braced, fiery breast puffed and facing the red edge of the rising sun. Another sings, faintly, from the housing estate across the meadow. The edge-land is stirring. Slowly, trunks and branches become etched in a cream sky; light blooms in the east. Starlings settle again on the pylon cables. Rooks pace the fields. The
wish-wash
of cars rises in a thin line.

There is no pain, only numbness, and for a moment he forgets his bonds and tries to stand. His yelp frightens away the robin. Licking, pulling and biting the wire again agitates the cut further, for the old post it is nailed to is crooked but strong, a creosoted chestnut pole driven deep into the ground by a farmer who believed a job worth doing was worth doing well. More fretting flares the wound; it boils up with fresh blood until it's too tender even for his tongue to touch.

A frozen puddle a yard away half-melts in the midday sun, maddening his thirst, but all through the changing light of the mauve and silver afternoon he can only scratch at the ground and bite at the snow-topped brambles. Soon every breath is a wheeze. As the sky bruises, he hears the continuous exhale of cars returning. The puddle thickens and solidifies again. A rabbit kit appears at the top of the ditch. Curious, it approaches the fox and becomes confused by the absurdity of its trussed legs. The fox blinks; the rabbit has changed into a rook, assessing him, preening under a wing, cocking its head and letting out a loud
kro-aa-ak
. Even hisses and snarls don't scare it; then the fox finds he can neither uncurl his lip nor lift his head.

Fringing the ditch are twelve snow-rooted silver birches. They look like apparitions, hard edged but soft-skinned, the luminosity of winter landscape distilled in their cream-russet trunks. The fox thinks briefly of his den; then forgets everything. The rook hops about the lip of the scrape, bending closer, twitching, and ducking back in feathery leaps. Others prowl too, a silky crow and a pair of grey-hooded jackdaws. Through a tangled web of purple birch twigs the firmament changes as the sun becomes a rim on the south-western skyline. Clouds gilded by the dying orb hesitate for a moment in a forget-me-not-blue sky, before it changes to the hue of ripe wheat. Amber comes next, before daffodil and rose, then everything assumes the dark crimson of field campion. This stretches the furthest, reflecting in the ice and snow, turning them bloody. Fading, it leaves only the husks of trees and hills, houses and farms and the smouldering black stems of wind turbines on the horizon. The last colour is the shrinking topaz of the fox's eyes as his breath dissolves into the darkness.

A month passes, maybe longer, before I find his body. It is a bright, fiery morning, cold and sharp, with snow still on the ground and trees as I wander west from the viaduct, down towards the Bachelor Gardens Sewage Works. I have half a mind to photograph the river, which is shining like tin foil under a climbing sun. Near a cluster of silver birch I pick my way around a ditch overgrown with bramble. Clambering over the last vestiges of a fence, I smell it – a strong, sweet, rotten smell – and glance down to my right. It takes a moment to make sense of the mess of body lying at the bottom of the scratched trench. The fox is sagged, sodden, blackened, caved-in, his back legs stripped to bones and still trussed up in wire. It's heartbreaking to see and made worse by guilt: I'd almost forgotten him in these intervening weeks. I searched for him after he disappeared, looking in different places and at different times, but in truth I knew his work was done. I am beyond the crossing point now; the edge-land is open to me in a way I couldn't have understood before. Following him has deepened the map, unfolding it, throwing it into relief. Stories are within reach. But the human world has been pulling at me too. Rosie has moved up from London. Work is picking up. Other exciting news has thawed my loneliness. And now, looking at the fox's sad, skeletal shape below, I don't see psychopomp or guide, but a wild animal again. His face is a shrunken and squashed mask, all life pecked out of it; his claws are broken from trying to tear himself free. That flame fur has long since leached into the earth.

When I was twenty-four, I was rushed into hospital for an emergency operation. Three hours later I woke, still blurry with anaesthetic, to find the surgeon who saved my life standing at the foot of the bed, holding the appendix in a clear tube. ‘You're a new man now,' he said. ‘I'm giving you back to the world.' It was a strange moment and a strange turn of phrase, which is probably why it has stayed with me. Seeing the fox elicits a similar sensation, like a part of me removed. At once an ending and a beginning.

Sun rakes the edge-land. New light over this now-familiar ground. It feels so long since the world provided any heat that I put away my notebook and lie down, using my pack as a pillow. Beside me is a patch of coltsfoot, an inadvertent little graveside bouquet. Its flowers, which bloom before the leaves, are the nourishing yellow of free-range egg yolks – an assertion of life. And all around, the sun bleaches buds of birch and hawthorn, its elevation such that it seems to spotlight everything: the edges of stems and stalks, a passing pigeon's wings, the rooks
yak-yakking
in the meadow, a lone bumblebee. The curtains have been ripped opened and the dustsheets dragged off. Lying here with the warmth full on my face and the
drip-drip
of ice and snow thawing in quickening rhythms, I can almost feel the earth turning.