Little Foxes (3 page)

And he had not forgotten his swan; he looked for her every day and searched the canal bank for her feathers. He threw bread out onto the canal to attract her back, but there was never any sign of her.

Then one day – it was just after Christmas – the owls were no longer in their arched window in the high stone wall of the ruin and that same day he found a kingfisher lying stiff and dead by the canal. He could see it was one of the young ones for it still had a white tip to its beak and a mottled breast. The ground was too hard to bury it so he carried it reverently in his hands down to the canal, hammered a hole in the ice and slipped it into the water. Hecould not cry – he was too angry for that. As he watched it disappear under the ice he vowed he was not going to let the others die. He turned on his heel and ran back to the chapel. He picked up any loose stones he could find and made a great pile of them on the canal bank. All day he went to and fro, until he thought he had collected enough. Then he began to hurl them violently at the ice that first splintered and then began to crack and break up. By the time darkness began to fall he had opened up a twenty-foot strip of canal water for the kingfishers to dive into.

He was back the next morning after bolting his breakfast. He had expected to find it iced over once again. But although the edges of the ice had encroached somewhat, the water was still open to the sky. He found this difficult to understand for the night had been as cold as ever. He did not have to wait long for the explanation. He had been there no more than a few minutes when he heard a strange slapping slithery sound, and into view came a swan, still brown in her youth, staggering ungainly across the ice before letting herself gently into the water. The neck was longer than he remembered and the grey had all but disappeared, but as she floated towards him now, the wings billowing like sails behind her, Billy had no doubt that this was indeed his swan come back to him.

‘So, it was you swimming around that kept the ice back,’ said Billy. ‘Grown a bit, haven’t you? Didn’t recognise you at first. How’s the wing then?’ And as if to reply, the swan rose from the water and beat the air about her before settling back into the water again. ‘Didn’t break the ice for you, you know. Did it for them kingfishers, so don’t you go frightening them off, will you now? They needto fish. Come to think of it, there can’t be much about for you. Is that what you’ve come back for? Not just to see me. I can still speak – been able to ever since that day, and I’ve still got your feather you know. I’ll get back home now and bring you some of Aunty May’s stale crumpets – she never eats them. Don’t know why she buys them. Don’t go away.’

The swan stayed for a month or more after that and by the end of that time was taking Aunty May’s crumpets out of Billy’s hand. He talked to her constantly and confessed for the first time what troubled him most – that he belonged nowhere, loved no one and was loved by no one. Once or twice she clambered out of the canal and allowed him to smooth the feathers on her neck. It was just as he was saying goodbye to her one evening, running his hand down the neck and over her folded wing feathers that he saw a large ring of red plastic around her left leg. ‘Where’d you get that from?’ he asked. ‘You want to tell me, don’t you? Funny, isn’t it? I mean, you taught me to speak and you can’t even speak yourself.’

Between them the boy and the swan kept open the pond on the canal for the kingfishers to feed, Billy breaking away the edges each morning to keep the ice back and the swan endlessly circling the water so that it was hardly ever still and could not freeze. No more kingfishers died and with Billy begging stale bread all over the estate no other bird in his Wilderness died of starvation that winter.

Then one night in March the frost lifted and the warm spring rain fell in torrents. When Billy arrived early the next morning he found the canal turned to water again. The swan was not there waiting for him as usual. He called out for her and ran up and down the bank, throwing bread into the water in a desperate attempt to bring her back. But all the while he knew she had gone. He felt suddenly deserted and rejected.

For some days he returned to wait for her, but she never came back. He found he could no longer be happy in his Wilderness without the swan. So he made up his mind to leave the Wilderness for ever, and he promised himself faithfully he would never return.

He kept his promise for a month or more, but then both boredom and a new yearning tempted him back. It was a bright day in a spring still chilled by a fresh north wind when Billy clambered back under the wire into his Wilderness. Already the skeletal trees were filling out with a new growth of leaves and the creeper was green again on the ruins. Billy ran across the graveyard to the canal, suddenly convinced that the swan would be there waiting for him as he had dreamed so often she would be. But the canal was deserted except for a moorhen that scooted into the reeds on the far bank. Seized with terrible despair he called out over the canal, ‘Why don’t you come back to me? Why? I saved you, didn’t I? Didn’t I save your life? I thought you were my friend. Please come back. Please.’ But the whispering murmur of thousands of swarming starlings turned to a roar above his head and drowned his words.

Billy made his way back to the chapel and lay down out of the wind watching the clouds of starlings whirling in the sky over his Wilderness. He lay back on a mound in the middle of the chapel under the leaning lime tree and closed his eyes in an attempt to calm the anguish inside him, but all the misery welled up and he could not hold it back. He cried then as he had never cried before. The only hope, the only joy in his life had gone. All that was left for him was the thin-lipped Aunty May and the inhospitable hubbub of his school.

He must have cried himself to sleep for he was woken suddenly. He was lying on his side, his legs curled up so tight that his knees were touching his chin. At first he thought the sound might be the rustling of squirrels in the tree above him – he had seen them up there often enough before – but he had never heard squirrels yapping. Billy sat up. A blackbird piped at him from a blackthorn bush. Billy sat like a statue and waited. He allowed only his eyes to move and they scanned the trees above him, trained eyes now, keen and sharp. When it came again the sound was distant, yet it felt close, and it came not from the walls or the trees or the undergrowth around him, but from the ground beneath him, a curious squawking and squealing, almost bird-like, but no bird he knew could growl. He put an ear to the ground and listened. As he did so he noticed a strange musky smell in the grass. And from below the grass there was a dull yet distinct high-pitched yapping. Billy had heard enough and moved carefully off the mound, stepping slow and soft. He climbed over the stonework and settled down to watch, his heart beating in his ears.

One came out first, his white snub muzzle sniffing the air, and he was butted out into the open by the one behind. And then two more emerged, almost together, until all four fox cubs stood like ridiculous infant sentinels, each one facing outwards, noses lifted, ears pricking and twitching. One of them was looking now at Billy but seemed not to see him. It was the largest of the cubs with a redder face than the others and more sharply defined black streaks running from the eyes to the muzzle. The eyes were grey and the nose that pointed at him earth brown. The fox cub sat down neatly and yawned, and Billy found himself yawning in sympathy, a long yawn that lifted the shroud of despondency from Billy’s shoulders and left him smiling and happy once again in his Wilderness.

CHAPTER FOUR

BILLY LOOKED ON THAT DAY AS THEY gambolled over the mound, stalking and pouncing on each other, rolling locked together down the slope and then springing apart again to play a remorseless game of tag and hide-and-seek. Then, as suddenly as it had begun it stopped, and a prolonged grooming session began, followed by a snooze in the thin spring sunlight – a bundle of foxes breathing as one. A crackling of twigs in the undergrowth was enough to awake them and send them scuttling down into the earth. Billy was aboutto leave, believing the show to be over, when he saw the vixen, a pigeon hanging from her mouth, padding through the graveyard, her white-tipped brush trailing behind her. He froze and prayed he had not been seen.

The cubs came out one by one to greet their mother and looked on patiently as the vixen neatly pulled away first the long grey primary feathers, then the downy secondaries until the pigeon was plucked clean. She kept shaking her head to rid her teeth of the feathers. The meal of regurgitated pigeon was soon over and each cub lay back replete while their mother checked them over in turn. And every few seconds she would lift her black nose and look about her nervously. She vanished down into the earth soon after the meal, taking her cubs with her. Billy was cold to the bone and he needed to stretch his cramped legs. He had seen enough for one day.

He crept away from the chapel as if every blade of grass might creak like a floorboard, and then he was outside the fence and hop-scotching successfully all the way home, never once allowing his feet to cross the cracks in the pavement. That night he took out his grey feather, held it in both hands, closed his eyes and willed the foxes to be there the next day. He knew that if the mother had caught his scent she might well take her cubs elsewhere. It was this dread that kept him awake most of that night.

He approached the den the next morning with the greatest caution, a damp forefinger in the air checking the wind direction to be sure they had no advance warning of his approach. But in his anxiety to see if they were still there he went too fast through the undergrowth, stumbled over a root and almost fell. Cursing himself silently he tiptoed on. He need nothave worried, for the cubs lay in a pyramid on the mound just where they had been the day before, and Billy settled down to watch.

Each day during that first week of the spring holidays he came to the mound and sat behind the chapel wall to watch. After a week he could identify every fox cub, but his eye was always drawn to the largest of them, the boldest, the one that had looked at him that first day. This was the one that seemed to call the tune whenever the vixen was away hunting. The others went where he went. In any mock battles this one always ended up on top, astride his opponent and joyfully triumphant. This was the one that often stayed awake and on guard whilst the others slept, and Billy felt that only this fox cub was aware he was watching them, and he tolerated it because he understood that Billy was a benign presence that held no threat for them.

The vixen appeared to be hunting alone. If there was a dog fox helping her, Billy never saw him. The vixen was a splendid creature with a thick yellow-brown coat that bounced on her back as she moved. Billy admired her greatly, and not just for her looks. She worked tirelessly for her fox cubs. Every waking minute was devoted to their well-being. She was endlessly patient with them, supplying their every need, and seemingly spreading her affection and attention evenly between them. She brought back rabbits, mice, voles, minute shrews which the cubs threw into the air and juggled with; and judging by the variety of bones Billy found all over the mound, she must have visited every dustbin on the estate at one time or another in her endless struggle to keep her cubs alive.

On the Sunday before school began again for the summer term, Billy took a picnic lunch with him and spent the entire day fox-watching in the ruins. He wanted to make the best of his last day of freedom. He had not seen the vixen for a day or two and did not want to miss her. So he got there early and planned to stay until after dark. Aunty May would fret and fume, but he would risk that this time.

The fox cubs were much altered since he first saw them. It was as if their white muzzles had somehow been stretched, and pulled out to accommodate their teeth. Their noses were no longer brown but black. Conversely, their dark chocolate coats had turned to milk chocolate and the sparse wispy hair had been replaced by a thicker woolly pile.

They seemed unsettled when he arrived; only the larger one sat on top of the mound, his tail curled cat-like around his feet. The others yapped and whined anxiously around him, but he paid them little attention. They did not sleep much all that day either and their games were brief and ill-tempered; and much to Billy’s disappointment they spent much of it underground. When they did appear, Billy noticed that one of them was listless, weak and unkempt. He felt something was wrong, but could not think what it was. He waited until it was dark for the vixen to appear, but again she did not. The cubs had gone below and were silent. Billy put his ear to the ground and listened. He could hear nothing. He left them to make his way home for supper.

He found a crowd gathered under the amber glow of the light outside the flats. Billy had to shield his eyes against the glaring headlights of a car as he ran towards it. Everyone was there – Aunty May running out in her fluffy mauve slippers and her curlers – and all the children were there in their dressing-gowns. But the crowd was strangely silent. As Billy pushed his way through he already knew what he would find. The vixen lay in the gutter, tongue lolling out, her unseeing eyes glinting fluorescent orange under the light. She was matted and muddied, and somehow smaller in death.

‘I tried to stop – thought it was a dog,’ said the man who was kneeling over her. ‘Just staggered out in front of me, she did, almost as if she wanted me to hit her. Looked to me as if she’d been hit once already – either that or she was drunk. She was dragging her back legs. I just finished her off. That’s all. Not my fault. Only a fox anyway. Don’t belong to anyone, does it?’ So many feelings were racing through Billy’s mind; grief at the vixen’s death, anger at its cause, and anxiety for the fox cubs left hungry in the Wilderness.

Everyone of course had to have their look. Someone wanted to cut off the brush for a trophy, but it was agreed in the end that the fox should be dumped in the dustbin for collection in the morning, before it began to smell. Billy made sure which dustbin it was before Aunty May took his hand and hauled him away. ‘I’ve been waiting for you for nearly two hours, Billy,’ she said. ‘Could have been you run over out there. I’ve told you time and again to get back home before dark. Worried sick I was. You got school tomorrow and you haven’t had a bath for days; and look at you, Billy, you’re filthy again. What do you get up to? No point in asking, I know. You never say anything, do you Billy? It’s not fair, Billy. It’s not fair at all.’