Common Ground (6 page)

A flash. And I go with him. We move, conjoined and flame-like, over the fetid leaves, dashing past an oak and into a holly thicket. A blackbird huddling on a low branch explodes in an upward flurry, chastising with a shrieking spray of notes. The leaping bite is instinctive but it catches only the waft of tail feathers. The fox grubs up a worm, chews it and waits for the wood to still again. After a moment, stealth re-forms like a membrane around us and we slip back into the trees.

Impossible, but I am following him still. An exchange, a fusion, has occurred. I suddenly see and understand. I know that it's seven years since his slippery birth under a gorse beside the river. I know that his mother and father were killed soon after his weaning, his father shot through the spine by a farmer; his mother's brilliance crushed by the glancing blow of a lorry taking sheep to slaughter. I see her laid out like a hearth dog among the silverweed at the road's edge, her tail wagging in the slipstream of passing vehicles. I watch him as a young fox foraging for beetles and shrews on fearful trips from the den. I see him grow in the summer that followed, becoming strong enough to fight off the foxes that came prospecting the edge-land as his father's musk faded from its fences and bushes. And I go with him now. I share his elemental possession of this ground, his mapping and claim via snout and gland.

From the Nidd to the old railway, the fox's nose bow-waves through field, hedge, meadow and wood. He knows all 320 acres by sight, scent and sound. He knows it when fat with mallard and basking in arbours of grass and rat's-tail plantain, the pineapple tang of mayweed astringent on the breeze. He knows what it is to forget the fear and doze among tufted couch strawed by heat, bees lumbering, pollen-laden, between the white funnels of bindweed as swifts sear through the blue above. But he knows it in winter too when all is hard earth, bleached air and burning bones.

Heels lifted, he paws through the wood to where it joins the holloway, rising south, uphill. Its hazel walls are blasted back by cold. Trunks look glazed with ice. Puddles pit the earth but their water has been robbed by cold, frozen into panes and smashed. He touches his nose to ghosts of plants, to cindered earth, bracken and bramble coated with rime. Only the hollies and goosefeet ivy have escaped this salt curing, their leafy pelts hanging glossy and green.

Halfway up he picks out a scent from an old run cutting over the fields. He takes it, heading west, over the plough ruts, bobbing, sniffing, detecting. A roe deer print is gouged into soil beside a rusted door hinge. He investigates three, four, five more, the last splayed where the deer broke into a run and its hoof took the weight of muscle. Further along is the dark stain of frozen blood.
Rabbit
. He gobbles a severed foot and the skin and head of a young buck killed the night before by a badger. Then he scratches around a slab of stone, a fallen gatepost for a path long forgotten, scrounging beneath for chrysalides and seeds.

At the edge of a field the ground swells to greet a boundary hedge. Bare hawthorn and blackthorn comb his coat as he twists beneath, sweeping for fruit, but mice have raided the last of the larder; even the frostbitten clusters of rose hips and haws are gone. The thinnest twig tips tremble and squeak against each other –
cheep-cheep
– anticipating the calls of warbler chicks that will explode from these hedges in spring. The fox rests in a clump of hogweed, unaware that it was once a Neolithic knapping point; two metres below, Kentish flints pepper the ground. Above, stars spin around a new moon. Breath freezing on his snout, he blinks, sniffs and scans fields awash with pearlescent glow to the west. Hemmed by dark hedge and wood, they fold into one another before succumbing to the sprawl of the town, a black sea flickering with phosphorescence. He sees a million eyes: street lamps and headlights, the yellow, maggot bodies of commuter carriages screeching, hissing and rumbling back from Leeds and York. It is an ever-respiring beast that puzzles him. He fears it; he craves it too.

Lean, hunched, he roams along runs that resemble the eroded ditches of dry rivers. All these tributaries loop eventually back to the meadow edge where, cautiously, he sniffs for me. He trots over the icy tufts, springing a bank vole from stillness and capturing it by the legs. There is the jerky snap and click of sharp, yellow teeth through bone. Then he drops it, puts his paw on its head and tears it in half. Somewhere deep in town an ambulance flicks on its siren.

Haow. Haaaooow
.

A different call. Animal.
Close
. It's warm and wide-throated and, head raised, vole wobbling in his jaws, the fox feels it more than hears it.
Vixen
. His ears twitch and range. She's young and in his territory, down by the viaduct. Over the old railway the fences of the housing estate reverberate with a volley of barks. A single German shepherd triggers the half-forgotten instinct of the wolf pack, sending a ripple of snarling and barking through the houses. Claws scrabble at kitchen doors and garden gates. The vixen ignores them and sings again –
haaaaoooow
. The sound pierces double-glazed windows, stopping forks halfway to mouths, wondering at the scream outside. It fires the urge to mate between the fox's thin hips. If he'd been stronger, perhaps he would have sought her out, but not now.
Haaaaaoooooow
. Others will be coming soon, young dog-foxes with only three summers under their pelts, slipping out from fields and the wastelands behind the playing fields, warehouses and paint factories to come here and search for her. The fox knows to encounter them as he is, flower-frail with hunger, would be dangerous. His patch could be taken. Or worse.

Territory is everything in winter. To be forced to roam in the open would be fatal. The fox hobbles off and sprays the brambles around his gully. All must be marked. From his position on its ridge the trees below seem to collapse inwards, caving in on the winding watercourse running along the little valley's bottom. Bilton Beck rises here and burbles over a silt bed strewn with black stones all the way to the Nidd. In places plastic bottles spin endlessly in the eddies; in others, ice sheets join the banks, roofing the stream. It rarely freezes completely, though, and he knows this. No wild fox would dig a den where there wasn't a pond, marsh or stream within a few hundred yards. Not that he dug this one; it is the remains of a badger sett hollowed beneath a beech a hundred years ago. Floods and landslips have exposed the tree's roots, leaving them clutching at the soil like a sparrowhawk's talons. Behind there's a scrape where the fox lies on warm days surveying the gully, but with the air sharp as a thorn in the nose, he disappears into deep earth, ducking along a root-draped passageway towards the furthest chamber where the ground is soft, black and nitrogenous. His copper fur parts to reveal a pure white undercoat as he flexes his body into a curl.

The soil is a repository of old smells and they come to him, given life by warmth and movement. The strongest is his vixen. For a moment he remembers licking, the wilful submission of mating and the sweet tang of kits. The den has known many such balls of brown fur squirming in its earth for heat and milk. In his drowsiness, time past and present combine and soft, clawless paws clamber over his face. Blind liquid eyes push up to his. His fur stirs with the hot, sweet breath of pink, mewing mouths. Then he is alone again. He dreams of root, burrow, earth and blood.

The fox's mate abandoned the den two years before, just as tender goose grass and nettles began to carpet the under-brambles. He watched her trot to the horizon at the top of his gully. Pausing on the ridge she became a silhouette under stretching arms of an ash then disappeared over the edge. The kits bounded after, scrabbling up the slope in pursuit, white-tipped tails flicking, fur only just fawned, all barely thirty days old.

The foxes had mated together before, raising litters that grew fat, first from her milk, then from the rabbits, wood mice and pigeons he'd hunted. But hunger came often in that last winter together. Sixty years earlier, farmers had thrown rabbit corpses infected with myxomatosis into the burrows that edged the wheat fields to the north. The infection spread ruthlessly, decimating warrens that had been tunnelled under the wood for a thousand years. It was a grim plague that still haunted the survivors' descendants, flaring into epidemic proportions during hot summers when the breeding conditions were perfect for the virus-carrying rabbit flea. That year it had thrived, spreading from coat to coat so that by the time the beech over the foxes' den had shed its last leaves, the prey they relied on was in sharp decline. The fox hadn't even needed to hunt the few rabbits he came across swollen, shivering and foul with disease. Eyes bulged red and bloody from skulls, sightless, scratched out. Blind, dumb and disoriented, they dragged their useless hind legs in pathetic crawls for cover; he felt none of the joy of execution when stooping to break their necks. Even the meat tasted poor, the flesh corroded.

The foxes hungered, a pain compounded each night by the smell of food drifting over the meadow. Sickly thin, hunting in the frozen, misty margins, the fox bit at the scents –
chicken bones, meat, hot marrowfat, rotting vegetables, baked wheat
– and scrabbled violently at the earth in his search for worms and insects. Once he dug up a squirrel's cache of acorns and ate them all, carrying none to his mate. But despite the gnawing in his belly, he kept to his territory, never straying beyond the old railway. Being a wild fox, the smell of man triggered received fears, memories that had passed from fox to fox via trembling whisker and womb. His were blurry visions of The Bramham Moor Hunt, founded in 1740 by the improbably named MP for York, George Fox-Lane. Although long since merged and moved to more respectable pastures, it had once been a regular sight through these fields and woods. The fox half-remembered things he'd never even seen: spectacular horses, duns and greys, gleaming horns and gentry in blue velvet jackets thundering along the treeline, driving piebald foxhounds up the gully's sides; thick winter fox pelts skinned from pink carcasses left to rot in snowy fields. His vixen had been different. Littered in an old construction pipe behind the sewage works at Bachelor Gardens, she'd scavenged discarded takeaway polystyrene and bin bags since weaning. She'd learned to wait from the cover of parked cars until closing time brought the rush for takeaways that would be spilled onto pavements by drunken hands. The smells of man compelled something different in her:
Leave
.
Feed. Mate again.

The fox had waited for her return, the freshness of rubbings around the den keeping her alive in his snout. Each night he patrolled, marking trees, leaving his twisted black coils on stumps and surveying the meadow from below the same ash tree his ancestors had. A favoured spot, its bark had been worn smooth by generations of foxes drawn to rub there by a usefully positioned nail. This was an unintentional memorial, hammered into the trunk in 1914 by Lieutenant Thomas Watson before leaving for Egypt with the Leeds Pals, with a vow to his fiancée, Elizabeth, that they'd remove it together when the war was over. That benediction never came. The fusion of bone and mud they salvaged from a shell hole three years later was spaded into the earth at Tyne Cot Cemetery, Belgium. The nail was left to the tree and over the years became almost consumed by bark. It stuck out just enough to snatch a few hairs whenever the fox scratched against it, forming a tuft that was foraged every spring by blue tits to line their nests.

Moons passed, five in all, but with no sign of his mate. As dusk heralded the sixth, the fox prowled along the river past the collapsed bank of his birth den and surprised a young rat, devouring it in seconds on the crescent of a small muddy beach. He cracked its skull with his back teeth and swallowed the tail. Strength surged through his limbs and he lollopped up the gully side following her trail as a flare of sun sharpened the horizon into a clear line. The day had been numb and grey and he trotted towards that fading frequency of warmth, weaving, nose to ground, tracing her scent through the fallen branches and infant snowdrops. The meadow was growing then and among a swathe of grass and sprouting dandelions, a cock-pheasant poked up. The fox sank to its haunches but the wind changed; a breath lifted his hind fur and the pheasant rattled off in a volley of clucking that echoed through the wood.

The fox crept along the treeline until he reached the old railway. His mate had paused there to wait for her kits, in the same spot where a signal box had once stood. He smelled them on the corner of an old brick poking through the mud. At this distance the town looked different, like an open mouth. Houses loomed. Behind them, the blurry amber curve of street lights. Power lines crackled off south-west towards a groaning electricity substation. Metal smells. New patterns and shapes. Drizzle began and he knew it was the dark precursor of a storm. He smelled man. Then, with a step, he left his territory for the first time.

Breaching a privet hedge, he paused halfway through the orange wash of a rainy cul-de-sac. Its reeks disoriented: oil, tobacco and mint smeared into pavements. Rain drummed on street-lamp casings, swirling down from a sky the hue of blackberries. He felt the tarmac tremble and turned to see moving lights closing at speed. A screech and a long horn-blast sent him scampering along a ginnel between two houses. Leaping over a wall, he slipped down a bank and into a scrappy wood. The storm was growing, awakening the earth; wind stirred the trees. The foot of the slope blew with plastic bags and bottles and a line of elder bushes entwined a twelve-foot security fence. On the other side lay a railway, a dull bronze line that thrummed under a row of arc lamps. The hissing whip of a train ran along its length, metal against metal, an unfathomable weight approaching. The fox slunk away, trotting southwards, his black paws splashing through run-off. It was then he saw it and his body jerked and froze: fur flashing. Red-brown fur. And that smell.
His mate
.