“Bastardo!” Charlie laughed. “Clint Eastwood or what? You coldblooded killer.”
We went to inspect the body. The pellet had taken its eye out. I felt queasy. I had a hard-on for the vestiges of Alice in my memory, and now this. It didn’t feel right.
“What are you going to do?” Charlie asked. “You should skin the fucker. Take its head off. Have it as a trophy.”
“It’s a fox,” I said. “It’s not a rhino.”
“Bury it, then,” Beaky said. He was reaching for the rifle.
“You bury it.”
“Not my mess.”
I placed a hand against the fox’s flank. It was warm and soft. I felt something moving through it. The last pulse of blood, maybe. Muscle memory. Something. I half expected the colour of it to come away on my skin when I lifted my hand clear.
Boredom was setting in. Beaky and Charlie ended up taking pot shots at the sky. They asked if I was coming and I said no. They wandered off. Charlie said something hilarious about fox AIDS and wearing a condom, and then it was just me and the fox and the closing of the day. I stayed for another hour, until it started to rain. I’d left my coat at Alice’s. I felt myself shiver and I could no longer look at the fox because with every tremor of cold it felt as though it was the fox, and not me, that was moving.
I wanted to bury it, but the ground was too hard. In the end I toed a stack of leaf mould over the body. I said I was sorry. And I left.
That night I came down with the shittiest cold I’d ever had. I remember Mum sitting with me for some of it, though I can’t remember what she said at the time. She was holding my hand. Sweat was lashing off me. With the coming of dawn, it seemed to just vanish, as if it was something that could only exist at night-time. Since then we always referred to it as my vampire flu. Mum said she was worried I might have contracted pneumonia and she was dithering over a call to the emergency services on a couple of occasions when my breath turned shallow, but Dad stayed her hand and told her to wait.
I ate an enormous breakfast and slept all day. My dreams were filled with red. I was well enough to go out that evening, a Saturday, and Alice had called, but I put her off. I took Dad’s raincoat and went back to the woods on my own. The fox was gone from the mound of leaves. I’d kind of expected that. I was getting a sore on my palm from where I kept rubbing it against my jeans. I felt the same movement I’d felt within the dwindling fox echoed in my own chest.
I went a bit nuts then, thrashing around in the rain and mould, kicking over the targets from the day before, to the point where I was exhausted with panic, little yelps rising from my throat. And when I’d stopped having my self-indulgent fit, the yelps continued. I went behind the huge banks of rhododendron bushes that surrounded the clearing and was hit by the cold, damp smell of musk just before I saw a litter of fox pups; I counted six of them. Somehow they’d climbed out of their earth, but they were tiny and blind, still. They were cold and starving. I was too wiped out by my outburst, and the aftershock of the flu, to feel anything but dismay. I moved as though someone else was controlling me. I took off the raincoat and tied its sleeves together to form a handle. I picked up the fox cubs and placed them inside, trying to ignore the little nips and licks they gave to my knuckles. I knelt down close to the entrance to the earth and listened but it was quiet in there now. I zipped up the coat and pulled the toggles shut at the bottom, creating a loop with the ends, then drew the hood down over the coat and tucked it through the loop, tying it off tightly. In the rain, I hurried home, pausing on the way to dump the fox cubs in the canal. I never went back to the wood again.
In the dark, a bleating.
I had stayed up late, reading. I spend so much of my waking day poring over dry texts that it’s something of a blessed relief to have some time to wallow in a bestseller so purple you have to check your fingers afterwards in case they’ve been dyed beetroot. The girls had gone to bed a couple of hours previously. I’d worked my way through half a bottle of merlot and I was approaching a state of relaxation where I thought I might be able to sleep. No gales tonight.
I found myself reading the same line over and over. Tiredness. But there was something wrong. Something I’d read. Tonight? A feature I’d worked on in the past? Something nagged at me like a child prodding a worm with a stick. Something to do with foxes. Or maybe it was just that I’d seen only chickens and cows at the farm. No sheep. Which didn’t mean there weren’t any, of course. It was a big farm, and we hadn’t explored as fully as we might.
Again, bleating, in the distance. It sounded all wrong. It sounded horrible. Was it a sheep trapped or injured? A sheep giving birth? Wasn’t it a bit early in the year for lambing season?
I thought about heading down to the farmer but what if he didn’t have any sheep? I could imagine the disdain, like something tangible, pouring off him. Not you again. And another fruitless quest to find an animal that wasn’t anything to do with him. No. But it was under my skin now and I had to check it out. I’d be listening out for that bleat all night otherwise.
I pulled on my boots and coat and reached for the torch. A quick check on the tribe — Kit out for the count, Megan and Lucy safe and warm, curled up with each other in their secret den — and I let myself out. Clear sky, big moon. The snow had developed a thin crust, and my boots made a satisfying crunch through it as I headed down past the chicken coop and the two unoccupied glamping tents to the far edge of the field. The bleating came again. It sounded desperate; reconciled, even, to its fate. At least it seemed as though I was heading in the right direction.
I came to the edge of the field and negotiated a collapsed portion of wooden fencing mired with rusty barbed wire. Moonlight picked out a set of tracks in snow that had otherwise remained untouched since it settled. They weren’t sheep tracks, though. These were shallow, made by something small and fleet. I breathed deeply and felt the cold scour away all the torpor that had draped over my limbs earlier. I felt fresh and alive, alert. Wildness awaking in the lizard part of the brain. I felt I could sense sap shifting through the smallest netted veins of a leaf; trace the course of a money spider’s journey through the air on gossamer strands. Or it might just have been the merlot.
Another bleat. A low, end-of-tether sound, just ahead. But I couldn’t see anything. Just the ongoing reach of snow. I kept walking, listening for more signals of distress, but they did not come. Confounded, I turned to go back and saw more tracks, criss-crossing those that had gone before. Some busy creature, making mischief while my back was turned. There was nature in a nutshell, I supposed: small things tip-toeing around behind the big things. Again I was haunted by some detail I had missed, a warning in text form, but I read millions of words each year, and anyway, what link could there be between my job and a tent holiday in the middle of nowhere?
Suddenly, fatigue slipped back through the cracks. My feet were aching and the cold was turning my face stiff. I wanted bed. I wanted to spoon with Kit and feel the curve of her belly under my fingers. I headed back to the fence and edged through the riot of wood and wire. A length of it snagged in my jeans, another on the hood of my coat. Great. I tried to extricate myself without pricking my legs/body on those sharp knots; how long it had been since my last tetanus injection?
Trapped, flailing, I nevertheless snapped bolt upright at the sudden scream. I couldn’t tell if it was human or animal; it had some weird glassy quality, as if the temperature in the air had shaped it into something brittle and fine. But then words began to form out of that mindless howling: my name.