Free Little Foxes by Michael Morpurgo Page B

higher and higher. It was hot and close under the roof of the barn with little enough air to breathe. He retreated to the darkest corner of the stack and hoped they would not be seen. More help had arrived and there were half a dozen people swarming around the barn as the clouds gathered grey and thick over the trees on the far side of the valley. And all the time the haystack was growing, higher and higher. Any minute now they would reach the top of the stack and Billy and the fox would be spotted. There was nothing for it. He pulled aside a few bales until he had made a trench wide enough and long enough to take the two of them. Then he pulled the bales back over the top leaving only enough of a hole for them to breathe through. Billy peeped out from time to time to keep watch, but once the stack had reached the top in the fourth bay and there were men working on the same level, he dared not even do this, but lay buried in his grave of hay with the fox, sweating till his clothes were wet with it.
    Thunder rolled around the skies and ricocheted across the valley and with it came torrential rain drumming with a deafening force on the corrugated roof above them. Within a quarter of an hour all the haymakers had dispersed and Billy thought it safe to push away the covering bales and climb out from his hiding place. He ventured to the edge and found they were alone. Billy sat with his legs dangling out over the edge of the stack and breathed the cooler air outside the barn. As he sat there he saw the first of the lightning crackling in the sky over the darkening valley and he counted the seconds between the thunder and the lightning to see how far away the storm was. One second for one mile, someone had once told him. He counted ten and it was getting closer all the time.
    It was the fox who led him to his only food for two days. Absorbed by the storm he had not noticed that the fox had disappeared and when at last he turned round to look for him he saw him stalking low over the hay bales. The hen flew up before the fox sprang and ran away, squawking with terror before taking off into the night. Billy scrambled over the bales on his hands and knees and arrived at the nest of eggs at about the same time as the fox. There were six warm eggs, and Billy shared them out equally, cracking them into his hand so that nothing was wasted. He had never before eaten a raw egg and to begin with he was revolted by the idea, but he watched the fox devour one with relish and followed suit. No egg had ever tasted that good before.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    WITH A GOOD SLEEP AND A MEAL INSIDE them at last, they were in high spirits as they climbed down out of the hay barn that night. Billy waited until the worst of the rain had passed and then with a fresh spring in his stride he set off to cross the valley that night. ‘Got to cross the river tonight,’ he told the fox. ‘The further they got to search, the less chance they got of finding us.’ But the fox needed no encouragement. He walked on ahead, the lead always at full stretch, pulling Billy along behind him. There was no moon now so Billy could see little except the grey sliver of road in front of him. They left the road when it began to twist uphill and away from the river. Once in the fields again Billy let the fox off the lead.
    There were no alarms except for a sheep that coughed from behind a hedge. It was a human cough, a perfect imitation of Aunty May’s smoker’s cough, and it was enough to send them scurrying into a flooded ditch. And more than once some great white bird wafted by over their heads; a barn owl Billy imagined it to be at first, but then he remembered the barn owl in his Wilderness flew more silently than this one, whose wings whistled gently as they beat the air. Billy thought it must be a bigger barn owl and thought no more about it.
    The fox glanced up at it and knew exactly what it was.
    They had not gone far that night when the rain began to fall again, a few sparse