Free Gods of the Morning by John Lister-Kaye Page A

front of me like a vision. Thesnow begins to sparkle, brimming with new light. A hoodie crow comes rowing across the lightening sky, sees me and swerves away. As he goes he calls out, once, twice, three times in a mocking cry, rough-edged with contempt. The fox prints weave a thin line across the lawn, purposeful, but not hurrying. They are bright-rimmed, shining with reflected sun, and dark-shadowed in the sunken pads, bringing them into sharp relief.
    He stopped at the base of a large Oriental spruce and scraped at the ground, turning a small stone – a beetle perhaps? Then urinated by lifting a leg – ha! This was a dog fox, not a vixen. He skirted the hen run – tracks now crisscrossed with those of the marten – as I guess he does every night, snow or no snow, so he knows very well that if the hatch is shut it’s not his lucky night. So he passed on, across the paddock and over the broken fence, rear pads side by side, pressed deeper as he springs, touching just once with a scuff on the top rail, then onto the old farm road. I curse silently: I have often noticed those scuff marks before, scratches in the lichen and the green protococcus algae on the rail, and wondered what had made them. Rooks, I had guessed, wrongly. I should have thought fox: I knew this was his circuit, his private byway. I had often caught a snatch of his vulpine scent, as rich as pickle, just here beside the fence. A thought passes through: perhaps the spurt of effort for springing up releases extra scent, or could it be that, because he is raised as he leaps onto the fence rail, closer to the human nose, he laces another layer of air with molecules of animal musk, an invisible stratum that lingersin the static air, wafting like smoke? Hmm. I had never linked the scent with the scuff marks until now. I set off up the hill, following his trail and feeling a little foolish.
    He’s not walking; he’s trotting in a leisurely but springy pace. His oval pads are evenly spaced and almost in a straight line, but not quite, like the repeating pattern of pansies on a quilt. ‘Here he went’ is what I see and I must conjure the rest out of familiarity. Out of film and pictures in my head, out of long-ago glimpses, out of chance encounters, out of that electrochemical album in my brain. Images filed away in my pre-frontal cortex, where he is now and where I want to fix him in absolute concentration. But imagination is not enough on its own. Like Ted Hughes’s ‘The Thought Fox’, I want to think fox and think this fox right into my head.
    Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow . . .
    For a while he sticks to human paths, the old farm track to the top fields and the moor, as though he is travelling somewhere particular. It’s known. I’m sure he does this regularly, relying on opportunism and luck to deliver, or perhaps he’s en route ; perhaps he has somewhere in mind; perhaps to the relative warmth of the pinewood beside the loch where foxes know they will find beetles, where therewill be good hunting. Somewhere I can’t know; something not my business.
    As a teenager in the sixties, I used to turn out, like most country boys, to watch the hounds of the local Seavington Hunt, which met outside the Rose and Crown in the Somerset village near my home. The master and hunt servants in pink jackets with mustard collars, breath pluming from the horses’ nostrils on a frosty morning and the hounds milling among the crowd. It was a social convention, a ritual mingling of farmers large and small and their many labourers of those days, of gamekeepers, trappers, landowners and gentry, of unshaven old country yokels in ragged raincoats, leaning on sticks, pipes clenched in their teeth under greasy caps, pork-pie hats or battered brown trilbies, weather-tanned faces all