Common Ground by Rob Cowen Read Free Book Online Page A

Instead, I sit and watch my hands changing shape in the falling light, my nails turning an iridescent black. There is a notion in the back of my head that if I can just stay here long enough, catch a glimpse of him again, follow him where he leads me, then I might attain a better understanding, a common consciousness with edge-land and animal. There is a noise and a movement across the meadow. I feel adrenalin flood my stomach as a breeze blows cold into my opened mind.
    He senses me from the wood edge and freezes. I am shapeless, blurred by darkness and vegetation, but something. Something large. Something wrong. Disorder speaks: the way the misted tops of dead willowherb have been parted, a solidity among skeletal stems.
Hide
, it all says and he obeys. Dusk has passed swiftly, the last light flashing by. High-pressure sodium vapour flares through the town but only throws the surrounding land into deeper shadow, too dark to discern what lies on the far side of the meadow. He tastes the air. Scents swirl –
bark, pine sap
,
rotting leaves –
then a stronger taint, mine: chemicals and sugar. He knows it immediately; any wild fox would –
man
.
    A hundred breaths later and we haven’t moved. We are eye to eye, aligned under a sky flecked with stars. The ground between us is crisp with hoar frost, to my ears stilled but to his alive with the scratch of tiny claws. Wood mice trickle like rivulets through the under-grass. I sense the starvation that hangs about him like a cloak. The sound of scurrying stokes his hunger, but he remains concealed – hair raised, back rigid, body twitching. His heart beats with a fear passed from nose to nose for 3,000 years, greater even than the sour ache of his empty gut. Nose and black-tipped ears work to range smells and sounds. There is meat and garlic on my hands. To the east, a boar badger has blood on its snout as it defecates into a shallow hole, marking territory. A staccato fart from the town, the bucket exhaust of a souped-up Vauxhall Astra accelerating towards a red light, then slamming on its brakes. Somewhere a door opens, releasing the muffled beat of a stereo. At the same moment, the fox picks out the imperceptible brush of wing on branch as a tawny owl leaves its roost to fall on a shrew. These noises do not disturb him, though. It is the unfamiliar that breaks the deadlock. Across the meadow, cramp means a shift in my position, sending out the strange
swish-swish
of a waterproof brushing against itself.
Swish-swish.
Oddness, anathema to the fox.
Enough.
He slips backwards until his hind paws feel the incline of a steep gully behind. Then he turns and bounds down it.
    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.