Common Ground by Rob Cowen Read Free Book Online Page B

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