Frost Dancers: A Story of Hares Read online

  FROST DANCERS

  A Story of Hares

  Garry Kilworth

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  This Novel is for Sam Jones

  Part One. Home is the Highlands

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Two. Lord of the Flatlands

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part Three. Sunhare, Moonhare

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Part Four. The Quest for the Flogre

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Part Five. The Magical Hare

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Chapter Thirty Six

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  Part Six. Frost Dancers

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty One

  Chapter Forty Two

  Chapter Forty Three

  Chapter Forty Four

  Chapter Forty Five

  Part Seven. The Greater Birds

  Chapter Forty Six

  Chapter Forty Seven

  Chapter Forty Eight

  Chapter Forty Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Afterword

  Website

  Also By Garry Kilworth

  Author Bio

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Remarkably, there seem to have been very few naturalist books written on the hare, so I am indebted to Henry Tegner’s Wild Hares (John Baker Ltd, 1969) which appears to be the only work available dealing solely with this familiar creature of ancient lineage. Prior to Tegner’s book, the last general work on hares was published in 1896, though there may have been one since which I have failed to uncover. In keeping with their private lives, hares have a low public profile. Up until 1910, hares were classified as rodents, which of course they resented, and then they were given their own order (lagomorphs) along with pikas and rabbits. The rabbits they reluctantly accepted, but when asked about pikas they simply looked mystified. Then only very recently the family name of brown hares became lepus capensis, where previously it was lepus europaeus. Some of the more staid amongst them still prefer their old title, feeling their national culture is being diluted by including them with Mediterranean and African species. Opinion varies on whether to call the female and male hares does and bucks, or jills and jacks. I have chosen the latter, to separate my hares more distinctly from rabbits, and, this being a work of fiction, ‘jills and jacks’ seem better suited to a lyrical fantasy. The story deals with two types of hares, the common brown (field) hare, and the blue (mountain) hare. The brown hare is larger and faster, but the blue hare more confident, with its own running tricks. The shallow home that the brown hare digs for itself, and the blue hare tunnels or finds in rocks, is called a form. Rabbits are newcomers to Britain, migrants come over with the Normans in the 11th Century, while hares have been native to the land since the dinosaurs went away. In certain remote enclaves of lagomorph society, the two species still retain a suspicion of one another, though happily in the main they are tolerant of each other’s differences and live side by side as cousins.

  GARRY KILWORTH, 1991.

  This novel is for Sam Jones

  ‘One June morning about four years ago I saw a sight that stopped me in my tracks. It was warm and sunny, about eight-thirty, and I saw a spiral cloud whirling in the dust around a cattle trough. I realised something was spinning round at great speed and was amazed to see it was a hare. It was whirling on its hind legs with its front paws out sideways and its ears down close to its head. It did not see me and I stood still to watch, the dust rose higher and higher, as it whirled faster and faster. Suddenly it dropped down and after sitting for about thirty seconds it went sedately off. I heard my father (a gamekeeper) say he had seen them dancing in the moonlight, but I always thought he was just kidding us …’

  Letter to Henry Tegner, naturalist, from Florence M. Lawes (1961).

  PART ONE

  Home is the Highlands

  Chapter One

  On this pale spring morning, a wet mist clung to the heather, and afforded some protection from birds of prey. There were still patches of hard snow, in the shadows, and cold pockets of air in the hollows. Skelter had woken with a start, having been dozing in his form. For a moment, he hunched himself inside the short burrow, unwilling to go out into the cold half-light. He twitched his nose and sniffed, scenting the damp heather.

  ‘Oh well,’ he said to himself by way of encouragement, ‘got to go some time.’

  Still he didn’t move, and remained listening to the other blue mountain hares, feeding on the sedge outside. Finally, hunger got the better of him and shuddering he left his form to have a good stretch in the open air. Then he gazed about him at the rest of his clan. He realised he was one of the last to wake, but he refused to recognise getting up after sleep as a competition. There was more than enough food for the clan, so who cared who got up first?

  Nearby a red stag, a knobber of under two years, was grazing, occasionally lifting its head
to peer into the middle distance as if dreaming of a lost time. This creature need have no fear of eagles or wildcats, and could see a lot further than Skelter. However, it was coveted by hunters that would scorn wasting ammunition on a small mountain hare.

  As he nibbled away at the sedges, his favourite food, Skelter’s coat gathered the moisture from the grass and heather. Every so often he would stop and shake this unwanted liquid from his body, spraying other jacks and jills in the process, getting sprayed in return.

  Mountain hares being gregarious creatures, Skelter did not move too far from his neighbour, a jill called Rushie. Occasionally they spoke between mouthfuls of food.

  ‘I’ve just seen a click beetle in some fir clubmoss, that’s a good omen, that is,’ said Rushie.

  ‘Everything’s a good omen to you. Why should click beetles be lucky?’

  ‘Well, they’re not on their own, but they are if you see them in fir clubmoss.’

  Skelter considered this and then dismissed it. Rushie was one of life’s optimists.

  He paused in his eating to scratch the side of his head with his hind leg.

  Still, it was a fine day. There were a few high clouds about, but nothing that foretold of bad weather. The heather swept away on all sides, like a purple flood, to splash and swirl against rocky outcrops. Saxifrage formed colourful bands around isolated tors, as if the tall stones had been decorated with garlands. In the glen below, some peat hags showed rich-brown against a green backdrop, like great gutted beasts washed up on the shores of a lake. Nearer still, a busy noisome burn, swollen with recent meltwater, flailed its passage down a stony rut in the mountainside.

  There was a bird of prey, a hen-harrier, wheeling over some stunted firs. Some small mammal, a mouse perhaps, had been pinpointed. The raptor dropped, snatched at the turf, came up with a limp form. It flew over Skelter’s head, and eventually met its mate in the air, where an exchange took place. The female hen-harrier turned upside down in flight, and took the food from the claws of the male in its own talons.

  ‘Did you see that?’ he asked no one in particular, and his question drifted away without receiving a reply.

  Skelter gave himself another scratch.

  The red knobber had moved a little closer to the patch of hares now and was gently nibbling at the grasses. Suddenly his head came up, sharply, and a ripple went through him. One or two of the hares caught it too: something in the air. For a moment the whole mountainside froze. Rushie, close to Skelter’s rear, was still as a blue stone, the mist curling about her face. Only a ptarmigan, rustling amongst some sheep’s fescue, seemed oblivious of the atmosphere.

  Skelter’s heart was pattering, not at all close to panic, but ready to pump faster if necessary.

  The scene remained frozen for quite some time, until gradually a thawing took place. Hares were the first to begin eating again, though still primed for instant flight. The ptarmigan muttered to herself, not really a part of the scene, but aware just the same. The knobber was slower to melt, its big brown eyes wide, its tense body on taut strings. A ringlet butterfly played around its head, as if taunting the timid creature. Then by degrees a change came over the deer, and it too resumed feeding on the grasses.

  Skelter was not ready for the thundercrack at all, and when it came, he jumped his own height off the ground.

  The deer staggered forward a few paces, a raw wound under its nearside foreleg. It let out a sound of despair that tore at the roots of Skelter’s fear. One rear leg went from under it, so that it collapsed on that corner. It regained its feet again, only to have another leg buckle. It managed to stagger a few rickety paces forward, its eyes wide with pain, before collapsing completely onto its face, sending puffs of mist up from the heather.

  Its fall triggered instant movement amongst the other creatures on the mountainside. Hares began hurling themselves in all directions, looking for their forms. Muscled fur flew, and white tails flashed panic. There was much whistling and grinding of teeth. True to their habits the hares had wandered all over the place. They were now between each other and their forms. One or two sensible ones used the nearest form, but were soon butted out into the open again by the true owners, once the latter reached them.

  Skelter telemarked around Rushie, skated near another hare, and then curved in an arc through the heather. He found his form between the two rocks. It was shaped like a short tunnel with both ends open, and when he was crouched inside, he was hidden, just. He smalled himself as much as he could, wondering why his heart didn’t burst, it felt so swollen with fear.

  There was the sickly smell of warm blood in the air, mingled with a harsher odour. Skelter’s flattened ears picked up the sounds of men as they crashed through the heather. They were growling at each other, the tones full of triumph.

  A click beetle crawled around the entrance to the form, but Skelter ignored it. He was listening intently, trying to make out from the sounds the men were making, whether or not they intended to stay or roam further afield. The little knobber was dead, Skelter was sure of that, but would that satisfy them?

  After a while, the beetle went away.

  One thing all the creatures of glen would agree upon was that those outside its craggy walls were not to be envied. The tumbledown landscape, draped in the colours of heather, alpine lady’s mantle, gentian and purple saxifrage, was a home that they all held close to their souls. The dotterels who lived at the top and looked down on the rest of the glen were satisfied that here was the heart of the world. The deer would have no other grazing ground. Ptarmigan knew that their camouflage fitted the glen so accurately they might have been fashioned from its very rocks. The stoats and wildcats had no arguments over the lack of game. The hare clans would have preferred a glen without predators, but it would have had to look exactly like the one they knew and loved, down to the last burn, outcrop, peat hag, stunted pine and hidey hollow.

  No one knew, or could divulge, what the resident eagle thought about the glen that was daily mirrored in the curve of his golden eye. This fearsome raptor that circled the glen, worrying the land beneath with his sweeping shadow, was only available for opinion at mealtimes, and those that joined him in these repasts were in no position afterwards to pass on any information they had gleaned. The rest of the creatures could only guess that since his terrible beak and talons were ever present, the eagle had no quarrel with those who extolled the virtues of his home.

  No matter which way Skelter chose to look, the horizon curved upwards towards the clouds. Not that hares bother very much with such distances, but he thought it as well to glance around the sky occasionally for signs of eagles. Even so, this was considered by some to be a futile precaution, a waste of effort and certainly trying on the nerves. The saying was that you never saw the eagle that took you.

  Rushie said once, ‘Hares are very silly creatures a lot of the time. They show off too much.’

  Skelter agreed with this, for he himself was an exhibitionist, who would just as soon clown his way to the attention of others, as do something clever or dextrous. There were days when he felt strong enough to brook an eagle, and days when he would run from a wasp. There were dusks when he was full of good sense, and dawns when he was giddy and wild. He was much the same as other hares in that opposites lived comfortably within his soul, and he did not give a hare-blown whistle for critics or censors.

  Skelter was slightly more level headed than most hares, which meant that he at least recognised the weaknesses of his kind, though like the others, he could do little to improve upon the situation.

  Chapter Two

  Skelter had been born in one of the last litters of the previous mating season and was just under a year old at the time of the knobber’s death. His father was Dasher, a fine frost dancer who had attracted a jill called Fleetie, and the pair of them had three litters of leverets together. Thus Skelter had several brothers and sisters and many cousins to share his highland home with him.

  Growing up had been a hazardous bu
siness, with predators around every rock, behind every cloud, but having made it this far, Skelter had gathered together a number of tricks to enable him to stay alive a little longer.

  In the highlands, man was not the most dangerous of the hare enemies. For one thing the mountains did not attract vast numbers of humans: they were the last stronghold of the wilderness. For another the jacks and jills of the heather did not destroy man’s crops nor bother his chickens and ducks, so they were not hunted down as pests. Any deaths from men were likely to be from lone hunters taking potshots, but without any serious intention to destroy the clans. A far worse enemy was the stoat, that wily small-eyed killer that crept up on forms and stole the leverets. Then there were eagles, foxes and the occasional wildcat.

  Skelter had grown up in the highlands, never straying far from the original form where he was born. His status amongst his kind was not yet established, as he had yet had no opportunity to box. His clan, the Screesiders, like other hare clans in the district, had no permanent hierarchy. Out of the mating season they were considerably unorganised, there being no real need for any kind of due order amongst them, with ranks and positions. They were not a fighting force, out to conquer, nor was there any need for government. In the mating season, or the frost dancing as they called it, things were different. The jacks all wanted the same jills and had to box each other to sort out a pecking order, but once all that was over, the system collapsed again.

  Not that there was an absence of bullies or rough hares around. There were plenty of bad-tempered toughies who would butt you, kick you sideways, or bite you if they wanted your patch to feed on. They tended to be loners though, not interested in taking over the clan. Their power was used purely to satisfy their personal needs, not because they wanted to rule. Who would want to be a leader anyway? All it seemed to bring those who tried it – the stag monarchs for example – was a lot of responsibility, and heartache when things went wrong.