I am dreaming of the edge-land again. It has begun to colonise my sleeping mind. Dreams take place in the midst of Scots pines and down among the cold, scrub-scattered banks. I am following a fox, a copper coat floating through the trees. He pauses. A backward glance. Incredible eyes – coronal black holes over exploding suns, that intense face; mouth curled at its edges in the white, greasepaint smile of The Joker. Another step. Am I to follow? He pads up to the lip of a rise and disappears. Suddenly I can’t move. I wake. The weak glow of a street light forms an exclamation mark on the ceiling. I dress quietly, shivering in the dark, pick up my notebook and walk out.
Modern life is such that it can be hard to see beyond the present. You think you know somewhere, but really you only know a layer, a moment. Most people don’t even notice such things, but just look around you. The moss-swollen pavement crack, the rosette of a dandelion defying a driveway or a gutter-growing sow thistle, these are glimpses of what lies beneath and beyond. The deep past and the far future.
A map drawn by Ely Hargrove in 1798 in his History of the Castle, Town and Forest of Knaresborough: with Harrogate, and Its Medicinal Waters shows the town I call home as little more than two rows of cottages. Harrogate, as the world now knows it, doesn’t yet exist. This hilly stack of roads, traffic lights and pristine flowerbeds, of imperialistic hotels, antique shops, churches and promenades, is still open land. Its cottage gardens, fields and marsh-meadows await delineation, diversion, draining and deed. The ‘medicinal’ wells that will soon lure legions of the aspiring middle classes to holiday here or, should they strike it lucky in the mills and mines, build vast villas on the woody escarpments to the south-west, are little more than mud-edged watering holes. Pigeons pick at salt accretions forming at their rims; only the informed aristocracy and gentry shoo them away to take the waters. The arches, domes and sweeping curves of Regency and Victorian architecture that will soon form the grand structures of ‘the English Spa’ lie dormant, locked in the gritstone cliffs and subterranean clay of the surrounding countryside.
Hindsight imbues the map with the feeling of land on the cusp. It has the death-stare of ground destined to be choked with high-density housing, tower blocks, supermarkets, shopping centres, warehouses and car dealerships. In a matter of decades the two little rows of cottages will bloom into an urban mass that consumes the surrounding land and villages. Eventually it will reach an ancient settlement a mile and a half to the north marked on Hargrove’s map with a green blob – a legacy of its past life as part of a royal hunting forest. Between the 1950s and 1990s, the sprawl will swallow Bilton almost entirely, appropriating its Celtic name – farmstead of ‘Bilain’ – for the suburb thrown up around the scattering of old homesteads and farms. But it will be a last meal. For now at least, Harrogate will reach no further in this direction. Bilton will become edge-land. There will be no protests, no public outcries or petitions, no organised lines of conservationists standing in front of diggers or activists hauled down from centuries-old oak trees. The ground won’t resist sublimation. After all, it has always been a place of transience and transformation. It has known innumerable beginnings and endings.
In contrast to the raw, jump-in-head-first shock I’d felt on the night of its discovery, my preliminary forays into this new-found land were to take more methodical lines. Confronted with this unknown world stripped bare by winter, I planned to navigate via its most obvious physical structures and landmarks in an effort to map and taxonomise it. I felt I needed to gain a sense of its definable perimeters and the logical starting point was its western edge.
In the 1840s, Britain’s burgeoning railway network reached Harrogate. Or, more accurately, it reached its outskirts. A decree had been passed to prevent the town’s reputation for restorative waters, clean air and new regal façades from being besmirched by steam-spewing engines and dirty tracks. Instead, it was decided that the first rail link should end a mile to the east, down a hill at a cluster of old houses named after the little stream that flowed past them. Starbeck station birthed a thriving community. Rows of terraces, pubs and hotels sprang up around the marshalling yards and engine sheds. Horse-drawn coaches more aesthetically acceptable than coal-fired trains carried the great and the good up the hill to the unsoiled spa resort. Meanwhile, financiers and speculators gripped by the frenzy of nineteenth-century Railway Mania had already turned their eyes to the land beyond, prospecting its gullies and ridges for potentially lucrative routes that would lead further north.
The intention of the hastily formed Leeds and Thirsk Railway Company was clear from its name: to connect the thrusting might of an industrialised Leeds with the outlying city of Ripon and the market towns of Thirsk and Northallerton. Starbeck soon changed from terminus to thoroughfare. Track was hammered at startling speed along a contour heading north-north-west, skirting Harrogate in a sweeping curve, colluding with natural features where possible and running over earth-stacked sidings where it wasn’t. Lying on its path like a body on the tracks was Bilton.
Seated in an ornate Leeds office, no doubt with a ticking clock and glowing dog grate in the corner, a suited and bespectacled planning clerk drew a line in pencil. That was all it took. The course of the railway sliced scalpel-like through the community, straight over Bilton Lane, an old drovers’ road that had already seen 400 years of foot- and hoof-fall. The bisection created an ‘X’ of road and rail, necessitating a level crossing. Probably no more than two white-painted wooden gates with lamps on top, it was a crossing nonetheless. X marked the spot and it still does, for today this is the edge-land’s point of origin, its moment of departure from the housing estates, cul-de-sacs and crescents; it is where town becomes something else.
I’m sure such coincidences must occur frequently in the buffers between urban and rural worlds. Over time, people and landscape leave unintentional impressions on each other. Things assume significance impossible to predict or design in the moment they are conceived. Though the planning clerk is dead and the railway gone, the crossing point remains.
It was an afternoon in January and I had finished work early and returned to follow that pale seam of rubble and mud, heading north-west from where it jutted off at ninety degrees away from the divisions of tarmac, B&Q plank fencing and houses at the end of Bilton Lane. The dismantled railway line was much as I imagined it would be with rail, sleeper and shingle removed: its edges grew unchecked with bramble, dog rose and willowherb. Overshadowing it were the interwoven tangles of blackthorn, hawthorn, willow, hazel, elder and ash that become indecipherable when denuded by winter and silhouetted by a low sun. Light torched the cascades of dead grass and birds flapped between branches in shrill fly-pasts, needling the air. Everything else was still. Poised.
A long, rectangular block of masonry and concrete, green with algae, was almost entirely consumed by bare vegetation. I would find out later that this was an old raised platform constructed in the 1880s to unload the coal that supplied Harrogate’s new gas works built to the west of Bilton at New Park. Its by-products, vats of ammonia and bitumen, were ferried back here and loaded onto trains heading for Middlesbrough and the shipbuilding yards of the north-east. It’s an exchange commemorated in the bulbous liquorice residues that still dribble down the platform’s face – great black drips hanging frozen in perpetual movement.
A few steps on and the ground gave way on either side, giving the impression of being on an elevated causeway. To my left, through the bare shrubbery, the siding became a sea wall holding back waves of housing. Tidy terracotta boxes with grey roofs rolled with the landscape’s contours like a swelling ocean, its peaks and troughs awash with the debris of suburbia: wires, cars, caravans and, cresting the waves, the square tower of a church, a tree or two and a dull defiance of offices. To the north the land assumed the form of a sloping field, dipping down to a farmhouse and beck, then quickly gaining height and thickening with tawny wood. Before long both sides rose again to rejoin the old railway. The land flattened out ahead, disappearing into that curious imperceptibility of distance.
Neat staves of high-tension cables ran perpendicular overhead, east to west, carried underarm by pylons. The nearest one stamped down the brush beside the track with four barbed-wire-rimmed feet and wore a thin shawl of starlings around its shoulders. The fence of power line skirted the bulbous edge of Bilton, disappearing westward and corralling the town as it fell away downhill towards a sewage works and the old hamlet of Knox. To my left as I walked, houses petered out into a sward of common land, a grassy plateau fringed with willow wood and birch copse that accompanied the old railway onwards. A hay cropping meadow that in summer would be sewn with bird’s-foot trefoil, orchids, Welsh poppies and alive with the rhythms of crickets, it was scarred with the marks of the urban: wonky white goalposts rusting in damp air, shrubs and gorse bushes fruiting the odd multicoloured membranous bag of dog shit.
Mirroring it on my right, through a thin belt of vegetation, I recognised the meadow I had stumbled back over in darkness on New Year’s Eve. The trace of a path cut across its dead grass and disappeared into a dark intensity of trees running parallel to the old railway, 300 yards east. Seeing it from the opposite direction elicited a similar feeling as when I’d first come here; it was like there was something undisclosed in the grass, brush and branches, something alternative. But I didn’t change course. Materialising through the mist ahead was what I’d come to find – the conclusion to this western border. Amid the blur of alder and beech was a huge metal gate prickling with railings and razor wire. The old railway plunged headlong into these reinforced shutters. Walking to the side, I craned my neck, expecting to watch the track’s crumbling demise down the wooded gorge into the river. Instead, an unbroken viaduct spanned the deep, narrow valley.
In 1846, having progressed north-west half a mile from the crossing point at Bilton, the Leeds and Thirsk Railway Company faced a major obstacle. The River Nidd’s meandering course rises on the mountain flanks of Great Whernside in the Yorkshire Dales, flowing on to the River Ouse near York before winding a further fifty miles east to the Humber Estuary and, eventually, the North Sea. This immovable, looping line was also proving a problem for men working a few miles east laying track for the East & West Yorkshire Junction Railway trying to connect York to Starbeck. Simultaneously, both companies began the gargantuan task of bridging the river, one at Bilton, the other at Knaresborough. Teams of men quarried enormous gritstone slabs straight from the sides of the Nidd gorge at an impressive rate. Then disaster struck. Nearing its completion in 1848, Knaresborough’s viaduct dramatically collapsed, sending thousands of tonnes of stone, crenellated towers and carved abutments thundering into the water. Rebuilding took another three years. Today it is an iconic sight, ranked among the county’s ‘best views’, immortalised in local TV news credits and preserved in the digital repositories of countless visitors. Upstream, Bilton Viaduct suffered a different fate. Opening without incident in 1847, it towered 104 feet in height with seven arches that dutifully carried freight and people over the water for well over a century. The railway’s closure in 1964 heralded an unglamorous downfall. Unneeded, unnoticed, I found it shut-off, shackled and destitute, left to the plumes of dead Oxford ragwort and buddleia that bristled from its cracks.
Mostly we have no idea what surrounds us. We don’t care. But to me the viaduct’s scale and size seemed extraordinary, so too the sense of rectitude, the way the abandoned arches reflected nobly, silently in the river. Pines and bare larch furred the far bank; wide black water flowed beneath. An irony, I suppose, but this once great crossing point was now a definitive end, closing the western border of the edge-land with steel and wire and by virtue of its sheer height above the river. There was no plaque or information board, just words scrawled over the metal shutters and mesh: ‘Kurt has Hep C’ in crude, white letters. The font was difficult to age, having an almost 1970s punkish, sectarian quality, like a Belfast wall, and yet the name and disease suggested a more modern story. In the dusk-darkening trees, this combination of viaduct and graffiti felt like a worn memorial to vanished narratives, fragments of time, lost lives. Here was an arbitrary bridge between the solid and the sensory. I thought of the men who built the viaduct clambering over its sides on ropes and wooden platforms, and of the water below sliding over slabs of rock that will outlive me. I thought of Kurt, his disgruntled lover and the randomness of what is lost and what is passed on. Of time passed and time passing.
Stupid, dangerous, but I wanted to get closer.
Manoeuvring gingerly around the railings, I shimmied up and onto the top of the three-metre-high shutters, smashing my feet against them with a loud bang, balancing precariously, a leg on either side. As the drop to the river below dizzied my vision I felt a moment of vertigo but pushed through it to tip my body over, dropping heavily onto the viaduct, heart pounding. There, from that lofty position above the slow, sliding river, I could see the shape of the edge-land from the other side. The breadth and depth of the landscape, past, present and future, era stacked on top of era. There lay the northern border, the ancient serpentine Nidd, twisting east on its course through flak-like explosions of trees. Westward, where the horizon vanished, hundreds of rooks and jackdaws were swarming rookeries, rattling, squeaking and murmuring in the furthest sepia crowns, jostling for position, bickering, fluttering up and settling again. They turned the bare branches black. I thought how each must be the offspring of the victorious or the lucky, a culmination of a bloodline dating back incalculable years. Out where the river gorge slumped into fields, the white and yellow orbs of street lights demarked the western rim of Harrogate. The sewage works was an abandoned city turning and whistling to itself. Bare sycamores towered over illuminated suburban avenues, stark against the ashen sky. Closer were beeches whose forms resembled milky streams of hearth smoke rising from cottages. A light, strong and gold, burned by the river’s edge in a clearing. In the descending gloom it passed for a great bonfire.
Standing there on the margin, listening to the faraway chatter of swarming corvids and watching the spectacle of night drawing a veil over the river, time and space seemed to slip and reel. All at once, I was on top of the viaduct; down by the fire and among the feathery swarm of rooks. Although it had appeared to reach its end, the long, straight track of the old railway had derailed me into a multiplicity of time, body and space. The air was thick with the sour-sweet tang of slurry, leaf-litter and pine. Then a more urgent, sweaty-smoky reek clamped over my nose and mouth, that rancid but unmistakable coming alive of irrepressible earth and animal. Fox.
Where? I wanted to see it. I wanted to glimpse the creature I shared this timeless twilight with. Keeping out of sight, I scanned the woods from my position high in the canopy, before clambering back over the shutters to search among the brambles, finding nothing. A few days later, though, it found me.
The smell was there when I returned at dusk to carry on plotting the next side of the perimeter, the edge-land’s northern boundary. Turning right at the viaduct, I took a rough track leading east along the edge of the meadow’s curtain of trees and down into the wood. Despite the onset of night, I followed the Nidd downstream, guided by the weak circle of a head torch, past drowned trees and along a muddy edge. The water tricked and teased, appearing still, not even a ripple giving away movement. I noticed a branch and a plastic cider bottle held in its surface overtaking me. The sudden presence of the fox was just as bewildering. Its scent, strong and sharp as cut lemons, crowded, pressed and pushed me, as though the animal was dancing between my legs, mocking my cumbersome, slithering progress. At moments I was sure it must be right behind or beside me, but each time I turned, my beam only emphasised the wood’s emptiness, silvering briefly the bars of beech and oak bristling the banks.
I fell back to the task in hand: making notes on distance travelled, cross-checking my location with the old OS map and striking a rough outline of the edge-land in my notebook. The next human mark wasn’t far away: the large weir I’d found on New Year’s Eve and, in my drawings at least, the region’s easternmost point from where it rose up and headed south in a final continuous track all the way back to the crossing point. The weir announced its position first, roaring with the previous night’s rainfall. My torchlight touched the long raised hump that spanned the river; water broke over it into a spumy waterfall that seethed down its cobbled slope. Lurking in the shadows of the far bank was a building whose small windows set in a solid, strong wall gave the impression of a scowl – the architectural expression of industry. Newly rendered stonework and posh cars parked in its drive suggested a private house, but the weir was a giveaway of its origins. Mills had once mirrored each other on opposite banks. One had crumbled, one survived; now the water held the only reflection. The ground where I stood still had the ghost of foundations, a muddy clearing pocked and chipped with roots and buried stones. Nearby, presumably set up to take advantage of the view of the Nidd’s continuing journey east, I found the stone-ringed blackened ground and ash of an old campfire. It had been lit about the same place as the ruined mill’s hearth would once have been. Here the smell of the fox was strongest. I rounded the trees and breathed its musty trace, trying to discern a route, stepping, pausing, sniffing and moving again until I lost the trail near an uprooted beech. Some way off to my right I heard the fleet-footed scarper of animal through brush. It’s marking territory, I thought. Just like me.
One final pencil stroke needed drawing: the eastern border. It was the connecting line of the perimeter and, fittingly, the way I’d first entered the edge-land. Now it would take me back the opposite way. I headed up a set of steps and then on to a track called Milner’s Lane – most likely a derivation of ‘Miller’s Lane’ – which rises south through the woodland to where the trees funnel, telescope-like, into the holloway. In places the interwoven saplings and shrubs squeezed in so closely that they felt like hands holding my shoulders. I pushed on with the sense I was swimming for the surface from too deep in a dark sea. Red aircraft warning flares winked from turbines on far-off moors. Closer was Harrogate’s nebula of lights flashing like a zoetrope through the black stems and twigs. Then I was out and breathing. Behind me, the aperture of the holloway shrivelled as I strode towards the crossing point over moonlit fields, descending through a last few hundred yards of wooded tunnel rank with the stink of fox. Over the crossing point, at the street lights of Bilton Lane, I closed my notebook and looked back. The dots were joined; I had navigated some form of the edge-land’s limits. But even as I traced that final line with my pen I knew all attempts at fixity were an illusion. Scratching the surface had already revealed far more than I could hope to contain in a cartographic triangle.
I see the fox for the first time on the same day I lose my job. It is an amicable split over lunchtime beers but no less worrying. ‘The business is downsizing. Last in first out. I’m very sorry.’ His hands are shaking so I make it easy. Besides, there is a catch in his voice, a fear for his own future. Well-founded, as it turns out. Everywhere is talk of cuts, job losses and economic turmoil the likes of which the world has never seen. Across my own industry, in writing and journalism, fees are being dropped and positions slashed. Writing, it seems, has gone from a profession to a luxury, an aside indulged in by those who have a ‘real’ job too. I heard a minister talking on the radio yesterday saying: ‘Given we are in a recession, anything that cannot justify its existence financially has to go.’ What, like education? I wanted to shout. Like libraries? Like a reed warbler? Like love? And go where exactly? Out to the shed with a revolver? Do the honourable thing and leave the world to those who think solely in economic terms? How did we ever get this far, confusing what is necessary for life with what living is about? To make it worse, I couldn’t shake the image of him slinking off the mic, taking a congratulatory call from the party whip and letting his thoughts turn to an upcoming two-week break in Tuscany or somewhere. It seemed such a removed existence, so unreal.
I call Rosie, my wife, who is still working most of the week in London, and she falls quiet when I tell her the news. ‘It’ll be OK,’ she says, even though we’re both thinking the opposite. We bury our fears about moments like this but it’s only ever a shallow grave. The profound uncertainty of it all is dredged from our unconscious as we sleep, manifesting as a strange 4 a.m. panic, a cold world that (you hope) melts away with the daylight.
After leaving the pub I forgo the quietness of our empty house for the edge-land and wander along the lane up into the fields. I need space. I’m vexed by an earworm: the words ‘recession bites’ – currently in every strapline and news VT – bounce around my head. It is a curious, irregular verb ‘to bite’, but it feels appropriate. Almost the first thing I find is a crow, an offering, headless, its chest open and the keel of its breastbone picked clean white. It lies back in the mud with its wings spread as if it has fallen out of the sky. I know this is the fox’s work. I can smell it everywhere. Chances are it was disturbed and marked its prey, intending to return. Nearby I find a torn hole pushed through the vegetation, a gap in the fuzz where new growth has been restricted by regular passage. The tatty circle promises open field beyond and, crouching, I can make out a shallow trench disappearing up and over the dirt. Half-pissed and growing sick of my human skin, I push through.
A pink-grey film of sunset behind pylons reflects in puddles between the dark, ploughed peaks of soil. Shards of sky shine in a hundred tiny fjords, briefly turning earth to heaven. Pressed into the churned ground between my feet is a single deer print. Inspection reveals it is a decent size with dewclaws visible, a roebuck’s. I search around but see no other, only this single hieroglyph lifted out of context months ago by a farmer’s plough. Ahead, a fat woodpigeon settles and bobs into a cluster of holly; I follow and find the indentation of a deer’s laying-up point scattered with white hair. Around it are clumps of badger-dug earth tilled by its bear-like paws on the hunt for a rabbit nest. It is darkening but I’m drawn further by the fox’s scent, west, tracing prints, walking deep into the heart of the edge-land. Waves of brambles as high as my head catch my clothes. Each tug on jacket or trouser works free a thread and unpicks a layer in me too. Moving through this terrain it becomes impossible to hold onto the cares and concerns of town: my worries about money and work. Through the saplings and brambles, the changing light and sounds, my attention cannot rest for long on anything; all things rush up and are absorbed in a second – the dry rattle-caw of a crow concealed in a black ash, the sour reek of fox sprayed on the frigid earth.
My eyes adjust. As the fields swallow the last of the day I crawl under a hedge and trudge across soil as thick and dark as chocolate cake. There is a little wooded valley ahead and, from within it, a barking. The fox? No, it’s more dog-like, a hoarse rasp, a smoker’s cough. I slip down an escarpment to a beck where it echoes again, followed by the crash of undergrowth. A flash of white rump bounding into inky brush – deer. It was a roe throating a warning. I’m standing still, wondering what other creatures are moving about me in the darkness, when I realise I’m sinking. Ankle-deep sludge drowns my shoes, forcing me to wade quickly forward in blind, belching steps until, leaping a stagnant pool, I land face-first on a muddy bank.
The fox manifests as I kneel there trying to catch my breath and work out where I am. I begin to right myself when a tree’s shadow morphs into an ebony silhouette, a shape from another realm trotting, head raised, along the treeline, fifteen, maybe twenty metres away. It is large, full-grown and winter-pelted, with a thick tail that it drags semi-submerged through the scrub like a rudder, scenting its wake. Seconds pass and I realise I’m holding my breath, immersed in the smell, the stillness, the sheer immediacy of it all; I’m willing it to drag me under, entranced by its indifference. There, look, I want to say, there’s your proof of another world, an earlier world, a greater world beyond economic justification. There tiptoes the counterpoint. And I want to join it. Follow it. But just as quickly and quietly as it appeared, the fox slips away. The door closes. When I reach the outline of town again, the street lights stab my eyes into streams. I’m numb with cold, caked in mud, shivering with the thrill of encounter.
The red fox (Vulpes vulpes) has endured a long and abusive relationship with our species, much like edge-lands. However, unlike many rural mammals in the UK, which have seen a sharp decline brought about by hunting, modern farming methods and the privatisation and monoculturalism of land, the fox has adapted to whatever environment we have thrust upon it, sticking for the most part to its own set of territorial rules. This adaptability – which experts term ‘biological plasticity’ – has kept fox numbers steady, in spite of our attempts to destroy them and their traditional habitats. In fact, paradoxically, there has been a proliferation. They are common. Relentless. Elusive. They have forced themselves upon us, and us on them. When you look into it the figures suggest that the UK has 225,000 foxes alive at any one time, a number that almost doubles during the breeding season. As much as 14 per cent of that population is thought to inhabit our towns and cities, although given their ghostliness I’m not sure how we’d ever know for certain. Regardless, the fox is probably now more an enmeshed part of the urban experience than that of the lone walker in a field; it possesses a wildness that shocks twilight streets, a feral face that flashes across parks and patios, effortlessly slipping between worlds.
No doubt because of our begrudging coexistence over millennia, the fox has come to symbolise many things in human art and literature. As I lie curled up in bed, my skin zinging and red after a hot bath, I read of how many Far Eastern cultures once recognised this animal as the embodiment of the shape-shifter, able to move between realms and bodies, neither fully human nor animal. In other societies, the fox is a shamanistic talisman, the animal form of ‘psychopomp’. I feel a twinge of excitement, for I know this word. Psychopomps are guides on spiritual journeys or rites of passage, the beings responsible for escorting souls to the afterlife. Based on this notion of the transitional creature, psychologist Carl Jung appropriated the term in the 1930s to refer to the mediator between unconscious and conscious realms. I switch out the light and listen to heavy freight rumbling a downstairs window in its frame. A low hum, like a chant. It all seems portentous, foretelling.
Finding the fox again is no easy business, but it feels imperative. As the last of my pay rots away and living suddenly alone, with no work to contain me, I turn away from town, beyond its jurisdiction, and spend whole days rooting through the overgrown hedges searching for tracks, kills and bone-filled twists of black fox shit. The house grows messier, but I don’t mind. I’m too busy peering down the tunnel-vision perspectives of lanes over fields that look as though I’m viewing them through the wrong end of a telescope. The edge-land is overpowering at times. Consolatory, cold, late afternoons before rain are painted a beautiful duck-egg blue and pink and sweetened with drifting woodsmoke. Rooks blow across the narrow aperture of my vision like the wind-blown ash. With no foliage to subdue it, light blooms and burns in the wood, sending shadows of trees creeping down the slopes, over me, towards the river. It is as though their spirits have slipped from the trunks to drink. Along the lane or down by the Nidd, saplings caught in a rising breeze quiver and clatter in woody notes against each other. At night I listen to their xylophonic sounds in distinct octaves, their tunings dependent on each tree’s thickness. They gather and crack, knock, creak, groan in communion. One second their bone beats are echoing far away, the next they are shockingly loud and right behind me, as rhythmical as falling footsteps. Walking alone in the dark, I suddenly fancy I’m being followed by a long-dead cattle drover leading his longhorns to market, a weather-cracked face under a rough hat, teeth clamped around a clay pipe. When I summon the nerve to look, he is gone; his white eyes are just holes in a holly hedge.
I find the fox beneath a pine. Actually, if I didn’t know better I’d say he sprang out of the tree, one of three Scots pines that grow where the wood joins the meadow. In man’s hierarchies of timber, pine is a commoner. It is the cheap stuff, the material sliced down and split for flat-pack furniture; the very name maligned as the fragrance of toilet cleaner and taxis. Compared to mahogany or walnut, the alluring cedar or the majestic oak, pine is plantation fodder, plentiful and useful but with no class. This centuries-old tree begs to differ. With its resplendent poise and beauty, it is the very essence of wildness and craggy moor, a poster boy from the ancient Caledonian Forest. Winter fiddles with colour filters dragging down tones, desaturating until the landscape takes on the drab hues of a 1940s cine film. In contrast, this tree’s bright trunk glows copper, rising over a tangle of bramble to bend gracefully at the top where it is persuaded eastwards by the prevailing wind. Its lowest branches are snapped short, spiky, bristling, without bloom and with little more than a haze of ochre, but higher up the thick branches that meet its circular core are sculpted arms. Just like a waiter carrying a tray, each fawn limb holds up a nest of needles that range from silver-green to a jade green-blue. A wind stirs them into life so that the whole canopy suddenly resembles an animal rising, the mist of needles shoaling and shimmering in the way fur ripples over muscle. As the gusts build, these coalesce and then separate, kaleidoscoping the darkening steel sky behind and creating a swirling vortex of green, silver and rust. It is magnetic. A passing magpie, caught by a blast of wind under its wing, is consumed by the whirlpool and disappears into its depths. At that moment the fox is birthed below, into the meadow. At first indistinct from the reddish trunk, he trots down to the frosted grass, eyes screwed tight, blinking in the last light. When he turns back, I follow him as far as I can. True to his mythical function, the fox is escorting me into this land.
Out there my hands freeze and thaw as notes are made obsessively, messily. Rain, when it falls, blots the ink. I record where I see the fox, where he moves and what he shows me. New spidery lines are required and scribbled over my ordered maps. The rough courses of his runs are bumpily drawn, approximated, often while walking. And he is a he, I’m sure of it. Although differences between the sexes are fairly indistinguishable at a distance, there are certain telltale signs when you get close enough, with size being the obvious one. I estimate he is about seventy centimetres in length, a figure I arrived at by measuring the space between two twigs on a fallen pine that he crossed near the weir. Halfway along he turned and looked straight in my direction. I had time to memorise his face, its broad head and long, narrow snout. He looked thinner. Haggard. Only those baleful eyes remained a roaring furnace of defiance.
Another day I find a blackbird limping on the ground with its eyes shut. It lacks the strength to take to higher branches and hops feebly away from me along the old railway into wiry caves of bramble, as if seeking refuge from the very air. Another scolds me and hurls past, diving beak-first into a moss-grown elder thicket. There are no melodies past the last line of gardens on Bilton Lane. Birds camp by feeders like refugees around cooking fires, hunched and hungry. Across all the fields and down the holloway I hear only one rusty chip of a solitary great tit. It is late afternoon under a high lead and gold sky and everywhere is bleak and empty, the temperature is the sort that robs your lungs of breath. Tundra air. Frost sparkles the spiders’ webs between stems of dead cow parsley. Weather forecasters predict –10 tonight and the trees seem anxious. In the deepest part of the wood their trunks are starting to crawl with frost and they reach for each other with long, trembling branches. They know what’s coming. Hardest hit are the insect-eating birds. The usual morsel-filled cracks and holes in bark are swollen hard with ice and yet it is a leaf- and seed-eater, a woodpigeon, I find dead on its back beneath a pylon. Ice has already softened the grey of its feathers into white and its face is a blur, like old fruit sagging with mould. I only notice it at all because of its two comically curled, pink feet, frozen stiff and sticking up in the air as though struck down in bed mid-prayer to the steel giant above. What I first mistake for a rook taking flight turns out to be a shredded black bin bag caught in the pylon’s struts, tirelessly lifting and settling. I watch it for a while flapping in the wind until the cold becomes too much. In the backyard, cutting firewood for the stove, the axe tings uselessly off logs as though they are steel.
Later, once warmed up by toast and tea, I’m up a ladder painting a ceiling. The radio smacks about the bare walls, rebounding off windows still unsoftened by curtains. There is an interview with an art critic talking about how paintings supply the mind with an important ‘fix’. Perhaps, but the edge-land provides a mental and physical transcendence greater than I’ve felt in any gallery. Merely the thought of it changes me.
I am drifting around the viaduct, frozen-breathed, following fox tracks. He must have been running: there are two prints, one in front of the other, then a gap and then two more. They lead down a gully to a scratched hole under a piece of corrugated steel, the sort my brother and I used to hollow out and commandeer in war games as kids. Fox holes. I lift the steel cautiously, then crouch inside. I’m aware that loneliness and the starkness of January are sending me ever inwards, into my mind and my memories. There is something about the stripping away of nature’s decoration at this time of year that induces this kind of self-reflection. There is a trade, however; the earth exposes its inner-self too. Different perspectives are revealed each time I search for him. Buried things. New dimensions. One pre-dawn I sit and yawn and wait, close to the mouth of the holloway, down-wind, by an oak, under an intense tangle of branch, pylon and cable. It is the silent window between night and day, that slow shift in state. Liquid air. Freezing. The dark shrinks and disappears into the silhouettes forming in the west. My consciousness widens, rising with the night air, broadening with the dawn. Eastwards the sun, weak and rheumy as an old man’s eye, hauls itself above the black trees firing the frost-fields into molten gold. The morning assumes a fragile blue hue, almost crackable, as transparent, triangular clouds freeze across the sky. Patterns appear on the surface too: the soft-focus haze of hedges blurring north and the corduroy shadows of tractor-combed earth. The edge-land is confessional, hiding nothing from me, revealing that which lies unwritten in books and libraries, unknown in the minds of those still asleep in bed. Those that have never seen this.
I watch the monotony of our constrained time unravel. The trees of the wood change colour with the rising light and trick my eye. Breaking out from the river gorge, their brown froth spills over the rolling curves of field and consumes the town. The spot where I am, the highest point in the fields, is suddenly an elevated mound in the heart of a royal hunting forest. Hoary old oaks shoot up shoulder-to-shoulder, sprouting dense canopies that turn the ground black with shade. Matted blackthorn, bramble and hazel unravel and twist in impenetrable lattices. Down through the woods, the Nidd licks at swooping branches of willow and alder. Heath and fern spring from its slopes; birch, holly, rowan and yellow-flowering gorse conceal fox, wolf, boar, grouse and deer. Huntsmen are here. They cut swathes through the virgin wood to the east using the edge-land’s undulations and beck valleys filled with wild garlic to hide their human outline and cowl scent. I see all of this in a second and then, with a changing breeze, I am left with the glinting fields, pylons and the bare tunnel of the holloway again. The hunting tracks reform into Bilton’s cul-de-sacs and estate roads – Meadowcroft, Tennyson Avenue, Knox Chase, Bilton Chase – the word ‘chase’ being the only indication of what came before. A young oak marooned in the centre of a farmer’s field stands like a lost child after some natural disaster. When I get home a note in my book reads: I love this place. It’s the best place I’ve ever been. Next to it is the scribbled drawing of the fox. I don’t remember doing either of them.
I rattle around our Victorian terrace. I gloss cupboards, strip and coat walls and wonder at the histories I’m exposing and covering up. Where was the nail made that hammered in these floorboards? Whose were the hands that wore these ebony cupboard handles smooth? What did the mute, paint-splattered servants’ bell by the bed sound like? Ghosts are filling the emptiness. These worlds of the dead and the living. Occasionally my mind drifts and I hear what sounds like the footfall of children running about upstairs or I’ll turn and the half-light and my tired eyes conjure the shadow of a woman, hunched and carrying coal to the stove. I cook, eat dinner and call Rosie. I wish you were here. When she does return, fleetingly, she is exhausted from travelling and we are granted an all-too-brief window to fall back into our happy, human patterns. As each weekend draws to a close we take to bed like one of us is leaving for war, pained by separation and seeking comfort. After she leaves I rise early and run to the crossing point before the world stirs. Passing the empty, spectral forms of buses on one dark morning, I read 2B: Bilton glowing on their LED destination boards. ‘To be’ indeed. I’m surrendering to the edge-land, and it to me. My time is determined by the dusk and the dawn, by these fleeting moments of suspension between day and night when I feel most fully and wildly alive.
Another heatless, open-sky morning. I see no one, not even the buttoned-up mirages of dog walkers on the old railway in the early mist, driven from warm beds by the bowel habits of their pets. The meadow’s grass is brittle, covered in a fine white dust and fresh with fox prints. They lead off in a trail so easy to follow it’s as though there is something he wants me to see, something beyond the old railway and the mills, past the histories of huntsmen and the deer herds.
The last of the cathedral-deep glaciers melted here 11,000 years ago, but today ice sculpts the edge-land again. Trees are black lines scratched in blue and the air smells of wet, cold iron. White mountains of cloud are indistinct from the hill-line. Pylons twinkle top to bottom like vast river icicles. I hear the quiet waves of cars stirring on the main roads and see the moving chrome and glass shine in the distance like wet stone. There is a sacred calm and I imagine I am at this land’s beginning, that very moment thousands of years ago when the great ice finally cracked and shrank back further north. I shut my eyes and let the sound of traffic morph into that of a flood river, breaking out from the glacier along a path of least resistance, tearing channels through the soft sandstone and carving out the river gorge ahead. The evidence is that humans reached here soon after the ground was released, conquering the rich, fertile earth as it burst with colonising seeds and spores after 100,000 years of incarceration. For so long there has been an unbroken line of eyes looking out across the gorge as I do now, seeing the skeleton tree canopies tinge with evening sun. The rift remains an open tear.
If you plumbed deep enough, you’d find foxes bound up in every layer of this land. Remains have been discovered in Warwickshire’s seams of Wolstonian glacial sediments dating their presence here to between at least 135,000 and 330,000 years. Data reveals that when the great ice came again, some were driven south to more temperate climes – Iberia, Italy, southern France – others curled up in caves and dens and slowly turned to stone. But the margins were always in their blood. The species returned from exile as soon as the climate permitted, repossessing the fringes of the habitable. Their post-glacial remains have been found at several sites in Britain, evidence of a swift reclamation about the same time as humans. The crossing point for both of us was Doggerland, an earth bridge that once connected this country to Germany and continental Europe. Perhaps foxes were our guides then too and we followed them into this new realm. Certainly the flooding of Doggerland 3,500 years later isolated us both. We were trapped here together on the edge of the world.
It’s been a few days since I saw him. The air doesn’t help. It is a clinging curtain of cold, wet wool, clouding sight. Disjointed noises of machines and trucks rattle from the roads. My breath blows thick as a sea fret. I hear muffled shouts and, inexplicably, sheep. Closer is the clatter and chatter of jackdaws. All around is the feeling of confluence, of things happening just outside my vision. We’re always told that time is linear, yet in this kind of atmosphere it feels more like a ball of string where points touch for the briefest moments and coexist in the same space. An overweight sheepdog sniffs at a gap in the undergrowth by the old railway siding before being pulled away. ‘Leave it. It’s dirty,’ shouts a man, yanking the lead. ‘Fox.’
I think nothing of ducking down and following the hole through the bushes. A squashed Fanta bottle lies by a torn clump of hen pheasant’s feathers. An unusual dinner. Soft down is scattered everywhere, caught in cobwebs and brambles, but three or four beautiful, mottled, russet-brown wing feathers are still attached to a bony stump. Slightly curved inwards at the edges, it looks just like a little baseball glove.
The crossing point is shrouded in fog, which forms an impenetrable wall behind the houses, deadening distance. It creates the illusion that the world is only a single street deep, a wood-backed Hollywood stage-set in an American desert. But from the viaduct, a different vista. The view stretches twenty miles in one direction, revealing open country in an astonishing collage. The nearest fields are a British military green, then come the smudged lines of grey-purple trees and hedge. Furthest is a blurry ochre where division between land and sky can only be discerned by the crimson glow of evening. It blushes the low cloud as though a great fire rages over the horizon.
As the days pass I sense a thin, alarming energy rising within, like when you get a nosebleed and, head back, you swallow blood. All this time out here in the cold brings an extraordinary clarity; I have bursts of intense awareness where I can almost hear, see and feel too much. But still no sign of the fox. And no fresh kills either, or none that I can find. I wait nightly, though, camped down in the seams of undergrowth between the old railway and the meadow. As the hours fall away I feel no urge to return to the empty house. 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. 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 pierces double-glazed windows, stopping forks halfway to mouths, wondering at the scream outside. It fires the urge to mate between the fox’s thin hips. If he’d been stronger, perhaps he would have sought her out, but not now. Haaaaaoooooow. Others will be coming soon, young dog-foxes with only three summers under their pelts, slipping out from fields and the wastelands behind the playing fields, warehouses and paint factories to come here and search for her. The fox knows to encounter them as he is, flower-frail with hunger, would be dangerous. His patch could be taken. Or worse.
Territory is everything in winter. To be forced to roam in the open would be fatal. The fox hobbles off and sprays the brambles around his gully. All must be marked. From his position on its ridge the trees below seem to collapse inwards, caving in on the winding watercourse running along the little valley’s bottom. Bilton Beck rises here and burbles over a silt bed strewn with black stones all the way to the Nidd. In places plastic bottles spin endlessly in the eddies; in others, ice sheets join the banks, roofing the stream. It rarely freezes completely, though, and he knows this. No wild fox would dig a den where there wasn’t a pond, marsh or stream within a few hundred yards. Not that he dug this one; it is the remains of a badger sett hollowed beneath a beech a hundred years ago. Floods and landslips have exposed the tree’s roots, leaving them clutching at the soil like a sparrowhawk’s talons. Behind there’s a scrape where the fox lies on warm days surveying the gully, but with the air sharp as a thorn in the nose, he disappears into deep earth, ducking along a root-draped passageway towards the furthest chamber where the ground is soft, black and nitrogenous. His copper fur parts to reveal a pure white undercoat as he flexes his body into a curl.
The soil is a repository of old smells and they come to him, given life by warmth and movement. The strongest is his vixen. For a moment he remembers licking, the wilful submission of mating and the sweet tang of kits. The den has known many such balls of brown fur squirming in its earth for heat and milk. In his drowsiness, time past and present combine and soft, clawless paws clamber over his face. Blind liquid eyes push up to his. His fur stirs with the hot, sweet breath of pink, mewing mouths. Then he is alone again. He dreams of root, burrow, earth and blood.
The fox’s mate abandoned the den two years before, just as tender goose grass and nettles began to carpet the under-brambles. He watched her trot to the horizon at the top of his gully. Pausing on the ridge she became a silhouette under stretching arms of an ash then disappeared over the edge. The kits bounded after, scrabbling up the slope in pursuit, white-tipped tails flicking, fur only just fawned, all barely thirty days old.
The foxes had mated together before, raising litters that grew fat, first from her milk, then from the rabbits, wood mice and pigeons he’d hunted. But hunger came often in that last winter together. Sixty years earlier, farmers had thrown rabbit corpses infected with myxomatosis into the burrows that edged the wheat fields to the north. The infection spread ruthlessly, decimating warrens that had been tunnelled under the wood for a thousand years. It was a grim plague that still haunted the survivors’ descendants, flaring into epidemic proportions during hot summers when the breeding conditions were perfect for the virus-carrying rabbit flea. That year it had thrived, spreading from coat to coat so that by the time the beech over the foxes’ den had shed its last leaves, the prey they relied on was in sharp decline. The fox hadn’t even needed to hunt the few rabbits he came across swollen, shivering and foul with disease. Eyes bulged red and bloody from skulls, sightless, scratched out. Blind, dumb and disoriented, they dragged their useless hind legs in pathetic crawls for cover; he felt none of the joy of execution when stooping to break their necks. Even the meat tasted poor, the flesh corroded.
The foxes hungered, a pain compounded each night by the smell of food drifting over the meadow. Sickly thin, hunting in the frozen, misty margins, the fox bit at the scents – chicken bones, meat, hot marrowfat, rotting vegetables, baked wheat – and scrabbled violently at the earth in his search for worms and insects. Once he dug up a squirrel’s cache of acorns and ate them all, carrying none to his mate. But despite the gnawing in his belly, he kept to his territory, never straying beyond the old railway. Being a wild fox, the smell of man triggered received fears, memories that had passed from fox to fox via trembling whisker and womb. His were blurry visions of The Bramham Moor Hunt, founded in 1740 by the improbably named MP for York, George Fox-Lane. Although long since merged and moved to more respectable pastures, it had once been a regular sight through these fields and woods. The fox half-remembered things he’d never even seen: spectacular horses, duns and greys, gleaming horns and gentry in blue velvet jackets thundering along the treeline, driving piebald foxhounds up the gully’s sides; thick winter fox pelts skinned from pink carcasses left to rot in snowy fields. His vixen had been different. Littered in an old construction pipe behind the sewage works at Bachelor Gardens, she’d scavenged discarded takeaway polystyrene and bin bags since weaning. She’d learned to wait from the cover of parked cars until closing time brought the rush for takeaways that would be spilled onto pavements by drunken hands. The smells of man compelled something different in her: Leave. Feed. Mate again.
The fox had waited for her return, the freshness of rubbings around the den keeping her alive in his snout. Each night he patrolled, marking trees, leaving his twisted black coils on stumps and surveying the meadow from below the same ash tree his ancestors had. A favoured spot, its bark had been worn smooth by generations of foxes drawn to rub there by a usefully positioned nail. This was an unintentional memorial, hammered into the trunk in 1914 by Lieutenant Thomas Watson before leaving for Egypt with the Leeds Pals, with a vow to his fiancée, Elizabeth, that they’d remove it together when the war was over. That benediction never came. The fusion of bone and mud they salvaged from a shell hole three years later was spaded into the earth at Tyne Cot Cemetery, Belgium. The nail was left to the tree and over the years became almost consumed by bark. It stuck out just enough to snatch a few hairs whenever the fox scratched against it, forming a tuft that was foraged every spring by blue tits to line their nests.
Moons passed, five in all, but with no sign of his mate. As dusk heralded the sixth, the fox prowled along the river past the collapsed bank of his birth den and surprised a young rat, devouring it in seconds on the crescent of a small muddy beach. He cracked its skull with his back teeth and swallowed the tail. Strength surged through his limbs and he lollopped up the gully side following her trail as a flare of sun sharpened the horizon into a clear line. The day had been numb and grey and he trotted towards that fading frequency of warmth, weaving, nose to ground, tracing her scent through the fallen branches and infant snowdrops. The meadow was growing then and among a swathe of grass and sprouting dandelions, a cock-pheasant poked up. The fox sank to its haunches but the wind changed; a breath lifted his hind fur and the pheasant rattled off in a volley of clucking that echoed through the wood.
The fox crept along the treeline until he reached the old railway. His mate had paused there to wait for her kits, in the same spot where a signal box had once stood. He smelled them on the corner of an old brick poking through the mud. At this distance the town looked different, like an open mouth. Houses loomed. Behind them, the blurry amber curve of street lights. Power lines crackled off south-west towards a groaning electricity substation. Metal smells. New patterns and shapes. Drizzle began and he knew it was the dark precursor of a storm. He smelled man. Then, with a step, he left his territory for the first time.
Breaching a privet hedge, he paused halfway through the orange wash of a rainy cul-de-sac. Its reeks disoriented: oil, tobacco and mint smeared into pavements. Rain drummed on street-lamp casings, swirling down from a sky the hue of blackberries. He felt the tarmac tremble and turned to see moving lights closing at speed. A screech and a long horn-blast sent him scampering along a ginnel between two houses. Leaping over a wall, he slipped down a bank and into a scrappy wood. The storm was growing, awakening the earth; wind stirred the trees. The foot of the slope blew with plastic bags and bottles and a line of elder bushes entwined a twelve-foot security fence. On the other side lay a railway, a dull bronze line that thrummed under a row of arc lamps. The hissing whip of a train ran along its length, metal against metal, an unfathomable weight approaching. The fox slunk away, trotting southwards, his black paws splashing through run-off. It was then he saw it and his body jerked and froze: fur flashing. Red-brown fur. And that smell. His mate.
The vixen pushed through the wispy curtain of old man’s beard across the railway on the opposite bank and, lit up by the corollas of light, slipped onto the tracks to chase a crisp packet. The fox’s ears flicked at the noise growing louder, a sawing sound like a gull’s shriek that shrunk him down into a crouch, yet his vixen stood her ground, watching something with a foreleg raised. Hunting. Then she pounced on a rat as it fled a flooded hole. Suddenly that moving wall of sound and weight and light was upon them, over them, part of them. A terrible flare and scream.
The fox ran, his legs a mess of speed, a force pushing him onwards along the fence and into the edge-land. He ran down that wild corridor and over the crossing point until his strength gave way and he curled up beneath the last elm on the river to sleep. By the next evening his heart had slowed.
He wakes now, disturbed by a vole scampering to its tunnel in the den wall, and stretches stiffly in the dark, legs numb from being too long motionless. With a yawn he tastes disordered air. Through the rooty aperture of the entrance, silent, feathery flakes swirl this way and that, aimlessly, diagonally. He blinks again, nibbles his fur and sniffs. Nothing. All scents are buried now. Even the voices of birds are quietened by blizzard. Pain swells in his arthritic legs. He has never been hungrier but he knows that hunting would be futile in falling snow. Covering his snout with his brush he lies awake, waiting, weakening.
By dusk the next evening the world has become monochrome. Lines of rooks huddle in the fields searching for a gap in the white crust. The fox is at the holloway, stalking a crow as it smashes its beak into a chalk-hard drift. With every strike it sinks a little until it raps impenetrable earth and draws out a rattling, krah-ah-aahhhh. The fox slinks on his belly, but the crow hears and hops, skips and vanishes into grey air. High above, the drone of a great metal bird whines and throbs, retracting its landing gear to begin its migration south.
Despite the snow, moisture in the air carries sound and scent: a foggy hum of lorries and cars and smells pumped from industrial vents. A Chinese takeaway on Bilton Lane is deep-frying pork. The fox’s ears twitch. He snaps at the air, retches, coughs and yawns. Disturbed, the rooks rise from the fields and throng the wood. Woodpigeons flying in pairs fold back their wings and come in to roost. He knows birds are beyond him now and he resorts to his clump of dead hogweed at the field’s edge as the street lights of town begin to shimmer in the darkening mist beyond. After twenty breaths, he rises and limps towards them.
Behind the old railway, down the siding bank, his territory finishes by a clutch of garden-escaped hellebores. They are a purple marker among the ermine snow. A rotten garden fence blown outwards lies semi-buried by earth piled into mounds from rabbit excavations. Moving from hole to hole he thrusts his head in and tastes the faint air of a warren. Memories flash: fur against his tongue and teeth, flesh, the breaking of bone. The scents are faded though and the warren collapsed. A Staffordshire bull terrier killed the last breeding doe a year earlier as its owner stopped to light a cigarette. The clutch of pink infants left orphaned in the burrow was a feast for a pregnant rat. The fox smells it all and moves on.
Crossing the collapsed fence, he crawls up a bank and under a laurel into a long yard thick with snow. The crystalline layer has turned plant pots into giant puffballs. A wheelie bin is on its side, lid open and overflowing with rubbish; the stench fills his nose. It is this that has drawn him. But there is another – dog. It’s weak, though. There’s been nothing in here for days save for a pair of blackbirds investigating another long-empty feeder. Only their spidery scrawls flaw the snow’s luminescence. The fox creeps, body tensed, each boot barely shifting the surface. Pad, pad, pad, he creaks towards the square of the house looming, cliff-like, at the end. A blind in an upstairs bedroom glows yellow. That’s all. He pauses. No. There is another, an intermittent flashing like sunlight on the river. It is coming from around the corner of the wall, near the bins. Suddenly the house wall erupts with a gurgle of steaming water swirling down a drain. He smells something familiar – elderflowers. He hurries into a trot and rounds the house, bringing a bright conservatory into view, a television blaring at its centre. In a heartbeat he is down on his chest, ears back, baring his teeth. Every sense tells him to flee. Here is all he despises: uncertain ground and dangers, but his hunger is like an animal eating him from the inside. He darts for the wheelie bin and tears opens a plastic bag like a rabbit’s stomach spilling wet cardboard, eggshells and half-eaten vegetables. Burying his snout deep inside, his teeth clamp on a chicken carcass, which he drags onto the snow to crack the cartilage and swallow the pale, forgotten under-meat.
Desperation has lowered his guard and he doesn’t notice the young dog stirred from bed and walking to the conservatory window. Outraged by his wild form, it slams its paws against the glass, barking sharp violent rasps. The sudden scream from upstairs sounds like a rabbit caught by the neck and the house explodes with yellow. The fox bolts the way he came, running hard, oblivious to the burning pain in his bones and thinking of nothing but reaching his territory, his earth. Yet he doesn’t run in its direction. His instinct is to lose enemies on foreign soil and so he doubles back, turning west along the old railway, dashing through borders, over fences, up bramble banks and through scrappy undergrowth strewn with fly-tipped glass and metal. Under a hedge he smells another dog-fox – young, strong – but presses on, past an allotment’s drunken fencing, flushing woodpigeon as he runs. A hundred yards further, behind the slide and swings of a children’s playground, a snowy belt of woodland leads down to the river. Scenting open water, he slows to a limp and skirts a shallow pool frozen and flecked with litter, ringed with the prints of moorhens.
Watching him unseen from the brow of a bank is a two-year-old dog-fox who tracks the bony shape panting beside his water source before emitting a high-pitched whine of warning. Surprised, the old fox jumps, spins round and retches back a gekkering call. His eyes are wide, muscles tensed, but the younger fox has no urge to fight him; he knows the intruder is too weak to contest ground. He stinks of fear and of death. But he carries another smell too, something familiar – dens and warm earth. The young fox lets out an ululating noise and lets his father pass, following his hobbling shape until he becomes invisible in the trees.
Moon renders the Nidd’s surface polished silver. The fox breaks it with his tongue and laps. There is no other sound than the continuous, indefinable whistle-hum of the sewage works, a noise he has never heard so close before. Instinctively his senses orient him and he turns east towards his territory. Mist haunts the river edges, skirting the alder and snow-dusted pines. Nosing his way downstream, the fox creeps through the cover of dead vegetation until his own faint scent drifts over a low woody rise. As he crests a trackless path the night-veiled land beyond begins to resolve into the recognisable shapes of viaduct, wood and meadow. A sniff. Close now. He quickens his pace, limping through a thicket of hawthorn and up to a leaning fence covered by an impenetrable wall of creeping bramble. Rather than retreat, he darts through the narrow gap between a fence post and tree, landing in a ditch on his front paws. Immediately he knows he’s been bitten.
There is a scratch and the feeling of being gripped. Sharp teeth hold his back legs. He yelps and coils round, snapping and hissing, fearing badger or dog, but his jaws clamp on something worse. Old discarded wire, barbed and twisted into loops, is buried deep into the flesh of his left hind paw and noosed around the other, suspending both in the air. He pulls and chews at the wire, dragging himself across the ditch, yet only deepens the wound. He tries jumping back and forth, then scrabbling over the fence from the other way, but the noose tightens and twists with the efforts, soaking the snow with blood. Eventually, exhausted, he collapses onto his side, ribs heaving, too weak to move.
The little ditch is massed with night when a robin breaks the silence – twiddle-oo, twiddle-eedee, twiddle-ee – a downpour of notes that wakes the fox. He blinks up at the song as it ripples through the wood. The robin is anointing the earth from a branch of a nearby crab apple, legs braced, fiery breast puffed and facing the red edge of the rising sun. Another sings, faintly, from the housing estate across the meadow. The edge-land is stirring. Slowly, trunks and branches become etched in a cream sky; light blooms in the east. Starlings settle again on the pylon cables. Rooks pace the fields. The wish-wash of cars rises in a thin line.
There is no pain, only numbness, and for a moment he forgets his bonds and tries to stand. His yelp frightens away the robin. Licking, pulling and biting the wire again agitates the cut further, for the old post it is nailed to is crooked but strong, a creosoted chestnut pole driven deep into the ground by a farmer who believed a job worth doing was worth doing well. More fretting flares the wound; it boils up with fresh blood until it’s too tender even for his tongue to touch.
A frozen puddle a yard away half-melts in the midday sun, maddening his thirst, but all through the changing light of the mauve and silver afternoon he can only scratch at the ground and bite at the snow-topped brambles. Soon every breath is a wheeze. As the sky bruises, he hears the continuous exhale of cars returning. The puddle thickens and solidifies again. A rabbit kit appears at the top of the ditch. Curious, it approaches the fox and becomes confused by the absurdity of its trussed legs. The fox blinks; the rabbit has changed into a rook, assessing him, preening under a wing, cocking its head and letting out a loud kro-aa-ak. Even hisses and snarls don’t scare it; then the fox finds he can neither uncurl his lip nor lift his head.
Fringing the ditch are twelve snow-rooted silver birches. They look like apparitions, hard edged but soft-skinned, the luminosity of winter landscape distilled in their cream-russet trunks. The fox thinks briefly of his den; then forgets everything. The rook hops about the lip of the scrape, bending closer, twitching, and ducking back in feathery leaps. Others prowl too, a silky crow and a pair of grey-hooded jackdaws. Through a tangled web of purple birch twigs the firmament changes as the sun becomes a rim on the south-western skyline. Clouds gilded by the dying orb hesitate for a moment in a forget-me-not-blue sky, before it changes to the hue of ripe wheat. Amber comes next, before daffodil and rose, then everything assumes the dark crimson of field campion. This stretches the furthest, reflecting in the ice and snow, turning them bloody. Fading, it leaves only the husks of trees and hills, houses and farms and the smouldering black stems of wind turbines on the horizon. The last colour is the shrinking topaz of the fox’s eyes as his breath dissolves into the darkness.
A month passes, maybe longer, before I find his body. It is a bright, fiery morning, cold and sharp, with snow still on the ground and trees as I wander west from the viaduct, down towards the Bachelor Gardens Sewage Works. I have half a mind to photograph the river, which is shining like tin foil under a climbing sun. Near a cluster of silver birch I pick my way around a ditch overgrown with bramble. Clambering over the last vestiges of a fence, I smell it – a strong, sweet, rotten smell – and glance down to my right. It takes a moment to make sense of the mess of body lying at the bottom of the scratched trench. The fox is sagged, sodden, blackened, caved-in, his back legs stripped to bones and still trussed up in wire. It’s heartbreaking to see and made worse by guilt: I’d almost forgotten him in these intervening weeks. I searched for him after he disappeared, looking in different places and at different times, but in truth I knew his work was done. I am beyond the crossing point now; the edge-land is open to me in a way I couldn’t have understood before. Following him has deepened the map, unfolding it, throwing it into relief. Stories are within reach. But the human world has been pulling at me too. Rosie has moved up from London. Work is picking up. Other exciting news has thawed my loneliness. And now, looking at the fox’s sad, skeletal shape below, I don’t see psychopomp or guide, but a wild animal again. His face is a shrunken and squashed mask, all life pecked out of it; his claws are broken from trying to tear himself free. That flame fur has long since leached into the earth.
When I was twenty-four, I was rushed into hospital for an emergency operation. Three hours later I woke, still blurry with anaesthetic, to find the surgeon who saved my life standing at the foot of the bed, holding the appendix in a clear tube. ‘You’re a new man now,’ he said. ‘I’m giving you back to the world.’ It was a strange moment and a strange turn of phrase, which is probably why it has stayed with me. Seeing the fox elicits a similar sensation, like a part of me removed. At once an ending and a beginning.
Sun rakes the edge-land. New light over this now-familiar ground. It feels so long since the world provided any heat that I put away my notebook and lie down, using my pack as a pillow. Beside me is a patch of coltsfoot, an inadvertent little graveside bouquet. Its flowers, which bloom before the leaves, are the nourishing yellow of free-range egg yolks – an assertion of life. And all around, the sun bleaches buds of birch and hawthorn, its elevation such that it seems to spotlight everything: the edges of stems and stalks, a passing pigeon’s wings, the rooks yak-yakking in the meadow, a lone bumblebee. The curtains have been ripped opened and the dustsheets dragged off. Lying here with the warmth full on my face and the drip-drip of ice and snow thawing in quickening rhythms, I can almost feel the earth turning.