The Farthing Wood Collection 1 (12 page)

‘The rabbits will move closer to the Wood,’ the sow badger remarked. ‘As the hares have done.’

‘Which means the humans will have done so too,’ Young Badger pointed out shrewdly.

‘Quite right, my son,’ the kindly old boar said. ‘And then we shall all feel as if they’re spying on us. Life won’t be very comfortable for the birds and beasts who are around in the daytime.’

‘Let them worry about that,’ his mate suggested.

‘I don’t know. We’re all together in this in a way. It’s our Wood we’re talking about. We all live here. I’d like to get the opinions of some other animals. We ought to do
something
.’

‘What? What can we do?’

‘Well, think about protecting ourselves as best we can. You know, keeping our secrecy as wild animals, and simply maintaining our natural behaviour. Humans can be very inquisitive and disruptive.’

‘What shall we do, Father?’ asked Young Badger.

‘I think we need to get together with the other senior animals – as many as we can persuade – and talk things over. We could meet any night in the centre of the Wood – somewhere that’s a good gathering place.’

‘Everyone knows where the middle of the Wood is,’ the sow badger said. ‘By the Great Beech.’

‘It’ll be difficult to get the smaller animals to come along,’ Kindly Badger reflected. ‘They won’t feel safe unless they’re given a kind of promise.’

‘Well then, give them one.’

Kindly Badger fell to thinking. ‘It’ll need the foxes’ co-operation,’ he murmured, ‘and that’s not an easy thing to arrange.’

So it was to prove. Lean Vixen scoffed at the notion of a promise. ‘An absurd idea,’ she said. ‘To think that foxes would commit themselves in any such way. If you
want to have a meeting; fine. But let everyone come at his or her own risk.’

‘The badger’s not so silly,’ Lean Fox disagreed as he often did. ‘We should have as many wise heads as we can get. Some of the smaller animals, such as the weasels and stoats, have a kind of cunning all their own. I, for one, would be willing to listen to them. They may have ideas that would be useful for all of us. I would promise to leave them unmolested.’

‘And the squirrels and rabbits?’ Lean Vixen mocked him. ‘You’d give them a promise of safety?’ She gave a hollow laugh.

‘Why not?’ Kindly Badger asked. ‘For just the duration of our meeting?’

‘They wouldn’t come!’ Lean Vixen protested.

‘That’s up to them. The squirrels might well do so. They could sit in the branches.’

‘When do you propose to meet?’ Lean Fox asked.

‘The sooner the better. There will soon be a new moon. The darkest night is our best security. We should choose then, I think.’

‘By the Great Beech?’

‘Exactly. I shall invite as many woodlanders as I can find.’

‘I’ll speak to the stout fox,’ his lean counterpart offered. ‘I think he’ll attend. He has been going around with a very worried look recently.’

‘Oh, that’s nothing to do with any human presence,’ the vixen informed him glibly. ‘His mate’s ill and she’s almost reached her time. No wonder he’s worried.’

‘Nevertheless …’

‘The old hedgehog will join you,’ said Lean Vixen.
‘You can be sure of that. He wouldn’t miss any opportunity to regale everyone with his weird fantasies.’

Stout Fox had begun to view the humans’ incursions with misgiving. His own cubs would soon enter the world in the shadow of their presence, and who could say how things would develop? But his concern for his unborn cubs was overridden by a much more profound concern for his mate. Stout Vixen was very sick indeed and the big fox ran in and out of their den, unable to rest for a moment. He was at his wits’ end.

‘There must be something I can do,’ he would mutter. ‘I can’t just let her suffer.’ Inside the earth he looked longingly at her. ‘Poor vixen! Are you in great pain?’

‘Pretty much,’ she whispered.

‘If only I could help,’ Stout Fox moaned.

‘But you can’t … we both know that.’

‘Perhaps there is a creature somewhere …’ he murmured and broke off as he heard a voice outside.

Lean Fox had come to give news of the meeting. Stout Fox scarcely listened, his mind was so taken up with his mate’s illness.

‘The Great Beech, you say? All right, I’ll come.’ Then a thought struck him. Maybe one of the animals at the meeting could offer some hope. He called after Lean Fox as he left. ‘I’ll certainly attend. As long as it’s safe to leave my vixen …’

The night of the new moon arrived. Kindly Badger and his mate, along with various hedgehogs, Lean Fox and Lean Vixen, sat waiting beneath the Great Beech. Sly Stoat, Lightning Weasel, and others of their kind, came cautiously. In the branches of the beech Nervous
Squirrel and others perched restlessly. A pair of hares, who trusted the badger’s word, had come to listen to the discussion from a safe distance. Other smaller animals peeped from holes nearby. And various birds clustered in the tree-tops, alert to every movement.

Jay spied Stout Fox loping through the Wood to its centre. ‘The stout fox is coming!’ the bird screeched, putting several timid beasts to flight at once.

‘Come back, come back,’ Kindly Badger called. ‘There’s no danger. Everyone assembled here must take the Oath of Common Safety, so that none can be harmed. Otherwise there will be no exchange of views and no opinions heard.’

Stout Fox appeared out of the gloom. He was the largest animal present. ‘I swear,’ he growled, looking around the gathering, ‘to respect the safety of all creatures assembled for this meeting.’

Others followed suit. It was a solemn moment.

Stout Fox mumbled in a low voice, ‘My vixen is sick. She must have found the last diseased vole. There has been no other sickness for days. Does anyone know of a creature who has survived the sickness?’

No-one answered.

‘I must save her if I can,’ the fox continued. It was strange to see the powerful hunter wearing a look of helplessness. ‘She will bear our cubs very soon. She mustn’t die. Not yet.’ It was as though he were talking to himself.

‘Some of the otters cured themselves,’ Sage Hedgehog said when the fox fell quiet. ‘They had the knowledge. But you drove them away. They are not here to help you now.’

Stout Fox hung his head in misery.

‘I thought this assembly was all about protecting
ourselves from human interference,’ Sly Stoat interposed drily. ‘Much as the stout vixen has everyone’s sympathy, we really have to think of what concerns us all.’ His sarcasm was evident, but none of the smaller animals dared to acknowledge it.

‘Well, it doesn’t concern
me
,’ Lean Vixen announced, ‘if you’re referring to the humans’ activities. I don’t hunt in the grassy area any more. I don’t need to. There are plenty of other places to find all the game
I
want. And I can’t believe anyone here is so stupid as to go nosing around that quarter these days. Let the humans attend to their interests, whatever they are, and leave me to attend to mine.’

‘A more shortsighted remark would be difficult to utter,’ Kindly Badger retorted, angry for once. ‘I wonder you came along.’

‘She’s fully occupied with our cubs, you see,’ Lean Fox tried to excuse her. ‘She can’t think of anything else.’

‘Perhaps she’d better return to them, then, and leave us to the serious discussion.’

‘An argument!’ Jay shrieked. ‘Not a good start!’

‘But the vixen’s right,’ Lightning Weasel gave his opinion. ‘We don’t have to watch the humans’ every move. We can forget them, at any rate for the forseeable future. They’re too far away to cause us any concern.’

‘M-moving nearer, I think,’ Nervous Squirrel said. ‘I w-watch them. They s-seem to creep closer each time I l-look.’

‘You’re imagining it,’ the weasel replied. ‘How can you tell?’

‘Why don’t you look for yourself?’ Sly Stoat sneered. ‘Then you’ll know!’

‘I can’t climb into tree-tops,’ Lightning Weasel snapped.

‘I think we’re losing sight of why we’re here,’ Kindly Badger interrupted.

‘Why are we here?’ Lightning Weasel chortled, glancing around.

Kindly Badger sighed. ‘In your case – and in some others – it would be difficult to say. But I called this assembly so that all of us can air our views as to how to proceed in these difficult times.’

‘What’s he talking about?’ one hare muttered to the other.

‘I don’t know. Waste of time coming, if you ask me.’

Lean Vixen cut across the mutterings. ‘There is nothing anyone here can do to put things right.’ She looked serious for once. ‘That’s if you believe things have gone wrong in the first place. We drove the otters out. We have more to eat, but the humans seem to have replaced the otters. That’s the story in as few words as it takes to tell.’

‘And what of your cubs’ future?’ Sage hedgehog asked her. ‘How do you propose to protect them?’

‘The same way my parents protected me,’ she answered. ‘Nothing has altered that. And when they no longer need me, well … they’re on their own.’

These words seemed to summarize the situation for every creature present. Beyond usual parental duties, there
was
nothing more in their power to do. The meeting began to break up without reaching any agreement. The smaller animals left first. And gradually all of the beasts and birds returned to their homes or their normal occupations in the night hours. Kindly Badger and Sage Hedgehog were left alone under the Great Beech.

‘They are beyond redemption,’ the hedgehog said with finality.

Far away from Farthing Wood another group of badgers were tidying their set after their fight with the intruding otters. It had been a short and savage fight. The mother badger watched her mate take the lifeless form of Lame Otter by the scruff of the neck and carry it along the entrance tunnel to the outside air. Lame Otter had borne the brunt of the attack as he had tried to shield Long-Whiskers. His wounds were ghastly. The badger dropped him far enough from the set so that no taint could foul the air of the nesting chamber. Then he returned for Long-Whiskers.

The badgers believed both otters were dead, and indeed Lame Otter was at his last gasp. But, severe though Long-Whiskers’ injuries were, she had some chance of making a recovery. She was dropped by the side of Lame Otter. The badger returned to his set, satisfied that the intruders had been properly dealt with.

Long-Whiskers opened her eyes. It was still light. She knew she must somehow crawl away from that place before dusk, because then the badgers would leave the set to forage. If they should discover she was
still alive they would quickly finish her off. She sniffed at the still body of the lame male.

‘Are you lost to me?’ she whispered. The horrible ache of loneliness had not yet made itself felt. Pain and fear dominated her senses. She detected the tiniest flicker of movement in her companion as he struggled to draw a breath.

‘You’re still living!’ she whistled softly, though aware life was ebbing from him.

Barely audibly Lame Otter gasped, ‘Leave here. Go on. You … must get back.’ The effort exhausted him, but he tried to speak again. ‘You … the last. For the cubs …’ These were his last words. He shuddered and was then quite still.

For a while Long-Whiskers remained loyally by his side. Then, for his sake as well as for her own, she began to crawl away. She had lost a lot of blood and she felt weak and sick. Her gashes were extremely painful. Amazingly, though, her limbs were still sound. The badgers’ attack had been directed against her chest and head. She paused after dragging herself a metre or two; then continued. She knew she couldn’t rest just yet. Little by little she removed herself from the scene of that horrible encounter, so that by dusk she was able to haul herself under a hedgerow, secure in the knowledge that she had escaped the badgers. She slept the deep sleep of exhaustion; helpless, injured and totally alone.

The grassland around Farthing Wood shrank steadily as the human construction site began to take shape. The Farthing Wood animals, for the most part, tried to ignore the fact. But some of them recalled the otters’ boasts. They remembered how there had, in truth,
been no human activity when the otters lived by the stream. And they remembered how the foxes and others had plotted to rid themselves of the clever animals, and, in particular, that the foxes had joined together to drive the otters out. Rabbits and hares had already lost their chosen homes in the grassy areas they loved best. Some of the more thoughtful animals wondered now if that was only the start.

‘Do you think that our set will always be here?’ Young Badger asked his father one day.

‘Of course it will,’ Kindly Badger replied at once. ‘Why, generation after generation of badgers have been born and raised here. It’s – it’s –
unthinkable
that that could ever change.’ He glanced at his mate for corroboration, as though perhaps needing reassurance himself.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said softly to the youngster. ‘You’ll grow old here, of that I’m quite sure.’

The young male couldn’t think beyond that point and was happy.

The foxes didn’t worry themselves about past events. The otters had gone and they thought that was a good thing. Yet Stout Fox would have been prepared to humble himself and ask an otter’s advice about the sickness of his vixen if an otter had been around for him to do so.