‘Did I hurt you?’
I nodded.
‘I’m sorry . . .’
‘Promise me one thing,’ I whispered. ‘Promise that you’ll never pull my tail again. Never, do you hear?’
‘My word as an officer,’ he said and set his hand on his medal ribbons. ‘Was it really bad?’
‘I felt ashamed,’ I whispered. ‘You know, I’ve done a lot of things in my life that I don’t want to remember. I’ve done a lot of harm to people . . .’
His face suddenly turned serious.
‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Please don’t. Not just now.’
We foxes are keen hunters of English aristocrats and chickens. We hunt English aristocrats because English aristocrats hunt us, and it’s a sort of point of honour. But we hunt chickens for our own enjoyment. Both types of hunting have their passionate supporters who will shout themselves hoarse defending their choice. The way I see things, hunting chickens has several serious advantages:
1. hunting English aristocrats is a source of bad karma, which is acquired by killing even the most useless of men. The karma from chickens is not all that serious.
2. to hunt aristocrats you have to travel to Europe (although some believe that the best place is a transatlantic cruise ship). You can hunt chickens anywhere you like.
3. while hunting English aristocrats, foxes don’t undergo any physical changes. But when we hunt chickens something happens that bears a distant similarity to a werewolf’s transformation - we come to resemble our wild relatives for a while.
I haven’t hunted English aristocrats for many decades, and I don’t regret it in the least. But to this day I’m still enthusiastic about chicken-hunting.
It’s hard to explain to an outsider what chicken-hunting really is. When you cast off your clothes and your shoes and pound furiously against the ground with three paws, clutching the chicken against your breast with the fourth, its little heart beats in unison with yours, and the speed-blurred course of your zigzag run flows freely through your empty mind. At that moment you see clearly that you, and the chicken, and even the pursuers clamouring behind you are really parts of a single incomprehensible whole that dons masks and plays hide-and-seek with itself . . . You want to believe that even the chicken realizes the same thing. And if it doesn’t, then in some life to come it very definitely will!
These are the basic principles of chicken-hunting:
1. you should approach the chicken coop in the guise of a extravagantly clad socialite - wearing an evening dress and high stiletto heels. Your clothes should restrict your movements as much as possible and provoke associations with glamorous fashion magazines.
2. you must attract the attention of the owners of the chicken coop - they have to see their elegant visitor steal a chicken.
3. you must not run away from your furious pursuers too fast, but not too slowly either - the most important aspect of the hunt is maintaining their confidence that they can overtake the thief.
4. when the pursuers have no strength left to continue the pursuit (and also in those cases when they suffer shock from seeing the transformation take place), you should erase their memory of what has happened with a special twitch of your tail and let the chicken go free.
I introduced the last addendum myself. Only don’t ask me what the chicken will do with this freedom. You can’t just wring its neck, can you? Of course, it sometimes happens that the chicken passes on during the chase. But would it be any better for its evolution to end this life in suburban soup?
Some of us extend the same logic to the English aristocrats, but I don’t agree with that - theoretically speaking, any English aristocrat could become a Buddha in this life, and you can’t deprive him of that chance just for the sake of idle amusement.
Ninety-nine per cent of aristocrat-hunting is a tedious social exercise that differs little from a formal tea party. But sometimes the most hard-bitten of my sisters, those with whom I want absolutely nothing to do, gather together in a pack and arrange battues, in the course of which many English aristocrats depart this life at once. In these cases events become quite picturesque, and the concomitant hallucination can be experienced by many thousands of people at the same time - you can get some idea of what I mean from the story of the so-called Battle of Waterloo. But the most shocking details remain hidden from the public.
I realize how hard it must be to believe in the possibility of such appalling mass deceptions, but the important point here is that when one and the same hallucination is induced simultaneously by several foxes, its power increases proportionately to their number cubed. That is, one and the same suggestion, implanted simultaneously by three foxes, will be almost thirty times as powerful as an illusion created by one of them on her own. This is achieved with the use of secret methods and practices - first the foxes study together how to visualize an object that they have just seen, then an object that they haven’t seen, and then they make others perceive objects that don’t exist, and so on. A complex technique, and the training for it lasts several centuries. But if ten or twelve foxes who have mastered it get together . . . Well, you can see what they’re capable of.
Some might ask why, in that case, the foxes are not yet the rulers of this world. There are two reasons:
1. foxes are not so stupid as to take on that heavy burden.
2. foxes are very egotistical and incapable of reaching long-term agreements with each other about anything, except for the collective hunting of English aristocrats.
These days people possess many new tracking and monitoring devices, and so foxes avoid interfering in human history and solve the problem in a simpler way. In the north of England there are several privately owned castles where aristocrats are bred from the finest stock and raised specially for hunting by foxes - the output isn’t all that large, but the quality is excellent. There are similar nurseries in Argentina and Paraguay, but the conditions there are appalling, and the English aristocrats, who are bred en masse using artificial insemination (so far attempts at cloning have been a failure) are only good for helicopter safaris: they talk like gauchos, drink tequila by the bucketful, require more than three attempts to draw their family tree, and as their last wish just before they die they ask to hear the song ‘Un Hombre’, dedicated to Che Guevara. Evidently, even in their final moments they are mimicking the portfolio investors whom they aspired to become.
There is another school of hunting, in which an English aristocrat is individually selected, and the fox herds him along his final road for several years - she becomes his mistress or wife and is there beside him right down to the moment of truth, which in this case is rather horrific. One day, during a thunder-storm or at some other dramatic moment, the fox reveals the whole truth to him and exposes her tail - not in order to implant a suggestion of one more dose of family happiness, but to strike him dead . . . This is the most complicated form of hunting, and it requires a virtuosic mastery of social manners, in which there is no one who can compare with my sister E Hu-Li, who has lived in England for many centuries and attained genuine perfection in this sport.
The greatest advantage of hunting chickens consists in the supraphysical transformation that we undergo. The chicken is required as a living catalyst who helps us to achieve it - in thousands of years of civilized life foxes have almost lost this ability and, like Dante, we require a guide to lead us into the lower worlds. The transformation does not always take place, and it doesn’t last long in any case, but the sensations it induces are so powerful that you are energized by the memories for many days afterwards.
Something similar happens to foxes when we are badly frightened, but that process is uncontrollable, whereas the art of chicken-hunting lies precisely in controlling our fear. You have to allow the pursuers to get close enough to trigger the mechanisms of internal alchemy which for a few seconds will turn you into a predatory beast, free from good and evil. Naturally, to avoid being freed from good and evil permanently, you have to maintain a safe distance. Basically, it’s pretty much like surfing, only the price paid for losing your balance is very much more serious. But the positive emotions are far stronger too - nothing is so refreshing for the soul as risk and pursuit.
It sometimes happens that dogs trail after me, but they immediately give up once they realize who I am. Dogs are just as easily to hypnotize as people. And in addition, they have a special system for spreading information, something like the Internet, only based on smells, so that news travels fast in their circles. After one courageous Rottweiler, who tried to play with me was raped by two Caucasian brothers (I mean sheepdogs), the dogs in the Bitsevsky forest began avoiding me. They’re intelligent beasts, capable of tracing the causal link between a certain Rottweiler growling as he attacks a beautiful red-haired sportswoman and all the male dogs, who are two heads taller than the said Rottweiler, suddenly taking him for a wide-eyed, lovesick bitch in full heat.
My decision to take Alexander hunting had nothing to do with any desire to boast. A fox’s transformation during a chicken hunt doesn’t go as far as what happens to a wolf, so there was nothing to boast about. But I thought that if I were to undergo the supraphysical shift while Alexander was watching, it would be the best way of saying to him, ‘you and I are of the same blood’. Perhaps it would extinguish the remnants of mistrust between us and bring us closer - that was what I was vaguely counting on.
I’d picked out the place for the hunt a lot earlier. One of the tracks that wound through the Bitsevsky forest emerged from the trees at a wooden house in which a forester lived (I’m not sure that’s the correct term, but the man’s job definitely had something to do with the park). Beside the house there was a chicken coop - a very rare thing in modern Moscow. I’d spotted it when I was riding my bike through the forest, and now I decided to make use of my discovery. But first I had to check everything one more time and determine my lines of retreat. Having devoted an entire day to reconnaissance on my bike, I established the following:
1. there were chickens in the chicken coop, and also people in the house; and so the two essential ingredients for the hunt were present.
2. I should bolt along the road that led into the forest.
3. I needed to escape from pursuit before the track emerged from the forest on the other side - there were always a lot of people strolling along the edge of the trees, mostly young mothers with prams.
In addition, I discovered how to drive a car almost right up to the chicken coop - although the forester’s house looked as if it was lost in the forest, the city began only three hundred metres away: the forest was cut short by a line of six-storey concrete buildings. I noted down the address of the block closest to the chicken coop. Now everything was ready for the hunt.
My bicycle reconnaissance trip also produced another result. On my way home I rode along a track I didn’t know and discovered a wonderful place where I’d never been before. It was a wide waste lot, actually more like a field, sloping down on one side to a small river and surrounded by the forest. The field was criss-crossed by narrow tracks, and on the slope leading down to the river there was a bike ramp for jumping - a steep embankment of earth worn smooth by numerous tyres. I didn’t dare jump, all I did was ride up it slowly, imagining how it would feel to pick up speed and go soaring into the air. But I wasn’t sure that I would be able to land.
Not far from the ramp I discovered a strange sculptural composition. A number of grey logs of various lengths had been set into the ground. Their tops had been chiselled into images of the faces of warriors. The warrior-logs stood tight against each other, and coarse, solid benches had been laid out around them. Standing at the outer perimeter, orientated towards the four points of the compass, were four simple gateways made of one log set across the tops of two others, as grey, monolithic and cracked as all the other elements. The whole thing was reminiscent of a wooden Stonehenge that had already suffered damage in its battle with eternity: the logs had been mutilated by camp-fires lit on them by the local kids. But despite the black scorch marks and a host of empty beer bottles, the site had beauty and even some vague kind of grandeur.
I sat down on one of the logs, fixed my gaze on the red disc of the sun (in Moscow you only get sunsets like that in May) and withdrew into thoughts of the past. I remembered a man I had met more than a thousand years earlier - he was called the Yellow Master, after the name of the Yellow Mountain on which his monastery stood. I only spent one night in conversation with him, but it was a conversation that I shall never forget - I only had to close my eyes and I could see the Yellow Master’s face as clearly as if he were there beside me. And yet I had encountered so many people from day to day over so many years - and they hadn’t left the slightest trace in my memory . . . My sister E knew the Yellow Master too, I thought. I wonder if she remembers him? I’ll have to ask her.
Just at that moment my mobile phone rang.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Hello, Red.’
I couldn’t believe my ears.
‘Sister E? How wonderful! I was just thinking about you . . .’