There have been such heavy dewfalls these last mornings, I could scoop a glass to drink. It’s a phrase I hear around this time every year. But this autumn the woods and fields are strangely quiet. There is no swish and crack of beaters’ flags, no trill, no whoops or hollers. No encouragement of dogs, with a “git in, git on” through the low, thorny coverts of brambles, to run the pheasants to a flushing point, where they take to the air above the guns. The estate we live on is not having a shoot this year, or next, and the gamekeeper has been let go, leaving his tied cottage behind.
After a century of the shoot, there is a palpable holding of breath across the landscape. Not a relaxing, yet, but the days are at least not bookended by the throaty crowing of thousands upon thousands of released pheasants, reverberating off the hills. The boom of military guns on Salisbury Plain 20 miles away is not preceded by a chorus of birds “cocking up” as the soundwaves reach them seconds before us.
We trespass a shortcut between footpaths, less tentatively than before. Along the track, a foxy whiff brings me up short. Its bass, musky notes are highlighted by something else – a metallic, cold tang. I catch sight of fur: a fox, lying under the hedge. A pelage of autumn, fire and hot coals. The bright brush of its tail still smoking with a comet’s afterburn. A young fox’s light has been put out – swiftly dispatched with a sweep of a lamp, a glitter of ruby eyeshine and a single shot. The old response of predator control, even when there are no pheasants to protect.
There is blood on the track, and a wilding apple. Scavenged, then dropped like a red ball, it lies beside the hedge the fox fell into. An innocent, almost-last meal.
Yet how I feel about these animals (and ergo, country life) is both hidden and revealed in the codified, rural language I dance around. One must have respect, but not sentiment for “Charlie” fox, for he is considered vermin to many here. Not wanting to expose myself, I travel fox-wise, obliquely through the working landscape.
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