Foxfire, Wolfskin Read online

  I was last seen on the black shore, on the sand by the glittering loch. I tore off my clothes and abandoned my shoes. A shimmer of air, a flash of silver, and I was the one that got away.

  I came to myself again in the chill of the gravel beds; I remembered who I was. A cold fish, for sure. As I swam for the surface, the scales fell away from my eyes. So I breached the still and holy waters; I beached myself in the blackness of the bog. I raised my eyes to their storm-strewn heaven, my fists to the clouds which covered the face of their sour and skulking god. If it was God they wanted, it was God they would have. An eye for an eye, a gut for a gut. I took a fish knife to the house of the fish-wife. When I stepped over her threshold, all the candles in the house blew out.

  *

  It was the cat who found me first. I stood naked on his doorstep, and shivering, pondweed streaming from my hair. Neither fish I was then nor fowl, but the cat screeched anyway; the dogs began to bark and soon he was there at the door. I opened my hand and offered him the gift I’d brought; he grew a little green around the gills. But I had treated it gently, the egg that had been growing in her soft, full belly. I’d laid it out on her best gutting apron, tied it carefully in a bow fashioned from a braid of her long red hair.

  He wasn’t a man to weep – not that one – but I can tell you he wept then. Tears black as a bog’s blood, oil-streaks slickening his stubbled cheek. I lifted a cold hand to his hot face; I winked a glassy eye.

  Never mind, I said; there are plenty of fish in the sea. We can have this one with chips, I said. For tea.

  FOX FIRE

  I SAW THE FOX first; she was mine from the beginning. A flash of red, like lifeblood, on the white-wintered fringe of the wood. So vivid she was, so tangible. The epitome of all that was wild and free. My heart sprang suddenly to life again and almost burst; I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful. So beautiful, so alive, that I cried out before I could stop myself. The fox stopped, turned, looked directly at me. Our eyes locked, the warmth of her amber melting my cold blue ice, and in that moment I was lost.

  I began to go to the wood each day, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. Most days she would come. She knew I was there, and it didn’t seem to worry her. She allowed me to watch her, and sometimes she let me follow for a while, looking back every now and then as if to make sure that I was still with her. Sometimes she would lead me out of the wood, all the way through to the low hills and wide plains beyond. I would rest there awhile to catch my breath, and watch her run and play and roll in the snow. On those days I would return home content but weary; it had been a long time since I’d pushed my body so far. I’d forgotten what breathlessness felt like, or the bite of winter wind whipping up a storm in my hair. I’d forgotten what it was to be alive. And what I remembered, I didn’t much care for at all.

  I began to bring her food. I broke it into fragments which I would throw onto the ground, taking one step back, and then another, so that she would learn to come to me. But she always stopped short. She’d make a sudden sharp dart to snatch up the morsel I’d just put down – and then she would scuttle away, looking over her shoulder as if to tease, pink tongue dangling out of a wide-mouthed, sharp-toothed grin. She’d always manage somehow to make me smile, and that wasn’t so easy to do in those days. After my last miscarriage – the third – the laughter had bled right out of me along with the dead foetus. With every child lost over the years, I’d lost more of myself. In the months leading up to that winter in our dark, northern wood, I didn’t know who I was any more. I didn’t even know why I should care.

  One day, I caught the fox napping on top of a dry fallen trunk in the middle of the woods. I crept up quietly to her and reached out my hand. Her bright golden eyes opened. Just for a few seconds she let me touch the soft fur on the top of her head, and then she leapt up and ran away. I put my hand to my nose, and breathed in the faintest rank, wild smell of her. Spirit of fox, sucked up inside me; seeping through the walls of my lungs, inhabiting my flesh and inspiriting my bones.

  I didn’t just love the fox, you see – I wanted to be her. Longed for it, as I had never longed for anything in my life. To be sleek and fast; to be beautiful and fierce, feral and unconstrained. To run wherever I wanted to run, to make my dark home in the belly of the fecund earth, to hunt at dawn in the wildness of a moonlit wood. So very long since I had wanted anything, other than oblivion. I wasn’t naive, though: I knew it was a hard life. The winters were cold, and food was scarce. There was always the threat of a farmer’s gun, the fear of a hunting dog, or an iron trap to break and tear. But some chances must be taken, if you want to live fully. She lived fully, my fox, and I envied her with all my heart. I wanted to dance with her, sister or lover, across the snow-clad vastness of this land. Together, we’d create the Northern Lights. For that is what foxes do – racing over the fells, whipping up the snow with their tails, the friction of it sending up sparks into the midnight sky. This is what makes the aurora’s glow. Revontulet, we call it: foxfire.

  Each day, I stayed a little longer in the woods; I returned with flushed cheeks and bright eyes, for my senses were slowly beginning to come alive again. My husband began to wonder what I was doing. And why wouldn’t he? For months I’d spent my days sitting alone and still, enshrouded in the dark mustiness of the small, neat bedroom which was supposed to have belonged to our child. ‘Oh,’ I said, with a swift shake of my head. ‘It’s nothing. I just want to be outside, that’s all. I like the fresh, crisp air. It makes me feel good.’

  But he must have grown suspicious, for one morning he crept out after me, and followed me into the wood. So silently did he tread that I didn’t know he was there till the fox came bounding out of the trees to greet me – and then froze, her glowing eyes firmly fixed on something behind me. She didn’t even acknowledge me; she just turned tail and ran. I knew at once that it was him. I lifted my nose and sniffed, caught the faint scent of the pine resin which always permeated his clothes. A twig cracked underfoot as he faded slowly into the trees and made his way back to the house. Did he imagine I wouldn’t see his tracks? Did he really think so little of me? Or had he simply, by then, ceased to care?

  We did not speak that day of what had happened, but the next morning he arose before I did. He was out of the door and into the wood before I had managed even to fumble my way down the stairs. It was my turn then to follow, torn between sorrow and fury. She was my fox – mine, and his uncovering of my secret, his usurping of my place, felt like a violation.

  Somehow I knew she would come for him. Somehow I knew it, and she came. She was just that kind of fox. She slunk silently through the woods, belly low and nose to the ground, as if tracking the scent of newly found prey. And then she saw him, and I saw him see her. I heard him catch his breath; I heard a faint, barking laugh. Then it was no longer a fox standing there before him in the woods, but a woman. A beautiful woman with red-gold hair, eyes amber as the fossilised heart of a tree.

  I saw my husband fall. And I fled.

  I followed him when he slipped out again the next morning; of course I followed him. I followed him as he confidently made his way through a thicket, and on into an older, wilder part of the wood which I had never discovered. And, peering through the cracked windows of a well-hidden, ramshackle cabin in a secret tree-dark glade, I saw what I should never have had to see. My husband, in a dusty, candlelit room with a fire burning brightly in its hearth. A flash of red hair falling down the length of her back; two bodies stretched out on a mattress covered with furs. And, hanging over the edge of the bed, a fox tail.

  My heart clattered loudly in my chest as dread overtook me. Huldra. She was a huldra! Couldn’t he see it? Didn’t he care? I had heard the stories; we had all heard them as children – stories told to make a child think twice before wandering alone into the wildwood. When you’re face to face with a huldra, they said, she presents herself as a woman who is beautiful beyond belief. So beautiful that no man can resist her. But if you see her from b
ehind, it is clear that she is something else entirely. Her back is carved out, and her body cavity is empty – and what’s more, she has the full, red tail of a fox. The huldra, they told us, was the ultimate seductress: she would gladly offer herself to any man who stumbled into her woods. But the place where her heart should have been was hollow. She wouldn’t think twice about killing those men who were unable to satisfy her, or those of whom she had grown bored. What would this huldra do to my husband when she was finished with him? And without him, faithless creature though it seemed he was, what would I then become?

  I backed away from the window; I closed my eyes and breathed slow and deep to quiet my pounding heart. Then I ran away home, and made my plan.

  *

  He came home in the late afternoon, elated and trying (failing) to hide it. He smelled (did he know it?) of fox. It was a long time since I had seen his eyes shine so. I mixed a strong sleeping draught into his bedtime drink, and, after a sleepless night gauging the depth of his snores, I crept out of the house at first light and retraced the path to the cabin.

  She was there, waiting for him, stretched out under the furs, a log fire blazing again in the rusty old grate. She didn’t move when I burst through the door; she simply raised an elegantly slanted red-gold eyebrow and smiled. She didn’t seem especially surprised to see me. The room smelled rank, and wild. I looked into her beautiful golden eyes and tears welled up in my own. I swallowed hard and clenched my fists, not so much then mourning my marriage as mourning the fox I had loved – the fox I had thought of as my only friend.

  At last, I found my voice. ‘So you’re a huldra,’ I said to her, the words catching in a throat that was hoarse with fear and sorrow. ‘A huldra! I’ve heard all the stories about things like you. You’re not a woman at all – you’re not even a fox. Only some devilish creature who wishes to do harm. Will you kill my husband when you’re done with him, when he no longer satisfies you? Will you kill me too, for discovering your secret?’ And, sobbing, I pulled out the sharp silver knife I had hidden in the deep pockets of my grey woollen coat.

  But she only smiled again, revealing the sharp white teeth which protruded from her blood-red gums. ‘You shouldn’t believe all the fairy stories you’re told,’ she said. ‘And not all of us are what we seem. Perhaps not even you.’ Then she stood – red of hair, white of skin, long-limbed and heartbreakingly beautiful. She turned around and began to walk over to the farthest dark corner of the room. And as she did so, I gasped – for her naked back above the foxtail was sleek, and entirely whole.

  What could I do but let my knife clatter to the floor, and follow? The fox-woman came to a halt in front of a tall wooden wardrobe with a mirror which stretched the full length of its door. She took a candlestick from a nearby table, lit the candle, and held it up between us. ‘Stand with your back to the mirror,’ she said, and I did. ‘Now turn your head, and look, and we will see which one of us is empty.’

  I stretched my neck and looked over my own shoulder into the mirror. I looked, and I saw, and then I screamed. For in the place where my back should be was a huge gaping hole, hollow as a long-rotted tree trunk.

  I sat trembling by her fire and sipped at the broth she gave me; I felt as if I were drinking down the spirit of the forest itself. It tasted of wood sorrel and wild mushrooms; it was laced with lichen and shoots of spruce. She did not speak another word to me, but she sat with me there at her hearth as the broth opened my throat, and I wept.

  I wept for the children who were lost to me, for the empty years I’d wasted and the strong, healthy body I’d shunned. For the desolate woman I’d become, with her hollow centre and closed-down heart, and the husband whose clumsy but loving efforts at comfort I’d always turned aside. I wept for both of us, each locked into our own fatal sorrow, trapped inside our own lonely skins. It had taken a fox to show us what we needed. To show us what we were missing, and how very much we had lost.

  When eventually I lifted my hands from my sodden face, she was gone. And on the simple wooden stool across from me where she had sat, was a fox tail.

  I lifted it in my hands are pressed it to my face; I inhaled the wild, rank smell of fox. I stroked the soft plush fur, let its vulpine spirit fill me to the brim. I wrapped the tail like a scarf around my neck, and I went home. To my husband, and the tattered remains of my life.

  She never came again to my husband. He mourned her, of course, for a while. But when I came fox-tailed to our bed and opened my arms to him, when I pulled his hair and bit his neck with sharpening white teeth, when I tangled and tore the sheets with sharp-clawed pleasure – I was the one he began to seek out in the wild heart of the wood.

  I am learning to become full again; the forest is showing me how. I go there each day, and I roll among leaves on the damp, mossy floor. I burrow into root balls and talk to trees, and I am beginning to understand what they whisper to me in return.

  Yes, I go each day into the wildwood, and sometimes I catch a glimpse of red-gold fur through the trunks. Sometimes, waking in the dark of night, I hear a vixen screaming deep in the heart of the forest. I am glad that she is there, living her own wild life. I am glad that I knew her; I am glad for the hard lesson that she taught me. But I will not follow her again. Now, I have my own wild-pawed path, and the power of the wood is remaking me. For when last I crept out to the cabin in the clearing and examined myself again in its mirror of truth, the hole at the heart of me was almost closed.

  MEETING

  BABA YAGA

  I SAW HER AD in Resurgence magazine the day I came back from my first time at the Glastonbury Festival. I was trying to cope with a magic mushroom hangover, and still having flashbacks. It hadn’t been a bad trip, but the talking mailboxes were a bit weird. ‘Journey to the Bone House’, the ad said. ‘Shapeshifting a speciality.’ I’d recently done a weekend course in shamanic journeying, but it hadn’t felt like the real thing. One of the teachers came from Peru, or somewhere weird like that, and I couldn’t understand a word he said. I wanted to connect properly with my power animal, and this looked just the job.

  It was a long way to go, but frankly I needed a holiday. I was feeling the call to adventure, I suppose you could say. Things at work were dragging me down, and I really needed to spend some more time on my own self-development. I’d been trying to find myself for two years now, and if the Russian woods were the next step on the Heroine’s Journey of my life, then the Russian woods it would be. I felt as if I’d done all the right things, so far – moved down to Totnes, read everything from Louise Hay to Deepak Chopra, subscribed to Kindred Spirit. I’d dabbled in Buddhism and Wicca; done a course on past-life regression – the lot. But somehow it just wasn’t happening for me. The Secret didn’t give up its secret. The universe just wasn’t aligning, you know?

  So: a week in the taiga it was. It’d probably be a bit fresh there in early October, but it’d make a nice change from my usual yearly yoga retreats on Skyros. I packed my angel cards; I packed my portable altar. I packed my newly minted copy of The Power of Now. And away I went.

  It was the human skulls on top of the fenceposts that gave the place away. Though I have to say, it wasn’t quite what I’d been expecting. Every one of them had a candle inside, eye sockets all lit up, grinning away in the late afternoon gloom like some half-crazed band of jack-o’-lanterns. Not exactly your average turnip. So a bit of internal reprocessing was required. If she was going to turn out to be some weird Russian goth, then I could go with that … maybe. Because then I saw that the fenceposts were actually bones. And the gate looked like it was made out of a ribcage. It had a skeleton’s hand for a latch and a lock made of clacking teeth. Oh, come on! I thought to myself. What was this – some kind of oddball, super-boreal Hallowe’en-themed Disneyland? But then it got worse: I saw the house. If you could call it that. More like a madwoman’s hut. It seemed like a regular sort of log cabin until you looked down at the ground – and then you saw it was perched on a pair of giant chicken feet! I ki
d you not – chicken feet!

  ‘What the f—’ I began, but my companions just sniggered. We’d all met up at the airport to share a ride, because apparently this place was sort of ‘out of the way’. Out of the way? It had taken us three hours through the forest in a clapped-out old minibus with a driver who looked like Igor out of one of those old Dracula movies, and any minute now I was expecting the bats to come swooping out of the trees. I was knackered, and this was frankly freaking me out. It was all right for them; they’d already told me they’d been here before – well, four of them had, anyway. Except for me, and an Irishwoman called Deirdre. And Deirdre was turning out to be one of those really irritating people who just take everything in their stride. And who stand about grinning inanely while Rome’s burning and the barbarians are gathering at the gates, you know? Saying, ‘Ah sure, we’ll work it out.’

  So anyway. We all climb out of the minibus, stagger a bit as we try to get our arms and legs moving again in the cold, rub our eyes – and then all of a sudden, all these blood-curdling screeches start coming from the house. No, I’m not making all this up! It sounded like a klaxon going off; it sounded like the end of the world. I almost wet myself; I’d been dying for a pee for the past hour, but old Igor wasn’t exactly the kind of bloke you asked. I looked at the house again, and it was shaking. Moving from side to side on its stupid bony chicken legs, shimmying in time with its own shrieks. And then I realised something else strange about it: I couldn’t see any doors or windows; couldn’t see any way we could possibly get in. That’s assuming we’d ever want to. And I can tell you, it wasn’t anything I was counting on wanting right now. If all this seriously screwy malarkey carried on for much longer, I was getting back in that minibus and scuttling off down the road with Igor. I’d cosy up with my power animal some other time, thank you very much. Preferably in Totnes.