Little Foxes. Michael Morpurgo

his catapult so as to allow the smaller birds first pickings – the robins and the hedge-sparrows and the blackbirds. But he could do nothing for the barn owls, nor for the family of kingfishers. He tried. He purloined sardines from Aunty May’s larder but the kingfishers ignored them. He took some of Aunty May’s stew and put it out on a gravestone for the owls but they never came for it. He broke the ice on the canal each day so that the kingfishers could fish, but it froze over almost as he watched. He had to stand by and see them weaken as the winter wore on.

      And he had not forgotten his swan; he looked for her every day and searched the canal bank for her feathers. He threw bread out onto the canal to attract her back, but there was never any sign of her.

      Then one day – it was just after Christmas – the owls were no longer in their arched window in the high stone wall of the ruin and that same day he found a kingfisher lying stiff and dead by the canal. He could see it was one of the young ones for it still had a white tip to its beak and a mottled breast. The ground was too hard to bury it so he carried it reverently in his hands down to the canal, hammered a hole in the ice and slipped it into the water. Hecould not cry – he was too angry for that. As he watched it disappear under the ice he vowed he was not going to let the others die. He turned on his heel and ran back to the chapel. He picked up any loose stones he could find and made a great pile of them on the canal bank. All day he went to and fro, until he thought he had collected enough. Then he began to hurl them violently at the ice that first splintered and then began to crack and break up. By the time darkness began to fall he had opened up a twenty-foot strip of canal water for the kingfishers to dive into.

      He was back the next morning after bolting his breakfast. He had expected to find it iced over once again. But although the edges of the ice had encroached somewhat, the water was still open to the sky. He found this difficult to understand for the night had been as cold as ever. He did not have to wait long for the explanation. He had been there no more than a few minutes when he heard a strange slapping slithery sound, and into view came a swan, still brown in her youth, staggering ungainly across the ice before letting herself gently into the water. The neck was longer than he remembered and the grey had all but disappeared, but as she floated towards him now, the wings billowing like sails behind her, Billy had no doubt that this was indeed his swan come back to him.

      ‘So, it was you swimming around that kept the ice back,’ said Billy. ‘Grown a bit, haven’t you? Didn’t recognise you at first. How’s the wing then?’ And as if to reply, the swan rose from the water and beat the air about her before settling back into the water again. ‘Didn’t break the ice for you, you know. Did it for them kingfishers, so don’t you go frightening them off, will you now? They needto fish. Come to think of it, there can’t be much about for you. Is that what you’ve come back for? Not just to see me. I can still speak – been able to ever since that day, and I’ve still got your feather you know. I’ll get back home now and bring you some of Aunty May’s stale crumpets – she never eats them. Don’t know why she buys them. Don’t go away.’

      The swan stayed for a month or more after that and by the end of that time was taking Aunty May’s crumpets out of Billy’s hand. He talked to her constantly and confessed for the first time what troubled him most – that he belonged nowhere, loved no one and was loved by no one. Once or twice she clambered out of the canal and allowed him to smooth the feathers on her neck. It was just as he was saying goodbye to her one evening, running his hand down the neck and over her folded wing feathers that he saw a large ring of red plastic around her left leg. ‘Where’d you get that from?’ he asked. ‘You want to tell me, don’t you? Funny, isn’t it? I mean, you taught me to speak and you can’t even speak yourself.’

      Between them the boy and the swan kept open the pond on the canal for the kingfishers to feed, Billy breaking away the edges each morning to keep the ice back and the swan endlessly circling the water so that it was hardly ever still and could not freeze. No more kingfishers died and with Billy begging stale bread all over the estate no other bird in his Wilderness died of starvation that winter.

      Then one night in March the frost lifted and the warm spring rain fell in torrents. When Billy arrived early the next morning he found the canal turned to water again. The swan was not there waiting for him as usual. He called out for her and ran up and down the bank, throwing bread into the water in a desperate attempt to bring her back. But all the while he knew she had gone. He felt suddenly deserted and rejected.

      For some days he returned to wait for her, but she never came back. He found he could no longer be happy in his Wilderness without the swan. So he made up his mind to leave the Wilderness for ever, and he promised himself faithfully he would never return.

      He kept his promise for a month or more, but then both boredom and a new yearning tempted him back. It was a bright day in a spring still chilled by a fresh north wind when Billy clambered back under the wire into his Wilderness. Already the skeletal trees were filling out with a new growth of leaves and the creeper was green again on the ruins. Billy ran across the graveyard to the canal, suddenly convinced that the swan would be there waiting for him as he had dreamed so often she would be. But the canal was deserted except for a moorhen that scooted into the reeds on the far bank. Seized with terrible despair he called out over the canal, ‘Why don’t you come back to me? Why? I saved you, didn’t I? Didn’t I save your life? I thought you were my friend. Please come back. Please.’ But the whispering murmur of thousands of swarming starlings turned to a roar above his head and drowned his words.

      Billy made his way back to the chapel and lay down out of the wind watching the clouds of starlings whirling in the sky over his Wilderness. He lay back on a mound in the middle of the chapel under the leaning lime tree and closed his eyes in an attempt to calm the anguish inside him, but all the misery welled up and he could not hold it back. He cried then as he had never cried before. The only hope, the only joy in his life had gone. All that was left for him was the thin-lipped Aunty May and the inhospitable hubbub of his school.

      He must have cried himself to sleep for he was woken suddenly. He was lying on his side, his legs curled up so tight that his knees were touching his chin. At first he thought the sound might be the rustling of squirrels in the tree above him – he had seen them up there often enough before – but he had never heard squirrels yapping. Billy sat up. A blackbird piped at him from a blackthorn bush. Billy sat like a statue and waited. He allowed only his eyes to move and they scanned the trees above him, trained eyes now, keen and sharp. When it came again the sound was distant, yet it felt close, and it came not from the walls or the trees or the undergrowth around him, but from the ground beneath him, a curious squawking and squealing, almost bird-like, but no bird he knew could growl. He put an ear to the ground and listened. As he did so he noticed a strange musky smell in the grass. And from below the grass there was a dull yet distinct high-pitched yapping. Billy had heard enough and moved carefully off the mound, stepping slow and soft. He climbed over the stonework and settled down to watch, his heart beating in his ears.

      One came out first, his white snub muzzle sniffing the air, and he was butted out into the open by the one behind. And then two more emerged, almost together, until all four fox cubs stood like ridiculous infant sentinels, each one facing outwards, noses lifted, ears pricking and twitching. One of them was looking now at Billy but seemed not to see him. It was the largest of the cubs with a redder face than the others and more sharply defined black streaks running from the eyes to the muzzle. The eyes were grey and the nose that pointed at him earth brown. The fox cub sat down neatly and yawned, and Billy found himself yawning in sympathy, a long yawn that lifted the shroud of despondency from Billy’s shoulders and left him smiling and happy once again in his Wilderness.