The Blue Fox (2 page)

He worked quickly, moistening the rifle sight with his spittle and dabbing on a speck of lichen. It froze to the metal, he adjusted it and aimed the rifle experimentally; he would be able to make out the lichen, however dark it got.

The man straightened up and aimed the gun, leaning forward on his left leg, focusing all his attention on the rock. No, the vixen was nowhere to be seen.

He waited for a long time before letting the weapon drop. The vixen wouldn’t give him the slip now. Snow covered the land up to the roots of the glacier, not a bare patch of earth to be seen; the vixen would write the tale of her travels on the blank sheet as soon as she embarked on them.

Grasping the weapon in both hands, he set off.

All day long the vixen ran up hill and down dale, the man following hard on her heels.

She was his letter of commission, setting him a task to perform in the material world.

When the man emerged from under the giant boulder that blocks off Asheimar, he came within an inch of losing the vixen.

He just managed to spot her as she turned three circles and flopped against a stone, skulking down and laying her tail over her muzzle.

The man did the same.

The rim of daylight was fading.

In the halls of heaven it was now dark enough for the Aurora Borealis sisters to begin their lively dance of the veils. With an enchanting play of colours they flitted light and quick about the great stage of the heavens, in fluttering golden dresses, their tumbling pearl necklaces scattering here and there in their wild caperings. This spectacle is at its brightest shortly after sunset.

Then the curtain falls; night takes over.

Sleep now became so importunate that the man had never known such overpowering odds. It flashed into his mind that he was in fact dying. He felt weak, his head ached and his breathing was laboured. There was a dull ringing in his ears, yet he could still hear a thudding, a hammering. It was his heart.

What might that bode?

At that very moment the vixen uttered three long-drawn-out warning cries. This was to the east of the man, borne to him on the wind; they struck him like a gust.

He jerked. Darting his eyes to the left, he glimpsed there a blue shape – it seemed to him a devilish coal-black beast.

It vanished.

Dead silence. Not even a heartbeat.

Was he dead, then?

After a considerable time he spied a vixen in the same place as before. She seemed smaller, and all her movements bore witness to exceptional wariness, caution and cunning. Her behaviour was different from before – and she didn’t make a sound.

When this one had flaunted herself before the man for a good while, she vanished from view. He fought the yawns that forced their way up to his mouth. Then he became aware of a movement dead ahead; a fox-like form appeared in the night darkness before his eyes. She pirouetted on her hind legs, seemingly free of the earth, coiling like an eel in a river.

A fourth shrieked somewhere out in the night, invisible in the blackness: ‘Argh, argh!’

The man got a grip on himself. In this part of the country blue foxes were so rare that one alone would be newsworthy. The black one, the shy one, the dancer and the yelper; they were all the same fox. It could not be otherwise.

‘They’re all the same fox, all the same fox. They’re all the same fox, all the same fox. They’re all the same fox, all the same fox ...’

He repeated the words over and over like a man groping his way out of a nightmare, crying out in his mind. At last he rallied, and when the tears had run from his eyes the man saw that the fox was still in the same place.

And he himself had not moved.

It began to snow.

It snowed.

Blue foxes are so curiously like stones that it is a matter for wonder. When they lie beside them in winter there is no hope of telling them apart from the rocks themselves; indeed, they’re far trickier than white foxes, which always cast a shadow or look yellow against the snow.

A blue vixen lies tight against her stone, letting the snow drift over her on the windward side. She turns her rump to the weather, curls up and pokes her snout under her thigh, lowering her eyelids till there’s the merest hint of a pupil. And so she keeps an eye on the man who has not shifted since he took cover under an overhanging drift, here on the upper slopes of Asheimar, some eighteen hours ago. The snow has drifted and fallen over him until he resembles nothing so much as a hump of ruined wall.

The creature must take care not to forget that the man is a hunter.

The fox closes her grey eyes. When she opens them again the man has gone.

She raises her head.

Reverend Baldur Skuggason pulls the trigger.

The world opens its good eye a crack. A ptarmigan belches. The streams trickle under their glazing of ice, dreaming of spring when they’ll swell to a life-threatening force. Smoke curls up from mounds of snow here and there on the mountainsides – these are their farms.

Everything here is a uniform blue, apart from the glitter of the tops. It is winter in the Dale.

‘Hello, I’ve come to fetch the hemale horse, listen, I’m here to take the female porks, oh, er, no, er, you, no, hand over the heehaw forks ...’

In the yard at Brekka a horse stands beneath a man, and it is the man who is babbling so inanely to himself. He’s a big fellow, probably turned forty; there’s grey in the pink beard which hangs untrimmed over his mouth and tumbles from his chin like an ice-bound cataract – yet he is bundled up in clothes like a child all set to spend the day in a snowdrift.

His breeches are hitched right up to his crotch, his coat is far too big or far too small, depending on how you look at it, and his knitted hat is tied so tightly under his chops that he cannot have done it himself; on his hands he wears three pairs of mittens, making it almost impossible for him to hold the reins of the hairy nag on which he sits.

This is the mare Rosa. She champs her bit impatiently. It is her legs that have carried them here. When you look back you can see her hoofprints running from the parsonage at Dalbotn, down over the fields, along the river, across the marshes, up the slopes, to the place where she is now standing, waiting to be relieved of her burden.

Ah, now the man clambers down from her back.

And his true shape is revealed: he is extraordinarily low-kneed, big-bellied, broad-shouldered and abnormally long-necked, and his left arm is quite a bit shorter than his right. He stamps his feet, beats his arms about himself, shakes his head and snorts.

The mare flicks her ears.

‘Sea-hail porpoise?’

The man scrapes the snow from the farm door with his stubby arm:

‘Can it be?’

He knocks on the door with his good hand and feels the blood rushing to his fist. It’s cold. Perhaps he’ll be invited inside?

The shadow of a man’s head appears in the frost-patterned parlour window, and a moment later the inner door can be heard opening, then the front door is thrust out hard. It clears away the pile that has collected outside overnight, and the cold visitor, retreating before it, falls over backwards, or would do if the snow allowed. When he is done falling, he sees that the man he has come to find is standing in the doorway: Fridrik B. Fridjonsson, the herbalist, farmer at Brekka, or the man who owns Abba. The visitor’s own name is Halfdan Atlason, ‘the Reverend Baldur’s eejit’.

Now he gulps like a fish but says not a word, for before he can recite his piece, Herb-Fridrik invites him to step inside.

And to that the eejit has no other answer than to do as he is asked.

They enter the kitchen.

‘Take off your things.’

Fridrik squats, opens the belly of the tiled stove and puts in more kindling. It blazes merrily.

It’s warm here, a good place to be.

The eejit bites his thumbs and tugs off his mittens before beginning with trembling hands to struggle with the tight knot on his hat strings. He’s in difficulties, but his host frees him from his prison. When Fridrik pulls off his guest’s coat a bitter stench is released. Fridrik backs away, nostrils flaring.

‘Coffee ...’

It was always the same with the Dalbotn folk; they sweated coffee. The Reverend Baldur was too mean to give them anything to eat, pumping them instead from morning to night full of soot-black, stewed-to-pulp coffee grounds. Fridrik takes a firm hold of Halfdan’s hands; the tremor that shakes them is not a shiver of cold but a nervous disorder – from coffee consumption.

He releases the man’s paws and invites him to sit down. Taking a kettle from a peg, he fills it with melted snow and places it on the hotplate on top of the stove. He points to the kettle and says firmly:

‘Now, you keep an eye on the water; when the lid moves come and tell me. I’ll be in the parlour nailing down the coffin lid.’

The eejit nods and turns his eyes to the kettle. Herb-Fridrik brushes a hand over his shoulders as he leaves the kitchen. After a moment the sound of hammer blows comes from the next room.

The eejit stares at the kettle and stove in turn, but mostly at the stove. It is a widely famed wonder of technology that few have set eyes on. The metal pipe, which rises from the stove, runs up the wall into the parlour, and from there up to the sleeping loft, warming the house, before poking out through the turf-roof and releasing the smoke into the open air. But first and last it is the handpainted china tiles that enchant: brightly coloured flowers sprawl here and there about the body of the stove, nimbler than the eye can follow. Halfdan rocks in his seat as he traces one flower spray, which winds under this one and over that, all the way up to the kettle.

The kettle, yes, just so, he’s keeping an eye on it. The water spits as it jumps around between the bottom of the kettle and the glowing hotplate.

Fridrik the herbalist is the man who owns his Abba; that is, Hafdis Jonsdottir, Halfdan’s sweetheart. Fridrik and Abba live together, just the two of them, at Brekka – until she marries Halfdan, then she’ll come away with him. But where might she be today? He twists his elongated neck to peer over his right shoulder.

In the parlour Fridrik is hammering the last nail into the coffin lid. Halfdan calls in to him:

‘I-Hi’m here to fe-fetch the female corpse ...’

The bleak wording takes Fridrik aback. That’s Parson Baldur talking through his manservant. The parsonage servants parroted the priest’s mode of speech like a parcel of hens. No doubt one might have called it laughable, had it not been all of a piece, all so ugly and vile.

‘I know, Halfdan old chap, I know ...’

But he is even more startled by what the eejit says next:

‘Whe-here’s h-his A-Abba?’

The water boils and the kettle lid rattles – it sputters slightly at the rim.

‘B-boiling,’ sniffs Halfdan, and it is the first sound he has uttered since Herb-Fridrik told him that his sweetheart Abba was dead, that she was the female corpse the Reverend had sent him to fetch, and that today the coffin he saw there on the parlour table would be lowered into the ground in the churchyard at Dalbotn. The news so crushed Halfdan’s heart that he burst into a long, silent fit of weeping and the tears ran from his eyes and nose, while his ill-made body shook in the chair like a leaf quivering before an autumn gale, not knowing whether it will be torn from the bough that has fostered it all summer long or linger there – and wither; but neither fate is good.

While the man grieved for his sweetheart, Fridrik brought out the tea things: a fine hand-thrown English china pot, two bone-white porcelain cups and saucers, a silver-plated milk jug and sugar bowl, teaspoons and a strainer made of bamboo leaves. And finally a tea caddy made of planed, oiled oak, marked: ‘A. C. PERCH’S THEHANDEL.’

He takes the kettle from the hob and pours a little water into the teapot, letting it stand a while so the china warms through. Then he opens the tea caddy, measures four spoonfuls of leaves into the pot and pours boiling water over them. The heady fragrance of Darjeeling fills the kitchen, like the steam that rises from newly ploughed earth, and there is also a sweet hint, pregnant with sensuality – with memories of luxury – that only one of them has known: Fridrik B. Fridjonsson, the herbalist from Brekka in his European clothes; in long trousers and jacket, with a late Byronesque cravat round his neck.

Likewise the scent raises Halfdan’s spirits, causing him to forget his sorrow.

‘Wh-what’s that c-called?’

‘Tea.’

Fridrik pours the tea into the cups and slips the cosy over the English china pot. Halfdan takes his cup in both hands, raises it to his lips and sips the drink.

‘Tea?’

It’s strange that so good a drop should have such a small name. It should have been called
Illustreret Tidende,
that’s the grandest name the eejit knows:

‘I-is it Danish?’

‘No, it’s from the mountain Himalaya, which is so high that if you climbed our mountain thirteen times, you still wouldn’t have reached the top. Halfway up the slopes of the great mountain is the parish of Darjeeling. And when the birds in Darjeeling break into their dawn chorus, life quickens on the paths that link the teagardens to the villages: it’s the tea-pickers going to their work; they may be poorly dressed, yet some have silver rings in their noses.’