LONELINESS AND LONGING
From the shadowed side of Kilmanagh rose a call less loud and defiant than his own. Redpad swung round, ears cocked, pad raised, but the still cold air of mid-January was silent but for the sheep-dog's bark. He whimpered a little and then plunged into the heather. The hillside was very dark, but Redpad's nose was keen and told him plainly who had passed that way. Where the main peak of Kilmanagh meets the more gradual slopes which rise up to meet it from the plain, is a little ravine, and here the night air bore a faint unmistakable taint to his nostrils—fox. Among the shadows ahead, his eyes, catlike, accustomed to see in the gloom, detected something which appeared more solid than a shadow. He approached it cautiously, while a low growl arose in his throat. A pair of ears twitched and then slid into the bushes. Redpad put his nose down and hunted out the trail as carefully as ever he had done that of hare or rabbit. By and by he came to a clearing. The moon had just risen above the sloping shoulders of Kilmanagh, and to fox eyes the hill was light. Here his quest ended, for not six yards from him sat the Belovèd. Her coat was as red as that of a winter squirrel, her brush was as thick as a pine sapling, and she was as desirable as a sunny evening in May. Therefore because she satisfied Redpad's longing he called her the Belovèd on the spot, and indeed he never knew her by any other name. He came forward cautiously, for he doubted what his reception might be, leaping this way and that and dropping on his forepads like a cub inviting a game. But the Belovèd had also been very solitary. She too had yelped the story of her loneliness to the moon. She trotted forward and touched Redpad caressingly, and then playfully rolled him over with her muzzle. They romped together for a few minutes, and either gave and received sundry love nips, and then they trotted down the hill in company.
The sheep-dog was silent, but a snipe rushed up crying 'kek-a-kek.' Rabbits were playing among the furze, and there Redpad and his Belovèd hunted together until the moon began to sink, and some wet clouds from the west rose over her face, bringing warm rain.
It still wanted some two hours till dawn when Redpad and his love came back up the hill, full-fed and contented. The Belovèd trotted in front, and her mate followed some little way behind. Suddenly the narrow goat-path took a sharp turn, and they came full upon an enormous fox. He stood half an inch higher at the shoulder than Redpad, and his coat was as grey as a badger's. He bared his teeth a little at the sight of Redpad, but most of his attention was concentrated upon the Belovèd. He crept forward with his long neck stretched out and touched her red shoulder. Redpad bared his double row of ivory fangs and the hair along his spine rose. In another moment he would have flown at his rival's throat, had not the Belovèd, as is the custom of the fox-kind, taken the quarrel upon herself. She flew at the Grey One with a fierce growl, and made her teeth meet in his flank. He would have fought with Redpad while he had a pad left to stand upon, but by the law of the Woods a fox may not attack a vixen in the love season. He felt the Belovèd's strong jaws close like a trap behind his ears, and fled. The vixen trotted back slowly to her lair, glancing back now and then over her shoulder and growling softly at the recollection of her recent skirmish and many other things. And Redpad, her accepted suitor, followed.
The afternoon was dull and raw. The frost had gone, and the fields in the plain were studded with pools of flood water, for much rain had fallen.
Redpad in his lair was awakened by a frightened woodcock which dropped down just in front of him. He sat up suspiciously with cocked ears, for it is not the way of woodcock after a clear night to shift their quarters undisturbed. There was a faint halloa at the top of the hill: 'Try-Tra-i-y.' Redpad slipped silently from the warm lair, and the Belovèd followed him, for they both knew the meaning of that sound. Suddenly there was a joyous 'yow-yow-yow.' 'Hike! hike!' came the shout again; and Redpad trotted down the hill, for although the heather hemmed him in, he knew well enough what was forward on the summit.
There is a low stone wall at the foot of Kilmanagh which separates a thick gorse brake from the fields, and Redpad squatted down behind it to watch. The hounds were gradually working down the hill. There was a man on a horse standing at a corner of the field, and all at once he waved his cap above his head. The Grey One was slinking down the fence. He had crossed the first field when a couple of hounds gave tongue close by. His heart failed him—he swung round to the covert again, leaped over Redpad with a snarl, and galloped back up the hill. The hounds broke into the field on his line, wheeled like a flock of plover, and came straight to where Redpad lay. It was time to be stirring—a strange covert is no refuge to a hunted fox. Redpad cantered gracefully a little further up the fence, and just as he leaped upon the wall in full view of the watcher in the field, some erratic puff of wind told him that his Belovèd had just passed that way up the hill to safety. He wavered for a moment, then the pack spoke again and he leaped. But he had not gone a hundred yards before the hounds gave tongue behind him, and a distant voice proclaimed: 'Gone away—awa-a-y—awa-a-y!'
From the very start Redpad knew where he was going, and set his mask towards Knockdane on the hill ten miles away. At first the fields he crossed were small, and cropped as bare as a billiard-table by starveling goats and sheep, while between them rose walls of loosely piled stone, five feet high and so broad that a horse could walk along the top. More than one horseman turned home that day with a red bandage round his horse's fetlock, for Kilmanagh stones are sharp.