Sjon - The Blue Fox

Yes, all this was in his mess-bag.

The sun warms the man’s white body, and the snow, melting with a diffident creaking, passes for birdsong.

At noon the peaks were still bright and there were patches of blue in the sky. The man recalled the untold glorious hours he had spent in the mountains since he was a lad. Nothing could equal the beauty of those days — except the new chandelier in the church at Dalbotn.

No! The man flings himself flat on the ground: what did he glimpse there? Was it a boulder?

He grabbed the spyglass but could see nothing. Mist on the lens. He wiped it off with his sleeve. What? Could it be what he thought it was? It vanished, no, there it came back into view:

A fox’s head! Yes, the merest shadow of a head. It was the blue. Of course, she must have been on watch there for some time. He closed the spyglass.

The vixen gave a bloodcurdling screech.

The land thereabouts is featureless and slopes to the east, with low tussocks and shallow gullies. There was no way for the man to intercept the vixen without being seen. So he lay still where he had thrown himself when he spotted her. The vixen sprang on to a rock and began to howl. There she sat, pointing her muzzle at the sky every time she uttered a sound.

And so the vixen tried to provoke the man to move. She had probably lost him when he flung himself down.

The man lay flat on his stomach. He had managed to twist himself to face north, with his rifle before him, but didn’t dare move because there was no rise in the ground between him and the vixen, nothing to hide him from her view. Moreover, his weapon was not loaded. He couldn’t prime it without alerting the little fox.

He had to think fast if he weren’t to lose the vixen like the day before — that would be unthinkable.

What was he to do?

The vixen spun round on the rock and poised, ready to vanish. The man rolled over on to his back, waggling arms and legs in the air.

Then he did an about-turn and got on all fours, raising his right leg like a dog pissing on a tussock.

He bleated loudly.

With antics like these the man managed to delay the vixen’s departure. He crept into hiding and took thought while she waited for more wonders to appear.

The man loaded his rifle, ramming down half a measure of powder, which would be needed if he were to hit the vixen with his first shot. Putting his hand in his pocket, he fumbled for the tatty little hymnbook he kept there, tore out a page, crumpled it between his fingers and stuffed it into the barrel. Now it wouldn’t whine even if he aimed the weapon straight into the stiff breeze.

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.