Wessex Tales: "The Infant and the Hare" (Story 1) Read online

  Chapter 2

  Dawn was still hours away when Blonde-hair woke to the pinch of labor-pains. The river crossing had induced them. The men had helped her across, but, with cold, rushing water to the chest, she had felt her fetus shift. Now, lying down, she noticed a spot where the moon struck across from a chink in the ox-hide roof, and wondered when pains would strike next. By the time cramps woke her again, pinching and definite, the pale light of the moon had shifted three hand-spans across the roof. There could be no mistake. Still, let others sleep: she could wait until day. Shifting her weight, Blonde-hair’s burden felt unfamiliar, out of place. The child had shifted, too.

  First light, when it came, brought a sullen grey fog with not so much as a breeze to shift it, dyed faint yellow by an impotent sun. It was then, in the twilight twixt dark and day, when life is at its lowest ebb—the hour when death removes the tired, the sick, and the old—that Blonde-hair’s waters broke. A sharp contraction caught her between breaths. She cried out in pain. The others woke.

  Small-ears took charge, banishing the men to fetch water, which they did, taking two skins from the roof and knocking dew into them from grass and bracken that wet them to the knees. In time they delivered a skin-full of water to the women in the pit. Then they went off to fetch armfuls of bracken for Blonde-hair’s birthing bed: it would be soft beneath the new-born child; it would sop up water, blood, and after-birth; and in the end it would be dumped on the fire to warm the pit and make all clean.

  The fog was lifting a little when the men ate fiddleheads of fern to make themselves invisible, rubbed its fronds into their skin, and disappeared into the fog again to hunt. [ref_2]

  Imagine the paradox of a time and a world in which the changing life of Nature—and the changing nature of life—made for such utter mystery that it seemed not mysterious at all. The facts of life, of death, of Nature’s forces, were accepted without question. The world and all therein was a given, not to ponder, but to live in as a part of Nature’s consciousness, like moving air, the tracks left by oxen, or the sudden appearance of fungus on a rotting log. The supernatural was wholly natural, for the natural world—that’s to say, the world made either manifest or inexplicable to human senses—constituted all.

  In this epoch, life was not a force distinct from death. A hunter had to be ever perceptive, for the life-essence might pop up wherever it chose to manifest itself. It might be as invisible as the power in wind; it might dwell in the moving coils of fog teased by the updrafts at the edge of the Downs; it might lurk as still as a deer in a thicket; or it might disappear, like a nightjar by day, or a moth or a fly that, seen in the air one moment, vanishes the next, apparently forfeiting life-force to turn to dead bark on a tree.

  Life might grow from invisible nothing, like lichens and ferns; or it might appear out of nothing, like the instant of a grass-snake’s passing or a lark rising from cover in a bald bed of flints. Sharp eyes and keen ears were essential, for living prey popped out of dead things without warning and disappeared as suddenly again. Life might materialize from stones, or trees, or change its form to hide within the inanimate world again. Life force, that at one eye-blink was a rock, might at a second glance become a weasel, a deer, or even take flight as a bird.

  Animists did not consider this to be camouflage, but metamorphosis, the ever-active interchange of life through myriad forms. Life was everywhere in earth and air, as earth and air were life. Did not the air breathe maggots into meat, force mighty oaks from barren ground? And then, with its power to change the world concealed as wind, it broke them down again.

  The men walked forward slowly, line abreast, watching for the sudden swirl of mist that might resolve itself into a life that they could take and eat. What stone, what bush, would suddenly be prey?

  In this manner the hunters quartered the top of the hill till the sun clawed its way through the fog and warmed their world a little. But they were still wet to the knees and as frozen as death when they spotted the hare. Sunken-cheek saw it first, signaling the others with slow-moving arms while he pulled back an arrow he held nocked in his bow. But One-tooth beckoned him to hold his fire, for at that range he might miss, and they wouldn’t get a second chance. So the other men stood quite still while One-tooth, who was nearest, began to walk, slowly, not towards the beast, but around it, keeping twenty paces between himself and his prey.

  The sun rose, burning off the upper layers of fog and gilding early-morning light while One-tooth circled the hare, around and around again, closing the distance with each lap, the creature scanning the man with panoramic eyes, turning its head now this way, now that, alternately watching the peculiar biped and washing itself, confident in its speed, in its estimation that the silent-orbiting thing presented no immediate threat.

  Perhaps five hundred heartbeats elapsed while One-tooth orbited the hare, his track apparent to the other men as an ever-decreasing circle of darker browns and greens where he had scuffed the silvery dew off the bracken and grass.

  Time passed, the man ever moving, the hare no longer grooming itself, but staring, unblinking, the better to watch, mesmerized by the constant motion, the steady footfall, and the otherwise silence of it all.

  They had been hunting for quite a time before spotting the hare, and their quiet circuit of the clearing had returned them to within two bowshots of the women in the pit. One-tooth was little more than a long jump away from the spellbound hare when one of the women emerged from the pit on an errand. The men’s hearts missed a beat; any movement might break their quarry’s spell. But the hare never budged, so fixated was it on the circling man.

  Now a new problem, the cries of Blonde-hair in labor. The men had been hearing her travails for several minutes, her contractions almost continuous. Sharp cries from the pit cut through the fog and fell shrill on the ear. The child must soon be born.

  If One-tooth felt for his woman he didn’t show it. Whether she lived or she died the others must eat. He trod pace after pace while the hare sat stock still, only turning its head from side to side, the better to watch the human animal define its horizon.

  Women’s voices rose in excitement, exhorting the mother to bear down, to push.

  The hare twisted its ears about, the better to hear the human cry.

  The woman yelped again, straining against her midwives’ support.

  The hare scented the air.

  The infant dropped a little farther down the birth canal.

  The hare twitched its whiskers, and stirred.

  The child’s head emerged. Beneath the membrane, the women detected a full head of dark hair.

  The hare stiffened, uneasy in its predicament, aroused from trance and suddenly aware of present threat.

  In a final, supreme effort, Blonde-hair pushed.

  The hare came up on its haunches—and One-tooth pounced…

  The child dropped.

  …grabbing the hare by the neck, lifting the struggling animal high in the air…

  Down in the pit, Small-ears lifted the child by its legs, cleared the membrane from its face, and smacked its backside.

  …One-tooth snapped the creature’s neck.

  Then the men heard the infant’s first cry.

  A hare had been killed, and a child was born. What, at this time, in this place, would these hunters suppose? A hare for a child? Or a hare to a child? Perhaps in the Mother Goddess’s great scheme of cosmic affairs, a creature had just been transformed.

  Endnotes

  [ref_1] About 6,000 years ago, the feet of immigrants, invaders, traders and their animals began to beat down what is now called the Ridgeway track, often called “Britain’s oldest road.” The Ridgeway led travelers inland from the Dorset coast near Lyme Regis to Salisbury Plain, and beyond. The Ridgeway (which is being restored for walkers) became one of the most travelled highways in Stone Age England. Inland, settlement on Salisbury Plain grew through millennia until it supported the Wessex Culture in the region that would produce Stonehenge.


  [ref_2] Dorothy Hartley writes: “Wild fern seed—which does not exist—was long considered the dietetic vehicle for invisibility.” Ferns reproduce from spores, not seeds. (The Land of England: English Country Customs Through the Ages, Macdonald & Janes, U.K. 1979. Or, in the U.S., Lost Country Life, Pantheon, 1980.) Ralph Whitlock describes fern “seed”-induced invisibility on Midsummer’s Eve (Guardian Weekly, July 15 1990). Katherine M. Buck, in The Wayland-Dietrich Saga writes: “It was about the summer solstice when / The elves are busy amidst mortal men. / One of the sages went at dead o’ night / To gather fern-seed, thinking thus he might / Make himself vanish ere worse evil come… / But finding none, he groaned in blank despair.”