He appears after dark,
reads the wind with his nose,
mirrors the moon in his eys,
laps the dew, feels the grass sing
in his blood.
Ebb and flow of stars,
waves of trees breaking
on the sky
-these are the nightworld things.And I shall go, foxwise,
in the darkness that is scent
and touch and wind and torment.
on those blowy nights
of September, all gales
and roaring moonlight...Brian Carter (1937-2015) Extract from 'Foxwise in the Darkness' (Where the Dream Begins 1979)
Melissa Harrison, in her foreword to the republished edition of the late Brian Carter's story of Wulfgar, the 'dark-furred fox of Dartmoor and Scoble the trapper', made me realise just how very, very fortunate we are to live here...
Here's Melissa...
'A Black Fox Running is not a children's book, but I first encountered it as a child. I must have been seven or eight when my mother first read it to me, the Devon landscape it so vividly described thrillingly familiar to me as the beloved country of our summer holidays...'
Though I was born in Devon and lived here until I was four, and though every holiday we had was spent either at my grandparents' cottage at Coleford near Crediton, or further down into Cornwall with family friends at Tintagel (long before the world discovered it), it would be twenty years or so before I came back. I brought a husband with me for good measure and of course our children were all born and raised here... and mostly out on Dartmoor. When you have such a wonderful go-to place to run the steam out of little legs and send them to bed exhausted, you don't waste the opportunities, and now, each time our wanderers return, Dartmoor is the place of choice they head to first. I would like to think we have filled their imaginations with wonderful (if frequently cold and wet..nothing ever stopped us) happy memories of Dartmoor too.
Set in the 1940s, A Black Fox Running, in the time-honoured tradition of Tarka the Otter, Watership Down and War Horse gives voice to the animal kingdom, and there might be your first concern, because it was certainly mine. How do you successfully invest such a magnificent creature with human voice and feelings,and also a spiritual life...this the chap Bookhound and I met out at Bel Tor last year..
Giving a genuine literary voice to animals is a tricky business fraught with danger and great huge sinkholes of disaster if an author doesn't get it quite right, but we are talking about Brian Carter here. He lived and breathed Dartmoor and gave its wild beauty expression in his artistic output, knowing the moor and its wildlife intimately, walking great swathes of it and preferably alone. Brian Carter understood 'wilderness', here writing in another excellent book Dartmoor - The Threatened Wilderness...
' Going alone up the East Dart to Cranmere I am confronted by the familiar invested with a splendour springing directly from the whole wilderness experience....many find bleakness and solitude intolerable; but what can seem a hostile environment to the casual visitor may be an area of immense interest to those who love it for what it is...
Brian argues in favour of solitude, a feeling I understood walking out to the head of the East Dart and Cranmere last year...
'What can we give of ourselves to the place? We cannot increase the beauty of the high moor. Caring deeply for a landscape does not sweeten the larksong or make the grass radiant. But we can tarnish that beauty or destroy it out of stupidity, avarice or carelessness. By remaining faithful to Nature we remain faithful to our better selves...'
The more I read his writing the more I realise that Brian Carter was one of the original footprints for the current resurgence in nature writing, and a heightened awareness of the fragility of it all, that we are benefiting from today.
And it's so clear, from reading A Black Fox Running, that all this feeds into the book. Brian Carter knows every inch of the moor he describes, he feels it as if a fox and he understands it as if he is any one of the animals he brings to life. You sense that he has been watching and taking it all in for the lifetime that he was given.
Bookhound and I first discovered Brian Carter in the 1970s, soon after we had moved to Plymouth and found Dartmoor on our doorstep. His book Where the Dream Begins became a substitute for owning one of his original pictures which were way out of our price league though I think we went back to the exhibition several times. In his foreword to the book, the much
missed Robert Hardy wrote...
'An awareness of what we have been busy destroying for generations, of what we stand in the most imminent danger of losing from the world for ever, and therefore of wilfully and wickedly denying to the generations that come after us, is dawning very slowly on the general consciousness...'
Remember this was 1979...
'Tap anyone's shoulder and ask, and almost all will admit to some sort of regret for a pace, and a space, and a simplicity of life that we have almost civilized out of sight and sound...'
1979... the internet still twenty or so years away...
'...the only hope lies with those who care enough to tell us what we are missing; the best of that hope with artists, writers and poets. Brian Carter is all three...'
And so Brian Carter a trusted pair of hands for the task of bringing Wulfgar, Stargrief, Ashmere, Thorngold, Brackenpad, Briarspur and all the other foxes to life.
And Stormbully and Fallbright, the buzzards...
And Thorgil the badger, Earthborn the hedgehog, Trollgar the barn owl, the otter Romany, Scrag the heron..
As you can see the names are a work of art in themselves but the prose is exquisite too. A book crammed with Carter's poetic vision of Dartmoor, so many moments that I had to note down...
'When the moon rose the farmland became suddenly radiant. The silence had a silver gleam.
'No matter what happens the stars won't stop shining,' Stargrief said...'
Pitched against the bitter and vengeful hatred of Scoble the trapper there are going to be some tragic moments to cope with here, and fair warning that there was a particular moment when I could have howled with sadness. But this is nature red in tooth and claw and Brian Carter doesn't shy away from the realities. Scoble, a veteran of the trenches of the Somme, has his own tragic reasons for a hatred of foxes and is contrasted powerfully with another veteran of a later war who has emerged with a very different perspective, all of which makes for some fascinating contrasts on the impact of war on the individual. The interesting thing as a reader was that I found myself firmly in Team Fox and I won't say another word for fear of spoilers.
Meanwhile my Walking Friend and I have been doing some Black Fox Walking, recently from Jay's Grave out to Hound and Holwell Tors...
I think you can probably tell that A Black Fox Running is a book that I loved and one that has seeped into my consciousness in the best possible way, so I hope, for those who don't know Dartmoor, the pictures have shared some of that visual imagery which made the book so powerful for me.
One of the joys of the book are the wonderful names that Brian Carter gives his animals so, before you scroll down for gifts, I'll leave you with these three, the fox cubs that we watched playing in Mowhay Meadow to the front of our house one bright autumn morning. We think this their last rough and tumble together before the more pressing business of being a grown-up.
Who knows, maybe these are reincarnations of Teg and Wulfgar's cubs, Oakwhelp, Nightfrond, Dusksilver or Brookcelt...
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