Mid-October in Coldhanger… pearly mornings and mushrooms, dying hues of leaf and fern, mists coming up from the river, and longer nights for hunting! Rufus was well grown now; a lithe, clean-run fox without a trace of mange.
In the woodland rides the gold-red leaves lay deep, and with every sigh of air, more would tick and waver down as though loath to join the earth. Most beautiful of all were the pink, almost incandescent, fires of the sloe bushes, and the vivid autumn fungi that grew round the bases of the big trees.
The field maples flamed a lovely salmony orange; the exquisitely cut leaves, borne on the slender pinkish stems, seemed to mock the paintings of a Japanese artist, and the ditches were full to over-flowing with millions of such little beauties, each one a picture in itself. The trees that already showed their bare bones revealed also new and hidden loveliness, yet men went about this world and were blind to it all.
There was a new exciting mystery in the woods, too; nay, in every little spinney, wherever trees gathered together. The lower veils of foliage had not yet dropped, but let through the light in a magical way, and the earth, strewn with the damp fresh-fallen leaves, took on a new smell, sweeter far than the rarest incense. This rusty wealth and range of colour blended with an enchanting rareness the hues of the fox’s coat as he padded about his secret ways.
To a black pool in the centre of the woods, some wild duck came in the evenings. The pool was not deep, though it appeared so because the water was so dark and peaty-looking, due to unburdening of many autumns such as this, generations of trees shedding their leaves into its mirror. To this pool came a drake mallard, a duck and three youngsters born in April by Wildwood pool, four miles away across the fields. Every evening, when the smoke from the cottage chimneys was sending up soft blue signals, they circled the wood and came in to this dark water, and Rufus knew of this arrangement. For three nights he had lain in the dying brambles close to the water’s edge at the upper end of the pond. From this ambush he had caught moorhens, young ones, as they quested about on the black evil-smelling ooze, in which a bullock would have sunk to his middle.
On the fourth night Rufus went again and hid in his favourite ambush. For a long while nothing came but a cock bullfinch that had been piping in the maple bushes, and he came for a sip before going to bed. He was a lovely little bird, with a breast the colour of some of the hawthorn leaves and a cap as blue as a crow’s wing. ‘Wit, Wit!’ he flew up again, and only his white rump was visible as he flew away through the dark thickets.
‘Hoo, hoo, hoohoo!’ the owls awoke, mothy and with mothy eyes, birds of the touchwood and the night.
A wee mouse rustled, ever so quietly, making no
