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their servility.
    Daniel clumps off down the path towards the field where he’s been lambing. He tries to put his numbed feet down lightly. The air is searingly cold. Patches of wool are scattered on the grass. All around him, the clamour of lambs calling to their mothers, the peremptory baa of mothers calling back. Wind gusts towards the house from the field, taking his scent away from where he’s sure the fox must be. If he was a fox, he’d work the bottom end of the field where it dips away down the fell. Here a stray lamb is easier to pick off, unsteady as it struggles up the slope. He’d found their bodies there in the past, their throats gored, intestines dragged out. It was a waste – and that’s one thing he could never bear.
    Daniel treads downhill, keeping the wall between him and the field. A footpath crosses his land a little lower down. When he reaches the stile, he climbs over into the field and sits on the bottom step, facing the commotion of bleating ghosts. Gently, he closes up the gun and lays it across his knees. The click of the catch is satisfying. He strains to see into the gloom, where he knows the fox must be moving. The merest rumour of a shadow. Rippling close to the wall. Slipping through the history of its race. Its purpose to kill, that’s all. To kill and then to die. Maybe to find a vixen then leave her to rear his cubs. It could know nothing more. Lurking at the edge of human affairs, to take what it could find. Winning a life from the flock, then dissolving back into the dark, the taste and lust of blood in its jaws.
    Daniel must have dozed off, despite the cold. What wakes him is a snowflake drifting into his face. He opens his eyes to find the moon gone, the temperature a few degrees higher, snow thickening the night around him. The sheep are quieter now, recognising the deeper, wholesale threat of snow. A fox is a fox, but snow is a wolf pack. They have that memory in them, behind their vacant, urine-coloured eyes. Now they stumble into a rough line against the far wall of the field, marshalling their lambs. The pregnant ewes stumble awkwardly, shaking their tails, falling to their knees.
    Snow has made the fox bold. From the corner of his eye, Daniel sees it haunching across the middle of the field. It moves belly-low like a dog rounding up its flock. There is snow on the gun. Daniel wipes it away with his cuff and raises the twin barrels slowly. The fox is twenty yards away. It hasn’t scented him yet. Fire, sweat, soap and gun oil: the stink of man. But the wind is taking the message away, shredding it over the fell. The stock nudges Daniel’s shoulder. He lines up the bead. The fox turns. It has heard something. Perhaps the swish of the gun against his coat. It sweeps its brush beside its legs then points its face towards the man on the stile. Now that stare: frozen across the centuries, the fox’s eyes hewn from ice.
    Snow comes down between them in small, rapid flakes. Twenty yards of snow between man and fox. Daniel thinks of the dogs in the yard, easily quelled by his voice. This fox is beautiful and still free. A rebel, a refugee, a doomed renegade at winter’s frontier with spring.
    The fields are turning white. Snow falls like sifted flour, faintly reflecting the moonlight that is stifled now behind clouds. In that moment Daniel sees the uncut pear tree, the rope swing tossed aside. Effie laughing with her front teeth not yet grown back. Then white sheets. Annie’s imprint on the bed when they took her away from a room with frosted windows.
    The gun barks and snaps into his shoulder. The fox is leaping in the snow, lashing the whole length of its body as if pinned to the ground by its tail. The shot has torn open its shoulder to the bone. The flock sets up a tremendous bleating, scattering from the shelter of the wall. The second shot takes the fox full in the face and it lies down, its paws threshing snow.
    Daniel