By way of introduction. The most excellent and quite private Star posted a link in her LiveJournal which basically said that we creative people should augment the Interweb by posting those pieces for which we had received money to our websites or to some other area such as Fanfic.net or something of that ilk.
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This is the only story for which I have, so far, received any recompense. The original file is undated but internal evidence suggests I wrote it some time in 1991, although I have a recollection of writing it in 1992. If I find better evidence I shall supply it here. I sold an option to adapt it for film for $54 in 1998. Not much in the scheme of things but that income allowed me to make certain deductions that otherwise might've raised the suspicious eyebrows of the Commissioner of Taxation or one of his flying monkeys. Here it is, complete with explanatory notes, in all its typo-filled, Courier New glory.
D J Rout's
THE FOXFOE
The small farm that belonged to Sgemsh the shepherd bordered on a brook and was surrounded on the other three sides by the dense forest that kept Antonville apart from its nearest neighbours. Once a week Sgemsh would take the three mile walk along a ragged forest path into Antonville, where he would have three pints of the sweet perry made at the Antonville Tavern. He would talk to Bechek, the butcher and brickmaker about the sheep he was rearing for slaughter. Bechek would haggle and moan about not having the time to come out to Sgemsh's to see the sheep but he would turn up three days later because Sgemsh was the only source of sheep meats Antonville had.
So things for Sgemsh had settled into the warming habits of village life. He wasn't exactly happy, but he was contented and relatively free of vermin about his person - no mean feat in those days.
Coming along the path on this day, about three weeks after the episode with the Guilty Machine, with the first sprucey hint of Firstwinter fluttering amongst the trees, Sgemsh stopped to take a leak.
Great clouds of steam were coming up from the cold and dewy ground when the wind started blowing Sgemsh's way. He was physically assailed by a horrible smell! He cut off the stream with a grunt of exertion and stood rooted to the spot. As a more clear state of mind overcame him, he reasoned that if he was going to stand rooted to the spot he might as well be doing something useful, but when he tried to get the stream going again he found that there is only so many interruptions your sphincters will take before they freeze up in spite.
The horrible smell was still with him, coming from off the path and away into the undergrowth. White-faced with fear, and with his sphincters threatening to re-open at the most inconvenient moment, he advanced into the bushes.
About four yards in he came upon it. White, fluffy - he recognised it instantly because he'd been a shepherd ever since he was old enough to be anything - around Antonville, since age eight.
It was the back three feet of a good-sized ewe. The front was spattered with blood, amazingly red even though dried. Sgemsh had the only sheep around - he might've recognised this one had there been a head, but the head was gone. Judging by the hoofmarks and signs of horns gouged in the trunks of trees, the ewe's death had been an eventful one.
Sgemsh reeled back in disgust. He stood against a tree trunk and wrung his hands in anguish. He was two miles from Antonville, one mile from his place. He jumped back onto the path, confident that nothing that had done that to a sheep could get him on a man-made path.
After a moment's thought, he continued on his way to Antonville, hurrying as a nervous man might hurry.
In Antonville, Hekke the carpenter was holding forth on his favourite subject, the clear and present danger of the Finnugs, whose raiding parties were getting ever closer to Antonville.
"Vigilance is the price of safety, " he was saying, which just goes to show you that nothing really changes.
"Hekke, " Losto began, "no-one here has ever seen a Finnug raiding party. What makes you think they're anywhere near us?" Losto was a man who had two pleasures in life and he sometimes didn't know whether arguing with Hekke wasn't the better of them.
"I have, " said Keps. His one pleasure in life was to say that he had seen, or done, or heard or wrote whatever it is that anyone happened to be talking about. His least believable claim came soon after the breach birth of Bechek daughter.
They were all gathered in the rough area of earth beaten so hard by the generations of tramping feet that it never got muddy even after weeks of rain. The shade of some apple trees made delightful patterns on the ground and the huge oaken table at which they sat. Each man had a quart of cider in front of him, the best that Antonville had to offer (well,, it was all one grade, really) but not as good as the stuff that Keps said he used to make.
"Keps, you would have to be about three hundred years old, multilingual, ambidextrous, clairvoyant and transsexual to boot, to have done all the things you claim to have done." That was Losto. Doubting Keps wasn't the other of his pleasures, but life isn't all beer and skittles.
"Well, I never claimed to be a liar, " Keps retorted, gulping his cider to make a point of order.
It was all the usual, pre-Firstwinter, seasonal banter.. It was suddenly interrupted by the twig-snapping, bough-waving entrance of a stranger.
For one ecstatic, agonising instant, Losto thought that Hekke had been right. In that same moment, Hekke felt a warm glow of vindication settle about his middle.
The stranger stood about six feet tall. He was almost that wide. His stomach bulged out with a thickness of muscle and the puffy body of a deep blue parka. He stood with his arms folded across his chest and stared across the little patch of earth like someone trying to start a fire with his eyes.
He had the eyes for it, too. They were roofed with dark, bushy eyebrows but they stood out like sapphires on ice. His nose was large and powerful, straight as a plane from the wide bridge to the wide, deep nostrils. These made plumes in the chill air as he stood with the cold sun highlighting his bone structure.
There was no sign of his mouth behind a very thick beard cut so square that it looked like a loaf of black bread.
After thirty of the longest second he had ever experienced, Bechek got up enough courage to turn to the stranger and inhale before speaking.
The man held up three fingers of his right hand that looked like cricket stumps and said; "I'm the foxfoe."
By the time Sgemsh got to Antonville he had developed a crick in his neck from looking constantly behind him to make sure he wasn't being followed. several times along the way he had almost wet himself when a tree branch had cracked under his feet or had fallen as some of the trees denuded themselves before Firstwinter. When he got into the square he saw a lot of the villagers gathered around the Foxfoe, who stood among them like a maple among pines.
He hung back while the foxfoe answered some people's questions. The stranger's eyes, missed little, and in a few moments he had beckoned Sgemsh over with a motion of one eyebrow. (This caused some comment because the villagers eyebrows, by and large, moved in sync).
"Sgemsh!" Bechek yelled, wanting to be the first to introduce the stranger, "come here, damn you! This is 'the Foxfoe.'"
With a sudden change of heart, Sgemsh trotted over to the clearing. He got up to the foxfoe and grasped his hand. He suddenly realised that the hand had only three fingers. He cast a sympathetic eye with a shepherd's compassion straight at the tall man's eyes, and was startled by the look of amusement he found there.
"That's handy, " he said as coolly as he could, "because one of my sheep has been killed by a fox."
The foxfoe, who had kept his arms folded while the crowd looked at him, now let them hang loose. The biceps and triceps bulged oddly, even under the parka's quilting. He turned eyes as charged as a woodland lake on Sgemsh and asked:
"A fox?"
His projected professional voice was deep, resonant and flavoured with menace. This was not lost on Sgemsh, who had grown like his charges in some ways - he smelt strongly of lanolin, for instance.
"Ye-es, " he bleated.
The foxfoe moved forward. The crowd parted like broken ice floes. "A fox?"
Through the gap in the crowd, a little yapping bundle of terrier sprang up to Sgemsh and the foxfoe. It liked lamb and it smelt plenty of it on the shepherd. In springing to plant its forelegs on Sgemsh, it came too close.
The foxfoe whirled like a dervish and his hand whipped out like a talon. In one movement he raised the terrier to his mouth and gulped it.
There was a silence so thick you could call it pea soup as everyone looked at the settling dust where the terrier had been and the spot where the foxfoe still was.
He bowed his head: "I'm terribly sorry, " he said. "I beg your pardon. I - I thought it was a fox."
The townsfolk looked nervously at each other's groins. Whose dog had it been, anyway? One by one they realised that it was probably just a stray and things got almost back to normal.
"Yes, a fox, " Sgemsh confirmed, trying to recoup the impact of his little bombshell.
The townsfolk suddenly switched their attention back to what damage a fox could do if it got loose around Antonville. The foxfoe knew they were thinking that and waited a few minutes.
"Very well, " he said, folding his arms again and eyeing Losto, presumably the most sensible (and therefore the most likely to fall for a rational sales pitch) member of the group.
"Let us discuss terms."
In the normal course of things, you might think that cider and canine wouldn't settle too easily in the same stomach, and so did the people of Antonville. But the foxfoe had scoffed down five pints of the stuff without reaching for his purse once - not that he seemed to be carrying one - and showed no signs of drunkenness.
He downed the last half of his current tankard and placed it on the table as if it was a dove's feather.
"Three hundred, " he said, "and I'll track the thing for as long as it takes, kill it, skin it, give you all of it for trophies."
"Two hundred, "said Losto, "and you can trophy it."
"Two fifty." Another tankard of cider was placed beside him. The foxfoe knew well that the cost of these tankards was being added up, given a suitable multiplier for inflation (caused by his sudden demand), augmented by a little commission for the brewer, increased by accounting fees and sundry expenses and being deducted from his bill, so he was setting the price as high as it would go. "Two fifty, " je repeated, "and you get the skin and head, and I trophy the rest."
"Two twenty-five, " Losto countered, not sweetening the deal to see how far the foxfoe would go.
"Two thirty-seven, " the foxfoe said just as plainly, "and one night's lodging."
The Antonville currency had no half-units. "Done, " said Losto
"And done, " the foxfoe responded.
The crowd cheered.
Around Antonville the seasons went Autumn, Firstwinter for three weeks, three weeks of Summer Reprise and then real Winter would settle in with cold, windless days, frequent snow and the disposition of an impatient barmaid.
Those that didn't dread it hated it, but it was a reasonably (for those times) hospitable time of year. There were almost no fatalities and one thing was for sure - the Finnugs were certainly not going to make any headway through the Winter.
The problem for the foxfoe was that nobody else was, either. He had a bit over a month to find the fox and kill it, because once the Summer Reprise settled in for its brief and disturbing visit, the fox might run as it pleased.
The fox would know that it couldn't move in the real Winter, and it would also know that the foxfoe couldn't chase it. There would be a long drawn out, starving impasse until the Spring thaw started.
The first thing the foxfoe did was to follow Sgemsh out to the scene.
In the time he had been in Antonville, no-one had seen him out of his blue parka, and he was still in it as he paced over and over the site, sniffing at tree-bark and powdering soil between his pear-skinned palms.
He prodded the carcass experimentally with a finger, then moved back a few yards. He began to pace a circle methodically, and when a tree got in his way he stared at it a few minutes then pushed it aside. It leant but didn't topple.
Completing his circle he then walked along the path that Sgemsh had used. He found the spot where Sgemsh had relieved himself entirely by smell. He scuffed the surrounding soil with his boot - it was almost dry.
He nodded sagely, squatted down and sighted along the length of his nose to where the sheep carcass was out of sight behind the undergrowth.
"Mm hmph, " he said and suddenly stood up. In three long strides that were more like the middle stage of a triple jump he had reached the remains. He looked back along his tracks.
He did this sort of thing for about a quarter of an hour. At no time did it seem like an exhibition for the villagers, and to their credit they didn't think it was.
Eventually, the foxfoe looked at a point four feet off the ground, midway between Losto and Sgemsh.
"You have a fox here, " he concluded.
The villagers relaxed with the knowledge of money well spent. . .then tensed at the thought of a fox.
A fox, they thought. A fox. . . .
Sgemsh was trembling. He was apprehensive at the thought of a fox, particularly on his lonely way home. It was also the notoriety of having been the shepherd whose sheep had been so mangled by the horror, and that copious free ciders that had bought.
His discovery of the sheep's carcass had been retold a number of times through the night, and if it assumed epic proportions with Sgemsh as a character just a smidge less adventurous and fearless as the foxfoe himself, well, that was all pisstalk anyway, and nobody minded. Probably because they were doing piss-listen. . . .
'HOw,' thought Sgemsh to himself, 'will I be able to keep this story interesting all through Firstwinter?' (He hadn't realised that in a village where everyone's lives are so intimately intertwined the same story never gets boring, it just gets more refined).
It was a mild dusk. The daybirds were coming home to roost, night insects were moving out, getting a few minutes of free time before they had to avoid the bats that were stirring fitfully as the sun set. A few insects were chirping quietly meekly and suddenly silencing as Sgemsh walked by or they were preyed upon by some twilight denizen.
About a mile away, the foxfoe paused in his minute investigation of a tree trunk to look along the line of the rays of the setting sun that refracted through the fine mist and dust of the forest. The tree trunk had small scratches in its smooth bark, and the direction told the foxfoe which way the animal had gone and the depth of the scratches gave him an approximation of the size of the animal
The crinkliness of the edges told him that the fox had passed only the day before If the edges had been smoothed by wear and tear then they would've been old ones The soft surface of the trunk had given a false impression of the fox's size - but the foxfoe knew his prey.
He stood proudly and with the confidence of an arrow followed the fox's trail.
In a bit under a quarter of an hour he came into a small depression in the forest, as if a gully was the handle and this the bowl of some giant earthen spoon. It was ringed with the same trees and undergrowth as the rest of the forest, except for a line along the rim of the bowl that for about fifteen feet offered a clear view of the darkening Western sky. His instincts quickened, the foxfoe walked as quietly as drifting snow down the incline, his jaws slightly agape. He began to salivate. His eyes were adjusting to the twilight and he could see a scuff in the leaf mould, nearly the size of his own foot.
His mouth opened incredibly wide, just like it had when he had eaten the dog. 'You'll have to be cleverer than that, ' he thought.
Something tapped him lightly on his left shoulder. He whirled, poised like a cobra with his mouth wide open and his teeth, pointed and curved inwards, prepared to strike. There was nothing there but a half-felt swish in the air as if something had passed.
His nostrils quivered at a familiar smell. At the same time his keen ears told him of a slow dripping, dripping onto the soft ground. With sickened anticipation he looked at his left shoulder.
It was ripped open so cleanly that he had not felt the cut. His own blood rolled out of the wound and down the puffy sleeve of his parka to drip on the earth. It was a spoor that any of the fools in Antonville could have followed, let alone a fox.
But he had not lived this long, nor had he hunted foxes from the Eastern mountains to the wide, limitless. . .the language of the Antonville people had no word for it. Always the colour of the sky, unless the sky was blue, when this moving world of water would be as deep and blue as. . .he pushed his mind back to the job.
The fox had saved him. He wasn't a man to take such chivalry lightly. He'd sing a few songs over its funeral pyre. In his body, the special talents that separated him from normal humankind went to work. The slash in his shoulder healed in a few seconds. His pupils to black holes that covered most of the front of his eye. His retinae were flooded with an enhancing hormone - the rods and cones were now triggered on only forty percent of normal light. The darkening, almost monochrome evening flashed back into living colour.
He danced back behind a tree, but before he had time to reach it, something thwacked him on his right side, rolling him against a rough-barked pine. He put his hand down at his side, expecting a gaping hole. The right sleeve of his parka wriggled to the dirt.
The arm underneath was heavily muscled, clad in a thin woollen undergarment. To a fox's eye it glowed with heat. Blood was pulsing through it at a ferocious rate.
The foxfoe couldn't keep that up for ever. His body was geared for action. So far he had cringed. Forget that! He clung to the bark while he oriented himself.
He put the now-bright denuded rim of the spoon behind him, picked his target tree a few yards away and sprang for it.
He got a glimpse of the fox this time as it sped between his legs and toppled him. he whipped his body around in midair and landed on his feet for the half-second it took him to jump to a completely different and huddle there with his back against the trunk and his folded under him like a grasshopper's.
His left hand felt strange. He looked slowly down his left arm, a small whimper escaping. It was the first animal sound there for what seemed like years.
His left hand was clenched around a whisk of white hair. The sight of it brought back the picture of the fox shooting towards him like a red and white missile. Its snout gleamed in the half-light, closed but deadly.
The foxfoe was treated to a horrible sensation of that snout hitting his stomach like a pick, twisting, clamping on his guts and pulling them out like ropes along the ground - no!
He was a foxfoe, by all that breathed, and if he just thought for a minute he could destroy this thing. Now - there was a crack from behind him.
With a soft, despairing sound he turned, keeping his vulnerable stomach to the trunk and stuck an eye out. He could see his blue sleeve mocking him across the bowl.
The fox stood on the rim of the gully, the dark sky still silhouetting him, his white brush waving back and forth like a tree bough blown in a hard wind, his snout pointed directly at the foxfoe's eye.
That one took a shaky, deep breath. "I've come to - " Kill you? No, that wouldn't do it. Wouldn't do at all. "I've come to tell you to lay off the sheep."
Eight and a half feet, tip of its nose to the tip of its tail, as surely as rain finds a gutter the fox glided down the incline.
Against his will, the foxfoe closed his eyes and crammed himself against the tree.
"I've no got your sheep, laddie."
"What?" the foxfoe snuffled.
"I said, 'I've no touched your sheep,' laddie."
"But, you're the fox! I saw the corpse of the sheep. The villagers - "
"Aye. But I'm just passing through, like. I've no got a hunger for your sheep. Even though I am a fox."
"But I saw a mutilated sheep carcass. There've been all the signs of a fox in the area - "
"Of course there's been the bloody signs of a fox! I'm a fox! But I haven't been anywhere near your sheep. I was just coming through the area on my way West, when I started to be followed."
The foxfoe made some suitably unbelieving sound.
"Doubting? Take me to where the sheep was and I'll show you."
Beaten to the last thread of his pride the foxfoe struggled up and caught the fox in the corner of his eye. He leaned on the tree for one last try.
His jaws wide, he swung on the fox, but his teeth closed on empty air. Twin jaws clamped and he was lifted by his neck and flung on the ground. The fox was above him, pressing his head into the soil. Its next words came out through its teeth,, clenched like scissors on the foxfoe's throat:
"Try that again, laddie and I'll bite your fuckln' head off."
Almost exactly as Sgemsh had done, the fox and his foe looked over the site of the sheep's carcass.
"Aye, " said the fox, "mighty convincin'. Would almost convince me if I wasn't sure where I'd been." The fox pointed its snout directly at the foxfoe: "I know what you're thinkin', laddie. Don't."
The foxfoe, who had been thinking that the fox would cover himself in just this way, grudgingly admitted that it had fooled him.
"That it did. But you had an interest, you see, in telling the villagers that there was a fox aboot. How could you have noticed yonder splintered wood."
The fox padded over to a nondescript tree and with his left forefoot indicated a stripped part of the tree about a foot off the ground. A sheep's hoof had made that score.
"You know me, laddie. D'ye think I'd let a sheep struggle enough to do that?"
"No."
"There are these bits of wool, too." The fox scraped at the ground. This was the morning after the foxfoe had first met the fox. They had spent the night in that little dip in the forest and for the foxfoe it had been a night of torture, mitigated slightly by the fox's interesting, accented tales of its travels. "Did it no strike you as odd that there're two kinds of wool? One's sheep fur, but the other's a pile of threads."
The foxfoe felt sheepish - not safe around a fox. "No."
The last thing the foxfoe did around Antonville was to show the fox the way to Sgemsh's house. Sgemsh, coming home from the tavern after having embellished the story of the mutilated carcass almost beyond where venn the villagers would stand it, was feeling what a lot of nine-days wonders feel - how was he going to be on the tenth, eleventh and following days?
When he came to his house he saw nothing unusual and as was his wont he looked out over the fields to where his flock grazed peacefully. When he looked back to his door it was blocked by a red and white monster waiting patiently - like a bullet in a gun.
Sgemsh suddenly realised that he was still walking towards the thing when it blurred towards him. He had time for one last look at white teeth and scarlet fur before he left time altogether.
"He was just a lonely man, d'ye ken?" the fox had said. "A wee time to be famous was all he wanted. But I canna have him bad-mouthing the foxes. So I'll teach him a lesson. As I've taught you one, aye laddie?"
"Aye," the foxfoe had said.
"There's no call for that."
"Right."
The foxfoe had turned East, away from the fox as they had agreed. He had failed in his mission, but he still had his head, as the fox had said.
Tramping along a trail that only he and a fox could find, something rattled in his parka pocket.
Always a good idea to get paid in advance.
4252 words
Like 'A Bird in Charge' this is based on a dream. It is part of a putative collection of my stories that are based on dreams, which would be called 'Cider Dreams.' The title derives from the fact that if you drink a sufficient quantity of cider, you have extraordinarily vivid dreams - all you need to do is pout stuff in between to make them into a story.
The Finnugs are the Finno-Ugric speaking people. This is part of the setting for the story. Antonville is set in what is Poland today, 3000 BC at the time when the Indo-European speaking tribe was beginning to make its presence felt. Other details of this setting are the lack of a word in Antonville's language for 'sea' - the original Indo-Europeans didn't have one, apparently. The names of the characters come from before I had the idea of setting it in those times - originally they were meant to sound Finnish, that is, foreign but not identifiable.
Why the fox should have a Scottish accent I have no idea. (I don't think he's consistently Scottish, either. Get me to a dialogue coach!) He had that accent in the dream. If both the foxfoe and the fox represent aspects of my own personality then I probably need therapy - I'll assume they don't, but keep your terrier at a safe distance.
The following is some joke piece I thought up. Some critic may seriously point it out later when I become rich and famous, but for the moment you should make nothing of it.:
My stories are like sex. A bit of atmospheric foreplay, a plateau of mounting events, an orgasmic action scene - followed by a short afterglow so I can nip down before closing time and tell all me mates. . . .
It is arguably superfluous to state that the above story is Copyright © D J Rout 1991 (or '92) and 2007, but I"m putting it here anyway to show that I'm both alert and merciless when it comes to pursuing copyright. Persons who know how i get my software may be appalled at the hypocrisy displayed here but I stand by my conviction that my copyright is sacrosanct and everyone else's is honoured more in the breach than the observance.
