‘Got to be a bridge soon. Got to be,’ Billy said, more for himself than for the fox. ‘Can’t be far now.’ It was a hope rather than a promise, but because it was spoken to the only fellow creature he loved in the whole world, it was enough to spur him on, enough to drive him to his feet once more and out into the wild night.
The rain eased at last just before dawn, the thunder-clouds disappearing under cover of the night, leaving the fields sodden and the trees still raining. Billy and the fox found themselves starting out across a broad sweep of flat water-meadows that followed the winding course of the river uninterrupted as far as the eye could see. Still there was no bridge, and nowhere at all for them to hide out in the open water-meadows. Even at its narrowest the river was far too wide for them to swim across, and yet that was just what Billy was contemplating when the fox beside him froze, one paw lifted in the air, his ears pricked. Billy stopped to listen. At first he could hear only the rush of the river and the croaking cry of a rising heron as it lifted out of the reeds nearby. Then through it all, unmistakeable now, though distant, the sound of a strange unearthly music.
Suddenly the fox was no longer by his side. He was running over the field towards the music. Billy called him back, but the fox ignored him. Reluctantly Billy followed, whistling all the while for the fox to stop and come back. Even though he was weak with cold and fatigue Billy had no inclination whatsoever to give himself up, and when he saw the dark silhouette of the barge moored at the bend of the river his instinct was still to hide. The music was warming and welcoming, but it was not that that drew Billy on now towards the barge, it was the sight of his fox sitting down only a few paces from the barge, head on one side, listening to the music. The fox was showing himself quite openly to whoever was on the barge, so Billy thought there was little point in his hiding any more.
As he walked slowly towards the barge Billy noticed that the water around it was alive with birds – moorhens, mallards, herons, a fleet of Canada geese and one large white swan. Every one of them was facing the music, listening intently to it; and in the fields on both sides of the river the cows and the sheep stood quite still, gazing hypnotically at the barge, some of them legless in the low-lying mist.
The dark hulk of the barge took on features as Billy came closer. It was painted from end to end with wreaths of flowers, and perched amongst them, almost hidden, Billy could pick out the shape of swans, dozens of them, wonderfully painted. And sitting in a deckchair by the wheelhouse was a man, dressed, Billy could see, in a collarless shirt, a tatty dark jacket and a wide straw hat with several holes in it. He could not yet see the face for it was bent forward under the shadow of the hat and was covered entirely by two large hands that seemed to massage the music out of the mouth-organ. Only when the tune was finished did the man sit back in his chair and at last look up.
‘Christopher! Christopher!’ said the man, pushing himself up out of the deckchair and coming towards Billy across the deck of the barge. ‘Is it really you?’
‘I’m Billy, Billy Bunch,’ said Billy, perplexed by the man’s question. The man nodded slowly, tried to smile but could not. There was in his eyes the far-away look of a solitary kind of man. Billy decided he was quite old, not yet grandfather old but old none the less. The sad, lined face under the straw hat gave him the appearance of a weary scarecrow that still tried to look the part, but had long ago lost the art of frightening the birds away. For there was nothing alarming about his dishevelled appearance, nothing wild in his eyes. When he did speak again his voice was firmer and younger, Billy thought, than his looks.
‘Caught out in the storm then were you, old son?’ the man asked.
‘Yes,’ said Billy.
‘Wet through I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘Yes.’
‘Hungry?’
‘Yes.’
‘That your fox, is it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thought so. Thought so. Better bring him on board then. You’ve time to dry yourselves off before breakfast. Bacon and eggs it’ll be. It’s all there is, all I ever have. He’ll have eggs and bacon will he?’
‘He likes eggs,’ said Billy, looking down at the gap of dark water between the barge and the bank. ‘How do I get on, anyway?’ And as if to show him, the fox leapt nimbly across onto the barge.
‘Like that,’ said the man and he reached out his hand and Billy took it and jumped on board.
Some way up-river, in sight of the barge, the lone swan sailed in amongst the reeds, waddled awkwardly up onto the bank and began to preen herself, arching her neck and twisting backwards so she could dive her bill amongst the feathers under her folded wings.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THAT FIRST MEAL TOGETHER WAS EATEN almost in silence. Billy was so tired he could not even find the words to thank the man for the food and the dry clothes. Anyway his mind was on other matters – he was desperately trying to dream up a satisfactory story and that was not easy. He was conscious, too, of being watched. Every time he looked up, the man in the battered straw hat seemed to be shaking his head, a rueful smile on his lips as he studied Billy from across the table. It made Billy feel uncomfortable, almost resentful. It was as if the man knew something he didn’t know. The smile broke into a laugh for the first time as Billy wiped his lips with the bread, dipped it in his mug of tea and fed the fox that sat patiently beside him. This was the third plate of bacon and eggs the boy and the fox had wolfed down between them, and they had eaten their way through over half a loaf of bread.
In the end it was Billy who spoke first because he wanted to forestall the questions that would inevitably come, and anyway he was ready with his story now. He had thought at one point of telling the man the truth, but he knew that to tell the truth would be the end of everything. He might still be able to bluff it out. ‘You live here on this boat, Mister?’ he asked.
‘Mister?’ said the man, laughing. ‘Mister? Can’t have that. I’m called Joe to my friends. When people are cross with me they call me Joseph. But I’m Joe to you.’ He sat back, folded his arms, and considered the boy and his fox in front of him. ‘And it’s a barge, old son, not a boat. I think it’s best not to ask questions, don’t you? I mean if I were to ask you now where you’ve come from and why you’re here with that fox, either you wouldn’t tell me or you’d make up some story which you’d want me to believe. The trouble with telling someone a story is that it means you don’t trust them. So I’m not going to ask you any questions. When you’re ready to tell me where you’ve come from or where you’re going to, then I’ll listen, I’ll be happy to listen. Agreed?’ Billy nodded, and set about scraping up the last of the egg yolk on his plate with his last crust.
Billy thought then of using his story, the story about how he was out camping, and this fox had wandered up to his tent one night, and then there was this storm and it blew away the tent and that’s how they came to be wandering together down by the river. But as he considered it, he knew it sounded feeble. He was glad not to have to use it.
‘Now, old son, clearly you were on the way to somewhere – otherwise you wouldn’t have been out in that storm. Question is, am I going your way? Thing is, old son, I’ve only enough food on this barge for myself, ’cos there’s only one of me. Now if you’re staying I shall have to go into the village a couple of miles away and get in some food, won’t I? Won’t take me long – I’ve got my bike, if you can call it that. Soon as I’m back I’ll be moving on down-river.’
‘Which way’s that?’ Billy asked. ‘Is it away from the city or towards the city?’
‘It’s that way,’ said the man, pointing to the bow of the barge. ‘And that’s away from the city.’
‘Then I’ll stay,’ said Billy quickly.
‘Good,’ said the man, standing up, his head almost touching the roof of the galley. ‘You’ve come just at the right time. I was going back down-river anyway today. Got a full house you might say. And old Noah’s Ark isn’t what she was – she takes her time the
se days. Can’t hurry her, you know.’
‘Noah’s Ark?’ said Billy.
‘The barge, old son. She’s got to have a name, hasn’t she?’
‘I can only stay if my fox stays with me,’ said Billy, putting his arm around the fox. ‘We’re together, see.’
‘I can see that,’ said the man, shaking his head again. ‘I can see that. Never seen anything like it. Couple of little foxes come in from nowhere. Mind you, I can’t have him wandering around below decks, not with the birds. He’ll have to stay on deck, just to be safe.’
‘Birds?’ said Billy. ‘What birds?’
‘Come on, I’ll show you,’ said Joe. ‘But take that fox back up on deck first of all. You’ll see why soon enough.’
The fox seemed content to wander away to the bows of the boat where he sat and surveyed the river around him. Billy went below decks with Joe. The barge was divided in two, with cabin, galley and wheelhouse forward and a long hold aft. They climbed down the stepladder into the hold which was only dimly lit by the light from the portholes. Only when Joe opened the skylight could Billy see that on each side of him were wire cages and that each of them contained a swan, sometimes two.
‘Noah’s Ark!’ said Billy, looking round him. ‘That’s why you call the ship Noah’s Ark.’
‘Barge,’ said Joe, putting an arm round his shoulder.
‘What they all in here for?’ said Billy. ‘Should be outside, on the river. That’s where they belong, swans.’
‘Most of them will go back there,’ Joe said, ‘but I’m afraid not all of them. I s’pose you could call this a hospital barge, Billy,’ Joe said, tossing some grain through the bars of a cage. ‘See Billy, there’s people throw all sorts of rubbish into this river and if it’s small enough rubbish it’s going to end up down some poor swan’s throat. Lead weights – you know, the kind they use for fishing – they’ve only got to swallow a few of them and they’ll die, and die slowly. Often it’s too late to do anything for them; but we have to try, don’t we Billy? But the worst is people who shoot and miss – most of these in here are recovering from gunshot wounds. There’s something about a swan, Billy. I think it’s because they’re so beautiful, so perfect. People resent that. Perhaps it’s a kind of envy. Can’t think of any other reason why you’d want to shoot a swan, can you? Then of course there’s the young ones that can’t look after themselves just yet – maybe the parent birds died or deserted them – so I take them in, feed them up and send them on their way again. Feel I’ve got to do it for them, Billy. Every year there’s fewer of them – I know because I monitor their numbers. Hardly a swan on this river I don’t know about. It’s my life, Billy. May seem a funny thing to do but the swans on this river mean everything to me.’ He spoke with a quiet passion that immediately earned Billy’s respect.
By the time they left the hold, Billy knew he had found a friend and rejoiced at it. He climbed up onto the deck of the barge and followed Joe to where the fox lay curled up, half asleep. ‘He’ll be happy enough up here,’ said Billy. ‘Only, can I have him sleeping on my bed at night? He won’t do any harm, honest.’
‘’Course he can, Billy,’ said Joe, lighting his pipe. He looked from the boy to the fox and back again shaking his head in disbelief. ‘A couple of little foxes. Never had foxes on Noah’s Ark before. Took in a half-drowned badger once, and a hedgehog, but never a fox. And now I’ve got two of them. Two right little foxes.’
Billy and the fox slept all that morning whilst Joe went off on his bone-shaker of a bicycle to buy some food. Joe had lent Billy a pair of huge pyjamas that had to be rolled up at the wrists and ankles to accommodate him. They were heavy and tickly and smelt of pipe tobacco, but that did not trouble Billy – nothing did. Cocooned under a mound of blankets he fell at once into a deep and dreamless sleep.
They were woken some time later by a deep growling vibration that shook the entire barge before the engine coughed, spluttered and at last settled into a rhythmic chug.
It was that slow chug of a heartbeat that propelled the barge down-river at little more than walking pace, a heartbeat that missed a beat every now and again; and whenever it faltered Joe would coax the barge along as if she were a horse. ‘Come on. Giddy-up, there’s a good girl now. Downhill all the way now girl. Giddy-up now.’
The days on the barge were long and followed a regular routine. Every morning before daybreak Joe would shake him awake and beckon him up on deck, leaving the fox still curled up asleep on his bunk. ‘The dawn is the magical time of day,’ Joe often told him. ‘When you feel you can make things happen just by believing they will. Only your age I was when I learnt to play the mouth-organ and thought that maybe I could sweeten the birds in so that I could see them close to. And it never fails. Sometimes you get a big audience and sometimes just a few. To them it’s such a strange sound that they have to come and listen, and to do that they have to come close. And that’s my reward, to have them only a few feet away and to watch them watching me.’ And as Billy found out each morning it never did fail. The birds were reluctant to begin with. The moorhens would always approach first, but within minutes others would come gliding in from all directions through the still water towards the barge and hover around it like bees around honeysuckle. Either the light of dawn would break the spell or Joe would finally run out of breath and stop playing. Then, the concert over, they would drift away slowly and disperse as if it had never happened. Billy marvelled at it each time he witnessed it.
Then there were the sick swans to tend to. Every morning before they set off down-river, Joe would take Billy into the hold to feed them. Each cage had to be cleaned out and a bed of fresh straw laid down. As he worked alongside Joe, Billy longed to tell him of the swan he had saved on the canal, but he dared not for he knew if he once began he would have to tell him the whole story and he was not yet ready to risk that.
For most of the day the fox lay curled up in the sunshine in the bows of the barge and Billy would sit beside him, his legs dangling over the side waiting for the next lock to come into view, for it was at the locks that Billy really came into his own. Joe would steer the barge close enough to the bank for him to leap out onto the towpath. Then he would race on ahead and try to swing open the lock gates before Noah’s Ark arrived so that Joe could glide her into the lock without having to stop. The locks were Billy’s responsibility and he warmed to the task with each day that passed.
Each evening at dusk, when the barge was tied up and they had had their supper, Billy would take the fox for a long run out into the countryside. Chasing each other around the thistles in the meadows until Billy flopped to the ground to rest; but the fox would have none of it, tugging at his trousers until Billy had to get to his feet and the game would go on, and on. And finally, when both of them could run no longer, they would wrestle together on the ground, the fox only happy to end the game when he was standing over Billy, his tongue hanging down and panting in his triumph.
Joe sat on the barge smoking his pipe to keep the midges away and wondered at the two of them. The boy had talked of little else but the fox since the first day they had met, and he would talk about him not at all as if he were a pet, but as a friend and a best friend at that. As Joe watched he feared for the future, for he knew a fox would always be a fox.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ONE EVENING THE FOX DID NOT COME back to the barge after their romp in the grass. Billy searched in the dark for an hour, shining the torch out over the fields, scanning the night for the glinting eyes of a fox. But he found only the yellow eyes of sheep shining back at him, and never the glazed red of the fox. ‘Maybe he’ll be back by morning, Billy,’ said Joe. ‘Gone hunting, perhaps.’
‘He can’t hunt,’ said Billy. ‘He’s too young. He’ll starve out there on his own, I know he will.’
‘Then perhaps he’s out there learning, Billy. He has to learn to hunt if he’s ever going to live alone in the wild.’
‘But he’s not,’ Billy cried. ‘He’s goi
ng to stay with me, for always.’
‘Billy, old son,’ said Joe. ‘You know a fox is a wild animal. I don’t know how you got hold of him, but I bet you got him from the wild, and a fox will always go back to the wild in the end, Billy. You can’t keep a fox tame for ever.’
All that night Billy thought of what Joe had said. Until then it had simply never occurred to him that the fox might ever want to leave him, and when he woke in the early hours of the morning and found the fox asleep on the bunk beside him, he felt like shouting with joy and waking Joe just to tell him that his fox had come back, that he was right after all, that he would never go off and leave him. But he waited until breakfast and said it then. Joe lit his first pipe of the day and sighed. ‘Billy, old son, I’ve been looking after wild things all my life. To start with I wanted to possess every one of them, to collect them, to keep them by me so that I could look at them. You learn, old son, that you can’t do it, not if you want to do your best by them. This morning I’m going to release two of our swans – you know, the ones that had their legs tangled up and torn by the fishing line. I don’t want to see them go, but I’ve done all I can for them. Now it’s up to them. Maybe they’ll live – I hope so – and maybe they won’t; that’s not in my hands. Just because I helped them, Billy, they don’t belong to me. They’re wild, Billy. You told me yourself, remember? It’s where they belong, out there on the river. And the longer you cling on to your fox, old son, the harder it will be for him to turn wild again. The younger he goes, the more chance he has of surviving out there.’ Billy knew he was right, but could not bring himself to acknowledge it openly.
‘He’s my fox,’ he said, ‘and we’re together. He don’t want to run off, else why’s he come back?’
‘One day he may not, old son,’ said Joe, and left it at that.
Each evening now the fox would disappear earlier and come back later at night, once so late that Billy was out on deck at dawn listening to Joe playing his mouth-organ, when the fox came trotting back across the field and sat down at some distance from the barge to listen. He would rarely come now when he was called, and instead of curling up beside Billy in the bows of the barge he would pace the decks like a caged tiger. When he was with Billy he seemed no less fond of him, no less trusting, but Billy sensed the fox was becoming more and more distant, more and more interested in other things.