All the Sky

By Avalon Weston

A story for those of perhaps nine years and older

Too many foxes they said.
The Hunters were coming.
It was time for the Running.
The Foxlings must flee

Blackberry leads the escape of his band of urban Foxlings from London to a New World in deepest Devon. There is adventure, rescue and friendship. The cooperation of all the creatures of the city, the cats, the rats and the squirrels and even a parakeet is needed to get the young foxes away.
In the country they meet new friends, the deer, the hawks and finally some country cousins

• Language: English
• Publisher: Avalon Weston
• Release date: Oct 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310253324

Avalon Weston

Avalon WestonAvalon Weston was born in London, but brought up her four children in Wales, Bristol and Devon. After a life as a midwife and medical journalist in the UK and abroad she has begun to publish the fictional stories she has always written but, up to now, kept in the cupboard.Email: [e-mail]: avalonweston.wordpress.com

Book preview

PART ONE

A Crowded World

Chapter 1 Blackberry’s Story

Chapter 2 The very first Running

Chapter 3 To the Station

Chapter 4 Visitors to the Cemetery

Chapter 5 The Rescue

Chapter 6 What next?

Chapter 7 The Getaway

Chapter 8 The journey

PART TWO

A New World

Chapter 9 The home of the Navy

Chapter 10 Between Sea and Moor

Chapter 11 And then there were three

Chapter 12 On the High Tor.

Chapter 13 ‘Until the Mela’

After Words

The Creatures

Notes on the Creature Code and Foxtalk

ALL THE SKY

A fable for today

PART ONE

A Crowded World

Chapter One

Blackberry’s Story

The metal clanged as the iron gates were closed and the key turned in the lock. The clock on Highgate Hill chimed four. It was time for the two-legged keepers of the Cemetery to go home for their tea. Along the High Street the sound of the rush hour traffic was beginning to swell.

The fox stood on his four legs, threw his head back and barked.

He bounded up to the pink granite monument, much visited during the day by the two-leggeds. He took possession. It was his place now. He stood on the gravel at its base, beneath the craggy iron head of its owner and barked again.

He was Black, their leader. His tribe came out to hear him. There were big foxes and old foxes and young foxes, girl foxes and boy foxes, but no fox-cubs because it was now September and this year’s young were nearly grown.

Black could also see two four-footers who weren’t foxes. They had appeared and joined the gathering. One was a large tabby cat. Opposite her, on the other side of the group was a grey and white badger. He settled himself down on a sun warmed gravestone, to listen.

It was a clear, dry evening. The sun was still out. The sky around it was gold and orange. High above the sun, were dark greyish purple clouds. The scrawny city trees in this, the foxes’ private kingdom, were beginning to lose their leaves.

There was hustling and snuffling and a rustling and tumbling and gentle snarling as all the foxes got settled in the fading light to hear the Talking.

High on his mound, Black watched Lucy, his mate’s mother and his cubs’ grandmother telling stories to the young foxes. He knew the stories. They were the stories of the tribe. They had to be passed on before the Running. They told of the old grandfathers and grandmothers and how they, so long ago, had reached this corner of city. Tonight she was telling the newest story of all, the story of Blackberry.

Black, the leader, was named because he was almost that, black. He was in fact a very dark brown. He had been the head of this band of urban foxes for three years. His mate Rubia was a vivid red with black feet and ears. This year, though three of their cubs were red like her, the fourth of the litter, a little dog fox, was completely black.

Soon they called him Blackberry. He got the name because he was so clever at picking the fruit and eating them without getting prickles in his pads or his coat. He taught the skill to the rest of the year’s cubs, so now it was a common sight, if a human strayed into the Cemetery after the gate was shut, to see several young foxes on their hind legs delicately picking blackberries with their teeth and eating them.

The older foxes didn’t entirely approve. They had never eaten such berries, but even they could see that this year’s cubs were particularly strong and healthy.

Black knew that this wasn’t the story that Lucy was telling the foxlings. She was telling the tale of the night that Blackberry was lost and found and how the New Friends had been made.

‘The night you were born,’said Lucy, looking at the young black foxling, sitting in the middle of his red relations, ‘there were shooting stars in the sky.’

It was indeed true that there had been a firework display on Hampstead Heath that Easter.

‘When we saw you and watched the shooting stars we understood you were special, but you were never easy to rear. You grew too quick, and left the den too soon and too often. None of us could see you properly in the dark.

One night, we couldn’t find you. Your father had just returned with a whole meat pie for you cubs, but you, Blackberry weren’t there.

We searched. Everyone searched. Hours later we saw Sister Cat dragging something that was too big to be one of her kittens. Your father challenged her. She showed him. She’d seen you on the road. You were black and the road was black, and you weren’t as fast as a cat. She said the poor driver-lady couldn’t really be blamed. She’d put the little body under a tree beside the main road and our Sister Tabby went to look. She licked you hard and you woke up so she picked you up like one of her kittens. You were much larger than a kitten though, so she half carried and half dragged you back through the fence until she met your father.

You lay in the den for days crying and calling with your leg broken and nasty things crawling over it. One day Brother Badger came down the tunnel to look at you. He said you made too much noise. He licked your leg. Then he bit off the bad bit, turned round, made water over the stump and went back to his sett. From that day you got better. So now,’ she finished, ‘Foxes from the Cemetery will always have respect for our neighbour Brother Badger and never ever take even a root from his store in the sett. Likewise Sister Cat is our friend and her kitten cubs are our cousins and never our supper.’

Lucy looked up at him and Black knew it was his turn to speak.

‘Foxes,’ he said, ‘It is time for the Running. We must decide who is to go and who is to stay.’

Everyone knew that this year there was a problem with the Running. Rubia Blackberry’s mother spoke first.

‘He must stay. He can’t do the Running as he is. He must stay with me. He can help with next year’s cubs instead of his sister.’

The Tabby Cat spoke.

‘Blackberry can’t stay. We all know he can’t. If someone sees him they will put him in a cage, and if they don’t see him he will end up dead under another machine.’

Badger spoke too.

‘He has to start a new tribe. It is his destiny. He must go to the moors and hills or maybe the forest, among the big trees where my ancestors came from. But he must go.’

There was chittering and chattering amongst the older foxes as they argued. Nobody expected Blackberry to speak. It wasn’t the place of a young one, with so little experience to have an opinion, but he stood up on his three legs.

‘I am doing the Running,’ he said. ‘I have a plan.’

Chapter Two

The Very First Running

The foxes knew the Running was important but why it was important was forgotten by many.

The older foxes remembered the Hunger. They knew it happened when too many foxes needed food. Once there had been years when there had been no Running. The leader hadn’t said go and the young wanted to stay where they knew and were known.

The search for food had led them to new places, dangerous places, the places where the two-leggeds lived. There had been open glass doors on a summer evening. A young fox ventured in, and up the stairs. He had grabbed with his teeth the pink meat he had seen sticking out between the wooden bars. He hadn’t realised it was the arm of a two-legged’s cub.

They had been hunted hard after that. There had been no need for a Running for many seasons. The tribe had become very small. Those few remaining foxes had eventually retreated from the parks and the gardens of the north of the city to the strange wild place where they now lived.

Black’s father Rosso had found the Cemetery. One day, when being chased through the park by boys with sticks, he had slipped through a gap in the tall iron railings. Then he paused and turned and watched the boys banging their sticks angrily on those railings. As he watched them he realised that they would not follow him through the iron barrier. He returned every day for nearly a week to this newly found wild place. He sat in one of the little stone houses and watched the comings and goings. He came to understand what went on in this green corner of the city surrounded by its iron fence. After days of watching and nights of exploration he had also come to understand about the big boxes. His nose told him what was in them. He knew that to disturb them would bring as much trouble as had that first biting of the human cub.

When he returned to his tribe Rosso called them all together. Most were now living in gardens and under sheds. They gathered their food from the dustbins in the surrounding streets of black and white suburban villas. No one felt safe. The family who lived under the Scout Hut had recently been expelled by men with sticks and cages and gas. Some of the foxes made homeless had escaped and moved in with an aunt’s family under another shed nearby. But everyone knew that the men could come back.

Black’s father Rosso collected his tribe in the only space left, where they could gather unseen. It was a ragged copse in the corner of a car park, behind the building where the two-leggeds came to change their library books. After dark it was closed and so quiet and empty.

Rosso told them what he’d seen. He told them of the new place he had found where few two-leggeds came and how those that