Nature Book Reader June 2020 - Flipbook - Page 58
A Nature Book Reader
MELISSA HARRISON
Melissa Harrison is the author of ‘Rain: Four Walks in English Weather’
and the novels ‘Clay’, ‘At Hawthorn Time’ and ‘All Among the Barley’, and is
the host of the podcast The Stubborn Light of Things. She has been writing
regularly for Caught by the River since 2012.
A Black Fox Running
by Brian Carter
When I was a child we
spent our holidays on
Dartmoor. There were six
of us kids, and sometimes
friends came too; we rented
an old stone schoolhouse
in a tiny hamlet on the
flank of a steep, wooded
valley, collected warm,
unpasteurised milk from
the farm opposite in the
mornings, and spent the
days climbing tors, paddling
in the Dart and picnicking
on the high moor.
Devon writer Brian
Carter’s A Black Fox Running
came out in 1981, when
I was six. My mum read
it to me a couple of years
later, and I have re-read it
countless times since. Set
on Dartmoor, I know the
58
villages, tors, farms and rivers
it describes: they are my
sacred territory, the magical
land of my childhood, my
blue remembered hills.
Set in the 1940s, it takes
for its subject the life of a
dark-furred Dartmoor fox
and his battle against a local
poacher, Scoble, and his mad
lurcher. It’s a classic work of
animal anthropomorphism,
and those irritated by talking
wild creatures should
probably look away now.
But Brian Carter was a
naturalist of rare abilities,
and a writer of extraordinary
power; there is nothing twee
about this book. Neither is
it sentimental; for one thing,
Carter (and the foxes he so
loves) believe in the hunt as
