Walking with Wulfgar

Every summer, G and I hike and camp across Dartmoor. This year, we walked between Buckfastleigh and Ivybridge, crossing the River Avon and Wella Brook before climbing high on the moor to pitch for the night and descend the next morning along the old Redlake Tramway.

This is a landscape worked by humans, a place of dams and cairns and clay pits. But when we reached the high point of the walk near Brown Heath, we could see, laid out before us to the north, the territory of another animal: Wulfgar the black fox.

Wulfgar is the hero of Black Fox Running, Brian Carter’s evocative story of this dark-furred creature and his nemesis, Scoble the trapper, in the seasons leading up to the pitiless winter of 1947. Carter’s description of Dartmoor is exquisite, rich in perfectly weighted metaphors and similes:

The hills were hardening in sunlight and all down the valley the grass glinted. The morning air was keen but the purity of light meant real spring. By the powder mill the fields were as bright and green as a fox's eye.

G and I were squeezing our trip into the last of summer, the final two free days of the school holidays. And on the evening of our first day, change was already on the wind that tumbled in from the distant sea and threatened heavy rain in the morning. It looked as though we would go to sleep in summer and wake up in autumn.