The Wi(y)ld Hunt

A Willerby story.

It was a cold February afternoon, but outside the Green Man the snowdrops were in bloom and the green stalks of new daffodils around them promised spring.

Inside, at a two-hundred-year-old table in the snug, Mauve, David, Dan and Sally were sitting by a bright fire burning cheerfully in the open slate hearth.

“I don’t care what they say. It aint tradition anymore,” said Mauve, arms folded and lips thin, “It’s just toffs living it up at our expense and I’m sick of it. They don’t even eat half of what they hunt.”

“And worse every year,” David said, frowning and nodding.

“The noise and the damage,” said Mauve, putting down her gin and tonic on table, “it’s beyond a joke.”

“Queen Moggie agrees,” said David, putting down his pint and turning to Dan and Sally, “The goblins are as sick of it as we are. And the dwarves too. It’s time we put a stop to it. Will you help?”

Dan looked at his wife, shrugged and then back at David and Mauve.

“I think we’d like to hear more about it,” he said, “We’ve never even heard of it let alone seen one.”

“They come out of the shortcuts and they call it the Wyld Hunt,” said Mauve, drawing out the y, “but don’t either of you say it that way. It’s just the Hunt or if you must, the Wild Hunt said properly without the affected accent.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Dan said. “Devils and demons chasing game through the forests with souls of the dead, hounds, King Arthur that sort of thing.”

“Very Willerby,” Sally said.

“King Arthur,” Mauve scoffed, “don’t ever mention that to them. They’d love that you know- they’d say he was one of them all along – make up a song about him, give him shining eyes and a crown of silver flowers and have one of ‘em dress up as him in armour leading ‘em all. But it’s nothing of the sort, nor devils or ghosts or whatever else they’d have you believe.”

“Who are they?” Dan asked.

“They call themselves the High People,” said David, “or just the High. They say they were the first here long before anyone else and that gives them certain rights. Whether they were here first or not, they act like they own the place even though they only ever come for the hunt these days – pouring out of the shortcuts in their silks and satins after the wretched fairyland game they drive here.”

“They scooped up Janice a couple of years back,” said Mauve. “Ha Ha. A huge joke to them that was – dressing her up in that green frock – ‘not green emerald’ she says now in that dreamy way of hers - getting her drunk on mead. Now she’s still mooning about the wood at all hours hoping they’ll come back and make her a queen like they promised. Failed her A Levels because of it. She’s not been the same since.”

And last time they were here, around this time last year,” David said, “they ran into a gang of dwarves on the way back home from the mine, charmed them to sleep and then spell-wove their beards together so tightly they had to be cut off.”

“The goblins get it worst of all,” said Mauve, “they order ‘em about, tell ‘em to fetch and carry things, knock ‘em over if they say no, are too slow and sometimes just for fun. And when they’re gone, we have to clean up – the damage they do to the trees, the rubbish they leave behind and all the dead game they just leave to rot.”

“Know what they said when I complained about that?” David asked. “That the meat was a present to us ‘for our trouble’ and we should be grateful!”

“Never head of Morrisons then,” said Dan.

“Morrisons!”, said Mauve. “You’d never catch them there – even Waitrose wouldn’t be good enough for them - they’d be all private shopping at Harrods and Fortnum’s if they lived in this world. In theirs – wherever that is – it’ll all be fine wine and stuffed swan’s tongues delivered by underlings to their gilded palaces.”

“I’m sorry and I know I’m probably not supposed to think this,” said Sally, “but they sound sort of fun.”

“Well yes,” Mauve nodded, “they are that. Lots of fun. Like a popular school bully is fun – making you feel special when you’re with them, makes you a bully yourself then dropping you like a stone as soon as something more interesting comes along, leaving you ashamed about all you broke while you were trying to impress them. That sort of fun.”

“Oh,” Sally said, feeling she might have got it, remembering a time when she’d been at high school and a popular girl in the year above befriended her and charmed her into revealing her best friend’s secrets, and how her best friend found out and how things had never been the same between them after that.

“The thing to get,” said Mauve, “is they just aint serious or responsible. To them everything’s such a lark regardless of who they hurt or the state they leave things in when they’re gone. I don’t know about bad – that’s hard to say – but they are arrogant, thoughtless and silly.”

“And they won’t stop on their own,” David said, “so we have to stop them, or it’ll carry on forever.”

Sally nodded thoughtfully. “OK, but how do we stop them? They sound pretty powerful.”

“Glad you asked,” David told her, looking at Mauve, “We got the start of a plan. We been working on it years on and off, but we needed more than us two to make it work.” He paused to look at Dan and Sally. “We decided now we got you, it might be time.”

He reached into his rucksack below the table. He pulled out a sheaf of paper bound together with a bulldog clip.

“Listen carefully – we’ll all have a job to do if this is going to work and we’ll only get one chance. The one thing we got going for us is they don’t expect folks like us to stand up to them – they think we’re cattle. If they catch on it’ll be over before it’s even started.”

Dan and Sally lent forward.

“And this will be very important,” said David, reaching into his bag again and taking out a battered brass horn. “This will be my job. Been practising.”

“Oh, my yes,” said Mauve, rolling her eyes. “Goodness, how he’s been practising. Relentlessly practising.”

“You aint got time to learn,” said David, ignorng her, “but don’t you worry I got you other stuff that will do just as well.”

…

There was no sign of the Hunt for a week and then it was two and getting so late in the year David and Mauve wondered whether for the first time in living memory it might not come at all.

But then on Saturday night, just as dusk fell, the sound of a horn from the shortcuts and then a moment later the cry of many hounds.

A moment later, in their lounge where they were sitting by the fire, Sammy at his grandparents, enjoying a rare childfree night, both Dan and Sally’s phones buzzed as David posted into the “Willerby Business” WhatsApp group, “they here.”

They raced out onto the street, pulling on their coats and grabbing a supermarket bag for life as they went.

They’d only just got there when the first of the panicked beasts rushed past the house – a pair of huge boar dripping saliva from their open mouths, panting steam as they careered down the street.

There was a loud splintering crash as the bigger of the two smashed into the old telephone box that now housed the village defibrillator, denting the metal and shattering the panes of glass in the door.

It screamed and then, bleeding, ran on.

“Quick!” Sally called to Dan, as she reached into the bag and thrust one of the two airhorns inside to him, “Get ready!”

“What is that?”, said Dan as he looked up, “is it a.. cow?”

It was – as Dan was to learn later from Wikipedia – an aurochs bull of a type last seen – in this world at least - in a 1600s Polish forest.

It had a long ash wood arrow stuck in its shoulder and was roaring and bellowing its pain, anger and fear as it thundered down the road tossing its long forward swept horns in the air.

Dan stepped forward; Sally pulled him back.

“Don’t be a tool,” she said, “stay to the side – being run into by that thing would be like being hit by a train. 3-2-1 – now!”

They waited for it to pass, waited a beat more until they heard the racket of pursuing horses and the jubilant cries of those riding them and then together, they sounded their horns.

David hadn’t scrimped – the horns he’d ordered off the internet were expensive, made to get the attention of thousands of teenagers at American high school sporting meets and pep rallies.

The howl drowned out the thunder of the aurochs, the hooves and everything else.

As it died away Mauve’s old Toyota Hilux pick up, horn blaring and flashing its lights, rushed up the road then skidded to a stop to block it.

Then –in the full beam of the pick up’s headlights – Dan and Sally got their first look at the High.

They were surrounded by a pack of twenty or more doglike things with pointed heads, thin and sleek as greyhounds, their movements somehow more feline than canine as they weaved around and between the legs of the giant deer they rode.

There were four– two male, two female, all tall, pale and beautiful.

Their clothes were tattered ribbons of silk that barely covered their skin, obviously once expensive but carelessly worn as if that didn’t matter to them.

It would be easy not to care about clothes, thought Sally as she studied them, if you looked like they did.

The four High on their deer fanned out into a line opposite Mauve’s truck.

One of the women, a delicate tiara of finely woven silver holding back her flow of golden hair, spoke first.

“You are loud and ugly,” she said, in a strange and delightful accent pregnant with music, “and you interrupt our sport.”

“That was the plan,” called Mauve, as she stepped out of the pick-up to stand beside it. “We decided the game’s up. Go home.”

“On whose authority?”, said one of the men. “This is our forest, and in our forest, we hunt where we choose. Be glad we let you live in it.”

“Might once have been true,” Mauve replied. “But it hasn’t been that for a long time now. You’re out of date. This is our home not your playground and we’re giving you notice. Go home. We’re tired of you.”

“What if,” the first woman said, gracefully raising her longbow, as she reached around her back to fetch a black-fledged arrow from a quiver, “we made you our quarry today?”

“I don’t think you’re allowed to do that”, said Mauve, calmly.

The second of the High men answered her.

“As you are not allowed to interfere with our hunt. It seems all the laws are changing.”

Mauve nodded thoughtfully. Then she reached into her Toyota and took out her shotgun.

“Know what this is?”

All four of the High leant forwards over the necks of their deer, framing their upright bodies between the antlers of the deer.

“Curious, aren’t you?”, Mauve said. “It’s called a shotgun. You wouldn’t like it. It’s not neat or pretty like a bow - don’t make one hole – it sprays lead. This one’s called double-barrelled – means I got two shots. Bang, bang. One, two. Mess you up this would – a nasty, ugly ripping. Might kill you – might not but you might prefer death to what you’d look like forever if I fired it.”

The last of the High to speak – clapped her hands and shook her head, making her ringlets dance around her shoulders.

“All so silly”, she said, “such a fuss over so little. End this fight – you, younger ones, leave this bitter old peasant and come with us – you can both ride with me if you please. We’ll show you how to feel the moon and the stars, teach you the songs that make you Friends of the High, eat raw life warm tongue while we wait for the prime cuts to roast – such fun, such fun!”

Dan and Sally both shook their heads.

“Then you bore me,” The High said, turning to the others, “let’s waste no more time – we can ride round her.”

She kicked her heels, and her deer stepped forward.

Mauve raised her gun, then nodded at Dan and Sally and they sounded their horns again in one long, loud blast.

The four High put their hands to their ears as their mounts skittered beneath them.

Then – as the sound of the horns ended – David’s bugle sounded out from down the road, three long calls and then three short ones.

The hounds wheeled and ran towards it.

“Trickery!”, shouted the first of the High.

“Look to the hounds!”, shouted another, bringing his deer round and setting off in pursuit.

“In the car!” shouted Mauve to Dan and Sally and a moment later, flashing headlights, car horn and airhorns blaring, they were pursuing the four High down Main Street, Willerby’s only paved road to the entrance to one of the shortcuts, where David was waiting with a shotgun of his own cocked and levelled.

“I’ve sent your dogs back where they belong,” he said. “Easy enough when you know the notes. The fun’s all over. Time to go home.”

One of them raised an arm and tried to say something, but Mauve, Dan and Sally drowned him out.

Then, slowly, David and Mauve advanced on them with their guns at their shoulders, driving them back into the shortcut and out of Willerby as they shouted insults and threats nobody could hear.

…

“They won’t come back,” said David the following Sunday as they sat in the snug of the Green Man, celebrating with chicken biryani and pints. “They got lots of other places to hunt in and they’re bullies – here’ll seem too hard to be worth the bother.”

“Would you really have shot them?” Asked Sally.

Mauve shook her head and laughed. “No,” she said. “Neither of them guns were even loaded – there’d have been hell to pay if we’d shot anyone. I might have been able to cope with the bollocking, but the paperwork – I couldn’t have been doing with it with my eyes as they are these days. But they wouldn’t have shot us either – it was a game of chicken, and they lost it. Can’t wait to tell Queen Moggie about it – she’ll die laughing and owe us a favour too.”

“What are we going to do about the boar and the cow thing?” Dan said.

“We’ll just leave the poor beasts be,” said David. “This is Willerby – we live happily with much worse, don’t we?”