THE WILD INSIDE

I have nearly completed a novella, WILD WAYS which is about a woman, a storyteller, who had become sanitized living in the city. With her partner, Jack and their small daughter, Bel, she returns to the small, stone cottage of her dreams.  Here they live happily for three years.  She gets back in touch with her wildness within and recovers her powers of story telling which disappeared when she became over-domesticated in the city.  Here is a short extract about a night she spends with a vixen...



Something woke me in the dead of night.  I sat up.  A scent of musk: glandular, strangely sensual,

drifting through the open window.   And when I looked, she was there, standing in a pool of

moonlight.  Her amber eyes met mine awakening something inside me.



Outside, the vixen pointed her muzzle into the air.  Adrenalin flooded my body.  She spun in a circle,

her pelt catching spears of moonlight, glanced haughtily over her shoulder barking, as if to say:

‘Follow me!’

So, I did.



The morning ghosted in green as we trotted between oak trees following a track long forgotten.  A

faint line through tall grass, a desire path, another way from here to there.   A place of vibrating

energy, half-forgotten things, other-dimensional.  I stopped to quench my thirst at the stream.



Foraging for insects and earthworms, sniffing the air: bark, sap, mulch.  My nose twitched.  My ears

pricked.  The fur lifted along my spine.  As I dropped to my haunches, leapt a long leap.  A flurry of

leaf litter.  The excitement and fear a tangible taste on my tongue.  A squeal as I bit down hard on

the rabbit’s neck, twisting it this way and that, slurping hot blood.  A savage snapping.  I tore its head

clean off, cracked its skull with my molars.  Gorging richly on its brain, slashing its chest, tearing the

soft belly, spilling blubbery ropes of purple and blue, scarlet too.  I gobbled it all up, then delicately

licked myself clean.



Satiated, I curled under the roots of an oak tree, smelling acorns and leaves, the malty earth.  A

clean, cold calm penetrated my bones.  As I felt a presence far bigger than me, one which endured in

my memory.  I blinked.  The vixen on her paws, flicked her brush.   In a flash she was off.   Flickers of rust-red ignited by cloud breaks.  And I watched her, until she disappeared deep into the forest like a mystery.