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or leg whenever he got the chance, resorted to taunts. ‘Catch me if you can, Fox. Whoops! Missed me! Where am I now? No, not there. Here! Clumsy fox!’
    The bigger animal was panting heavily and beginning to look confused. Then Lean Vixen rushed up and the scales were tilted. The two foxes together were too much for the athletic otter. If he avoided one’s attack, he stepped right into the other’s. He received a succession of deep bites and suddenly wilted. The Wood was quiet. The onlookers held their breath, expecting a kill. The foxes lunged on both sides. Smooth Otter rolled over, bleeding from a dozen gashes.
    ‘He’s done for,’ Lean Vixen panted. ‘Leave him.’
    Lean Fox stepped back and looked at the stricken animal. His sides heaved from his exertions.
    ‘D-death, death of an otter!’ shrilled Nervous Squirrel.
    The cry was taken up by a host of other small animalsand the news spread through the Wood like wild-fire. Other creatures came running; badgers, weasels, rabbits, hedgehogs. Elsewhere the foxes heard the cry and responded. Their blood was up. Four other otters were cornered in the Wood and pulled down by their long-suffering adversaries. Another was caught and savaged as she raced for safety to the stream. Stout Fox took no part in the killing. He restricted himself to running along the Wood’s perimeter and driving others on who were trying to escape. The otters were vanquished. Those who survived abandoned their holts and ran for their lives, believing the foxes would massacre them all if they stayed.
    By dawn not a single otter was left in Farthing Wood.
    The foxes came together in the centre of the Wood, grimly satisfied with their work. They were not yet aware that the surviving otters had disappeared for good and indeed were at that moment still running across country under cover of darkness.
    ‘It had to be done’, Lean Vixen spoke for all of her kind. She panted deeply. Many of the foxes still simmered from the heat of battle. They had not escaped unscathed. The otters’ sharp teeth and claws had left their mark. Blood lust still glinted in some eyes. The foxes were ready for more killing if any creature dared to cross them. For the moment none did and, gradually, their fighting ardour cooled.
    ‘The Wood’s ours again,’ Stout Fox said. ‘But surely we could have achieved that without such extreme savagery?’
    The animals returned to their own territories, certain that no otter would ever presume to set foot in them again. They couldn’t have known that theiraction would mean that, in the long run, their lives would change for ever.

The stoats and weasels were astir soon after the foxes’ attack. Sly Stoat found Smooth Otter’s carcass and sniffed at it inquisitively.
    ‘Your arrogance put paid to you,’ he murmured to the dead animal. ‘You wouldn’t be told. What’s your so-called superiority worth now?’ He laughed a stoat laugh. ‘A feast for the worms, that’s all.’ He trotted away, his movements brisker than for a long while.
    Quick Weasel had attracted a mate and was oblivious of anything that happened around her. The male weasel was dark and quicker even than she: lightning-fast. He circled her and chased her and they ran through the flower carpet, tumbling and sparring like two kittens. In places the ground was tainted with blood. Where the weasels rolled it flecked their glossy coats with dark spots. They groomed themselves and continued their courtship, forgetful and careless of others’ dramas. Life and its continuation was all that mattered to them.
    In the badgers’ ancient set Kindly Badger spoke to his son. ‘The foxes reacted as I feared,’ he said. ‘The otters were too clever for them and they resented it.’He pressed down some fresh bedding and lay on it. ‘We had no part in it and yet.…’
    ‘Yet what, Father?’
    ‘And yet we are part of it,’ Kindly Badger seemed to contradict himself. ‘We’re part of Farthing Wood, just as they