Vegans are brave – and they have a point

It was a clear and icy night at home in Derbyshire last week. I love these times and, before bed, stepped outside to stand on the lawn in the moonless pitch-black and take it in. All at once the dark was pierced with an awful scream. I was not greatly alarmed — the rural night is full of strange noises — but stood there, puzzling out what it might be.

The scream, almost human, was repeated, and its provenance seemed to be moving from one side to the other of the field adjacent to ours. Could it be a fox? Vixens do make some blood-curdling cries during the mating season but does that start as early as January? Or might it be a fox’s victim — a hare or rabbit, perhaps, fighting back as the poor creature was carried off — or even an owl’s prey? Might it be the call of some kind of night-bird? But this was a call I’d never heard from anything with feathers.