Landed (7 page)

Everything was food for something else, or served a purpose of some kind. Few species self-sufficient, or purely parasitic.

He wore an old pair of leather gloves, protection from the spiny pricks. The pace of the work determined by the slow pull, it could not be hurried, immensely satisfying. By the time he'd cleared the lowest field and looked up, the moon, three-quarters full, shone on silver hills. The sun had long since gone down, leaving a fringe of burnt orange still in the western sky.

As he walked back around the flank of the hill, Owen entered the wood that covered the lower, steep slope on that side, down to the creek by The Graig. Squat twisting stunted pillars of oak growing on the steep bank; the air some degrees cooler under and amongst their branches. The phrase ‘Open-air Mass' came to him: it suggested an image of worship in a bare field; better in a wood, Owen thought. The atmosphere here had the same quality as the church in Welshpool, of something he couldn't quite identify. Of sanctity? No. Of quietness, contemplation? What was it? There was a feeling of expectation within him, obscure and real as an illness coming. It was the sense of something about to happen, about to materialise. He sat on the ground, leaned back against a tree trunk. What time was it? After nine, for sure. Grandma would have kept his dinner in the Rayburn. Maybe nearer to ten.

Owen's breathing slowed. There were sounds in the silent night but all, at first, indistinct. Faraway rustles in undergrowth, a murmur in the air, some vague thing's breath; a high-pitched shriek in the distance, out at the edge of his field of hearing.

Amazing how much moonlight seeped into the wood: he
was in a grey glade, tinged with a mercury glow. Then it happened. He felt his skin bristle, the whole surface of his skin was suddenly switched on. Alert. Not knowing why. And then a creature lumbered past him, big as one of his grandfather's dogs but more bulky, padding within inches of him, then pausing, sniffing the air, moving on a little more quickly, while Owen sat there, his heart thumped to a halt.

The creature moved on and away, out of sight. A blobby, sidling beast from deep in human dreams. A creeping thing from Owen's unconscious, slipping into silver visibility for a moment. No. A nocturnal animal, he told himself, that's all. What on earth was it? A badger.

Owen stumbled back to the cottage, certain of two things: he would investigate further, and make no mention of the matter to his grandfather.

 

Thirteen years old. The boy's voice had changed: like honey over sand. He used it sparely. Tall as his mother, he wouldn't grow much more. His father had gone for good the previous autumn and it was as if other men knew this was the cruel clean final severance; as if his territory were no longer marked, they closed in on his woman. Men came to call. Some were strangers, others Owen knew, vaguely. They'd give him things. A penknife. A fifty-pence coin. One man, with a permanent kink of a smile at one side of his mouth and jet-black eyes, took Owen to the football in Shrewsbury. His mother was feckless, sweet. Accepted her husband was gone, and let go. She seemed to her son to do nothing to discourage or encourage the men, was available, that was enough and they knew. He headed for the hill when he could.

 

The badgers' sett Owen found the next day, Sunday, further down the slope, deeper into the steep wood. The half-dozen
holes were larger than rabbit burrows, and so were the spoil heaps below each one, of sandy soil excavated by the diggers. Stones too big to have been dug out by rabbits amongst it. He studied the ground and found footprints, and coarse hairs trodden into the soil. In the evening he ate supper with his grandparents then said he felt like a wander, walked up the track till out of sight then cut back over the shoulder of the hill to the wood, just in case his grandfather was not viewing TV but having a smoke outside.

The boy sat downwind and watched the entrances to the sett, and saw the animals emerge from their burrows. It seemed to be a colony of six adults and three large cubs. He saw no discernible difference between male and female; the cubs stayed close to one adult, presumably their mother, even if they no longer suckled from her. The animals came up out of the ground and the adults directly set off, in various directions, along well-worn paths.

 

Back in Welshpool Owen bought a camouflage jacket from the army surplus store and paid a visit to the small town library he'd not been to in years. He hunted along the shelves, found natural history books, but not what he wanted. Kept browsing. Eventually one of the two women at the desk asked what he was looking for.

‘Badgers,' Owen said, shy eyes cast down.

‘You want a book about badgers? Let's see what's available and order one, shall we?'

It came a week later – newly published, Owen this copy's first reader – and the boy stared at the pages and soaked up their contents like a sponge, to his mother's amazed witness: this was something new. Owen told his mother that badgers were close relatives to weasels, polecats, mink, martens, sable,
otter. Omnivores, he said. ‘They'll eat mice, rats, moles, shrews, hedgehogs and rabbits,' he recited in his voice of grit and oil. ‘All kinds of insects. Daddy-long-legs. Beetles. They'll eat frogs, toads, snails and slugs. In the autumn there's blackberries, strawberries. Fallen apples, pears. But you know what their favourite food is, Ma?'

‘I don't.'

Owen scrunched up his face, an expression of delighted disgust. ‘Worms.'

 

He couldn't wait to get out, every weekend, and his grandfather was glad of him, the old man's right hip hurting now, bone grating bone. Inside his flesh, under his skin, you couldn't get at it. The boy's young wiry legs scampered up on to the tops, checking the sheep. His grandfather considering a quad bike. He had a catalogue and chewed through it, full of resentment. Went on the waiting list for a hip replacement operation.

Owen's grandparents gave him a little money for the chores he did; he resolved to save it all up for a pair of binoculars. Aimed to have them by Christmas.

With the summer holidays Owen was out there the whole time, a young farmhand. After an early dinner with his grandparents he went off, always up the track and skirting around to the wood, the pattern set. The badgers spent almost all night foraging for food and Owen followed them as and when he could, taking care to keep beneath the breeze: badgers lacked the good eyesight of foxes, but their sense of smell was many hundreds of times keener than humans'.

Owen watched one pad across pasture with its nose to the ground, sniffing for worms, whipping them up quickly, snapping the whole worm into its mouth. Worms were full of water,
and gave badgers all the liquid they needed if they caught the number they required: two hundred in a night.

It was a damp July, and continued into August, food plentiful, and the badgers returned to the sett. The cubs were almost as large as the adults now: one chased a fox off. Owen saw them grooming each other, and sometimes sharing food brought back, members of the group jostling each other like comical rugby players, barging one another out of the way with their ample flanks. He began to perceive the pecking order, at least those at the top and bottom. One slunk around in the background; if he or she came close to shared food any one of the others would turn on it, bite it if it didn't scarper fast enough. The clearly dominant boar sprayed his scent around the sett, and elsewhere on his territory, and even on the other badgers in his colony. Owen could smell its musky aroma, milder and more pleasant than his grandfather's pungent ferrets.

Even as the hidden creatures and their habits became familiar to the boy, there remained something uncanny in the observation. He assumed it would be the same with any animal; allowed a glimpse into one of the infinite workings of God's creation.

At first the boy overdid it, stayed out too late, engrossed, crawled into the cottage in the early hours. Up unsparingly early the next morning, he was soon exhausted; some nights he stayed in, yawned, crawled to bed first. At least his grandparents had no curiosity, didn't bother him with questions: where was he going, where had he been; whether he did or didn't want to watch television with them before turning in seemed no concern of theirs.

Then one evening at dinner, ‘By the way, lad,' his grandfather said. ‘Been meaning to say. See a brock on your rambles, let me know.'

Brock. Another name for a badger, Owen knew. Was the old man aware of how he spent his evenings?

‘Terrier man I owe a favour to,' he said.

Owen nodded. No more was said. But then a couple of nights later, as they ate in silence, Grandpa suddenly spoke. ‘Be no use, see.'

‘What's that, Gwyn?' Grandma asked.

‘Brocks,' the old man said. ‘Even afore they spread TB to cattle. Do no good, do they?' He slurped half a mouthful of tea, and swallowed. ‘Cull 'em. Used to gas. Trap and shoot now.'

Owen understood it was he whom Grandpa was addressing.

‘Terrier man always happy to nab a badger. Sells them all over.'

Owen asked why.

‘Baiting,' his grandfather said. ‘Good fighters, see, stand their ground. No braver animal.'

‘But baiting's against the law,' Owen said, betraying his interest.

The old man nodded. ‘Been illegal hundred and fifty year. Doesn't mean it don't happen, see.'

Owen envisioned a scene of men setting their slathering dogs to fight a badger, a crowd of baying punters waving banknotes, his grandfather among them. As if reading his mind, the old man said, ‘Won't catch me going to one a they.'

Owen's relief made him blink, slowly, but his grandfather continued, ‘How d'you know it's not fixed?' He grinned at his food, the expression so rare it was both radiant and macabre. Shaking his head. ‘Not Gwyn Ithell. Oh no. Won't catch him out.'

 

That year's lambs were weaned in August, turned onto grass on the low fields left after hay and silage crops had been taken.
Owen helped his grandmother in her garden, dead-heading roses, planting the bulbs of autumn-flowering plants, cutting back the straggly growth on pansies and violas. Unlike his grandfather, who seemed to think advice freely given to the boy was unearned, Grandma passed on all she knew and more.

 

One night Owen was watching the sett. Most of the badgers had returned with food and were eating, and two of them, he realised, were in communication with each other. It was hard to tell at first in what way: they drew close then apart, snuffled and growled. It could be playful, or amorous, but gradually the volume and agitation of their movement increased, an ill-will between them became apparent. They whickered at each other, moving around now at a wary distance, as if anticipating the other's attack. And then suddenly, as if at some prearranged signal, they hurled themselves forward and tried furiously each to bite the other's tail, within a moment were wheeling around in a crazy rotating dance. They didn't stay in one place but rather ploughed across the ground like a spinning top or gyroscope, oblivious to undergrowth or anything else in their way.

The fighting badgers went away from the sett, disappearing into the darkness of the wood, but Owen could hear them, their growls giving way to awful ominous screams. Then they were back, one clearly in retreat. It scuttled into one of the entrances, closely pursued by the other. For a while Owen heard the fracas continue, deep rumbles of anger underground.

Eventually there was silence. The violence had sucked all the boy's attention towards it. He looked around him. The other badgers were feeding, unperturbed.

 

Owen had long since made his last visit to the Catholic church in Welshpool, soon after his confirmation. His mother had taken
him, in those early years, to gain his lifetime's membership rather than for her own sake. He became an altar boy. She stopped going, and after some time so did he. If there was holiness in the world, the boy found it more easily in the wild than inside a building, between the words of a liturgy.

Sunday mornings Owen's grandmother went to church early, down in the village. Upon her return she set her shoulder to the great meal of the week, roast beef or pork or chicken with vegetables, Yorkshire puddings, gravy, food the three of them tucked into like the starving or condemned. Afterwards they would sit stretched out on sofa and chairs, snoozing, immobilised.

This Sunday the boy's mother joined them. There were no buses; she must have been given a lift. One of the men, Owen guessed, dropped her at the bottom of the lane; would be sitting in some pub now, be back there to meet her later. The two women spoke, adult inanities, flowers looking lovely, the lack of rain.

Grandpa spoke. ‘I seen a badger once, stranded by the rains, swim across the River Lugg.' He ate systematically, piling a morsel of each component – meat, potato, carrot, cabbage – on his fork, parking it in his mouth, chewing slowly. ‘Thought the bugger'd drown, but he didn't. Fought his way across.'

‘If he had've drowned,' Grandma said, ‘the others would have found his body and dragged it home.'

‘Is that right?' Owen's mother said. ‘Did you know that, Owen?'

The boy shook his head.

‘Oh yes,' the old woman insisted. ‘Badgers bury their dead. Give them a proper funeral, they do.'

Her husband, to Owen's surprise, did not contradict her, though what she said was surely nonsense. The boy was coming
to the conclusion that his grandmother was not particularly intelligent. Either that, he thought, or did she – and his mother too, now he considered it – make themselves out to be ignorant, in some tactical act of self-effacement?

 

It was odd, these parallel activities: Owen furtively watching the badgers, his taciturn grandfather bringing the species up in conversation, as if the old man had just discovered a subject he felt able or desired to talk about. Was he toying with his grandson, the way he kept raising the subject up from underground?