The Dig Read online

  The badger was going nowhere and it was not about speed but persistence now.

  •

  After two hours they stopped for a drink and ate some of the paste sandwiches. The big man ate nothing. The dry soil on the boy’s hands was tide marked with water from the blisters that had torn and were flaps of skin now and there was a type of dull shock in his back. He had been expecting more action, not this relentless work, and he didn’t understand it.

  The dog had been down for two hours and had continually been barking and yelping and keeping just out of the badger’s reach for that time.

  Every so often, the boar rushed the dog and the dog retreated and the badger turned and fled; and Jip went after him through the tunnels and junctions until they reached the stop end.

  Then the badger turned and ran at the dog again. It was nearly two and a half times the weight of the terrier and armed with fearsome claws and a bite that would crack the dog if he landed it properly. But the dog was quick and in his own way very dangerous. Jip kept barking. Yelping. The badger faced him down and every now and then turned to try and dig himself into the stop end. But then Jip moved in and bit his hindquarters, and the big boar swung round again in defense.

  In the confined tunnel of the sett, the constant yelps were deafening and confusing like bright lights in the brain of the badger and it was unsure what it could do. It was then a standoff. A matter of time.

  They sent the bitch in and Jip came up. He looked like he was grinning. His mouth was open and flecked with spit. The dog was exhausted and thirsty but gleamed with the event somehow and when they took off the box and collar, steam came into the morning air off his body. The boy was confused that they ignored the thick obvious blood that came out of the Patterdale and spread down its throat.

  The boy kept looking nervously at the exhausted bleeding stubborn dog. The fresh blood seemed a synthetic color against the dun-green slope.

  Messie’s good, said the big man. She’ll hold him for the rest.

  The boy sat and held his blistered hands against the cold metal of the foldaway spade. He had gloves but he did not feel he could wear them. Steam rolled off from the plastic-flask cup of tea and it came off the body of the injured dog. Steam came too off the lifted soil, but no birds came as they might to a garden, as if they knew some dark purpose was at work.

  The man’s bag hung on the tree and the head of the mink protruded. The boy looked at it. The mouth was drawn and the precise teeth showed. He thought of one of his earliest memories, of his father holding a ferret and sewing its lips together so it couldn’t gash the rabbits it was sent down to chase. The mink had the same vicious preciseness as the ferrets.

  Get your dog on it, the big man said. The boy immediately felt the redness at being talked to.

  He nodded.

  She on rats?

  The boy nodded again. He had a panicky lump in his throat.

  Good rat dog should take mink. Start them early.

  The boy felt the swell of pride come up and mix strangely with his nervousness.

  Nice dog, commented the man.

  They’d gone through finally into the roof of the tunnel and it looked now like a broken waste pipe and it was midmorning when they lifted the terrier out. There was still an unnerving composure to her, a kind of distant, complete look.

  The boy did not understand the passivity of the badger and that it did not try to bolt or to struggle. He had to develop an idea of hatred for the badger without the help of adrenaline and without the excitement of pace and in the end it was the reluctance and nonengagement of the animal which drew up a disrespect in him. He built his dislike of the badger on this disgust. It was a bullying. It was a tension, not an excitement, and he began to feel a delicious private heartbeat coming. He believed by this point that the badger deserved it.

  The big man was in the hole alone now, his shape filling it. The boy’s head pumped hotly from the work and finally his nerves sped.

  Have a spike ready, his father said.

  Then the badger came out. It shuffled, brow down as if it didn’t want to be noticed. It sensed them and looked up and the boy looked for a moment into its black eyes, its snout circling. The boy was expecting it to have come out snarling and fighting with rage, but it edged out.

  It had been trapped in three or four feet of pipe for hours and it edged out until it was by the opening and the big gypsy took it.

  He got it round the neck with the tongs and it struggled and grunted and then the man swung it up and into the sack with this great output of strength. Then it kicked and squealed and you could see the true weight and strength of it and the boy didn’t understand why it hadn’t fought at first, at the beginning.

  The badger scuffed and tried to dig and the big man punched the sack and the badger went still. At this, the boy felt a comradeship with the man again and a sense of victory, holding the iron spike there in readiness, as if he was on hand.

  We’ll hang him while we fill things in, said the big gypsy, stop him trying to dig.

  They filled in the hole. Threw in the old roots and stones they’d dug out and finally put back down the sods of bluebells. The place was slick with mud and trodden down and the ground of the area looked like the coat of a sick dog.

  The big gypsy looked at the sack hanging from the tree, at the sack-like weight of it.

  It was the second time he’d dug a badger for the gang. That first time, Messie had been just a pup. He thought of the money. It was worth the risk. He made a point now and then of taking in a badger he found genuinely hit on the road to the Veterinary Investigation Center and he carried the receipt slips in the van to produce if he was stopped. But that worked only for dead badgers, or to explain the hairs they might find. He had to move the live badger and it wouldn’t matter what else was in the van if they stopped him.

  The big man reached into his bag and took out the mink and threw it to the boy. Its damp weight and the limp, sumptuous ropiness of the animal surprised him as he caught it. The mouth was drawn and he could see the precise teeth.

  You can keep him, the big man said. They’re vermin here. It was like a payment for things.

  The boy felt a glow of pride and the sudden warm teamship with the man that was alien to him and which he had difficulty with. His father looked at him with a strange grin and the redness came to him then.

  He lifted the mink’s lips to see the needle teeth. They were like sewing needles. He looked at the needle teeth and felt the fur of the rope-like body. The electricity was gone out of it.

  Give her a shake tonight. The big man nodded at the pup. Good rat dog be good on mink.

  The boy’s father was panting and looked brightened. The boy could see the sweat on his father’s head through the very short hair. The adrenaline was coming in the boy now and he looked at his pup and swelled with pride. He felt a warm cruelty, standing there on the beach of soil.

  I’ll start her tonight, he said to himself.

  When they got back to the yard after taking the badger it was gone midday. The boy was exhausted and tired. The boy had been expecting the same kind of flurry as ratting and he was in shock at the monotonous graft of the dig.

  How’s the dog? asked the big man.

  The boy’s father picked up the big Patterdale and looked at his throat and chin. There was a glancing scratch underneath its jaw and a little way back was a tear some two or three inches long that had bled all down the dog’s front. The dog seemed unperturbed.

  Stitches? asked the gypsy.

  Aye, said the boy’s father. He lifted the cut flap of skin up, peeling it from its own blood, and holding the dog more firmly as it bridled. The blood had soaked into the rough coat and it was jammy.

  There’s nothing cut, he said. The dog’s artery was a fraction above the cut and he could see it pump thickly through the dog’s skin.

  The big man had not put the badger down at all and when he put the sack in the back of the van he swore once, succinctly, at
the release of weight.

  They uncoupled the dogs and let them sort themselves out and the boy watched his pup work over a log pile with the other dogs. They were frantic with the scent of rats the big man had driven out the day before.

  The boy was ratty and awkward himself and he watched his pup with a proudness, thinking of the mink the big man had given him. It had given him a teamship with the big gypsy.

  What’s for him? said the boy’s father. He nodded at the sack in the van. Behind the big gypsy the farmland looked wider and tamer without the mist. You could hear the tractors work somewhere again on the land.

  I’ll take him somewhere, he said.

  He divided up the money that the magistrate farmer had given them for getting rid of the badger. He did not mention the other men, nor the five hundred pounds they were paying for the big forty-pound boar.

  When the others had gone, he pushed the sack to the back of the van and carried over some straw bales that he put in the back hiding the badger. He thought of leaving the tools and coming separately back for them but then thought, Ag. If they look in the van they’ll find it anyway. Just the badger was enough to send him down.

  He drove home without incident though and got the dogs from the van and unloaded the bales and took the badger and dumped it in the sack in the coal bunker. Then he went in and called the men. They said they’d be ready for it that night and they gave him a time and directions. It was about three in the afternoon. Ag, he thought. He figured on getting some rest.

  PART THREE

  The Cloth

  chapter one

  THE BLACK LAMB looked tired and beaten under the lamp.

  It had not put on weight and he could make out the fingers of its ribs with the bloated milk-full stomach behind them. It was folded in the bottom of the box, but not with the folded comfortable way of a sleeping cat, more with the weak compliance of something sick beyond will.

  Daniel picked up the small black lamb. His father would have simply dashed its head on the barn floor. He was not a hard man, but a pragmatist; but that kind of will wasn’t in Daniel. Despite the lamp the lamb felt cold, as if it could generate no heat of its own, and it was too light for itself and hung limply. It was as if he’d picked a jumper from the floor. It had a completely will-less passivity.

  I don’t expect this of you, he said. I just want you to understand it. Sometimes you have to choose between a quick misery or a slow misery. He heard his father talking, saw him take the useless lamb from the box. You have to understand it as an option. There was a movement and the lamb hung dead from his father’s hand, a thin spittle of blood reaming from its mouth.

  He heard the voice again. Heard his father, that there were the two miseries, and somewhere in him a vicious voice told him that his wife had no fear now of the worse, drawn-out misery that might have come. Hers had been the quick misery, the head dashed against the barn floor. He thought of his father stricken, becalmed by the stroke. He ignored the vicious little voice, as if it was something overheard he had no wish to know.

  He rubbed the lamb, trying to bring some warmth into its muscles, the wrinkles of the loose skin riding under his hand like rolls of sock. There was the superstition that every flock should have a black lamb to sacrifice should the Devil come and it was to Daniel like the lamb was a victim of this.

  He felt the lamb’s heartbeat under his hands. It was faint. A bare registry.

  You need to live, he thought.

  He picked up the lamb and carried it into the house.

  He put it down in the porch and took off his boots and then went in and found a box and came back for the lamb.

  He opened the door of the Aga and took out the racks. He hadn’t cooked in it since she had died. There was just the residual automatic heat of it running and he took out the racks with unprotected hands and felt inside the oven space. Then he put the lamb in the box in the Aga, leaving the door open, and went back outside.

  The policeman opened the door, looked at the deep mud of the yard, and got deliberately out.

  Set back from the window, the man watched him through the gap in the curtains. He watched him scan the place. The policeman was young and he was not a policeman the big man had seen before.

  The policeman bent through the car door and pushed the horn twice.

  What do I do here? thought the man. He wished he’d left one of the big dogs off but knew even through the coal it would scent the badger and bother it. If I stay in the house, he’ll start looking round, thought the man. Ag.

  The policeman had started to walk toward the house from the car and the big man came out.

  Afternoon, sir. It’s clearing up, the policeman said. The policeman looked at the man and looked out as if at the weather over the valley.

  The big man just nodded.

  Few questions, really, sir. The policeman was light and inoffensive the way they are and the man moved to bring him away from the house.

  Can you tell me what you were doing last night, or early this morning?

  The big man didn’t reply.

  The policeman looked around at the yard and privately noticed the two sets of tire tracks that were cut into the mud and that were not filled with overnight rain. He saw the old red van and guessed one set belonged to that. The policeman took in the many dumped engines and tires and the wastage of vehicles and machines about.

  We’ve had a report of fly-tipping. He waited. I just wanted to ask whether you would know anything about that.

  What did they tip? asked the man.

  The policeman didn’t respond. He was looking at the junk and the big man saw and said, Does it look like I throw things away?

  Just wondered if you could help, sir, said the policeman.

  Somebody pointed at me, said the man. The two men stood in the yard.

  The policeman could sense the man was guilty of something but knew he had not been tipping. He was suddenly aware of his singleness at the place. He knew the man had past firearms offenses and way back some assault. He didn’t respond to the man, using the silence instead.

  I was here last night. Asleep.

  The policeman smiled. We had quite some rain, didn’t we. Kept the kids awake, he said. He felt this horrific electricity coming off the man. The policeman was smiling but he thought briefly and preciously of his kids.

  I don’t know, I was asleep, said the man.

  Did you go out this morning?

  I just fed the dogs. That’s all.

  The policeman looked over to the dog run with distaste.

  What sort of dogs do you have? he asked, as if he had an interest in them.

  Some big ones and some little ones, the man said. This couldn’t be it, he was thinking. They were like this when they raided the house. They had these stupid questions, then the rest of them all came out from nowhere.

  You haven’t been out this morning? asked the policeman. No, said the man. Somewhere in the near distance a chainsaw started up and some of the terriers yapped, knowing the sound from going ratting.

  The policeman looked round at the yapping of the dogs. Anyone been here? he asked.

  No, said the man.

  The policeman thought of the tire tracks without the rain in them.

  Mind if I take a look in the van? he asked.

  The big man’s heart quickened as his brain worked through his routine, as he went over each step. Yes. He’d followed his routine. He nodded at the van and the policeman went over and opened the back and looked in. There were just some palettes and bales in there. The policeman felt this horrible inside apprehension as he turned his back on the man. He had an extreme dislike of him.

  Distantly, the chainsaw was biting and idling. It stank of dogs in the van.

  The policeman stepped back and smiled at the man and made a kind of “everything’s fine” gesture.

  Well, he said. Thanks for your cooperation. Something is wrong here, he knew. He thought again of the rain keeping his children awake and thought
how easily someone like this could turn, and thought again of the firearms charges and how there should have been backup, and he knew there was something wrong with the man.

  He looked out over the valley and then at the dog run and then he drove off.

  When the policeman had gone, the man went to the coal bunker and lifted out the badger. From inside the sack, the badger had dug into the pile of coal and the sack was torn and blackened with filth.

  The big man knelt by the bath panel and pushed it and the plastic wraithed against the bath as it flexed and he took hold of the sharp top of the panel and bent it over and lifted it off. Knelt down like that in the big coat, the bulk and actions of the man looked bearlike.

  He stood the panel out of the way against a wall and with his face down smelled the dry piss and the uncleanliness around the toilet and the copperiness of the old pipes. He had the kind of extra-awareness of when you see a commonplace thing from a different perspective and noticed the way the copper pipes had the strange eucalypt green on them that looked somehow stony.