by Claire Peate
Gwyn and I looked at each other for a second.
“There’s talk of putting her in a zoo,” Gwyn said, sparing Tomos the details.
“Never!” Tomos was grabbing the table now. “We’ve got to make sure they don’t get her. We have to do something and save her from them. My poor girl!”
“You’re not going to get her now?” I asked.
“Of course we have to get her now. She could stroll up to those policemen this very evening and then what would happen to her? No, we should definitely get her this evening. We should make the most of the policemen and the hunter being occupied by your English friends over at this party you didn’t invite Gwynfor or me to.” He nudged Gwyn, who looked plain embarrassed. “We’ll need something to entice her to us…” He looked around, as if the solution lay in the main bar area of the pub.
“Oh my God.” I slapped my forehead. “What on earth is happening? There’s a puma on the loose and we’re going to catch it? We’re going to go out there this evening and look for it? There are trained professionals down the road who could do a proper job – if they weren’t too pissed. If we amateurs start having a go, God knows what will happen! Surely you can leave it up to them? We can tell them that she’s tame and you can help them out?”
“We’re hardly amateurs,” Gwyn objected, looking offended. “Tomos and I are more than used to dealing with animals. And we have the right equipment to capture it.”
“What, an exposed neck and some tender flesh?” I asked, remembering how vulnerable that part of my torso had felt on the road earlier that evening.
“She’s tame,” Tomos argued, “she’s a lovely character when you get to know her.”
“Such a lovely character that she tore your arm up?”
His face softened and he put his hands out in front of him on the table. “I was provoking, wasn’t I? I’d kept her cooped up all day and had to get her into the trailer. Turned out she wasn’t having any of it.”
“And trying to capture her now when she’s broken free isn’t going to provoke her at all?” I asked.
Tomos ignored the sarcasm and shrugged his shoulders. “Not if you give her a good reason to go into the trailer. Gwynfor, do you have any meat in the house? A hunk of beef? Some lamb? Chicken?”
“None.” He looked sheepishly. “Does she like bread and cheese?”
Tomos smiled again. His face cracked around the mouth area and his eyes went a bit twinkly which was probably as good as a smile ever got for him, probably not having much practice. For a split second he looked a bit like a nice old granddad, before assuming his gruff old-militant-Welsh-farmer-look again. “Let’s see now…” He looked around the pub again before his eye caught the chalkboard menu and he stared at it for a moment. We followed his gaze, trying to see what had interested him. This was surely no time to be thinking about ordering profiteroles and a coffee?
“Right.” He slammed his hands down on the table and made me jump. “We need fifteen pounds! Do you have any money, young Gwynfor? I’ve got –” and he emptied his pockets on the table, counting the coins – “eight pounds.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I came out in a bit of a hurry. I don’t have my purse on me.”
“It’s OK.” Gwyn jumped to the rescue. “I’ve got the rest.”
“Good man!” Tomos slapped his money down in Gwyn’s hand. “Now, my young friend, go and order a very rare steak from Angharad. She hardly ever cooks the steak even when it’s well done, so a rare one probably means she’s just walked it past the oven.”
Gwyn dutifully went off to the bar and left me with Tomos, who looked, for the first time I’d ever seen him, rather animated and, well, happy.
He winked at me. “We can have the chips before we go,” he said, “shame to waste them.”
I smiled at him and took another sip of lemonade. Really, he wasn’t that bad. Once you got past the hardened Welsh exterior. Maybe it was a defence thing? Maybe having endured a lifetime of knocks, and having seen someone near you sail through their life with the best of luck, you were left hardened and forever embittered?
Had he really never met anyone after Angharad? Had she been the one true love of his life who was stolen away from him on the very brink of their marriage and then remained in the same village as he did, so he could watch her marry her new love, raise a family and grow old together, while he lived alone and watched from the sidelines? Now that put all my worries about a Dull Life Crisis into a perspective; some people had a much tougher life than I would ever have. So I didn’t go horse riding? At least I wasn’t condemned to a life of solitude while my true love cavorted around the neighbourhood with another man.
“You and Gwynfor then, is it?” Tomos brought me back to the present, looking at me meaningfully.
“Oh. Oh no!” I said, putting my drink down hastily and suddenly going very hot. “No, I’ve only just met him.”
He just nodded. “Shame,” he said eventually. “Nice man, Gwynfor. Had a terrible rough one from Merthyr a while back. Awful scraggy thing she was. No, you’re much better. So you’re not…”
“No!” I said, with pantomime gusto, now aching to ask about the terrible scraggy one from Merthyr. How long ago was that? What was she like exactly – what does scraggy mean? Did she not wash her hair very often or something? Or did it mean she was very thin. How thin? Thinner than me? Did he like thin women? And how long had they been seeing each other? Did she have a name? Was there a photograph?
I didn’t ask him any of the questions. I just smiled and nodded and pretended I was completely uninterested, ferociously gripping the edge of the table with the effort of restraining myself from launching into so many questions.
Fortunately, before I had chance to break down and beg Tomos for information, Gwyn came back from the bar and all talk returned to the puma and what we ought to do with it once we’d caught it.
Assuming that we caught it.
We all agreed that it had a right to its freedom. We didn’t want it to go in a zoo and spend its life padding round a small wire cage and being shouted at by obnoxious sugar-crazed school kids. And we didn’t want to leave it on its own out there, with a good chance that a pack of hung-over marksmen might maim it in the next few days.
“So you think there’s no possibility that this puma of yours will escape the hunters and eventually things will die down a bit? No prospect of her going about like before?” Gwyn asked, playing with his empty pint glass. “I mean, if you say she’s been living here untroubled for years now…”
“I don’t reckon she’s got much of a chance, to be honest,” Tomos said, sadly. “I’ve seen to that haven’t I, fool that I am. No, I think now that livestock have been affected she stands the best chance if she were to be taken somewhere else where she can mind her own business and not get into trouble.”
“But where?” I asked. “Where can she go where it doesn’t matter what she kills to eat?”
Tomos thought for a moment.
“England?”
“Tomos!”
“OK, OK, only joking. I reckon we should drop her in to Mid Wales,” he said slowly, thinking it through. “I’ve got a brother up there in the Carrog Valley with acres and acres of land. She would be fine with the rabbits and the birds to catch, just like she used to be. Plenty of woodland, the river. I even recall him saying there was a sighting of a big cat or something up there a few years ago. My cat might have company, which would be nice for her…”
“Yes, but they don’t like company, do they?” I said, the voice of knowledge since I’d spoken to Joe the policeman who had boastfully told me everything Josh had told him. “That police marksman I told you about earlier was saying that big cats’ territories are really important and they don’t overlap them with other cats. Suppose we put her in another cat’s territory? The other cat would rip her limb from limb. She’d be torn in two. And the original cat would have the advantage because he’d know the terrain and he could…”
“B
ut it’s a female,” Tomos said. “Shouldn’t be so much of a problem. Although it’s a good point you’re making there, miss. But I don’t think we need to worry ourselves about it. Ahh lovely, steak!”
Angharad bought the dinner over and for a moment there was an awkwardness as she and Tomos looked at each other but said nothing. He still loved her. It was so sad.
We tucked into our chips and surreptitiously Tomos wrapped the steak in a clean white handkerchief and put it in the satchel he always carried with him. I saw Gwyn eyeing up the steak – honestly, did the man never eat? What he needed was a good woman…
Within a few minutes the chips were finished.
“Come on then,” Gwyn said, getting up. “Let’s go and bag us a puma!”
27
“Go on, go on!” Marcia clapped her hands together in excitement, eagerly leaning towards me. She was leaning so far towards me, in fact, that she was almost falling off her seat. I was so enjoying the moment, taking my time and sipping my wine while her eyes, wide like saucers, were imploring me to hurry up and tell the story.
“This wine is really lovely…”
“Oh come on, come on, Rachel!” Marcia slammed her manicured hands down on the table. “What happened next? Oh my God, I can’t believe what you’re telling me!”
“Well,” I said, slowly putting my wine glass back on the coaster, “after the pub we took Gwyn’s Land Rover and went down to Tomos’ farm. The men thought it was best if we split up and looked for the animal separately…”
“And you were OK with that? Going out there on your own?”
“I had no choice,” I said, savouring the look on her face. “Besides, I already knew what I was dealing with. I’d fought the puma single-handedly on the lane earlier that evening and managed to stun it, giving me just enough time to get to Gwyn’s.”
“Oh my God, you’re just so brave!”
I laughed modestly. “I did what I could. Anyway, we were determined to rescue that poor animal so we split up and I was assigned the track that led down into the valley and to the river. It was dark, really, really dark, but Tomos had given me a torch. It was powerful enough, but it meant that I could only see straight in front into the beam so for most of the time I had no idea what was lurking in the woods on either side of the track.”
“You must have been terrified!”
“Well, you know, not really.” I examined my nails. “You do what you have to do. Anyway, I’d been on my own for about ten minutes or so when I saw it, straight in front of me in the torchlight. I don’t know why, but I crouched down and with my third of the steak I lured it up to me and managed to tie some rope around its neck.”
“No way!”
“Oh yes. I just sort of knew what I had to do and I did it. I wasn’t the least bit frightened. All I had to do then was to call Gwyn and Tomos on my mobile to say I had it, and walk it back to Tomos’ farm. I must have looked extraordinary, emerging from that wood with a puma straining on a lead, still dressed in all my party gear – gold dress, kitten heels and curled hair. Huh, I guess that’s what drove Gwyn to do what he did next.”
“I so wish it had been me!” Marcia whined miserably, throwing herself back in the chair. “All I did last weekend was swim the channel in a record time, but that’s really lame in comparison to your weekend…”
I replayed this triumphant scene over and over in my head as Gwyn manoeuvred his Land Rover down the muddy track from the pub to his house.
“Are you all right?” he asked, glancing briefly in my direction before turning back to concentrate on the road which was treacherous to say the least, twisting left and right, plummeting sharply with no warning and rutted with potholes.
“Who, me?”
“Yes, you. You keep sighing.”
“Oh. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”
“Maybe we should take her back to Tŷ Mawr,” said Tomos from the back seat. “This is no place for a woman.”
“NO! I’m fine. Honestly. And I want to be here. I’ve already met the puma once, so what’s the big deal?”
I didn’t want to be sent back to the Hen House and miss all the excitement. What would I have to tell Marcia if I went back now? That I stayed safe inside by the fire while a handsome farmer lassoed himself a puma in the Welsh countryside?
“Well, here we are, anyway.” Gwyn pulled up at what must I assumed was Tomos’ farmhouse. In the beam of the headlights I could just make out a tiny crooked building, timber framed with small leaded windows and a bent and bowing roof. There must have been a fire on as smoke was coming out of the chimney. Probably for his dog, Old Shep, curled up in front of it, waiting for his master to return from the pub.
Gwyn turned off the engine and we sat in silence for a moment. I looked over to him but could barely make out his expression in the thin moonlight coming in through the windscreen. Tomos, sitting in the back, was completely in the dark.
“So what are we going to do then, Tomos?” Gwyn asked.
“I reckon it should be me that goes out with the meat, looking for her. She knows me, she trusts me.”
“Trusted,” I corrected.
“OK, call it what you will, but she knows me. Gwynfor, you stay by the trailer and when I bring her in – if I bring her in – you be ready to close up the doors once she’s inside. Be sure to stay downwind of her, though. We don’t want her to know you’re there.”
“And what shall I do?” I asked in my bravest voice. There was a long pause. It answered my question without them needing to say another word.
It was Tomos who finally spoke up. “I reckon you should stay in the house.”
“WHAT?” I cried. “That’s not fair! What’s the point of me being here if I have to stay in the house? I won’t even see what’s happening! Can’t I at least stay in the Land Rover and be a lookout? I won’t make a noise, I promise. Please don’t leave me in the house. I want to see.”
“Oh for the love of God!” I could make out Tomos holding his hands up over his ears. “Stop your whinging, for God’s sake, woman! You can stay in the vehicle if you like, but no sudden movements. No noise. And no more whining!”
I nodded, still put out that I wasn’t going to be on active service. Still, a lookout was important. I checked my phone – I still had plenty of battery left and there was one tiny bar of signal. I should be OK.
“Phone OK?” Gwyn asked, seeing me checking it.
“Fine. Is there a phone in the house just in case I don’t have enough signal?”
“Go in the front door, straight ahead on the left,” Tomos said. “I keep the door unlocked so go right in. Shep won’t bother you – he’ll be by the fire all night.”
I nodded. Now I was beginning to feel more involved. If this were a film, I would be kitted out with one of those silver headpieces that people have in call-centres, with a little microphone attached that I could talk to the boys on. I would be dressed in close fitting black stealth clothing, a bit like Catwoman but without the tail. Or the ears. And I’d be the key to the success of the whole scenario. If this was a film, I would be the first to spot the puma and have to direct the men to the animal so the whole success of the mission would be down to me. Really I was the key to the whole thing.
Tomos and Gwyn continued to work out a foolproof plan for rounding up the puma without being pounced on, clawed, bitten or generally savaged to death.
I turned to the dash and carefully positioned my mobile for quick-access. My command centre was up and running. I peered out of the windscreen into the moonlit farmyard to the left of the house; the concrete ground was a dazzling white rectangle in the black forested landscape. It was spooky to know that out there, probably not far away, the puma was prowling around, looking for food. I shivered. So much for my big plan to emerge glorious from the woodland with a puma on a leash and make Gwyn hot under the collar. But the realisation was beginning to dawn on me that exposing myself to mortal danger was not the only way to put an end to my Dull Life Crisis.
Surely it was enough just to be here, sitting in a Land Rover in the remote Welsh hills late at night and playing lookout on a puma-hunt? This on its own proved that I was, in fact, leading a very exciting life. It was a Sunday night and there wasn’t a Domino’s pizza box or rented video in sight. I wondered, fleetingly, what was happening back up at the Hen House. How was the party going on? Had Louisa pounced on Josh the Hunter yet? Would he stab her with a sedative dart and make a quick getaway?
Tomos and Gwyn had begun speaking in Welsh now, but every so often they would slip in an English word, sometimes an innocuous word like “see?” or “yes”. But just as I was slipping back into my daydream telling Marcia about the weekend, I was horribly brought back to the present when they unmistakably used the words “muzzle” and “neck hold”. Hmm, this was definitely a job for the boys. And farmers at that. But was Tomos right to think that firstly she’d remember him and secondly, if she did remember him, she would forgive him for what he had done, keeping her cooped up and hungry? Could the plan really work? Could we actually capture the animal? Christ, what if it all went wrong? What if she turned on him, with her pointed fangs and razor-sharp claws? What if Tomos stumbled out of the woodland ripped to pieces and bleeding everywhere? Who would I call? How would I direct the ambulance to the farm? Where the hell were we? Near the Crossed Keys pub in the Brecon Beacons but down the valley a bit. Shit, I should get directions from them before they went off.
“Rachel, Rachel!” Gwyn hissed at me, trying not to make too much of a noise. I should really stop daydreaming.
“Sorry, miles away. What?”
“We’re off now. Did you hear what we had planned?”
“Erm, yes. Absolutely.” It was probably best to sound like I knew what he was talking about.
