by Tim Pears
‘Maybe. Might have cornered one down a blind alley, see, and can’t bear to leave it. If she’s slipped her muzzle and killed one, she’ll suck its blood dry, gorge herself. Settle down for a good long sleep.’ He shook his head. ‘Not minded to dig her out.’
They gathered stones, blocked the entrances to the warren. ‘You can get her tomorrow. She’ll come out when she’s hungry.’ As Owen began to brick up the last hole, his grandfather said, ‘Wait. Got that wailing damn thing on you?’
Owen had been given a Jew’s harp by his favourite teacher when he left primary school at the end of that summer term. He took care to play it out of earshot of his grandfather, who claimed to despise all forms of music, but sound carried on the wind. Owen found it now in one of his pockets, beside a penknife and some rubber bands, and produced it.
‘Play it there,’ his grandfather said. ‘Nosy beggars, ferrets, like. Might bring her out.’
Owen lay kneeling on the bank, the harp between his teeth, and plucked the harp’s tongue. He felt foolish, suspected that his grandfather was having a joke at his expense. As he played, however, he overcame his scepticism, began to believe in the ploy, that as the notes twanged down into the dark tunnels, reverberating through the burrows, even if his grandfather was laughing behind his back – perhaps ferrets were famously tone-deaf? – that actually this would work. Like a snake charmer, Owen would seduce this ferret to the surface. And thus, for the first time in unrecorded history, as he would tell his grandmother a short while later, on this day in the summer of nineteen seventy two on the side of a hill on the Anglo-Welsh border, a boy lured a ferret out of the earth with the music of his Jew’s harp.
Before the beginning of these summer holidays Owen had rarely been brought out here, though it was less than ten miles from Welshpool. His father and grandfather, it was understood, did not get on. Some slight or argument had occurred that could not be overlooked by either side. Owen was never told exactly what this had been. It was, he imagined, so fundamental a moral breach that to find out more would provide him with a vital clue to the unblossoming mystery of human relations.
No detail was given, even to his direct questions. ‘What happened?’
‘Old sod’s an obstinate bastard,’ his father told him.
‘What happened?’ Owen asked his mother.
‘Dislike each other, simple as that,’ she said. ‘Never could stand to be in the same room.’ Not liking your own father had not offered itself, till that moment, as an option, though now Owen saw how it could. Not that he knew his father well enough to love or hate him, his father was invariably just off, just gone, on his way. If they’d had a tent, Owen thought, rather than a house, they could have moved as a little family with his father’s moods.
It was his mother who telephoned, and rode with him on the bus. They climbed on, sat down, one of the other passengers came and collected their fare for the driver. His mother told him she needed time alone with his father. ‘To bring him round. Better for us all in the long run. Believe me.’
His grandmother stood at the bus stop in the middle of the village in the valley. ‘Get in the van,’ his mother told him, while she spoke with her mother-in-law, before crossing the road to wait for a bus going back the other way. Owen opened the door on the passenger side of the filthy white van. His grandfather sat gazing out of the windscreen, hemmed in, his rough hands resting on the steering wheel. He was too big for this vehicle. Without looking directly at Owen he nodded his head, indicating the area behind the two seats; with his left hand he tilted the passenger seat, it knelt forward to the dashboard. There were two collies in the back. Owen climbed slowly towards them, expecting them to snarl at this invasion of their territory. To his relief they ignored him. His grandfather kept the engine idling, impatient to return home, get back out in the open.
Shortly Owen’s grandmother got into the van. They climbed slowly up out of the valley. The vehicle stank of dogs and sheep, tobacco smoke and human sweat, of petrol and empty canvas sacks and the feed they’d once contained.
His first days in the country Owen spent fearful. Of the isolation of this hilltop farm, the empty space around it, the silence. Of darkness at night. Of his taciturn grandfather, who mumbled unintelligible messages to his grandmother but said not a word to him. He was afraid of the animals: dogs, cats, the two young pigs that ran at him, ears flapping, squealing with pure aggression, probably, and the geese that pecked at his wellingtons, and the sheep that ran away, and the ferrets.
‘Handle him often as you like,’ his grandfather said, his first words to the boy, his third day on the hill. ‘Nervy beggars. Need petting.’ The male was fat and lazy, the good-natured son of the rabbit hunter and a polecat father. Its eyes were dark red stones, almost black. Inside its yellow and brown fur the animal wriggled in perpetual motion, consisting not of flesh and bone but liquid pouring itself over Owen’s hands. It made a hiccuping noise when it was happy, performed little jumps of excitement. An overpoweringly pungent musky odour that would leave Owen’s skin and clothes reeking.
They were kept in a rabbit hutch, and fed on bread and milk. The female – the mother – was starved from Friday morning. She was far more aggressive than the male, especially when coming into season. It took Owen a fortnight to summon up the courage to pet her too. ‘Keep your hands steady, like,’ his grandfather said, reaching out, making to pass the animal to Owen. Its teeth were beautifully made for destruction, like miniature versions of a sabre-toothed tiger he’d seen in an encyclopedia. ‘Twitch and you’ll find her teeth in your fingers. Hanging off; won’t want to let go.’
It wasn’t his grandparents’ farm. Mean as it was, they rented it from some estate. The latest of many, Owen learned, across a wide arc of the Marches, either side of the border, his grandfather falling out with a landlord, proudly moving on. He had five hundred sheep here, split into smaller flocks ranging across a few hundred acres of these uninhabited hills.
At first, when Owen woke up in the morning his grandfather would be gone from the house. The old man issued no invitation, but after a while Owen rose earlier and went with him, trotting in his wake up onto the tops. He feared he was intruding upon a chosen solitude, or privacy, but he didn’t know what else he was supposed to do. He waited for his grandfather to take notice of him. The two dogs sniffed the hard ground around them as they climbed, tracing the invisible criss-crossing tracks of nocturnal animals, like they were reading some haywire manuscript written in scent. They looked bewitched by the aromas, but a portion of their attention remained always on their master, who ignored them until they were needed.
Grandpa checked his flocks each day, counting their numbers in groups of twenty, for each score transferring a pebble from left to right pocket in case he lost count. In summer he wore a grey suit, must once have been his best; from a distance he looked smart, it was only up close you saw how worn and frayed it was. Swallows swooped low over the pastures, picking off flies that swarmed around the sheep. After an hour or two the pair would go back down for breakfast. As if Grandma had been standing outside, scanning the green hills with a telescope for the dark specks of their figures descending, she’d have a plate of egg and bacon and a thick wedge of buttered bread on the table as they reached it, mugs of well-brewed tea pouring from a brown-stained, once-white teapot.
After a cigarette, back to check the rest. It was the easiest time of the year. Grandpa had finished shearing shortly before Owen arrived – the spindly naked ewes were barely larger than their robust lambs – but the bucolic calm of a shepherd’s life, which Owen had imagined for his grandfather from Bible stories, did not exist on these Welsh hills. There was no time for contemplation. His grandfather was always on the move. He issued commands to the dogs, whistling through his fingers and with guttural yelps. He appraised each ewe as he counted them, Owen realised, and if one caught his eye the collies, following his grunts and array of shrill whistles, set to isolating it. The dogs worked as a team, each with h
er own role: one went out left around the flock, the other right; one would stop, the other come on, halving the size of the flock with a mad dash, then pausing while the other dog quartered it. Owen had no idea how they knew which particular ewe Grandpa wanted: he was a magician making them choose the right card from a pack.
His grandfather’s growls were the monosyllables of a primitive language from which humans had evolved a million years ago the words with which to speak to each other. Owen wondered whether they’d been passed down from one generation to another of farmer and dog from primeval times, or whether his grandfather, and every other shepherd, invented his own. It wasn’t so much the syllables of instruction themselves – one sounded like ‘Hip, hip; hip, hip,’ another like ‘Goop, goop, goop’ – it was the way in which they were expressed. They weren’t formed in the mouth, shaped with the tongue and lips and issued on easy exhalations of breath, but hiccuped and burped out of his grandfather’s throat, growled like he was a dog himself, repeated as if he had retched a word he couldn’t quite get right out.
The dogs, Meg and Pip, cornered the ewe and Grandpa hooked her round the neck with his crook and yanked her to him. He inspected her just long enough for Owen to see the skin on her flanks red and raw. Back at the cottage Owen heard his grandfather speak words barely more intelligible than those he used for the dogs. ‘Scab. On Rock Hill.’
‘Fly-strike’s caused by blowflies,’ Grandma explained. ‘Crawl into a ewe’s wool and lay eggs. Their larvae hatch and burrow into the host, Owen – maggots eat a sheep alive. The mites that cause scab do the same, and make the sheep rub against tree or stone. Even bite its own skin raw.’
They were like a comic routine in this regard, his grandparents, like a sketch from The Benny Hill Show Owen liked to watch with his mother for the way she laughed, sometimes, without constraint: Grandpa uttered a few terse monosyllables and then Grandma translated for the boy, but her explanations were ridiculously long, as she took it upon herself to elaborate. It was funny but Owen bit his lip. Laughter, he sensed, was uncommon in this cottage.
‘Dip,’ Grandpa muttered, and his wife turned to the boy. ‘Your grandfather reckons he’ll have to dip the whole flock now. A big gather. Day after tomorrow. Mites can live without food for three or four weeks, see, Owen, on a piece of machinery, a gatepost. Pick it up on your jacket going by, pass it on to the sheep.’
Grandpa added nothing, uncomfortable with words, shy, almost, with his own kin, his wife, his grandson, but it wasn’t that. Words came out of his mouth like solid hostile objects he wanted to be rid of. He didn’t trust them. Then he would get up and go as if Owen wasn’t there, and the boy would rise and follow, apostle of a silent shepherd.
Behind the cottage a disarray of sheds, rusted metal, manure and mud, but in front was Grandma’s garden. A visitor, if one ever came, would walk from the wooden gate in the stone wall to the front door, through a colourful jumble of flowers. Marigolds and roses, poppies and hollyhocks. Butterflies and bees drifted from one blossom to another. In amongst the flowers Grandma had planted vegetables. Beetroots, cabbages, onions. While Owen helped her digging up or tidying, she enumerated the array of illness and disease to which sheep were susceptible.
‘Pasteurella’s caused by a bug that’s always there in the flock, Owen. It gets dangerous when the sheep’s immunity’s low, when they’re stressed by the freezing sleet drives in from the north at the end of winter.’
He learned that the ewes developed pneumonia, and Grandpa would find a carcass attacked by crows, belly bloated, bloodstained froth bubbling from the nose.
Many sheep limped – like wounded soldiers, Owen thought. It was foot rot. He listened with growing wonder: it seemed that a sheep farmer’s life was a manky, maggotty battle against disease. Mange, Grandma said, sheep could catch from a fox. Ewes grew old, lost their teeth, suffered from mastitis, an inflammation of mammary glands in their udder.
There were times Owen went exploring on his own. At the foot of Roundton he found the cave. With earth built up in front of it, the entrance was invisible unless you stumbled upon it. He crawled in. Where there was still light he could see the bones of animals taken in by their killers and eaten. Tiny skeletons, of birds, mice, rabbits. The skull and ribs of a sheep. How that came to be in there unsettled him. He crawled further, on all fours, into darkness, turning to see the light behind him. His hands touched stone. Twig. Bone. The air smelled gamey. The temperature grew cooler the further down he went. He began to sense that something lay ahead of him, some kind of wild archaic cat, still here somehow from long ago, undetected by human society. Waiting for him in the dark ahead. He forced himself on into the dank, rotten, inky chamber, his heart thumping so wildly that he became disorientated, it seemed that the tunnel was actually inside him, he was in a winding chamber of his own heart beating. He pressed on, determined, eleven years old, driven by obstinacy as much as courage, until he turned and – the tunnel having curved or perhaps descended – saw no light behind him. In panic Owen twisted around, scraping an elbow, a knee, and scrabbled back, sweating, desperate, back out into the light of a bright summer day.
Owen’s mother came out to visit one day towards the end of August. ‘This is for you, my darling,’ she said. He unwrapped a tiny sword, a Moorish scimitar sheathed in a curved scabbard. A paperknife. ‘Your father got it for you.’ Even as she said it, Owen understood this to be a lie. His mother had bought it, and pretending she hadn’t was the attempt at another gift. She stayed for lunch, telling them of the week’s holiday in Spain from which she and the boy’s father had just returned. Red Spanish wine, chips, outdoor discos, hungover on the beach and a glass-calm sea, siestas, a swim, then again the drinking. It was almost good again, she’d almost brought him round. She asked if Owen could stay a little longer. Grandpa pushed his plate away, went outside to smoke, but Grandma nodded. Owen followed his grandfather out, crouched nearby as the old man took another drag, spat tobacco off his lips.
‘Couldn’t be bothered to come himself,’ he said, presently. Although, as Owen knew, he’d told his only son he was not welcome here. Owen stole a glance at his grandfather: the old man’s grey eyes had darkened. ‘A bad ’un,’ he said.
His mother came outside. ‘Give me a big hug goodbye, my lovely,’ she said, drawing Owen tight to her. She smelled of the Polo mints she sucked after every cigarette. She said she would walk down to the valley, there was no need for a lift. She wore tight blue jeans, a hippyish pink cotton top and espadrilles, and carried the posey of flowers Owen had earlier picked for her from Grandma’s garden. Owen watched her walk down the track. After twenty yards she half turned and blew him a final kiss. Thirty yards further on her gait changed slightly, slowing to a stroll, and it occurred to Owen that at that moment she stopped thinking about him, her son, behind her, and began thinking of what lay ahead.
That evening Grandpa grasped the neck of the bottle of Tia Maria his daughter-in-law had left as a gift and carried it to the shed. He didn’t ask whether Grandma might like a tipple. ‘Seen a pheasant down by the gate,’ he said. ‘Never seen one this high up.’ He dipped a tin bowl into a sack of grain, poured in half the bottle of sweet liqueur, left it overnight to steep. In the morning Owen laid a trail of grain up the track. By noon the bird had eaten its way into the barn. They closed the doors and watched it totter in the gloom, lurch like a stupid hooligan towards the dogs, who seemed to understand and played along, teasing the drunk aggressive bird. It was the first time Owen saw his grandfather smile uninhibitedly, a cruel grin of pleasure that lit up the barn.
Owen would wonder whether anger had burrowed like sheep’s lice under his grandfather’s skin.
‘If I go first,’ Grandma said, ‘make sure you bury Grandpa with a piece of wool in his coffin.’
‘Why?’ Owen asked.
‘St Peter, on Judgement Day, can see what work he did, why he wasn’t at church every Sunday.’
In his chair by the stove Grandpa snorted: he may wel
l have feared God, but had no wish to appease Him. Owen craved his grandfather’s approval. The old man’s one hobby was making shepherds’ crooks in the shed, from rams’ horns and hazel cut from the dark, damp wood in the narrow gulley beneath the Graig that received so little sun the switches grew straight up towards the light. Owen watched his grandfather soften a horn in boiling water then squeeze it in a vice to iron out its natural spiral. If the process required more precision, persuading a bend or kink out of the bone and skin, he held it over the chimney of a paraffin lamp, eased it a little further.
Nothing was explained. Owen was obliged to observe for himself how too much heat made the horn brittle. His grandfather offered no tuition. As far as Owen knew, aged eleven, this was the nature of apprenticeship: knowledge had to be stolen from a reluctant master, a slow, forensic theft. Grandpa married the hazel to the horn’s heel, drilled a hole through them both and glued in a steel rod. Finally, he’d hold the stick in a variety of ways – across his palm, between two fingers – then cut off a fraction of the bottom of the stick. Hold it again, assessing the balance between the size and weight of the stick and of the horn. Shave off a little more wood. If he judged he’d taken off too much he’d spit in the dust and break the stick across his knee, disgusted with it, and start again with another one.
Owen whittled Y-shaped sticks himself, burned designs into the wood the way the old man did, with a heated nail held in a pair of pliers. One afternoon his grandfather, rooting about at the back of the workbench, found a small, spiralled ram’s horn he must have once rejected. ‘Here,’ he said, tossing it to his grandson. Owen caught it – rough, ancient, almost fossil-like in his hands – his heart weak with gratitude.
