The Extinction Club

by Robert Twigger

  The Novelist also liked to talk about T.S. Eliot. He contended that the original Waste Land (before Ezra Pound edited it) was all about light and how that symbolized for Eliot the vital source of all life, the creative life force, if you like. And more than being just a symbol, it was something Eliot had really experienced. Only when he wrote about it, well, it was just a bit too much, a bit over the top. Pound stripped it right out and turned The Waste Land into a nostalgia piece, a fashionably fagged-out shoring-fragments-against-the-ruins piece. This interested the Novelist because (a) he considered the Pound version better literature than anything Eliot wrote unaided and (b) he wondered if there is now, of all times, a basic hostility between literature and truth. The Novelist told me that people had been suspicious of literature before, that in medieval Arabic there was no word, as we now use it, for literature. My wife confirmed this.

  But what I really wanted to know was what his next novel would be about, the one after the breakthrough novel. But though I pried and hinted and spied, he would never tell me.

  CON AIR

  IASKED LORD H if I might help Callum with the annual deer cull. If he thought it was a macabre request, he politely kept his opinion to himself and asked Callum to take me along for the week when the main cull took place. Now I was where I wanted to be, albeit in a paradoxical position. I was writing a book about an endangered species, and here I was rubbing my hands together at the prospect of dispatching them from the planet. The Major would definitely have approved.

  Scroll back a bit, to the previous summer. I had, for some unfathomable reason, become obsessed with hunting. I had tried to gain a firearms certificate, but that required a letter from your GP to say that you weren’t insane. The certificate also required references from landowners. It also hinted that every time someone was shot, the police would be around for a fireside chat and a sniff at your gun barrel (which had to be in a locked steel cabinet or else). All this just to kill innocent creatures. My friend Mark, a forester, who had the chance to shoot but chose not to, said, “A gun in this country, it’s like being a bit overdressed, isn’t it?”

  The obsession waned. The only GP I knew was already a hate figure because of the offhand way she’d treated my wife just after our son was born. In fact, we had had such a rough experience with the medical establishment that I couldn’t bear to bring myself to ask them if I was sane or not.

  Now that I had the chance to pop off at some harmless Pere Davids, my old hunting urges returned. I secretly hoped Callum would let me “take down” a couple, or even just one. Maybe he’d let me keep the antlers as a memento. I wouldn’t ask, though; well, not until I knew him pretty well.

  I excitedly told Klaudia that I was finally going to get near to some deer-slaying action, hoping that this would make her feel I wasn’t being slack about the book. I told her my wife had had a baby, and she asked the usual polite questions about health, sleeping habits, etc.

  I’d told everyone that suddenly becoming a father wasn’t going to interfere with my traveling. And here I was proving it—going off to Woburn and leaving my wife to her own devices just a few weeks after the child had been born.

  This time I wasn’t staying in the main house. I would be in Lord H’s pad, a ranch-style bungalow with a swimming pool on the edge of the estate. Actually I was going to be in the guest wing and Lord H would be in the main part of the bungalow. Then I heard that Lord H was staying on for a day or two in Scotland, so the first night I was put up at his expense at the pretty expensive Bedford Arms Hotel.

  That night I sat in the bar and watched. Con Air on the television. Normally I hate TVs in bars, but tonight, being alone, I was pleased it was there. A middle-aged/elderly man made comments at regular intervals to the bartender about how bad it was to have a television on in a bar. Fortunately for me, the bartender did not have the authority to turn the TV off. Maybe only the manager could make important decisions like that.

  In the end, the company of the bartender and the grumpy oldish man was spoiling my enjoyment of the film. They had got together now and were deep in the sort of conversation that seemed designed to show that though both of them actually had a natural antipathy toward each other, they could “talk to anyone.”

  A man from Liverpool came in and asked if there was anywhere in town to get a bite. I’d already had some food at a pub up the road and told him so. This was my entire conversation for the evening, which would have been pretty depressing if Con Air hadn’t been on.

  I retired to my room for the final part of the film. Of course, this was something of a letdown. For some reason the plot ended with a big one-location showdown in the desert with lots of crashing planes and jeeps and tanks and with the police just arriving over the hill. The filmmakers had made a mistake. They should have kept the film moving, like North by Northwest. Since Con Air was about bugger all, it should at least have been dynamic. Instead of a literal grounding-out there should have been a sequence of air sequences, each smaller than the last: jumbo jet, Learjet, turbo prop, helicopter, biplane, microlight, hang glider, parachute. The film was aptly titled because it was a con air, since half of it took place on the ground.

  It was pretty stupid staying up late watching the film, because the cull was due to start the next day at 5:30 A.M. outside the estate office.

  I booked an alarm call with reception to be on the safe side. I knew that Callum wouldn’t hang around if I were late, and, of course, I felt constrained to appear at least vaguely professional.

  EXPERTS

  EARLIER, WHEN I had arrived, Callum had taken me up to where there were some pedigree red deer to feed. I had carried a bucket of feed just to show myself willing, but I could tell that Callum didn’t really need me to muck in. They weren’t short staffed, and they too wanted to look professional, i.e., not requiring help from passing writers.

  I hate being on the receiving end of “professionalism.” You feel excluded and bored. And trying to be “professional” usually means copying a procedure or relying on a machine. Both of these are signs of lack of faith in one’s own human abilities.

  The problem is that people have to protect themselves. My friend Mark, the forester, claims he needs lots of expensive machines, otherwise potential “clients” won’t think he’s “professional,” even though he assures me he isn’t in favor of all the machines he has. The machines and systems and paperwork become something to hide behind, a kind of necessary fakery everyone requires. It is as if we have convinced ourselves that life really is very complicated and therefore to be taken seriously. If things were too simple, we might think life was too easy. So we make life complicated and the pain of trying to figure things out both takes up time and seems worrying and by extension serious. There seems to be this complication threshold; if we can manage to dip below it we start actually thinking about our lives—I mean our real lives, not our outer career lives.

  CULLS

  CALLUM’S LIGHTS came slowly closer as he drove toward where I was parked in front of the estate office. He was a bit grim-faced when I got into his Land Rover. “Every year I look forward to this less and less,” he told me. “It’s not like stalking.”

  We drove at less than walking pace across the darkened parkland. A few hundred yards away was the assistant keeper in his Hi-Lux. We coordinated our moves with his over the hand-held radio.

  Callum knew the position the main herd would be in at dawn. We parked under huge oak trees and waited for first light. I’d already had an early morning cigarette, but if I hadn’t this would have been the time to smoke one. “Can deer smell smoke?” I started to ask Callum, but at that moment he grabbed the radio and told the assistant we were going in. He put the radio down and then remembered I’d spoken. “What?” he asked. “Nothing,” I said. We were going in.

  The herd stood grazing, over two hundred of them spread out in front of us with a slight mist lying in the hollows, making them look like wraiths. It was a curious experience, because as a child I had for
a while believed that ghosts appeared in the form of elk or large deer—it was only later, aged seven or so, that I learned that ghosts were dead humans come back to haunt us.

  Culling is more difficult than ordinary deer-shooting. You might think that having the pick of a big, relatively tame herd would be easy, but it isn’t. The first consideration is background. “We don’t want to shoot anyone down in the town,” said Callum. If the shot wasn’t against a slight rise in the land, a miss could go for another two miles and still be lethal. Next was the problem of deer standing in front of each other—again, a miss, or a bullet leaving one beast and entering another, could cause unwanted injury or death. Finally, when you had an isolated deer in your sights against a slight incline, you had to be sure it was one of those intended for the cull. Today we were after “spikers,” young males of around eighteen months.

  To outsiders the idea of culling an endangered species must seem mad. Pere Davids are among the rarest deer in the world, and we were just about to blow a few away before breakfast.

  Some people who have received Pere Davids from Woburn refuse to cull. Often these deer reduce their surroundings to bare ground and barkless trees. They escape and interbreed with red deer, or are shot on other people’s land. Or they so crowd the limited environment they are kept in that disease takes its toll. Now that Pere Davids all live in controlled environments, they need to be culled.

  At this point, though deer aren’t really at all like humans, I was beginning to identify with them strongly. I allowed my mind to explore the idea of human culling. After all, we all live in controlled environments now. Overpopulation is imminent everywhere. In some countries there is not enough food, in others not enough land or natural resources. Countries that have imposed strict birth control, like China, have ended up with skewed populations of more boys than girls, because girls are often aborted after a scan. Everywhere people complain about how there isn’t enough land anymore, how the world is being used up too quickly.

  The simple answer, I darkly fantasized, would be a human cull. Teams of trained marksmen would go out and search for herds of humans—probably young males and females, the human equivalent of spikers. Once they’d staked out a herd, say a queue for a nightclub or a football match, they could wait for a clear shot against a safe background. Couples leaving late at night might be safest to pick off, especially with infrared night vision.

  “Do you ever use night-vision equipment?” I asked Callum.

  “We looked into it,” he said. “But too many weirdos walk through the park at night. We might have ended up killing someone we couldn’t properly see. At least in daylight you can judge the background properly.”

  Maybe the human cull would have to be a daylight job too. It would be a terrible job to do—very stressful. The cullers would have to be men of the highest moral fiber. Imagine if parents bribed them not to cull their offspring? Disaster. Culling would have to be seen to be fair.

  The first few culls would have to be very heavy, to make any dent in the population at all. There would have to be a whole subsidiary industry to get rid of the bodies.

  My fantasizing ground to a halt when I started to invent reasons why I alone should not be culled

  Dark thoughts for a dark night, but dawn was almost upon us.

  Callum wound down his window and sighted his rifle on an isolated spiker at the far right side of the herd, resting the gun on the big wing mirror. Without warning he flipped on a pair of plastic earmuffs. Shit, I thought, and immediately jammed my fingers in my ears. I’d been caught out before by being close to gunfire—the noise, especially in an enclosed space, is the most shocking thing about it. I’m surprised more old soldiers aren’t completely deaf.

  There was, after a long wait, the huge expected bang and the deer fell hard, straight to the ground. A head shot. Callum preferred head shots to the more usual heart shot because the animal died instantly and didn’t upset the others too much. A heart shot could also result in considerable internal damage to other organs, lowering the sale price of the carcass. All culled Pere Davids are sold as top-class venison.

  The next shot Callum took he missed. “Shit,” he said. I could tell he didn’t like missing. Then the assistant missed a shot so they were even. And two Pere Davids lived for another day.

  After each beast was slain it was humped by the antlers onto the low-loader trailer, which was soon awash with blood. We—well, they—shot five deer, which was enough for one day, said Callum. He took great care to cover up the animals with a green tarpaulin. “I like to keep as low a profile as possible,” he explained. “Shoot before people get up, and deliver the deer to be dressed without anyone being disturbed by the sight of them.” Anyone who saw our convoy crossing the main road of the estate might think we had a trailer of feed or some other innocuous cargo, “And that’s the way I like to keep it,” said Callum.

  There was something of the undertaker in his concern for decorum, for people’s feelings about seeing dead creatures. Partly, no doubt, it was common sense. There were enough fools prating about cruelty to animals without supplying them with further ammunition. Yet wasn’t there also a feeling of shame, that what we were doing wasn’t quite right?

  We were killing innocent animals. We were daring to threaten the levels of the animal population.

  But though nobody wants to do it, killing has to be done.

  That is why we had to hide the carcasses under a green tarpaulin.

  DRESSING DOWN

  AT THE deer larder I was in for a shock. The place was high-roofed but not large, two rooms, one with an overhead rail on which to hang the dead meat, the other full of black plastic bins ready for deer feet and offal.

  Callum set to with a knife and a hacksaw, slicing through ligaments and sawing through bones to remove the hooves and inner organs. He wore a white overall and worked almost indecently fast. I was in the way, but had to watch. This was butchery at its finest, British hard work at its most efficient and quick. “We like to get a momentum going,” said Callum. “Get the job done quickly.” I could see that mucking about with blood and entrails when you hadn’t even eaten breakfast was not something to linger over. After the fifth deer had been dressed I was ready to leave. The bins were humped onto the trailer, again covered, and driven off to be disposed of as food for wild animals in the safari park. No one could say they didn’t get fresh meat.

  PAD

  ICHECKED OUT of the hotel and into Lord H’s personal pad, the luxury bungalow with the indoor swimming pool. I was in the guest wing of the pad. The housekeeper was very friendly, but I realized quickly that it was a self-catering setup. I had corrections to make to a book I was writing, but something was wrong about this place. I decided the windows were too low. My feet could be seen from outside, if there had been anyone outside, and this made the place feel cold and distracting. I needed, I told myself, cozy places to write, places where my lower body couldn’t be seen from outside. I switched on the television instead of working.

  The housekeeper came over and told me that Lord H had left a message. He had been further detained in Scotland and wouldn’t now be back until Thursday.

  I drove out to a local town that evening to get fish and chips and a nice bottle of wine. Back in the guest wing with the too-low windows, I drank my wine and wondered if I was missing the noise and disrupted nights provided by my new son.

  The next day my alarm went off, but allowing myself a few minutes’ lie-in, I realized I’d missed the start of that day’s cull. Seen one, seen them all, I said, and persuaded myself I’d go down to the deer larder at seven-thirty.

  At nine o’clock I met Callum by the side of the road. He smiled wryly when I made my excuses and then turned the subject to a detective problem. Someone had reported seeing a dead deer on the road. Callum had his dog, an expensive Bavarian Mountain Hound, sniffing around for clues. We found blood, but no deer. Then the man who had reported it clarified that he had actually seen only a leg of a deer. “I
t must have fallen from a bin,” said Callum, “as we drove over the road.”

  After this I spent some time watching the Pere Davids just grazing. I sat in my car alternately sipping coffee from a polystyrene cup, smoking, and looking at the deer through Callum’s excellent Zeiss binoculars.

  But there is a limit to how much deer-watching you can do, even of a rare and endangered species.

  I thought about my wife at home with our new son. I surprised myself by how much I was missing him. Being on my own didn’t seem as much fun as it usually was. Maybe some fatherhood hormone had kicked in. I thought about another evening of fish and chips (or pie and chips for a change). Another “decent” bottle of wine. The I Ith Duke had been right—a man shouldn’t be separated from his wife and children.

  I stopped off at Callum’s office for a while and chewed the fat. “This book,” he said, “it must be a minority interest. It’s not like your snake book. Most people aren’t going to be interested in deer, are they?” I had to admire Callum’s no-nonsense regard for the subject of his profession. Callum had made me welcome, but I thought he would be relieved when I had gone. As far as deer management went, I was just an obstacle to efficiency.

  That evening there was another message from Lord H. He was going to be held up another few days in Scotland. I drove out to the local town where I had bought the fish and chips. This time I focused my attention on the pies. The pies inside the hot cabinet were squashed looking and wrapped in see-through plastic. I noticed the plastic seemed to be going brown on the inside. I settled for a saveloy and chips.

  When I came out of the pie shop I found that the wine shop had inexplicably closed early. Saveloy and telly, or saveloy, pub, and telly? Now I was really feeling homesick.