The Wanderers

by Tim Pears

  Then the shepherd and the boy left them alone. Periodically over the days following they returned to the pens and released the ewes with the red mark upon them that showed they had been served.

  *

  When Leo had ridden into the farmyard and asked for work Cyrus Pepperell, the tenant farmer, told him that his horse didn’t look strong enough for agricultural labour and neither did he. The boy assured him that together they were worth more than any other horse or lad. Mister Pepperell narrowed his eyes. He said the boy was lucky, he was looking to take on a new lad, having only just let one go.

  ‘You’ll be wantin fodder for yon horse – I’ll take it out a yer wages,’ the farmer said. ‘Let’s try you, boy. Learn the shepherdin from my old chap. He was a dab with sheep. As good as any in his time.’

  He shook Leo’s hand. It was like grasping rough-barked wood. The farmer took Leo to the barn and told the old man to show the boy the ropes. Vance Brewer regarded Leo through narrowed eyes. When the gaffer had gone, he muttered, ‘The ropes? Do he want a shepherd boy or a fuckin sailor? I spose he don’t reckon I’ll be needin many more pair a shoes, do e?’

  2

  The farm lay in the bottom of a coombe, miles from the nearest village, south of Bodmin Moor. The land was all up and down, nothing level, yet more rounded than steep. It reminded the boy of his mother’s bread-making. The earth here had been kneaded into shape. The sloping fields were small and overlooked by woods. Even on clear days the sun found it hard to find the farm. Vance Brewer told him that the water supply was unreliable and dried up most summers, as did the pond across the yard, yet the fields around the farm turned marshy when it rained. Leo looked at the threadbare pastures and guessed they had not been visited by a muck-cart in a long time.

  The farmer, Cyrus Pepperell, was a man of medium build, a head shorter than his wife, Juliana, and once he stepped out of the farmhouse he had a harried air. He was always on the move. However hard he worked his men, Cyrus toiled more. He chose the tougher part of any job and sweated at his labour. On occasion, shifting from one place to another, he broke into a run. Vance Brewer shook his head and told the boy, ‘Never will catch his self up.’

  Vance said Leo should see him in the spring on the vegetable patch, the gaffer scratching the miserable earth with his hoe like some demented cock.

  There was a stockboy, too, an ill-tempered lad by the name of Wilf Cann. He was tall and rangy, with straggly brown hair, and wore a permanent scowl as if he was suffering from some irritating pain or insult, but did not wish to share it.

  All slept in the small farmhouse, Leo with Wilf Cann in the loft above the Pepperells’ bedroom, which they climbed to up a ladder off the landing. The house was odd. Heat was supposed to rise but in this dwelling it did not and on cool nights the attic was shivering cold. The old shepherd slept on the ground floor in a stall on the other side of the kitchen wall from the hearth, partitioned out of an old pantry or stockroom. There were no others on the farm. No children. According to Vance Brewer there were once four, ‘two of each’, but all had long gone.

  It was a poor establishment of a kind Leo had heard referred to but not seen for himself before. They were known as mean farms. The Pepperells provided cider sop, bread soaked in cider, for breakfast. Mustard sandwiches for lunch. Rice pudding for supper. Pastry lard and bread pudding. Tea was offered but neither milk nor sugar. Juliana made no apology for this meagre fare. She was an anxious, fidgeting woman. She made it clear that she could do better with assistance. Why her daughters had left her she did not say. Her breath smelled of menthol, from some concoction she gave herself daily to ward off the flu. Yet she was often sick, she said, and was obliged to drink beef tea as she laboured, trimming the oil lamps or blackleading the grate.

  When Leo and Wilf Cann climbed to the loft at night the lad crawled beneath the unwashed blankets of his mattress, blew out his candle and told the boy to do likewise. When Leo spoke to him, all Wilf said was, ‘Why does you croak when you talk? Is you a frog?’

  Leo resolved to avoid him but this was impossible for the farm was too small. Every day at some point the gaffer ordered Leo to help Wilf dig this drain or mend that gate. Beside the flock of long-woolled sheep were half a dozen Ruby Red cows, two pigs, geese and chickens, and a single ancient carthorse by the name of Cobby. Wilf was junior stockman, part-time carter, ploughboy. He was three or four years older than Leo and might have welcomed at least one companion within thirty years of his own age, yet did not seem to.

  There was no greater cordiality between the lad and the old shepherd. Beyond the most essential discussion they only exchanged jibes and insults. ‘A sheep’s fart is better than a cow’s turd,’ Vance Brewer told Leo within Wilf’s hearing. ‘Cattle does sod all for the land, they gives nothin to it, see?’

  ‘Oh, aye?’ Wilf said. ‘But at least a cow’s breath is always sweet, eh, unlike them fuckin ewes, all shitty one end and sour-breathed t’other.’

  *

  Through the autumn Leo watched the woods around the farm change colour. It was as if the trees were singing, not in sound but in their own language that he suspected no human painter could quite equal. None of the others seemed to take any notice. Leo lifted his gaze. He regarded the field maples’ flame-filled leaves. There was a chestnut tree. A breeze blew across the hill and a dozen pigeons rose out of the branches, bad-temperedly, as if the tree had tired of their company and shrugged them off.

  Some days they hitched the colt to a cart and went up onto Bodmin Moor and cut bracken for cows’ bedding, a coarse and cheap equivalent to straw.

  Thursday was baking day. Juliana set the dough beside the fire to rise, and on that day the kitchen filled with the odour of yeast, fermenting in the rising dough. On Fridays Cyrus Pepperell went alone to Bodmin. Some weeks his cart was laden with jams and jellies made by Juliana, or eggs and potatoes, or geese for the butcher. Another time it went empty but returned with four sinewy, ill-tempered goats. Leo could see no pattern or logic. The only certainty was that Cyrus would bring back a single copy of the Cornish Echo, which in the evenings he read from beginning to end over the course of the week, allowing himself occasional pinches of snuff as he did so.

  Leo spent a cold day ditch-clearing with Cyrus Pepperell and Wilf Cann. All three of them worked hard so as to keep warm. The gaffer possessed a pair of oilskin waders and went into the ditch to dig out silt, while the lad and the boy hacked branches and brambles from the banks.

  At the end of the day they carried the tools they’d used to the shed and Wilf said, ‘Do that again and I’ll fuckin trim e.’

  Leo asked what it was he should not repeat. Wilf did not answer but dumped the shovel, billhook and slasher noisily and went out. The boy reviewed the events of the day in order to discover what sin or affront he had committed. Had he uttered some insult? Used the lad’s favourite tool? Worked in sunshine, Wilf in shadow? He could find none.

  *

  Leo’s pay was two shillings and sixpence for a sixty-hour week, which Cyrus said he would receive at the end of the farming year, after harvest. He allowed them ten-minute afternoon breaks, which had to be worked off between midday and one o clock on Saturday. On Saturday afternoon Wilf Cann and Vance Brewer went rabbiting. In the village shop they received three ounces of tobacco for each rabbit they produced.

  On Sundays Wilf shot pigeons and brought the catch home so that he could enjoy pigeon casserole made by Juliana once a week. One time he saw no pigeons but bagged two hares. Juliana made a hare stew that included their eyes.

  Leo took out the white colt. He rode up onto the moor. The miserable farm in its gloomy coombe was a good place to hide, but he had to escape. If only for a while.

  Grey sheep grazed on Bodmin Moor, perhaps coloured by the sulphurous smoke that rose from one or two chimneys. Pump houses and engine rooms stood empty, spoil tips around them. He heard the throaty cry of birds but could not see them. Moorland birds were unknown to him. He came to a quarry, now disu
sed and full of water. Promontories ran out, made up of huge rejected slabs of granite. Before he saw horses he smelled their dung. Then he saw them. They were much like Dartmoor ponies but a little less robust-looking and were mostly bay or blackish. They had good coats, manes and tails, and stood around thirteen hands high.

  One Sunday in October he rode down off the eastern side of the moor. In the middle of a wood was a barley field, all enclosed by trees like some secret holding. He could identify the crop by its stubble, which had not been burned. Perhaps owing to the danger of a forest fire. He found evidence of the deer before he ever saw them: the twin half-circles, like elongated horseshoes, of their slots in the mud of a ride or fire-break after the rain. Under the trees were small mounds of neat droppings.

  On subsequent Sundays he revisited the wood. He saw trees had patches of missing bark, chewed when better food was scarce or else rubbed off by stags scraping the soft skin or velvet off their antlers. He could recall his brother Sid telling him that.

  Then he saw them: a group of fallow does with their calves out in the barley field, nibbling at what they could find scattered amongst the stubble. Perhaps this was a Cornish custom: the gleaning was left not for women and children but for deer. He eased the white colt deeper into the wood, away from the herd. Looking back over his shoulder, they did not seem to have noticed him.

  The week following he dismounted from the colt and let him graze. Leo sat upon a fallen tree. Some way along the path a doe and her calf appeared. She stared at Leo. Or towards him. He kept still. The doe had large dark eyes. Her ears appeared to have pricked up, alert. He knew she had an incredible sense of smell, and acute hearing. His brother Sid had told him deer could smell a man a mile off, though their eyesight was comparatively poor. The doe lowered her head and grazed.

  Other deer came out of the trees and onto the path. Leo reckoned this was the same group he had seen in the barley field. They browsed and chewed the moss off beech roots. One of the does was more alert than the others. They grazed, or even sat down to rest, but this one cast around her, listening, scenting the air. She must have smelled him and sought him out with her eyes, for when his gaze returned to her he found her staring at him as her fellow had done. But this was different. This guard doe held him in a fixed gaze. Leo felt a strange sensation in his stomach. He was an alien passing through their domain. She turned and walked away from the path and off into the trees, and one by one the other deer stirred or rose and followed her.

  *

  One Saturday afternoon in November, as Leo was grooming the colt, Wilf came up to him and said, ‘I don’t know where you go, boy, but I’m prepared to come with you tomorrow. I’ve had enough a pigeons for a while.’

  They rode together on the colt, Wilf behind the rider, at a walking pace. They rode up past the mines and the quarry, and on over the eastern side of the moor. The day was cool and smoky, and still. Wilf declared that this was his favourite time of year. Leo took them to the woods. He told Wilf that he came to watch deer. Wilf said that if he’d known he would have brought the gun.

  Leo tied the colt to a sapling on a long rope and left him to graze. ‘This way,’ he said, and led Wilf to thick undergrowth in which he’d made a comfortable hide. They could look out upon a wide clearing.

  ‘This is the spot from where you make your observations, is it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Leo whispered. ‘Now we wait.’

  They sat or kneeled and peered out between branches. After a while Wilf yawned and lay down. Some time later he sat up again.

  ‘This is it?’ he asked. ‘This is what you does on a Sunday? Come all the way up here, crawl into a bush and sit starin at nothin?’

  Leo shrugged. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘The tedium’ll kill me,’ Wilf said. He stretched out his legs. ‘If cramp don’t first.’

  Leo shushed him. ‘Quiet,’ he said. ‘Look.’

  They gazed and saw a doe on her own, walking slowly, her black tail flicking over her white, heart-shaped rump. Her light coat was changing to the dull brown of winter. Then she began to move faster and Leo saw that a buck pursued her. She ran away but not far. The buck trotted after her, and she stopped and waited for him. When he reached her, she stroked his neck with her cheek and rubbed her body along his. Leo wondered whether they had already mated for this looked less like a courting ritual than a marriage. The buck waited to let the doe walk slowly ahead of him and then he rose on his hind legs, his front legs scrabbling awkwardly astride her. But she walked on and he slipped back onto his four feet.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ Wilf said.

  Leo put his hand on the other lad’s arm, to quiet him.

  The buck followed after the doe, grunting. Whether out of annoyance or frustrated lust, Leo did not know. Otherwise both buck and doe were silent. The male tried a second time to mount the doe and again she moved away and resumed grazing. He followed her. This time he moved alongside and licked or nibbled her neck, the boy could not quite tell which, for the buck was on the far side of the doe from where Leo and Wilf were hidden. After a while the buck once more mounted the doe and this time she stood her ground and took his weight upon her back quarters, and the buck pressed himself into her. For a few seconds the beast thrust to and fro into the doe, then suddenly his great back arched and his antlered head flew up in the air. The doe stepped forward and the buck teetered on his back legs then fell to the ground.

  The doe resumed grazing as if nothing had happened. In seven or eight months’ time there might be proof that something had. The male wandered away.

  The lads watched them until both animals had moved out of sight. ‘That’s the thing about fallow deer,’ said Wilf. ‘And most other breeds too. They split after the rut. The does stay with the fawns. The stags and young bucks form a male tribe, go off wanderin across their territory.’

  Leo looked at him, open-mouthed. ‘How do you know that?’ he asked. ‘Was your father a gamekeeper?’

  Wilf exclaimed as if expelling breath that had got stuck in his mouth. ‘A gamekeeper? No,’ he said. ‘My old man was a poacher.’ He shook his head. ‘The worst poacher in the history a Liskeard District. He knew all about deer. He just knew nothin about keepers. Always gettin caught he was. I’m not sure as I’ve ever tasted venison, even now.’

  They crawled out of their hiding place and walked back to where they’d left the white colt.

  ‘Roe deer is different,’ Wilf told Leo. ‘They’s the odd ones out. They lives as families all year round. Father, mother, usually twin kids.’

  They rode back to the farm. Wilf slid off the horse. ‘That was good, boy,’ he said. ‘That weren’t too bad at all. I’ll be sure to bring the gun next time, mind.’

  3

  In December, wood pigeons ate ivy berries. Against a grey sky, black leafless trees swayed. They appeared to Leo as sentient beings deep in thought. At dusk a flock of starlings swirled overhead. They did not fly straight but changed direction all the time, all together. Thousands of one mind, creating patterns, the birds knitted one to another into a fabric that stretched this way then contracted that. How could they swoop and veer and alter course so swiftly without hitting one another? It was impossible to understand or even believe, only to witness.

  Leo stood and watched. When the starlings passed directly overhead the whole world darkened. The sound of all their wings beating was a roar. There was a stand of sycamores and the birds flew there to roost. Some landed and were lost to sight. More came swooping out of the sky.

  Something made him look to his right across the field. Out of a lone oak a sparrowhawk appeared. She flew on into the black whirling mass of birds. Leo saw some kind of disturbance and then the hawk came out of the flock with a bird in her claws. She flew back to her oak. The starlings did not show any sign of panic but continued swirling as they had before and settling in the sycamore trees.

  The boy stood, transfixed by the brief spectacle of violence. It was a moment before he remembered to resume brea
thing.

  *

  One Friday morning Leo went out with the shepherd to look at the ewes. With no dog to bring them in, the old man stood some way off and regarded them from a distance. ‘You’d be surprised what you can learn from watchin em,’ he said. Leo did not think there would be much. He remembered little Ernest Cudmore, the shepherd back on the farm where his father was ploughman, always in amongst his sheep. The air was still. Blackbirds sang loudly as if to exclaim at the mildness of the morning. In the east the sun had not yet risen but lit up that portion of the grey sky, turning clouds into pink continents of some otherworldly realm all may go to in time. Soon a watery sun rose, and the sky lost its colour. Rain fell in the afternoon. The water was colder than the air into which it came. They spent the day turning the wheel of the cake-grinder in the granary, grinding up slabs of kibbled linseed and cotton-seed oil cake. Cyrus Pepperell had gone to market.

  In the afternoon the rain ceased. Leo walked across the yard to beg black tea from Juliana for their break. She told him he must not come in the house while Cyrus was away, and that they had their cider. She had no time to make them tea. On the way back, Wilf Cann stood in his way.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘That’s it. I’ve had enough. Put em up.’

  Leo tried to walk forward but his way was blocked. He made to manoeuvre around but Wilf stepped across him in whichever direction he began. Leo stood with his arms by his sides, palms forward. Wilf was a head taller. Leo did not look up at him but at the ground. ‘I don’t want to fight you,’ he said. ‘I thought we was friends.’