The wild isles, p.50
The Wild Isles, page 50
There was a family of thrushes who nested in the dainty woodland, and every spring, our cats would upscuttle the nests, displace the hatchlings. How many times did I try to salvage the peeping babies before they had their bones crunched by cat jaws? I’d wrap them in my mother’s linen napkins and feed them pureed worms through a surgical dropper. Once, I successfully nursed two thrush babies to a condition at which they might have been able to fly away, then I locked the cats into the house and left the birds in the woodshed with the doors opened wide. A few hours later, they were gone, and I was overjoyed. But before the end of the week I found a severed leg beneath the silver birch, some feathers caught in its lowest branches, fluttering, and the second thrush baby turned up a week later. It had fallen behind the woodpile and starved to death.
One-legged pigeons, bats with snapped or fractured wings, rabbits with myxomatosis. My sister and I grew up digging tiny graves. Dad had designated us a flower bed in which we were allowed to cultivate whatever we wished, but our plants were few and far between, wild or weed-smothered. Instead we used the flower bed for burying creatures, several deep, until we couldn’t dig a new hole without unearthing a crushed matchbox coffin, a ghoulish hamster skull.
I try not to think about the countless lives I failed to save as I prise my sparrow from the pothole, cradle it in my T-shirt, carry it home to my grandmother’s house.
*
Struggling bird clasped to stomach, I tip the gunge out of the basin, refill it with clean, warm water. On the back step, in the basin, in the water, in my hands, the sparrow’s plumage soaks and shrivels to nothing, a ball of wriggling gristle.
‘I can feel all your bones,’ I whisper.
I don’t understand why I remember how to distinguish the sex of a sparrow when I’ve forgotten so many other, more valuable things, and yet, I know from its dark nape that my bird is a male. My male’s mouth and nose are bunged, the black glue is everywhere, encrusted with dirt and vegetation. I try for some time before I realise that tar does not come out of feathers, and remember, of course, I knew this all along. Everybody knows this.
I place him in the shade of the garden shed. My sparrow lies, exhausted. And I hope he will die soon.
*
I forget my trip to the shop, return to my wilderness, the shade of my grandmother’s plum trees. But all afternoon, blaring above the words of my book, I can hear him beating his sopping wings, hammering the shrubbery down.
It’s almost dark before I fill the basin again. This time the water is nearly scalding. This time I know it’s useless; I do it anyway. I manage to clear enough mess from his beak to allow the sparrow to drink. He gulps and gulps, even though it’s scalding, and suddenly he goes still, relaxes, floats on the surface without my support.
The state of his plumage is even worse. Coated with moss, with dust, with buttercups. Now my sparrow looks costumed, almost foolish.
*
In the kitchen, I find an old dishcloth. In the yard, I find a heavy, smooth stone. I place the cloth over my sparrow and wish he’ll go quietly, but he doesn’t. For a second before I weigh the stone down, my sparrow recognises that his light and air have run out, and he pushes against me with his last shred of useless strength, and eternity passes before the tiny bubbles rising to the surface from beneath fabric and rock and tar and feathers eventually stop.
When I unwrap him, my sparrow’s beak is frozen open. Tongue extended, eyes vast with terror. I do not take a photograph. This is the rule, remember? I am not allowed to kill something and then steal its spirit as well. I only bury him in the compost heap. Bird bones are fine as fingernails. And back on the step, I sit with my arms folded around my knees and I cry indecently hard. I cry my throat raw and eyes puffed and head sore for a long, long time.
*
Have I cried out my deadness now?
from THE DIG
Cynan Jones
Born near Aberaeron, Ceredigion, Cynan Jones (b. 1975) is a novelist who continues to live in north-west Wales. His debut, The Long Dry (2006), won a Betty Trask Award. In 2010 he published Le cose che non vogliamo più (Things We Don’t Want Anymore) in Italian. His novels are short and he has experimented with removing punctuation such as speech marks in The Dig (2014), which won a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and the 2015 Wales Book of the Year fiction prize. He won the BBC National Short Story Award for ‘The Edge of the Shoal’ in 2017 and published a short story collection, Stillicide, in 2019. He also wrote the screenplay for an episode of the BAFTA award-winning crime series Hinterland, and Three Tales, a collection of stories for children.
They staked the dogs some way from the sett and poured them water and took a drink themselves. The boy had a queer feeling about the man’s mouth being on the water and still did not want to drink it.
The trees had opened up a little and you could see the light finally coming through. There was a moment of greater coldness, like a draught through a door, and the boy felt an unnerving, as if something had acknowledged them arriving there. They had made a lot of noise moving through the wood and when they stopped they heard the birdsong and the early loud vibrancy of the place.
First dig? said the man.
The boy nodded, with that hesitancy. They could hear the dogs lapping and drinking at the water bowls.
The main hole’s up there. The big man gestured up the slope. We’ll put in the dog, he said. He meant Jip, the big Patterdale.
The big man’s own bitch was by his feet, with her distant, composed look against the other dogs.
I want to put her in next. He indicated. Better be a dog goes in first. The big man was thinking of the big tracks and the possibility of the big boar. A bigger dog would have more chance up front. They knew if you put a bitch down after a bitch, or a dog down after a dog, there were problems most times; but if you changed the sex the other usually came out with no trouble.
The boy’s father nodded agreement. He was checking the locator, checking the box with the handset.
The boy was thirsty and looking at the water, not wanting to open the other tub in front of the man.
Take him round and block up the other holes. I’ll do the other side.
The big gypsy brought out the map he’d drawn of the holes and went over it with the boy’s father. The gypsy asked the boy if he understood and the redness came to his throat under the zipped-up coat collar; but he was feeling the rich beginning of adrenalin now. He was dry and thirsty and had a big sick hole of adolescent hunger but he could feel his nerves warming at the new thing and began to feel a comradeship of usefulness to the man.
They unwound the sheets of thick plastic and went off and systematically blocked the holes with stones and sheets of plastic and laid blocks across the obvious runs with heavy timber and then went back to the dogs. Then they went up the slope with the two first dogs and gathered around the main entrance and stood the tools up in the ground.
There was old bedding around the hole, the strange skeletal bracken starting to articulate its colour in the grey light. Jip started to bounce on the lead and strain for the hole as if he could sense the badgers. The strewn bracken might have meant the badgers had gone overnight, but from the way the dog was behaving there was a fresh, present scent.
The boy looked at the dog straining on the lead and could feel the same feeling in his guts. He felt the feeling he did before the first rats raced out and the dogs went into them.
The boy’s father knelt with the excited dog and checked the box and collar over again and Jip let his enthusiasm solidify into a determined, pointed thing and stood stockily facing the hole, a determined tremble going through him.
The boy’s father studied the locator once more and checked the signal, then they sent the dog in.
The boy was not expecting the delay of listening for the dog. He could feel his stomach roll though. He could feel a slow soupy excitement. This was a new thing. Then deep in the earth the dog yelped. Then again; and his father was instantly by the hole, prone, calling to the dog, calling with strange excitement into the tunnel.
Stay at him, boy. Good Jip. Good Jippo.
The boy glanced at the man as his father called this out, as if it had revealed what he was thinking about the way the man looked. But the big gypsy seemed to be rapt, a pasty violence setting in his eyes as he listened and watched Messie, his bitch, solidify, focus. Finally, the dog let out a low whimper of desire.
You could hear the barks moving through the ground now and they came alternately sharp and muffled until they seemed to regulate and come with a faraway percussive sound.
The big man moved across the slope. He seemed to swirl in some eddy, then came to a halt, as if caught up on something.
The big man moved again, listening, and the boy’s father tracked across with the locator until the two men stood in the same place, confirming the big man’s judgement.
Here, he said.
They brought up the tools and they started to dig.
It was very early spring and the bluebells were not out but made a thick carpet that looked newly washed and slick after the rain. They cut through this carpet and cleared the mess of thin sycamore from the place and the big gypsy cut a switch and bent it into a sack mouth and laid the sack down by where they would dig.
The ground was sodden with rain and sticky and they worked with the sharp foldaway spades, cutting through the thread roots. The smell of rotted leaves and dug-up soil strengthened. When they came to a thicker root, they let the boy in with the saw. Then they started to dig for real.
The big man swung the pick and the father and boy shovelled. Within minutes the boy was parched with thirst and hunger and could not shout properly when they called constantly to the dog below. He was dizzy with effort. He was afraid of not being able to keep up with the men. As the hole deepened they shored up the sides of the hole with the plastic sheeting and the work steadied to a persistent rhythm.
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 defence.
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 stand-off. 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 colour 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 mid-morning 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 adrenalin and without the excitement of pace and in the end it was the reluctance and non-engagement 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 foot 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.
from THE SECRET LIFE OF FLIES
Erica McAlister
Erica McAlister is the Senior Curator for Diptera and Siphonaptera at the Natural History Museum and @flygirlNHM on Twitter. She was educated at the University of Manchester and holds a PhD from the University of Surrey, Roehampton. She has carried out research projects on mosquitoes in Britain and Tajikistan, and is contributing to a project on Ethiopian Diptera. She has presented a Radio 4 series on insects and is regularly communicating science via radio, talks and social media. She is the author of The Secret Life of Flies (2017) and The Inside Out of Flies (2020) and president of the Amateur Entomologists’ Society.
THE NECROPHAGES
A friend will help you move, a good friend
will help you move a body.
Steven J. Daniels
According to Benjamin Franklin nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes. Everything living eventually dies. But what happens to all of the bodies? Humans are generally either cremated or, as with most animals, left to rot away. Can you imagine if this didn’t happen? Corpses littering the high streets and countryside! Luckily for us, nature’s own gravediggers start working on the dead immediately life ceases. Adult flies locate the bodies, lay their eggs and, for the most part, leave their offspring the job of cleaning up the mess. If it weren’t for these little organic munchers we would be knee-high in dead bodies, with corpses floating around in a quagmire of putrefying organs! These necrophagous species, along with the dung beetles, did not evolve until relatively recently – 66 to 26 million years ago – and since they were not around during the age of the dinosaurs, the decomposing fauna and landscape must have looked quite different then. Flies weren’t the first to be involved in the clean up then but they are some of the most important insect carrion feeders today in terms of both densities and efficiency. Not only do they munch away on dead bodies but some feed on the dead or dying parts of living ones, which can have a positive or negative impact depending on the situation. The negative is myiasis – a parasitic infection by any fly larvae in a vertebrate host. This often looks as gross as it sounds and I will cover it later. But the positive is a very exciting thing indeed – and one that humans have used for thousands of years to aid our recovery from injuries.
Not too often can one quote the King James Bible in a scientific book, but the Book of Job (24:20) states: ‘The womb shall forget him; the worm shall feed sweetly on him’. It was not worms but fly maggots that were being discussed here, and this was not the first published mention of maggots feeding on meat. In the 4th century BC, Aristotle, the famous Greek philosopher, proposed his spontaneous generation theory. He argued that some animals grew from their parents while others just appeared – including flies – from either rotten vegetable matter or from the ‘inside of animals out of the secretions of their several organs’. This theory was believed to be true from Aristotle’s time right up to the 17th century. It was then that Francesco Redi, an Italian physician and nature lover, conducted the first experiments debunking the myth. These were reinforced in 1862 when chemist and microbiologist, Louis Pasteur, conducted his famous swan-neck flask experiment to disprove spontaneous regeneration. When the flasks were sealed nothing grew on the meat but when they were left exposed flies appeared. But the flies’ appearance was not a miracle of spontaneous generation. They needed to arrive in the first place and lay their eggs on the food source.
