Cynan Jones - The Dig

He could not explain it, but he felt that there would be a rightness now. That it should never have been moved.

THE BIG MAN assessed the space. The mound seemed to be set in some old clearing. It was ringed with thicker, older trees. There was a hollow before it as if the mound had been formed by some great digging out at some point. For some reason the man thought of the cell. It was perhaps the thick wall of trees.

That policeman, he thought. He could not stop thinking of the four walls, the hatch for food, the dog-pen proximity of others. It was the worst thing for him: to be surrounded by people and to be forced to fit in the social system of them. He was too much an instrument to change what he did, but he had a strange feeling of exposure now. He was nervous about the policeman. I can’t go back, he said to himself. I wouldn’t get away with it again.

He took a lantern and lit it on the ground to keep the light low. The man could see the mound was heavy with holly and it had a freshly washed look of newness in that light.

Ag, I should get rid of the gun, he thought. Nothing else is so serious. They won’t catch me for anything else. Thinking of the things he did, his mind whetted at the thought of the badger.

Take the dogs and find the holes, said the big man. Leave the lurchers. When you find a hole, cut some holly and stuff the hole with it, then close it up with stones. Or dead wood. Make it heavy. Keep the dogs to hand for now.

We’ve dug before, said the skinny man. The big man just looked at him as if he could ball him up like paper.

When the town men came back they took a drink then went to the entrance hole with one of the dogs. The big man was holding the spade and it had the look of a cudgel in his hands.

They fixed the locator to the dog and sent it in.

The skinny man began to work his way over the mound, staring at the locator. The big man spat thickly. He remembered the sound of the dogs at the bus depot. Then the dog began to yelp.

The big man eddied on the sound. He was trying to picture the system of the sett.

They followed the locator until it pinpointed the dog. There was an excitement amongst the other two men.

The big man staved his spade into the ground. Here, he said. Dig here.

ABOUT AN HOUR had gone by and there had been a brief fall of rain. They worked in the lantern light and everything beyond the space it lit looked impenetrable and dark. At the edge of the wood a robin was singing, undisturbed by the digging within, and there was something unsettling in that.

They had left the other dogs off the mound in the clearing and they were variously slumbered or cleaning themselves when the fox came through them. The fox seemed to be in their midst before it understood and the dogs exploded.

The men were straight off the mound to the dogs but the noise had been massive and abrupt. The fox had gone, and they couldn’t understand how a fox could come into the smells of them and the sound of them digging but it had and the dogs’ reaction had shattered through the cloak of trees.

•

Daniel was going through the cattle when he heard it. He stopped. For a moment he listened to the rattle of the corrugated iron as one of the cows scratched inside the barn, and to a tractor clanging as it changed loaders on the next farm.

His own dog was up and alert on the roof of the kennel and there was the clink of its chain as it scented the air, smelling the echo of sound. Over the cwm the sound had set other farm dogs off but he knew what he had heard. It was not fox, he was sure. The bark was different from the sheepdogs. Smaller dogs.

He stayed still, as if recalling the sound, trying to pin it down, and then went through the cowshed and looked out over the dark fields to the woods. Sounds came to him through a wall of thought. He listened hard.

The men settled the dogs and when the sheepdogs in the nearby farms started up they saw it could cover the thing.

The big man was looking at the tops of the trees for the breeze to see which way the sound might have gone. He listened for the sound of a quad bike. When there was none after some time he seemed to settle. He had been like an animal growing in its senses and his whole frame in the big coat seemed to shrink minutely as he relaxed. He could hear faintly the echoey sound of the sheep in the barn above and thought the noise inside must be complete and heavy. Ag, he thought. You wouldn’t hear it over that.

After a while they started again to dig.

Daniel stayed still, listened. He had just fed the sheep and they were only just quietening from the great bleating they made as he unfolded the hay. They had fallen quiet with eating now, and he listened. The dogs had bothered him. It was trancelike, like feeling for a lamb, as if his mind felt round his land like a great hand feeling for something wrong, some fault in its body, some small thing out of place.

And then he heard it, was sure he could hear it. Some tap foreign to the concert of the land. Once. Twice maybe. It wasn’t a random sound; it was a sound of work. A tink far away, like the sound of a thrush cracking a snail. And then it was gone again.

Despite the cold the skinny man worked in his T-shirt and you could see the national tattoo turn grotesque with the work and the strange, febrile bulldog inside his forearm. He had the peculiar heating of fatless men and he swung the pick onto the stone a second time before the man could stop him, and then a third, shattering the thick leaf of shale, the strange percussive noises going off into the air.

Too much noise, said the big man. Next time dig round.

He had this strong captaining and the skinny man looked at him guiltily. It was like he was drunk in the effort and he was showing a kind of childlike excitement. The big man just stared right through him. Then he went off into the woods.

Daniel went into the house and through the kitchen and went into the lean-to for the gun.

He opened the cabinet and took out the.410. Then he put it back and took out the twelve bore.

In his tiredness the gun felt heavier than he remembered. He breached it. The smell and the look of the gun made him think of the shard, the metal smell still somewhere on his hands.

He took a box of cartridges and went through again to the kitchen. Then he got the bag of rice and prepared to swap the lead out of the cartridges.

The Aga pinged and drew his attention and he put the gun down breached on the table and took the box from the open oven.

The lamb was dead. It was dead and comfortable.

He put his hand to the lamb’s ribs. Nothing.

He got up and put the gun back in the cabinet, and then went out. And there was something sacrificial in the way he did.

The skinny man was in the hole passing the dirt up to the asthmatic man. It was deeper than him, and you couldn’t see the skinny man unless you looked right in.

Every now and then the big man passed water down to him which he tipped on his head as if he were too hot. They were close to the badger now and they could sense this closeness and the men talked encouragingly to the dog.

The big man had returned and was standing with the dogs.

This is it, thought Daniel. This is the last bit I have. Right here. He was down on the wet ground clenching his fists and trying to calm himself and rouse himself all at once. He could feel his fists sink into the wet earth.