Cynan Jones - The Dig

He listened to the men call to the dog, could hear the accents, hear the spade slice the ground, muffled, the men digging her grave at a distance. The noise of the work and the slope of the mound protected him and he looked up through the big trees, then down at the place around the dig.

There was a pile of severed roots. The tools.

He felt something set in. This is it, he said to himself. He could smell the new opened ground. Then he stood up, and the dogs went berserk.

The spade coming was like the wing of a bird.

He watched the jay pick up from the ground the leftover food they always threw from the door. He watched the day sink. The cold snap had come, the low sun started to decline.

He was looking at the jay. They had grown more confident now, since more magpies had been trapped in the hedgerows, like they filled their space. The jay was curious moving and the same color as the sunset and he was looking at the symmetry of that color and thinking of the pink cloth she had lost.

He heard the door click and the jay startled and flew off, the blue splash of its wings dazzling in their selfness against the bird.

She came out, pushing her feet into her boots. She looked bigger than she really was in her clothes. From the house came the smell of warm bread.

I’m going down to the horse, she said.

He watched her walk away. The light seemed to vibrate in the land and he felt a great love for it, as if he had seen it anew. He had the great, choking feeling.

The sun was dropping before her and he watched her go over the fields.

This is everything. This is everything I need, he said.

They pull up the cars some way off from the place and get out, holding the latches up as they push the doors to. It is impossible to be silent with the wet ground. The dogs pant, scuffle.

The policeman looks down at the wet ground while the others get out around him, get readied. He presses his foot into the mud of the verge, lifts it deliberately. When he checks his torch, his footprint is clear and defined. He thinks of the earth of the sett, its witness. There are the boot prints. Matches of soil. A dog’s hair taken from the mouth of a tunnel.

There is the faintest squelch on his radio and he presses his ear, nods there in the darkness. The teams are in place. The greatest risk is the dogs.

Perhaps in his sleep the big man distantly registers the clink of chains, the click of doors, the suck of footsteps. As if they happen in some earth some way above him. Then they come, with an immediate noise.

He is sleeping and stunned bright light-like for a moment into a childlike immobility. His own dogs echo riot in the sheds and the police dogs respond, deafening in the low, crouched house. And though this is his space he is disoriented, startled and slow.

In the confined room the constant yelps are deafening and confusing and like bright lights to the man, and he is unsure what he can do.

Lights blind his eyes, a dog barks inches from his face. There is nowhere to go. He has nowhere to go.

In the small hole of his room he feels sick misunderstanding fear and lashes at the dog, kicks and scuffs as he cowers, finds himself stopped up against the wall, tries to use the thick blanket like a hide.

The handler shouts him to be still, to stay still in the spattering space of noise, the sniffer dogs breathing through the tunnels of the house, the shouting men.

He sees past the dog’s glaring eyes the metal cuffs, the instruments readied for his taking. He revolts again but the dog yaps. The dog yaps. The dog yaps every time he moves.

Thanks to the Society of Authors for a Foundation Award and to Literature Wales for a bursary, both of which gave me time with the book.

Thanks to Gordon Lumby of Badger Watch & Rescue Dyfed for confirming things I already knew, and for furnishing me with details I didn’t.

To John Freeman and Philip Gwyn Jones, for consecutive votes of faith.

Thanks too, Jon McG., Euan, and Ch. and the rest of you. You know who you are.

CYNAN JONES was born near Aberaeron, Wales, in 1975. He is the author of three novels, The Long Dry (winner of a Betty Trask Award, 2007), Everything I Found on the Beach (2011), and The Dig (2014), winner of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. He is also the author of Bird, Blood, Snow (2012), the retelling of a medieval Welsh myth. The Dig is his first novel published in the U.S.