Cynan Jones - The Dig

HE PULLED THE van into the gateway and dropped the lights. It was a flat night and the van looked a strange, alien color under it. For a while he sat there carefully.

It was lambing time and here and there across the shallow valley and variously on the hills there were lights on. And while it looked to him from this distance like some community at work, he knew that all those farms were involved in their own private processes, processes in their nature give or take the same, but in each space of light carried out in isolated private intimacy.

He looked out across the scape and recalled in those wells of light those farms which were sympathetic or against this thing he did. In his time he had covered most of this ground and in his mind he drew vaguely the shape of the lands that attached to each farm and called back the names of each property he knew as if he were noting constellations.

It was a time of mixed certainty for him, with these people awake at night; but they were also busier and distracted, and with that general busyness disregarded noises more readily, accepted them as products of another’s work. Attributed more readily the distant bark of dogs.

He was a gruff and big man and when he got from the van it lifted and relaxed like a child relieved of the momentary fear of being hit. Where he went he brought a sense of harmfulness and it was as if this was known even by the inanimate things about him. They feared him somehow.

He opened the back of the van and the wire inside the window clattered and he reached for the sack and dropped the badger out. He spat into the dirty tarmac beside it.

The dogs had pulled the front of its face off and its nose hung loose and bloodied, hanging from a sock of skin. It hung off the badger like a separate animal.

Ag, he thought. The crows will sort that.

He kicked the badger round a little to unstiffen it. He kicked the head out so it lay exposed across the road. Its top lip was in a snarl and looked exaggerated and some of the teeth were smashed above the lower jaw, hanging and loose where they had broken it with a spade to give the dogs a chance.

They hadn’t had the ground to dig a pit so they had fastened the badger to a tree to let the lurchers at it and its hind leg was skinned and deeply wire-cut.

That could be a problem, he thought. That could be a giveaway, but everything else is fine. The other injuries would be disguised.

The badger’s underbelly was torn and ripped where they had let the terriers at it before he had finished it off with a shovel.

Messie was good tonight, he thought. She was good and persistent.

The badger’s teats were pronounced and swollen with feeding and several of them were torn off and the pelt was slick with the mix of blood and milk.

It’s a shame we didn’t get them cubs, he thought.

He thought about tearing off the leg.

Ag, I wouldn’t get it, he thought. I wouldn’t get that off. He was suddenly repulsed by the idea of touching the badger again. Of giving it any reverence.

The idea of hiding this act suddenly made the big man angry and fatigued. He had been up all night and the walk and the hard digging and adrenaline made him tired, though it came up only as a swelling of anger in him.

He got back in the van and it sagged under his weight. He took off the gloves and threw them into the passenger seat that was bearded with dog hairs. A little way down the road he turned round and came back and drove over the badger. Then he turned round and did it again.

He let the van idle and got out and stood over the sow. The skull was smashed to remnant. He looked at the leg and it still stood out like butchery unnatural and premeditated.

Bitch, he said; then he ground his foot down on the leg, and stamped over and over, smashing the thin precise line of the wire out of the raw flesh.

THE DOG STIRRED as Daniel came between the buildings and got up in its chain and stretched and yawned and in the torchlight Daniel saw this lazy stretch and the torchlight caught on the links of the chain.

He went through the feeding yard, the cattle crunching at the feed ring in the spilled-over floodlight from the shed, and he heard the dog shake and settle again in the kennel behind him.

The night rippled with stillness.

He went into the sheep shed. The ewes were variously rested and the place was maternal and quiet. There was just crunching, the odd cough of sheep. He rested the torch on the shelf and turned on the light and some of the lambs bleated and there was a clatter from the warming box as the orphans excited at the thought of food.

While he waits for the kettle to boil he walks the shed. From the beams hang compact discs, strange astral things in this half-light, now ignored by the sparrows and starlings they are there to keep out. Every now and then they catch some light with some incongruous Christmasness and he thinks of her hanging them, her other things of quick invention, as if she were a child making models off the television.

A singular moth flutters in through the wind baffles to the naked bulb above the kettle, cuspid, a drifting piece of loose ash on the white filament, paper burnt up, caught in the rising current from some fire unseen, unfelt.

At the back pen, one ewe pads the ground, her lip lifting like a horse mouth. It is his shift, he must stay until she lambs, though he knows this Beulah breed are good mothers and often need no help. He knows she is close, that it will not be long.

The kettle rolls mechanically, steam bowling into the light of the bulb, and clicks and he makes the mix and while he rests the wide jug to cool on the shelf he checks the stalls, the tired lambs somnolent and pliant under their mothers’ warmth, and lifts out the water buckets, cupping out the floated hay and the droppings that stain chromatographical in the water; and the thunder of filling the water buckets at the tap does not disturb the soft crunching of the slumbered ewes, lying as if exhausted after eating, a thing replete about them. And in this quiet night he feels briefly, as if something unseen touches his face, the ancientness of this thing he does, that he could be a man of any age.

He looks again at the ewe, padding, and goes to her and she grinds her teeth and looks goat eyed at him and he sees the lamb presented backwards, the small catkin of tail tadpole-like in the sack, the obscene bag proffered from her vulva glistening with dark water.

He puts the ewe on her side and puts the gel on his hand, its bright pink surgicalness foreign in its manufacture against this natural process. There is an understood geography, familiar and mammal, as if some far back thing guides his hands about the lamb inside her, understands the building of the baby, this thing he does, which could be repellent, comfortable to him somehow, the warmth, the balloon warm and lipid. It is only visually there is shame. The fluids and motherly efforts are beyond that, too ancient for shame, and he understands a great and vital force at work, equanimical with his instinct, and assured.

He pushes back the breaching lamb, its mother prone, fallen in crunching straw, teeth crunching. He looks nowhere, working with gentle strength, thinking, far away, unfocused. There is a brief sound of rain. Quiet crunching. The light rain on the tin above, and outside the suck and clap of cows feeding in the floodlights. And the rain goes quickly. A hiss. The hiss of the water troughs filling.