The Dig (14 page)

chapter three

A
BOUT 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.

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.

epilogue

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.

acknowledgments

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.

Also by Cynan Jones