The Dig (7 page)

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 color in the gray 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 judgment.

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 shoveled. 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 defense.

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 standoff. 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 color 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 midmorning 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 adrenaline and without the excitement of pace and in the end it was the reluctance and nonengagement 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 feet 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.

The big gypsy looked at the sack hanging from the tree, at the sack-like weight of it.

It was the second time he'd dug a badger for the gang. That first time, Messie had been just a pup. He thought of the money. It was worth the risk. He made a point now and then of taking in a badger he found genuinely hit on the road to the Veterinary Investigation Center and he carried the receipt slips in the van to produce if he was stopped. But that worked only for dead badgers, or to explain the hairs they might find. He had to move the live badger and it wouldn't matter what else was in the van if they stopped him.

The big man reached into his bag and took out the mink and threw it to the boy. Its damp weight and the limp,
sumptuous ropiness of the animal surprised him as he caught it. The mouth was drawn and he could see the precise teeth.

You can keep him, the big man said. They're vermin here. It was like a payment for things.

The boy felt a glow of pride and the sudden warm teamship with the man that was alien to him and which he had difficulty with. His father looked at him with a strange grin and the redness came to him then.

He lifted the mink's lips to see the needle teeth. They were like sewing needles. He looked at the needle teeth and felt the fur of the rope-like body. The electricity was gone out of it.

Give her a shake tonight. The big man nodded at the pup. Good rat dog be good on mink.

The boy's father was panting and looked brightened. The boy could see the sweat on his father's head through the very short hair. The adrenaline was coming in the boy now and he looked at his pup and swelled with pride. He felt a warm cruelty, standing there on the beach of soil.

I'll start her tonight, he said to himself.

When they got back to the yard after taking the badger it was gone midday. The boy was exhausted and tired. The boy had been expecting the same kind of flurry as ratting and he was in shock at the monotonous graft of the dig.

How's the dog? asked the big man.

The boy's father picked up the big Patterdale and looked at his throat and chin. There was a glancing scratch underneath its jaw and a little way back was a tear some two or three inches long that had bled all down the dog's front. The dog seemed unperturbed.

Stitches? asked the gypsy.

Aye, said the boy's father. He lifted the cut flap of skin up, peeling it from its own blood, and holding the dog more firmly as it bridled. The blood had soaked into the rough coat and it was jammy.

There's nothing cut, he said. The dog's artery was a fraction above the cut and he could see it pump thickly through the dog's skin.

The big man had not put the badger down at all and when he put the sack in the back of the van he swore once, succinctly, at the release of weight.

They uncoupled the dogs and let them sort themselves out and the boy watched his pup work over a log pile with
the other dogs. They were frantic with the scent of rats the big man had driven out the day before.

The boy was ratty and awkward himself and he watched his pup with a proudness, thinking of the mink the big man had given him. It had given him a teamship with the big gypsy.

What's for him? said the boy's father. He nodded at the sack in the van. Behind the big gypsy the farmland looked wider and tamer without the mist. You could hear the tractors work somewhere again on the land.

I'll take him somewhere, he said.

He divided up the money that the magistrate farmer had given them for getting rid of the badger. He did not mention the other men, nor the five hundred pounds they were paying for the big forty-pound boar.