Tivington Nott (3 page)

But that was last April when, despite the warmth of the day, there were still packed scallops of dirty snowdrift left out in the sunless hollows of Codsend Moor and Dunkery Hill. Remnants of the vicious winter that had gone before. And the strange sight of the new shoots of the deer sedge and the dark green cotton-grass poking up through flutes of melted ice, where the peat bogs had frozen to a depth of eight inches and more during the February blizzard.

Alsop and Kabara both a world away then from where they are now.

Alsop and his wife got smashed up coming back from Taunton at high speed one night in July. Midsummer and living it up. Carefree! Driving like a young man and the T junction at Handycross slipping his mind. So they hit a four-hundred-year-old wall. Which wouldn’t have happened to a local. No matter how carefree. A reflex swing of the wheel at that point and a local would have gone past laughing. One of the dangers of being an alien. A local’s always got something extra on you. They can feel the shape of the country in their bones. And they can afford to wait for outsiders to make a mistake. Saying nothing. Being there and waiting. Like the wall. Six foot thick. A remnant from a sturdy past and Alsop speeding along with his foot held confidently on the throttle as if he were still in the emptiness of Australia.

She’s probably going to keep going till she’s a hundred, but he’s finished. You’ve only got to look at him. Getting out of the house is just him proving to everyone that he can still walk. Grey and struggling. Whatever it was that got smashed inside him, it will never come right again. He’s not certain whether he can still hope for something or not. No confidence about anything now. It’s downhill all the way for him from here. Staggers and slogs his way across the fields, struggling against the wind, and stands there panting, watching me and Morris getting a putt-load of mangolds out of the clamp. You get the feeling he’s about to hop in and start helping you. Then he’ll see we’re not breaking our rhythm and he’ll pass some remark. A comment he’s made up. Nothing much. And away he goes. Dragging himself back the way he came. Pausing on the horizon to wave his stick and look down on us. Morris has been kind to him from time to time and I suppose that’s it.

He came to the stables a couple of times and stood looking at Kabara. Nothing to say on those occasions. There’s always been something about him that was totally out of step with this place. That couldn’t be accounted for simply because he was a foreigner. Something that led him from time to time into being ridiculous. He turned up at his first meet of the Staghounds wearing hunting pink. Everyone, except him, knew this was something reserved for the Huntsman and the whips, but no one said a word to him about it. They exchanged glances, not smiling, not passing judgements, and they looked at each other again the same way when they heard he’d hit the wall at Handycross.

I could have told him. You’ve got to keep your head down in a place like this. Take it all a step at a time. Wary! Charging around in red coats and leaping bang into the middle of them on black stallions is not the way! Provide yourself with back-up and keep something in reserve! Let
them
do some of the guessing.

His wife came over to see the Tiger a couple of days after the smash. A few scratches and a bruise here and there, but apart from that you can see she’s going to live forever. One of that sort. Hardy. And a touch of luck about her. The kind that walks away from a bomb blast with all her clothes blown off but herself still intact. A cigarette stuck in her mouth all the time and messy-looking. Wearing an old black dress and gum boots. Not the peacock of the family in other words. And swearing a lot. Which has the Tiger on edge at once.

She wants someone to look after the stallion till things get back on an even keel. Can the Tiger assist? She’s practical. Matter-of-fact. Straight to the point almost before she’s through the front gate. No hedging around with, It’s a nice day, or, How are you? Just, Let’s go! Let’s pick up the pieces and get things rolling again! That’s her attitude. You can see the way she operates. Not in mourning for any lost dream. Expecting everyone to drop what they’re doing and to start listening to her. Every now and then there’s a hint of an English accent in her voice that makes you wonder. And she has an aggressive way of looking at you suddenly, when she’s not actually talking directly to you. Challenging. As if she almost expects you to be on the point of disputing what she’s saying. I get the feeling she could come down pretty hard on someone she decided not to like.

The Tiger comes to some financial arrangement and I’m sent off with her to do what I can with the horse. Even though it’s only going to be extra work for me, what with haymaking under way and everything else going full pelt in the middle of July, I still consider this a windfall. I’m looking forward to seeing something of Kabara on a regular basis. And anyway, the days are long.

The house is a big red-brick place with stone windows and timbering. Not a real manor house. A replica in a few acres of park, with a terrace looking across the valley towards the Quantock Hills. High clipped beech hedges and a gravel path raked clear of weeds and rubbish. All spick and span.

She bends down and snatches at fallen twigs as we go along towards the stables. These are off to one side, through an arch in a brick wall which is connected to the kitchen end of the establishment. There’s a sandpit and first-class accommodation for four hunters with a tack room and feed store. Through a gate in the adjoining hedge I see an extensive vegetable garden, laid out in rows, and several hothouses.

She’s watching me taking it all in.

And I realise it’s her. She’s the worker round here. Not a minute to lose.

She doesn’t go near Kabara. He’s checking us out from his stall. She points in his direction and says, ‘I suppose you must know what to do or he wouldn’t have sent you would he?’ I get the impression she’d be happy to see the back of the horse. ‘Give us a yell when you want a cup of tea,’ she says and heads for the house.

The horse is no trouble to me. As the weeks go by I realise it’s a decision he’s made. I’m no Irishman to work magic with horses. It’s him. He has decided I’m okay. And pretty soon the Tiger starts showing more than an idle interest. The ease with which I get along with Kabara intrigues him. But he keeps his distance. Leaving it all to me. Not making his interest too plain; watching to see how things work out. Making no move to get to know Kabara. Nothing like that. Staying a stranger to the horse. And that’s his mistake.

I’m watching the Tiger too. Keeping abreast of his little schemes as they’re running through his head. I have to. And I don’t think he understands that this horse is not really the good-natured nag he seems, but is a potential stroke of lightning. Looking back it is easy to see how Tiger makes this mistake. He sees me crawling all over Kabara without any caution and jogging along the Wiveliscombe road with a loose rein and no saddle.

But
I
never forget for a minute the energy of this entire, and his potential for something like heroic action. You can’t touch him without knowing it, no matter what you might imagine from a distance.

It’s in his blood.

A feeling that he’s preparing for something.

A big day when it’s all going to come together for him. When all the lineage, and all the breeding and all the care and all the years and the generations of refining are going to be called finally into action. He has a performance in him, and being close to him I feel it. But it’s held in reserve and would have to be
called
out of him at the big moment. His rider would have to be his equal in potential or the limit would not be reached. That’s the way he makes me feel. He’s ordered, disciplined, quietly under control. Waiting. For the day. This is the only way it makes sense. My ‘good’ reflexes are a joke in comparison with his. Kabara can react and restore his balance in the instant before I have had time to register what is going on. So I don’t kid myself. I’m just taking care of him. He’s out of my class. Out of Alsop’s too. Out of most people’s. Needing someone as special as himself to call out that performance. So I don’t try anything fancy with him. I let him know what’s going on, but I let him lead.

I say nothing to anyone about all this. And between haymaking and everything else, whenever we get the odd chance, which turns out to be mostly around late evening, me and Kabara are left alone to get on with things for a while. The Tiger keeps his eye on us and slips the odd question about the horse, but I don’t say too much and I can see he’s seriously starting to entertain the idea of hunting on him one day himself. Maybe it’s no more than an outlandish fantasy at this stage rather than an actual idea. But the germ of it’s there sure enough.

This horse is not an Exmoor hunter. Without superior horsemanship he’s the wrong horse for this place. The first time I take him out on the Chains he panics when his feet start sinking into the bog. The local ponies skip their way over such places. Kabara thinks the earth is opening under him. And when I show it to him again, dismounting and leading him forward, giving him a good look, he makes it clear we aren’t going that way. Ever!

It was about then that I decided to let him take over. Thundering along on the sound heather of the table-lands suited him just fine. But getting among the bogs and drainage ditches and old broken bits and pieces of sheep fencing, the worst of which was downed wire hidden among the bracken, was not something that interested him at all.

And it wasn’t courage he lacked.

He had too much sense. Too much instinct for himself and for his own preservation. I could point him down the steepest combe and it wouldn’t worry him. He’d pick his way without fear. Alert to every danger. Then one day, when there was a brief lull before the beginning of the harvest, I took him out early. Had him ready and saddled up in the yard before daylight so we could get away straight after milking, taking my breakfast with me and heading for the remote streams at the headwaters of the Barle. Taking Kabara to visit the lonely spot where I had discovered the soiling pit of the Tivington nott.

By midday we were there. Out on the tops. Then down through the steep larch woods rising up on either side of us and at the bottom a black and peaty wallow. The air rich with the stench of wet earth and rotting vegetation.

Private here. Unvisited. The depth of the wood, where the great stag-without-horns rolls and soils, cooling his body in the black mud, away from any eyes but those of the wilderness.

As we step forward, entering the dim glade, there’s a whiff of mint hanging in the still air. He has moved out silently ahead of us, crushing the wild herb that grows on the edge of the stream as he stepped away. I can see his slot there, the brown mud still circulating slowly where it has filled with water. And a tiny whirlpool where his dew claws have shifted a pebble.

Kabara’s senses are stretched to the limit here. Picking up the smell of the male deer close by. A slight tremor of expectancy running through his withers, transferring his readiness to me. There is a balance now in the horse, as if his hooves are not quite touching the ground, an alertness that almost tempts me to action. To leap miraculously into the dark forest after the deer . . .

I keep still.

Watching.

But we are not going to see the nott. He is in the shadows, watching
us
I dare say. I examine each dark patch of shade with care, letting my gaze rest for a moment on every uncertain shape amongst the gloomy conifers. But I can’t tell where he might be. A knowing survivor. Somewhere between sixteen and twenty years old, Morris has told me. Surviving now by infinite skill and care. Old for a red stag. He’s eluded the hunt on numerous occasions. Tricked them. And created a legend for himself. Many consider him dead. And none of them know he has moved to these woods or they’d come after him again. It is their practice always to take a nott stag whenever one presents himself, for they fear that notts will breed and diminish the elegance of the species.

I’m not about to tell them where he is.

Tell them nothing.
They’re
the locals. And he’s a long way from Tivington now. They chased him once too often and he shifted his ground right out of the district, crossing the Beacon and the Quarme and the Exe and setting himself up way over here.

I discovered him by chance and swore Morris to secrecy. Being from Wiltshire makes the secret easier for him to keep. A local couldn’t hang onto such a hot piece of information for long. To harbour a stag for the hunt is the ambition of every yokel in this neck of the woods. And keeping the whereabouts of the Tivington nott a secret would burn a hole in their brains. Simple as that. You couldn’t trust them with it.

The Tiger would give money to know it!

They’ll find him anyway. One day. Of their own accord. And when they do he’ll be on the run again. Sooner or later, when the Arctic weather is tightening his belly, he’ll sneak into someone’s turnip field. And then some half-witted labourer, arriving to shift the hurdles, will see his great slot there, superimposed on the sheep tracks of the day before and frozen into the mud in the morning. The footprint of the devil staring him in the face!

The yokel will drop everything and run to tell his master. Crazy to see those big hounds having a go. Howling and wailing and crying on the trail! Lighting everybody up with his news that there’s a warrantable stag harbouring in the area.

Except you don’t need a warrant to hunt a nott. It’s open season on them all year round.

Solitary. Always on guard. Never at ease with the herd.

It was late one October afternoon a year ago that I found him. I’m following this stream to its source. Just for the pleasures of exploration and of being on my own. It’s Bampton Fair day and the Tiger’s been forced by one of his own traditions to give us most of the day off. He’d squirm out of it if he could, but Morris doesn’t ask on these occasions. The local custom is good enough for him. He makes sure the Tiger knows what his plans are in good time, and he and his wife go visiting her parents, over to Monksilver for the day.