fresh, sweet-smelling straw. The rangers had often told me that the tom in Pen 2 was threatening, possibly even dangerous. ‘Oh yeah,’ I’d shrugged, smiling smugly to myself. ‘Dangerous? Nah, don’t believe it.’
I unchained the gate and entered the safety chamber, carefully closing it behind me. He hissed again, louder, his anger rising to something akin to fury, ending the hiss with a sharp ‘Spat!’ A duty ranger would always have food – quail or rabbit, or fluffy, yellow day-old chicks (a by-product of the ghastly intensive poultry trade) we buy frozen – to throw to a hungry cat that came close. It’s a routine, expected when we enter the pen: they pounce, snatch up the prey and whisk away into cover, up onto a high perch or into a den. I had none – hadn’t thought it important; besides, my head was full of Iberian lynxes and new ideas. I wasn’t thinking right, dull stupidity eclipsing brighter reason. I opened the second gate into the pen. He was five feet away, no sign of backing off. ‘Hullo,’ I spoke softly, shaking my head. ‘Sorry, Tomcat, nothing for you tonight.’ I showed my empty hands.
It happened so fast, so dazzlingly lightning fast, that I had no time even to flinch. He sprang. He lashed out with both front paws, razor claws fully extended, slashing down my trousers and onto my boots. Then he was gone. Fire without smoke. In one blur of black-striped fury he had launched, slashed, turned and vanished under a clump of broom. The corduroy at my left knee was torn open and blood began to well up from a blade-thin slice in my kneecap. Long white streaks in the green rubber of my boots marked where the claws of both paws had ripped downwards, streaks eight inches long. But for the boots he would have slashed my left leg to the bone.
I had felt nothing. It happened so fast and with such accuracy that the tomcat had not bodily hit me, not followed through with brute force, rather it was delivered at a perfectly calculated distance, the down-swiping claws at full stretch, pulling away the instant they hit home. That cat knew exactly how to use its claws as weapons of contempt, just as a thug with a knife might slash to disfigure you.
I looked down at my knee as the blood roped and plied itself through the torn weave of my trousers. I cursed, a curse as much at my own disregard of the warnings and my crass appearance in the pen without food as at the tomcat himself. I limped out. Only twenty-four hours earlier I had told the Spanish biologists that even though our cats were captive bred they were still wild animals and totally unpredictable. Some of us only ever learn things the hard way.
I walked back to the house feeling more than a little foolish. ‘Serves you right,’ my mother would have said – did say many times over – when through impatience or stubbornness, or just mindless folly, I had hurt myself. ‘What d’ you expect?’ she’d ask, gesturing frustration at my stupidity when yet again I had run to her tearful and bloodied after falling out of a tree or grazing my knees.
Once, aged about five, rushing to catch a red admiral butterfly with my hands, I tripped and crashed into a stone wall. I broke a front tooth, splitting my top lip so that blood flowed freely down my chin and onto my shirt. She wiped away my tears. ‘Now every time you look in the mirror and see that tooth, it will remind you to be more careful.’ She hung on the word, hung on to me, love issuing from every pore. But it never did. If it ever existed, the caution gene had been strangled at birth, totally absent from my armoury. I now see that back then, without ever knowing it, I had led both my parents a merry song and dance. My mother, who was never equipped to cope with a rambunctious, hyperactive child always in trouble, must have struggled – must have wondered what she had done to deserve me.
2
Death of a dog
It was a dog and it was dead, unquestionably dead. On its side with one ear and half its head missing. A dog blotched with its own dried blood lying dead in a ditch under a thorn hedge. A dog flat on its side as if it had been thrown there, or collapsed over sideways from a savage blow. Its mouth was slightly agape. A long canine fang curved down from a lip drawn in a last snarl, a snarl that should have been of rage or pain, or perhaps just disbelief, a snarl shattered by oblivion. Blood and saliva shone on a slightly protruding tongue hiding the lower teeth as though the dog had died with a heavy exhalation, thrusting the tongue outwards, never to be withdrawn. A glazed eye stared opaquely, unnervingly, a stare of shock and despair and emptiness. Something terrible had happened here and that eye had been its silent witness.
To a seven-year-old boy who knew dogs and loved a dog, a dog not unlike this powerful, stocky, brown and white bull-terrier-ish mongrel, a boy who knew the bond of trust, the hot muzzle, the velvet ears, the barley-meal breath, who had romped and rolled and held dogs close, it was a catastrophe. The world had lost a dog in wild and terrifying circumstances I could not begin to imagine. My heart convulsed inside my chest and tried to break out through my mouth. I wanted to touch it, to stroke its smooth fur, but I held back. I wanted to cry out, to cry for comprehension of the brute forces that had done this thing, to cry for help and for someone to share with me the intolerable burden of this abruptly shattered life. But no tears came. So I ran.
I ran the quarter mile across the damp Longbottom meadows and ditches above School Lane; I ran a frantic course, crashing through briars and marshy places, slicing the corners off fields, hurling myself over fences in the most direct route home I could take. I wanted home and to find a grown-up to whom I could pour out this breathless tale of dog destruction.
I ran round the bottom of the old pond, stagnant with duckweed, past the moorhen’s nest of soggy rushes on a fallen tree. I hurdled over elm branches wind-ripped from high above, on through the orchard’s long grass as high as my waist. I burst through the tangy veil of scent from tall balsam poplars and poured myself over the oak-railed fence into the paddock, hands and trousers smeared and stippled with grey-green algae. Hens scattered in front of me as I dodged through the nettle clumps to the big-boarded gates with the rusty latch. I heaved it wide. Leaping the open drain, I raced through the cobbled stable yard, past the servants’ lavatories and on to the back door of the house.
Scratched and muddied I burst into the flagstoned scullery, where low stoneware sinks and scrubbed draining boards stood efficiently bare and empty. Nobody there. On into the big kitchen, with its cream Aga range and huge table of bleached pine topped with flaking American cloth. Nobody there either. I yelled for Nellie. No answer. I ran through to the hall, heaving open the heavy green baize door on its stiff spring, down the single stone step and out into the cool, respectful silence of the black and white chequered floor and the deep, ponderous ticking of the hall clock called the Bowler in imitation of its booming chime, which echoed all round the house. Empty. I called out for my sister, my father, for anyone, pealing my seven-year-old voice up the elegantly curving stairs to the landing above and echoing sideways down the corridor to the schoolroom library with its shelves of fusty books. No reply.
The furled iron ring of the front door latch was heavy and took both hands and gritted teeth to turn. It clanked up and the huge iron-studded oak door swung inward with a startling burst of sun. I ran out onto the crunching yellow gravel, leaving the door wide. Across the paved terrace and past the French windows to the drawing room and on to the ancient yew tree ringed round with its white painted seat, the tree in whose dark and scaly caverns a tawny owl always roosted, the tree that seemed to brood and cast its long shadow across the smoking-room lawn.
I leapt down the stone steps and over the neatly mown square, past the bronze sundial on its age-lichened stone pedestal and on towards our grandfather’s outer sanctum, his holy of horticultural holies, where we children were strictly forbidden to go – the long, ordered glasshouses, four of them in parallel rows, with their dirty panes and worm-drive roof vents that squealed and juddered open and shut when the handles were cranked. I raced past the green corrugated rain butts in which mosquito larvae wiggled and mice mysteriously drowned, and on into the first long glasshouse with a vine espaliered against the once whitewashed brick wall and the slatted benches running full length under the glass, benches crowded with dozens of terracotta flowerpots
