Bog Myrtle & Peat

I’ve seen Orion before, but never from this angle through a byre vent on the coldest night of the year. As the hours moaned and the cleanings chilled in the straw like pudding, the old familiar stars rolled out of sight and new ones took their place.

The first piglets fell into the darkness and vanished without landing. She ate the dead before I could find their bodies, so the only mark they made on this Earth was a thin contribution to the smell of piss and amniotics. Who knows how many had come and gone by the time my torchlight found survivors steaming like porridge in the cold. Then another, curling and whining on the granite setts as I ran for a coat on my pyjamas. Ice woke to the moonrise with an extravagant expansion. Eggs popped in the coops and the hose burst in segments like a roadkill adder; the coldest night of the year, and the hardest.

In strange distress, the sow had walked back and forth and dropped her young like luggage in the bone-cold shedding. I had been reading indoors as they died; dying where they fell in the cold, and let that be a lesson to me – frost kills like a bullet. Even as I lunged to save the new lives, they slipped away through my fingers; they fell quiet and numb and the pauses grew in their endless squealing like sirens breaking. I tried to find them in the straw but the coldest became the quietest; snooker balls chilling in the pockets, knowing that the sow would eat them dead and cycle them back into herself like a birth reversal. I rushed and flustered, causing her to stand with a start and step upon the pelvis of an hour-old boar. The tiny creature squealed in one continuous shriek as if all the air had gone for it. Then it died nodding as if in agreement.

Two cold survivors came into the house and a box on the stove; two I could find and be sure of. Minutes from death, I coiled them in jumpers and socks; a towel which had been drying on a warm rail. One twitched. The other didn’t. The sow made way to lie at last, and that’s when I stripped milk from her teats by hand. I carried the colostrum back across the yard in a coffee cup and the moon-blaze raged in the frost, long past midnight. I used a syringe to leak milk into their hooky little mouths and was glad when they bubbled up a lather. Then I ran to the byre and smashed ice on the water trough for the hundredth time, and the chips jingled in the stoneware like a tumbler, and it froze again.

The sow lurched on with contractions but the afterbirth was hardly flushed. I rolled back my sleeve and pressed inside her to the depth of my elbow, feeling for more or some obstruction. And in the devastating darkness of the shed; in heavy breath and the low-slung dust of autumn straw, I felt nothing but warmth; a comfortable push-back. I turned my palm and moved in silence like a diver in a wreck, coasting through abandoned bedwear and the vacant stems where life had grown, each bay cupped like the empty socket of an acorn. She eats them too, and in withdrawal I brushed against a ham and the swell of backstrap fillets, and I know that place well enough with a saw in my hand.

She was empty, so whatever I had left was everything. One of the piglets on the stove was resurrected. The other was not, and it lay heavy-headed like a drowned pup, and I thought well she might as well eat that now it’s nothing. The survivor went back outdoors and then I was left with two from God only knows how many to start. The Plough stood begging on its tail in the north sky towards the village. A teal called and my arms itched with dry blood.

Towards four, when the heat lamp was hung and the water trough ice was smashed again, I sat with my back to the rough-stone wall and watched two piglets, tiny as mice in the red electric light. I am used to life which comes in immaculate perfection. Perhaps I was overdue some disaster; I deserved it as repayment for work that is often easy. But I couldn’t have known and I did what I could. If I’d found them sooner, I might have saved more lives. And if I’d gone to bed and looked in on the sow at first light, I might have been none the wiser; my beast unburdened with nothing to show.