Bog Myrtle & Peat

When all is fed and done, we meet at the hill-road for a fox. It’s nine fifteen and there’s fag smoke and plastic mugs of coffee in the back of a truck; gunslips slick with mirk and dog slavers. Sleet runs about your bunnet brim and it’s good to see your pals again.

Foxes come and go as they please on this hill, and you can hardly shoot them with a rifle. I used to run snares up one side of the glen and my neighbour caught the slack on the other. That kept them down, but the Government’s made snaring so hard that nobody dares try it anymore. Besides, most of the old fox runs are rank with black-and-white these days, and if you catch one of them, it’s curtains. Still, these foxes have to go and the keeper’s a good man so we pitch in beside him a few times in the normal season, even when it’s the last thing you’d choose to do and the rugby’s at four and some of us are leaning into a hangover like it was a headwind.

We line out and make a stand in the lee of dykebacks and slaes. We’re black and glossy in our oilskin hoods and the rain drives on in a reek of tobacco and dead grass. It’s just a line of men and dogs ahead, and they walk with their bellies bagged out in the wind. A few woodcock slide away from the trees like scraps of wrappy old sacking. They’re off downwind and no sooner gone than a roe buck comes out and past us, tossing his head and hating the water. We crouch and lie and steel ourselves against the creeping rain until the skin of our hands is white and puffy as towelling. Water runs on the ribs of our guns and bulges the barrels in beads.

The first drive is a blank, but we find two foxes running together in the second. And they only come when a pair of blackcock have risen up from the myrtle and hurled themselves along with the rain. One passes me at head height and I watch his tail trail behind him like ribbons; eyes wide, beak open and pounding like a cormorant. Smirk, wink and nod him past, saying morning boys.

It’s become a joke that I never shoot the fox. I’ve stood a hundred days like this and only killed him two or three times. Folk laugh that I should leave my cartridges at home, but I did that by mistake one time and guess where the fox came? Gunshots rise flat and drab from down the line, and it’s a nice reminder that I’m not alone on this hillside or ever. I look out to the birch trees turning and replay the expression on Tom’s face when I told him how much that bull calf made at Castle Douglas; bloody criminals, he said, and I laugh again.

Two foxes killed in the rain, carried by the tail and slack as jackets. It’s a good piece of work, but somehow more important to see your neighbours and remind yourself that you don’t have to carry this all on your own back. There’s more talking than killing in this group. We lean together like the limbs of a teepee as the sleet comes harder, and you’ll have a shot of this gin? Separately and together, we hope that spring will take better care of us.

An earlier draft of this post was published here in January 2019