Bog Myrtle & Peat

My father’s friends would go to shoot on Billy Inglis’ hill. When I was seven or eight years old, I’d often join them for the sake of the walk and the wonder of feeling like a man. It was fine to see snipe shot as they turned against the cloud, but the group was more inclined to run the dogs for the chance of a hare – and by three o’clock on a January afternoon, it was anyway time for the pub or the rugby.

It happened one day that between the gorse and banks of birch, the big dogs caught and held a roe between them. They never caught deer, and the men worked hard to prevent the chase from starting. Billy liked his deer besides, and it wasn’t worth the asking. Thinking back to the sudden roar of swearing which arose in that moment, it must have been an accident – the deer asleep or the warnings dampened by the morning sleet.

The dogs had him by the flanks in a clearing of the myrtle; two big lurchers and a broken-coated hound. But they couldn’t kill him, and I feel sure that roe must have screamed or made some sound to reflect a sudden surge of pain and despair. I don’t remember much beyond the clatter of rain on my hood as the dairyman from Auchenray ran forward to catch them as the dogs toiled and fell like a maul – he pulled the group as one to the ground with his own bare hands, expressing strange confidence that he wouldn’t be bitten himself in the mess. 

Then crouching with one foot on the roe deer’s neck, he cried for a knife to cut its throat. Without thinking, I gave him mine – an opinel more used to cutting string than sinew. And I do remember the subsequent rush of breath to the porcelain-bright larynx; the pant of foam and the back legs pulling to rise as the front were pinned with pressing. There were no bullets then, or any cautious decision to take or harvest a creature for the larder – just the hauling-down of a gasping, sodden thing. Even at that age, I had seen deer killed with rifles over long distances. I knew the diagnostic slump of death, but only as something which happened “over there”. I wasn’t prepared for the spray and gurgle of blood which leapt in ropes upon my boots and churned the sphagnum cherry-black.

I have often been confronted by a sense of fear in the throes of killing. Because if you’re in for a penny, you must be prepared to pay the pound – and things do not always go according to plan. I don’t diminish the shame and regret of that memory, but it’s all too easy to draw a line around your limits and say there are things you’d never condone. Because shit happens, and the worst response is sometimes no response at all. The roe was torn and wouldn’t have lived, and the sawing was something like a kindness. But if there’s any consolation here, it’s only that horror never horrifies in the way you feared it would, and lines look different when they’ve been crossed. Approaching adulthood at last, I handle that day now as if it were a thing which passed sharply through my body on its way to somewhere else. The scar endures, but scars are just a rearrangement of the skin you had before – and if from time to time my stomach seems stronger than yours, remember that we started out the same.