Bog Myrtle & Peat

I drove the bull to work in the meadow, and we walked together on the quarry road which runs around the river. He’s made this trip before, but the wind blew the scent of cows to remind him. They were hidden in a fold of the bog, but he knew where to find them and we moved up between the hard blue shadows of crab apple trees and scented gusts of meadowsweet and valerian. The sound was of his hooves and of finches in the sorrel; linnets from the reseeds and the crick and mousiness of pipits which sprang from the grassheads. In these earliest hours of autumn, there’s a manner of stasis beneath which the momentum of spring has stalled. Having risen so far, only falling remains – and while there’s no pace to the downhill straight, you can smell it coming beneath the hardening bracken and the panned expanse of budding ragwort.

I lose touch with my bull in the out of season months. He stays elsewhere, and I see him only briefly through the window of my truck. I tell him he’s a good lad and he buffets my hand and begs for cake like a dog. At these times, the light of his desire is held in the off position; if he sometimes glowers at the sound of distant cattle in the dawn, he lacks the ambition to follow it up. He knows they could be miles away, and even on the approach to his third birthday, he’s a lazy man.

But driven to cows of his own, he shits like a mackerel and screams. The lights on his dashboard start to blink; sensors spring into life and he’s alive again. As we walked towards the waiting herd, he sometimes stopped to thump at the roadside flowers. Foxgloves which meant no harm were smashed and trampled upon; he rubbed his chin in the wreckage and delighted in a wake of sap and shattered lignin. And pity the ants who built their nests on the rocks cleaned out for the cundies; those floury heaps were torn to shreds and the remnants wiped on the forehead of a bull who was moving slowly and with purpose towards his objective.

I lose track of how fine he’s become in this state of full inflation. He’s broad enough across his back to spread a tablecloth and lay a set of candlesticks – the shape is firm and mobile, and you could imagine how the rub of his movement might squeak aloud – not in the childish squawk of balloons tied at a party, but in the basso moan of trees in storm elision. The hump of his shoulders sweeps to his neck – the curve of his belly is caught and reverberated in the downcast sweep of his thigh. It becomes clear that the casual, oafish boor of his own time has become the defiance and pride of mine.

That mumbling roar travels best through the ground itself, and the men who monitor the quarry’s blasting with seismographic dials would soon know that a bull was out to work in a known vocabulary of frequency and vibration. Meanwhile, birds shy from the fanfare; spiders and butterflies are vaporised by the shockwave of his movement – but even in the underlying devastation of rumbled moaning, he’ll sometimes pause to scream again. The whine is hosed from an outstretched chin, as if no frequency should be left unused in the broadcast of this grand, expanding return to the meadow. 

The cows scattered before him like ninepins. He did not press the point – their time would come. Instead, he dug a hole with his forehead and pissed into it.