Bog Myrtle & Peat

I carried the same cartridges to the fox drives for many years. They’re heavyweights, but they’d begun to rust up because I am never in line for the moment of truth. I stand and wait for hours at a time, and often I am so far away from the action that I don’t even hear the shots being fired. I simply get a text or a phonecall to say that we’re moving on or trying elsewhere, and the outcome of the morning’s work is something like an afterthought. I take the cartridges from the gun and put them back in my pocket for next time. Over many years, their caps had turned a little green – still safe, but showing their age.

A fox drive works on such enormous scale that there’s little sense of camaraderie or fun to be found in the margins. That’s beside the point, and if you learn at the end of the day that a fox or two was killed, there’s no reward in that fact either. The truth is that this business has to happen, and we pool our resources by standing apart in lines which run for a mile or more between the trees and the blackly sagging peat. So it’s nothing like a social event, and when I have sometimes said to friends “let’s catch up at the foxes”, I find the day’s gone by and the friends I meant to catch had simply never come within shouting distance. Without seeing a fox, firing a gun or meeting with friends, those days can often feel surreal – the task only present in name.

I was in the wrong place when the moment came for me at last. I’d mistaken my instructions and found myself in the slump between two drumlins where the myrtle jagged my knees. It was raining hard, and water had begun to gather between my toes. Such dogs we had were working out a streak of alder wood beyond the horizon, but I couldn’t see them. As if in a matter unconnected with the day, a fox emerged along the dykeback and ran towards me through a litter of blackthorn stems eaten low by the sheep and meshed in a tangle of stumps. She was a hundred yards away and coming fast in my direction, so I slipped the cartridges into place and clipped the gun together. 

At twenty yards, she stopped and looked back across her shoulder, never seeing me. And I had time to wonder how she was so clean and fresh on a day which only had sleet to show for itself. There never was a sodden fox, and this one shone as brightly as the cat which kneads your lap as you read these words. The art of shooting frequently calls for the hardest, most artful shot. Birds are presented in such a way as to be challenging, and there’s something like pleasure to be found in coming up against the odds. But I killed that fox as she stood before me, as simply as I’ve sometimes killed the lambs I’ve held between my knees.

All her well-kept freshness vanished then. The rain found her like a dam-burst, and even in the time it took to gather my gear and walk in her direction, the fur had begun to show a parting on her side, and a grey line of skin beneath it. I picked her up by the brush, realising that she was far lighter and smaller than I thought – really no bigger than a hare beneath the mantle, and “all this fuss for you?”, I said.

Rain dripped from the black of her nose, and I have spent so many days in passive resignation, moving wetly from stand to stand in the certain knowledge that no fox would ever come. Then one came in a moment of silence and isolation, and all I have to show for it is a text message which I afterwards sent to confirm our shared success. That, and the empty plastic tube of a well-spent, worn-out cartridge.

You’ll have to take my word for the rest.