Landed by Tim Pears Page A

interdependency of life forms on the crust of this earth, but there were some species whose value was obscure. Thistles were one. Wasps another. Colt’s foot. Mosquitoes.
    Everything was food for something else, or served a purpose of some kind. Few species self-sufficient, or purely parasitic.
    He wore an old pair of leather gloves, protection from the spiny pricks. The pace of the work determined by the slow pull, it could not be hurried, immensely satisfying. By the time he’d cleared the lowest field and looked up, the moon, three-quarters full, shone on silver hills. The sun had long since gone down, leaving a fringe of burnt orange still in the western sky.
    As he walked back around the flank of the hill, Owen entered the wood that covered the lower, steep slope on that side, down to the creek by The Graig. Squat twisting stunted pillars of oak growing on the steep bank; the air some degrees cooler under and amongst their branches. The phrase ‘Open-air Mass’ came to him: it suggested an image of worship in a bare field; better in a wood, Owen thought. The atmosphere here had the same quality as the church in Welshpool, of something he couldn’t quite identify. Of sanctity? No. Of quietness, contemplation? What was it? There was a feeling of expectation within him, obscure and real as an illness coming. It was the sense of something about to happen, about to materialise. He sat on the ground, leaned back against a tree trunk. What time was it? After nine, for sure. Grandma would have kept his dinner in the Rayburn. Maybe nearer to ten.
    Owen’s breathing slowed. There were sounds in the silent night but all, at first, indistinct. Faraway rustles in undergrowth, a murmur in the air, some vague thing’s breath; a high-pitched shriek in the distance, out at the edge of his field of hearing.
    Amazing how much moonlight seeped into the wood: he
was in a grey glade, tinged with a mercury glow. Then it happened. He felt his skin bristle, the whole surface of his skin was suddenly switched on. Alert. Not knowing why. And then a creature lumbered past him, big as one of his grandfather’s dogs but more bulky, padding within inches of him, then pausing, sniffing the air, moving on a little more quickly, while Owen sat there, his heart thumped to a halt.
    The creature moved on and away, out of sight. A blobby, sidling beast from deep in human dreams. A creeping thing from Owen’s unconscious, slipping into silver visibility for a moment. No. A nocturnal animal, he told himself, that’s all. What on earth was it? A badger.
    Owen stumbled back to the cottage, certain of two things: he would investigate further, and make no mention of the matter to his grandfather.
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    Thirteen years old. The boy’s voice had changed: like honey over sand. He used it sparely. Tall as his mother, he wouldn’t grow much more. His father had gone for good the previous autumn and it was as if other men knew this was the cruel clean final severance; as if his territory were no longer marked, they closed in on his woman. Men came to call. Some were strangers, others Owen knew, vaguely. They’d give him things. A penknife. A fifty-pence coin. One man, with a permanent kink of a smile at one side of his mouth and jet-black eyes, took Owen to the football in Shrewsbury. His mother was feckless, sweet. Accepted her husband was gone, and let go. She seemed to her son to do nothing to discourage or encourage the men, was available, that was enough and they knew. He headed for the hill when he could.
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    The badgers’ sett Owen found the next day, Sunday, further down the slope, deeper into the steep wood. The half-dozen
holes were larger than rabbit burrows, and so were the spoil heaps below each one, of sandy soil excavated by the diggers. Stones too big to have been dug out by rabbits amongst it. He studied the ground and found footprints, and coarse hairs trodden into the soil. In the evening he