The Dig by Cynan Jones Page A

again on the land.
    I’ll take him somewhere, he said.
    He divided up the money that the magistrate farmer had given them for getting rid of the badger. He did not mention the other men, nor the five hundred pounds they were paying for the big forty-pound boar.
    When the others had gone, he pushed the sack to the back of the van and carried over some straw bales that he put in the back hiding the badger. He thought of leaving the tools and coming separately back for them but then thought, Ag. If they look in the van they’ll find it anyway. Just the badger was enough to send him down.
    He drove home without incident though and got the dogs from the van and unloaded the bales and took the badger and dumped it in the sack in the coal bunker. Then he went in and called the men. They said they’d be ready for it that night and they gave him a time and directions. It was about three in the afternoon. Ag, he thought. He figured on getting some rest.

chapter one

    T HE BLACK LAMB looked tired and beaten under the lamp.
    It had not put on weight and he could make out the fingers of its ribs with the bloated milk-full stomach behind them. It was folded in the bottom of the box, but not with the folded comfortable way of a sleeping cat, more with the weak compliance of something sick beyond will.
    Daniel picked up the small black lamb. His father would have simply dashed its head on the barn floor. He was not a hard man, but a pragmatist; but that kind of will wasn’t in Daniel. Despite the lamp the lamb felt cold, as if it could generate no heat of its own, and it was too light for itself and hung limply. It was as if he’d picked a jumper from the floor. It had a completely will-less passivity.
    I don’t expect this of you, he said. I just want you to understand it. Sometimes you have to choose between a quick misery or a slow misery. He heard his father talking, saw him take the useless lamb from the box. You have to understand it as an option. There was a movement andthe lamb hung dead from his father’s hand, a thin spittle of blood reaming from its mouth.
    He heard the voice again. Heard his father, that there were the two miseries, and somewhere in him a vicious voice told him that his wife had no fear now of the worse, drawn-out misery that might have come. Hers had been the quick misery, the head dashed against the barn floor. He thought of his father stricken, becalmed by the stroke. He ignored the vicious little voice, as if it was something overheard he had no wish to know.
    He rubbed the lamb, trying to bring some warmth into its muscles, the wrinkles of the loose skin riding under his hand like rolls of sock. There was the superstition that every flock should have a black lamb to sacrifice should the Devil come and it was to Daniel like the lamb was a victim of this.
    He felt the lamb’s heartbeat under his hands. It was faint. A bare registry.
    You need to live, he thought.
    He picked up the lamb and carried it into the house.
    He put it down in the porch and took off his boots and then went in and found a box and came back for the lamb.
    He opened the door of the Aga and took out the racks. He hadn’t cooked in it since she had died. There was just the residual automatic heat of it running and he took out the racks with unprotected hands and felt inside the oven space. Then he put the lamb in the box in the Aga, leaving the door open, and went back outside.

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    The policeman opened the door, looked at the deep mud of the yard, and got deliberately out.
    Set back from the window, the man watched him through the gap in the curtains. He watched him scan the place. The policeman was young and he was not a policeman the big man had seen before.
    The policeman bent through the car door and pushed the horn twice.
    What do I do here? thought the man. He wished he’d left one of the big dogs off but knew even through the coal it would scent the badger and bother it. If I stay in the