The Man Who Rained by Ali Shaw

ruminate on its deeds. But Daniel was weak-willed. His father and grandfather had
always said so, and he conceded it was true. He had shown the kid the mercy it had not offered the tree, and killed it with one quick squeeze of his trigger.
    Daniel loved the trees. Their blossoms in the spring were as silky and fragrant as rose petals. When the winds blew the blossoms loose they rolled through the air and reminded him of that day
when he and Betty stood side by side in a swirling cloud of them, and two symmetrical petals had landed on Betty’s nose, for all the world like butterfly wings.
    He snorted, and spat out a wad of phlegm.
    He had done as she had asked and taken care of Finn, even though the boy was so unnatural that Daniel sometimes feared he was damning his own soul by doing so. He only prayed it would mean
something to Betty if she came back and found he had kept his promise.
    ‘Ah, ahh ,’ he said to himself. ‘Now there’s a telltale sign in your thinkings.’
    If , he had thought. If she came back.
    When she first left he had been so certain of her return. There were some things, he’d told himself, that were fated, and his and Betty’s love was such a thing. Star-crossed, they
had been. He had divined it from the feeling of his bones – just as his grandfather had read signs in goat entrails (and charged a shilling for the service).
    He no longer felt such certainty. These days, his heart felt like a broken compass, always spinning after a direction it could no longer find. These days, it was as hard to maintain his belief
in Betty as it was to hunt for a goat on the Merrow Wold. These days, there was just the mountains, the weather, and the stink of pelt and old dung.
    He left the main path and took a tussocky fork that would skirt the edge of Thunderstown to reach the south road, where the Fossiter homestead had stood for over two centuries. Not for the first
time was he letting guilt gnaw at him. True, he could not bear to consider the reasons for Betty’s long absence, but he could always bear to torture himself with what he had and had not done
during those eight years.
    He had done as Betty had asked and looked after Finn, but he had not done so happily. He was a love-smitten fool who was incapable of refusing her, but that didn’t mean he was ready to
forgive Finn for being the thing he was. At best Finn was a freak of nature. At worst he was touched by the devil, just as the ravenous goats were.
    Every Fossiter man back through the generations had been a culler such as he. Only his father had bucked the tradition. Whereas previous generations had been heavy drinkers, meat-eaters and
womanizers, Daniel’s father was a teetotal vegetarian, and as spiteful as a hornet.
    Throughout Daniel’s childhood his father and grandfather did not speak to one another, and when Daniel’s father died of a sickness they had still not reconciled. Daniel was fourteen
when that happened, and after that his grandfather raised him and recommenced in earnest the Fossiter tradition for raising boys. He taught Daniel how to shoot, how to work his way upwind of a
goat, how to use the curved knife that peeled softened fat from the hide. How to cleave the meat, drain the blood without spoiling the pelt and how, once Daniel’s fifteenth birthday came
around, to drink. He had made Daniel eat for the first time in his life the flesh of an animal, and it had tasted as seductive and vitalizing as it had immoral.
    He taught Daniel the characters of the mountains, the methods and charms for appeasing them and the ways in which a canny goat could exploit the landscapes to hide from a culler. He instructed
him in the preparation of traps, the spring-loading of iron jaws that would snap clean through a leg. He taught him to carry goat droppings in his pockets to dupe the foolish beasts into trusting
him as he stalked the mountainsides.
    He taught him, too, about the roamy goat, the one that could only ever be