21st-Century Yokel

by Tom Cox

  3

  TWO OTTERS, SEVEN BEAVERS, TWO RIVERS AND A LYNX

  There was an escaped lynx on Dartmoor so I went up to Dartmoor, alone and unarmed, to try to find the escaped lynx. I took with me a map, an old book about ghosts, a bottle of water, a packet of crisps and some past-their-best walking boots. In packing for the trip, I had given arguably less thought than I should to the lynx’s needs, but I was carrying a rucksack with a long piece of elastic attached to it that I could forcibly remove and coax the lynx to chase, in the event that the lynx turned out to be playful. The elastic – which formed part of an exterior compartment intended for the carrying of drinks or maps – hung off the rucksack in a perilous way and had been irritating me recently so it would be a relief to remove it anyway. The previous week I had been walking down the high street in town in the sun feeling fairly decent about myself when the elastic had caught on a pedestrian bollard, twanging me back up the high street four or five feet in the direction from which I had come, like a small allegory for the experience of being human.

  Dartmoor Zoo, to which the lynx had been exported from Kent immediately prior to its escape, has a fairly infamous history, having been the scene of a few other animal escapes, including that of a jaguar in 2006 and a Canadian timber wolf called Parker in 2007, which was recaptured outside the pub in the local village and further emasculated by being described by the zoo’s owner Benjamin Mee as ‘a big girl’s blouse’. A marginally limp film was made about Mee and his zoo by the mostly excellent director Cameron Crowe in 2011. The film was set in California, but Dartmoor Zoo is not in California; it is on the edge of Sparkwell, a few minutes’ drive from the twenty-four-hour Tesco at Lee Mill.

  In attempting to locate a Carpathian lynx on a 65,000-acre high-altitude moor, the most important thing to do is to try to think like a Carpathian lynx. Using my new lynx brain, my firm instinct was that the lynx, whose name was Flaviu, would head north from Sparkwell, away from Tesco and towards Burrator Reservoir, which was a good place for Flaviu to have a nice big drink. Flaviu, following his instinct, would then head to the very highest part of the moor, approaching Okehampton, where there would be snow later in the year, enabling him to put the large pads on his feet to use in a way that he probably couldn’t in a zoo. En route he might well pass Raddick Hill, where a distraction could occur in the form of a sizeable population of sheep and a few wild ponies and cows. It was here that I planned to intercept Flaviu.

  I parked in Princetown, a settlement architecturally anomalous to most of Dartmoor and Devon, where the greyness of the pebbledash houses and a sky colour that often matches them can make me forget I am not on a journey from Mansfield to Worksop in 1986 with my dad to buy some Swarfega and gravel. Here, like some part of industrial Yorkshire that went off on a downcast inward-looking wander and never came back, looms Dartmoor prison, scene of even more escapes than Dartmoor Zoo, including that of Harold ‘Rubber Bones’ Webb, who gained his freedom by contorting through the tight spaces between some of the building’s heating ducts, and James Jennings, who, assisted by two fellow inmates, stole a tanker delivering oil to the prison and used it as a battering ram: more elaborate procedures than Flaviu’s, which merely involved chewing through a cage.

  I set off in the opposite direction to the prison, towards South Hessary Tor. It was a curious experience temporarily living inside the mind of a lynx, as it not only made me quite good at tracking but gave me a strong craving for chamois. You don’t get chamois in west Devon and I am a vegetarian so I settled for the packet of crisps in my rucksack. The packet was one of those with GRAB BAG written on it, a thoughtful and liberating gesture from the manufacturers granting permission for assertive action to people like me who’d previously been hesitant around crisps and afraid to admit what we truly wanted. I climbed the tor and scanned the blasted and desolate surroundings for the lynx. I could not see the lynx. I sat for a small number of minutes and admired the new iron cobra head on top of the tor, which stood next to the stump of the previous iron cobra head. The previous cobra head – one of four erected in 1867 to mark the boundary between Walkhampton Parish and the Forest of Dartmoor – had been snapped off by thieves a couple of years earlier. I puzzled over the mentality that had led to this surreal, nonsensical act of vandalism, conducted out of sight of any building save for the abandoned farmhouse down near Foxtor Mire. Did the thieves later transport the cobra head to Bude on the north coast and sell it at the sprawling Sunday car boot sale there, being haggled down from an ambitious show price to the one they’d actually hoped for? Or perhaps they listed it on eBay, with a ‘Buy it now’ teaser price, in the hope that somebody just happened to be using ‘cobra’, ‘blacksmith’, ‘retro’ and ‘Duchy of Cornwall’ as search terms that week?

  I turned south-west in the direction of Raddick Hill, following the course of the Devonport Leat, which dates from the 1790s and was for a long time, before the excavation of Burrator reservoir and its accompanying dam, the principal source of water for Plymouth. There is rusty metalwork in the ground here from the Victorian age that can trip you up, and I hoped that if he followed this route Flaviu had been careful, since he was only two and, having lived in captivity his whole life, would not be used to negotiating rusty Victorian metalwork.

  Via the local and international media, Devon police had been keen to get the message out that members of the public should not approach the lynx. Presumably this was for the normal lynx reasons but also perhaps because the lynx had a store of remarks that could be very cutting. I felt pleasantly alone in this region, where the moor gets big and yellow like a monster range of algaed sand dunes and begins to swallow a person. I thought of my phone, also alone, where it currently sat, on top of a cupboard in my living room. I often feel bullied by my phone and spend an increasingly large part of my life wanting to throw it forcefully into a builder’s skip, so I frequently leave it at home when I walk, but it did occur to me that, were the lynx to corner me, I would not have any means of calling a friend or an appropriate authority and informing them I had been cornered by a lynx.

  Dartmoor, like all three of the major moors of the South West Peninsula, already had its big cat legends: blurred sightings of big dark shapes slinking through the heather. Sheep carcasses too expertly mutilated to suggest the work of even the biggest domestic dog. In the late 1970s Mary Chipperfield, animal trainer and circus owner, set out to transport five pumas from the old Plymouth Zoo to Dartmoor Zoo, but only two of the cats ever arrived; the others, it is thought, were released, or escaped, onto the moor. A zoologist who lives on the moor – an acquaintance of my friend John – claims that she categorically identified a puma slinking across her driveway during the early nineties. The average lifespan of a puma in the wild is no more than thirteen years, but if Chipperfield’s pumas bred, Flaviu might not be the only wild feline up here.

  Near the aqueduct where the leat crosses the River Meavy I checked for lynx droppings, although I found this tough, having never previously seen any lynx droppings. I was so busy looking for lynx droppings that I dropped my OS map in the leat. The map flowed west with the current towards Tavistock for a few yards before I retrieved it. I shook the water off the map and skirted the bottom of Down Tor then headed over the high ridge to Crazywell Pool, another great potential drinking place for a thirsty lynx. For a long time there were claims that the pool was bottomless and that when all the bell ropes from Walkhampton church had been tied together and lowered into the water they still did not reach solid ground. But this was disproved early in the 1900s. Crazywell is in fact an old flooded tin mine no more than fifteen feet deep and, if you are someone like me who doesn’t mind getting pondweed stuck to your legs, looks quite inviting for swimming and diving. Dusk was edging closer now, and as I sat by the pool I could not help remembering another legend: the one that said if you visited the pool at this time of day a ghostly voice would whistle along the wind and inform you of the next person in the neighbourhood to die. The breeze weavi
ng through the grass behind me did seem to form words of a sort, but I didn’t recognise them. They didn’t sound like names, unless they were complicated, unusual names and doom was being foretold for the offspring of nonconformist middle-class West Country hippies. I was also more glad that none of the words sounded like ‘Flaviu’ than I was that none of them sounded like ‘Tom’. At any one point you’ll get loads of Toms in west Devon. If the Ghostly Voice had whispered my name it could have been referring to virtually anyone.

  From Crazywell I climbed past a restored medieval stone cross to the logan at the top of Black Tor, which forms a ledge of sorts. I thought this was a possibility as lynxes like to make their dens under ledges, but I found nothing save for the marbled shapes of crab’s lichen and a small circular hole in the ground, probably made by an adder. A few hundred yards on I encountered a sheep with a pronounced limp. Was this the first sign of the lynx? The keepers at Dartmoor Zoo had said that the lynx was unlikely to kill any livestock but this was not to say that the cat could not inflict a leg injury on a sheep. Upon review, I decided the evidence was inconclusive. I was almost back at my car and I had not found my lynx, but to be honest that was OK, as I hadn’t had any decisive plan of action for a scenario in which I did. I certainly wasn’t going to dob Flaviu in to the authorities and probably would have decided against taking him home. I already had four cats, which was more than enough. I tend to find that, with cats, neediness increases in a ratio directly in accordance with size. My smallest one was fairly aloof and got on with her own thing, but the biggest was constantly following me around, dribbling on my clothes, sitting on my chest and watching me sleep in a slightly unnerving way or asking my opinion on stuff that he really should have been confident enough not to need affirmation about.

  Back at my house a browse through social media suggested that opinion on Flaviu was split into three main camps. A few people were concerned that Flaviu might head towards Plymouth and eat one of the city’s many schoolchildren. The Plymouth Herald ran a story about a pair of lovers who were due to have their wedding at the zoo in the near future and were worried that Flaviu might choose that moment to return, gatecrashing the festivities. Some people were keeping their fingers crossed Flaviu was soon rescued and returned to the zoo. Others – and I tended to side with this camp – were rooting for Flaviu to make it on his own and hoping his escape was an early step towards the rightful re-wilding of Dartmoor, which would hopefully soon also include the appearance of wolves and bears. The parts of the Norfolk and Suffolk countryside that I stomped around before I lived in Devon were similar to the South West in that they had lots of famous ghost animals roaming about, many of which were of a wild nature. But in Norfolk and Suffolk people rarely talked about reintroducing actual living wild animals to the countryside. There had been a re-flooded fen a mile up the road from my house but at no point did anyone discuss the logistics of introducing a moose or hippo into it. Here, however, people talk about that sort of stuff all the time.

  ‘I’m going to Ireland,’ a neighbour of mine in Devon announced earlier in the summer.

  ‘Ooh lovely,’ I said. ‘Why are you going there?’

  ‘I’m going to a wedding,’ she said. ‘I might bring back some pine martens too, and release them into the woods. If we had them here it could lead to a strong resurgence of red squirrels. I’m taking my van, so I’ll have plenty of room.’ She showed me a space in the back of her van beneath one of the seats which she’d cleared out, where the pine martens might be able to sleep in what for pine martens would be relative comfort on the long journey across the water, down through the convoluted roads of Wales and round the hook of the Bristol Channel back to the South West Peninsula.

  One reason I was not more dejected about not locating the lynx on Dartmoor was that I’d already had a bumper week for spotting unlikely wildlife in my home county. Just a few days previously I had, for the first time in my life, had a close-up sighting of beavers swimming around in the wild. This occurred on the River Otter, about forty miles east of where I live.

  Nobody knows exactly how the beavers first appeared on the Otter. The most likely theory is that they were captive beavers from a beaver farm, released by the owner of the captive beavers or someone loosely or not at all affiliated to the custodian of the captive beavers. Sightings of them by members of the public began in 2010. Not long afterwards, the beavers began to breed. The Conservative government then decided to have the beavers removed from the river, owing to the fact that it does not like the UK to be in any way a fun or diverse place. Fortunately, the Devon Wildlife Trust, with overwhelming support from conservationists, opposed this removal and – having tested the beavers for diseases and found them to be in rude health – managed to get a licence for the beavers to live on the river for five years and their effect on the environment to be monitored. There were now thought to be around twenty on the River Otter.

  I did not travel to the river expecting to see wild beavers. Just to have known I was within a hundred yards of some wild beavers and seen their teeth marks on some trees would have been exciting enough for me. But as dusk fell and my friend Sarah and I and Stephen Hussey from the Devon Wildlife Trust made our way quietly along the riverbank, we heard a loud splash and, about twenty seconds later, two otters dipped past us at speed. The otters had a rattled look about them, like thugs who’d picked the wrong target for their thuggery and were now beating a regretful, chastened retreat. The size of the initial splash we’d heard, Stephen said, suggested that the commotion was about more than just these otters and some other otters. A larger animal had been involved: perhaps a dog, perhaps a beaver.

  My friend Hayley once described to me a very spiritual evening encounter she’d had with an otter in the River Dart, less than a mile upriver from Totnes. Hayley had been staring into the water, seeing only her blurred reflection and stones and vague fish and the blackening ripples of the water, but then her reflection grew slick fur and whiskers and a button nose and became brunette not fair and was no longer in the water but out of it, only four inches in front of her face. She and her reflection – which she now realised was not a reflection but a real-life breathing medium-size otter – held one another’s gaze for what felt like a minute but was probably an unusually long eleven seconds.

  I have seen an otter in a similar spot on the Dart, but it was a far more ordinary sighting: a shiny head of dampened fluff several yards away that I only fully realised did not belong to a bird as it made a dive for the riverbed. There are lots and lots of otters six miles upstream though, including one called Mr Squeaks, who is too old to swim properly any more and, when requesting fish, makes a noise suggestive of a forty-a-day Benson and Hedges habit, and another called Sammy, who sits on the head of a man named Tim upon request. These otters are not wild, and neither is Tim; they, and Tim, belong to the otter sanctuary at Buckfast, but the water in which they swim is pumped directly from the Dart, which runs alongside their enclosures. The river gets volatile here, as it arrives on flatter ground from the moor, and when it overflows its banks, otters – wild ones, not from the sanctuary – have been found out of their element, washed away into the surrounding farmland. In the 1800s otters were hunted a few miles north of here on the west branch of the river by men with poles who compounded the asininity of their actions by shouting, ‘Hoo-gaze!’: the otter hunting version of ‘Tally-ho!’ The otters did their best to escape by running at speeds up to eighteen miles an hour, hiding in their parlours – deeper, safer places than holts, beneath hanging rocks – or running up trees, a little-known otter skill I learned about from Tim when I visited the sanctuary.

  After the fast stretch below Buckfastleigh the river widens and dozes for a few miles, even while it prevaricates most dramatically about its intentions, then hits Totnes and goes tidal with a dramatic seabird flurry. In the sludge beneath the main bridge over the water in the town there is typically at least one upturned shopping trolley. The muddled clangs of the business park dr
own out the sound of cormorants and greenshank. Close by are the railings, hooped barbed wire and graffiti of the long-abandoned former Dairy Crest site. But the river still has an old-fashioned way of feeding the mythology of the place. Even at its most urban it retains a wildness that has not quite been buried. Stories from its banks find their way up the hill into the pubs at night. Over a pint my friend Ru told me he’d watched the town seal sitting on the bank a couple of weeks ago, munching casually on a huge salmon. There is almost certainly more than one seal, but everyone seems to have made an unspoken agreement to amalgamate them into a single town seal, possibly because the idea of him gadding about on various adventures between the weir at the northern end of town and Baltic Wharf at the southern end creates a more pleasing image. Sometimes I feel like I am the only person to live within a five-mile radius of the place who has never seen the seal, and this can be very socially isolating.

  Teenagers hurl themselves into the water en masse down near the weir on the first semi-hot day of the year, and on every other subsequent one. You can walk past them in the garb of a counterculture fool from the middle of the previous century and they don’t bat an eyelid. After nearly three years I am almost accustomed to it and have to remind myself it is nothing like the places where I spent my own youth. I seriously toned my look down the last time I went back to the town where I attended school, and kids still hurled abuse at me from across a street. I won’t go into the details of the conversation, but suffice to say it was significantly less polite than when a stranger in Devon shouted, ‘Get back to Woodstock!’ at me and I assured her that I’d been trying my hardest to do just that for several years with only sporadic success. The town where I grew up did not have a river; it had a park, which sometimes had puddles. You went to the park, drank Special Brew and either had a fight or a snog. My training from that habitat kicked in last summer when I was walking parallel to the Dart and a tall, slightly lairy-looking teenage boy dripping river water from his shirt started striding purposefully towards me. I put my guard up, expecting trouble. ‘Would you like a hug?’ he asked very sweetly, with arms outstretched. I told him I’d better leave it, having not long got out of the shower and only just applied deodorant. The only criticism I can really level at these kids is their taste in music, which runs largely to dubstep and drum ’n’ bass.