Julian and Robin. In the tiny interval between now and Luke Fleming’s return Pete knows what he wants to do. He goes to his computer, and, having already memorised the address, types on the keyboard: ‘[email protected]’
‘Dear Julian,’ he now writes, ‘Hi! The journal Nat keeps – which I have read – has supplied your email address as well as a great many facts about your life – Ilona’s worrying illness, for instance – that I am hugely ashamed I was ignorant of. Maybe you are in Hungary right now, as you intended. If you are, you may well not have heard of Nat’s mission to bring us both money and himself fame by “disappearing” into the Berwyn mountains. It didn’t result in either, I have to say, just in enough attention for me to resent the business heartily, and exposure to the ele-ments and an injury to the foot that are keeping him bed-bound for the time being. These may not be the only bad consequences of his ill-conceived venture. Just at the moment I can’t ward off ideas of a prison sentence being handed the lad for the wild goose chase he’s led everybody. That’ll bring satisfaction to The Daily Mail and further heartache to Izzie and me and everybody else who cares for him. Thank you for your own friendliness to Nat. It makes me bold enough to suggest we see a bit of each other. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t, is there? The terrible thing that divided our lives after I was “on the Heights” mustn’t determine the rest of them. I remember…’
But he can’t complete the sentence. Because what he is remembering is his own exclamation to Julian as he lay there on the hospital bed: ‘I was up there on those Heights – those Heights in Wales, and they took care of me after my accident. What had I done to merit those Heights?’ And this makes him recall Julian’s letter to Nat, ‘I prefer to let Peter stay up on his Heights, and not drag him down…’ Heights, always that word Heights!! And suddenly a truth breaks on him which it amazes him it has taken decades to see.
With his regaining of consciousness Julian did recover memory; though he was declared to have amnesia, he knew perfectly well why the family had left Woodgarth at so unprecedentedly unusual an hour. But had chosen to keep quiet. He had wanted to spare Peter, to ensure that he did not suffer any more than he was already doing, that he was not troubled by further questions from authority or by more stabs from his already disordered conscience.
Kept quiet then, at a time when he must have wanted to cry out in protest at what had happened to him, kept quiet after that, for all the long years since.
Pete draws back from his computer, to place his head, eyes closed, in his cupped hands, consumed by an emotion so strong, so devouring that it defies naming – and maybe it will never quite let go of him. He is wondering how he can bear this new revelation – far more disturbing even than what he’s heard about Sam from Don, asking, as it does, gratitude from him to someone he’s rarely bothered himself about – when he hears a knock on the glass of the door. It is, of course, Luke Fleming returning from his lunchbreak.
Nat wakes up from his brief but deep sleep to hear this knock, realising who is responsible for it. But I’m ready, he tells himself, ready for absolutely anything, and I mean ready. And why? Because just now he’s been reliving in his unconscious head those experiences in the Berwyns which he regards as far and away the biggest favour life has yet done him. Having received this – and treasured it, and stored it safely in his mind, to draw on for sustenance whenever he wishes – he is surely protected against whatever unkindness and suffering are to come his way. He doesn’t feel disposed to telling anybody about it all yet, certainly no journo (even if this particular one, Luke Fleming does the kind thing and keep Nat’s secret secret!), nor his mates, even Josh, nor Dad who certainly does respect animals, nor Mum who so loves, and seeks out, peace and harmony. The day may indeed come when he wants to share with others, but it will be for their sake, not his own.
He has already composed a poem – well, it’s more of a psalm really – about all he witnessed up on the lower slopes of Pen-plaenau, but new verses for it keep on occurring to him, even now, in the interstices of stretching himself further awake and hearing Dad and Luke mount the precipitous ladder-like stairs to give him the news:
‘You, all of you up there, I could never say anything to you. One syllable aloud, and the whole wonderful atmosphere – with me hidden, spellbound, you venturesome and active – would have been destroyed. You have not great reason to think kindly of my species, but there are some of us – and not a few – who wish you well, who delight in you.’
It was by chance – in surely a double sense – that Nat had come across the badgers. It was the evening of his first full day in the Berwyn Mountains, his first, that is, to start with him waking up there, a bit stiff and slightly damp.
Twice in its course he’d glimpsed people in the distance, making their way along a path leading between two peaks: a walking party in the first instance, a tall young man with an Alpenstock (hopefully not a rival, some fellow recluse or hide-away) in the second. But he’d espied both these human intrusions from behind an outcrop of siltstone rock; there was no likelihood of having been seen, but anyway, to be thoroughly sure, he’d retreated, bent more or less double so that he covered ground like a deer or a less massive wild boar, further uphill. Though his twisted ankle was still hurting, he was filled with general satisfaction, not least at himself. By now he had arrived at the lower reaches of Pen-plaenau, not so far indeed from where, four days later, he was to be spotted and rescued.
He had slept pretty well the previous night. To his relief. Unlike Pete in 1974, he had a sleeping bag with him; he’d bought it in Shrewsbury on his way over. When eventually he was rescued, as a hardy, plucky, stoical casualty, nobody would hold this invaluable piece of equipment against him; rather it’d confirm opinions of him as a sensible, well-prepared, countrywise lad who’d been undeservedly unlucky and suffered a serious tumble. He’d fought against admitting to himself any worry about the night (inability to achieve restful sleep apart) which had occurred to him when hatching his plan: that he might be disturbed, even frightened by all the noises of predators and victims issuing from the dark into the dark. But he needn’t have doubted himself so. Maybe his nocturnal escapades in South London seeking foxes had steeled him. Instead the problem he faced in this twilight hour was: however to pass the sizeable time before sleep, even if fitful, delivered him from his immediate surroundings and carried him on to the burgeoning light of the next calendar day, in his own unadulterated company?
The light was dimming, but surely more gradually, more subtly, than Nat had appreciated in his urban life. One kind of greyness would hold for a while, as though it intended to stay forever, and it came, even to the intent watcher such as himself, as something of a surprise when it yielded to another deeper shade. The colours, this second evening of this mountain country – light green (turf), dark green (clumps of woodland), light purple, deep purple (all the heathers), brown (bracken), grey (the shale) – were, he thought, maintaining themselves so well that this time maybe they might win against the descent of night, and remain intact… Impossible, of course – though was it? Up here his mind was surely changing its set, and shedding its former certainties.
Not enough light for him to continue with Henning Mankell’s Sidetracked, though its ever more horrifying unfolding of violence in the Swedish coastal town of Ystad had left him on tenter-hooks, on which he would gladly impale himself next day. And his torch simply wasn’t strong enough to illuminate page print; anyway stupidly he’d forgotten to buy new batteries, and mustn’t let these ones run out. Just as he was despairing of hitting on any compensation for forgoing the Wallander mystery – and no speculations about UFOs! he commanded himself – he noticed an all but hidden little path which somehow appealed to him. It led up from the ledge on which he was now standing towards a rock crevice, its surface beaten hard and dry by constant use by some regular. He would follow it, but walk on the sheep-cropped grass to its right rather than in the wake of any discernible tracks, whose makers might no
tice and fret.
The path ended in a huge mound of slightly sandy soil, fresh and perfectly clean, thrust up by claws from the earth all around the crevice’s base. Nat looked down. A large hole opened some inches from his calves, about ten inches across, and shaped ‘like a D lying on its side’. The comparison came to him from some book he’d read about British wild life and its habitat a few years ago. Therefore… yes, this was the entrance into, the exit out of a badgers’ sett, and the Berwyns, it was a well-attested fact, firm in his own head, were home to many badgers. The fissured rock directly above him would give the creatures excellent protection, and shield just such a reliable look-out post for them as he himself had needed earlier in the day.
Soon there could be no doubt. Here were three similarly shaped and formed holes, but slightly smaller, more like six inches diameter. At the end of one he could make out a descending passageway; no doubt if you edged along through it, you would arrive at the very same chamber as through the first opening. Nat would examine the first more closely but from an oblique angle. Remembering his successes with London foxes, he was wary of putting himself about too comprehensively, and was faithful to his wariness even at the cost of uncomfortable bodily contortions.
All round the hole, he saw, was a pattern of parallel lines, the work indubitably of the same sharp claws responsible for the pile of earth. Then, raising his head he saw the same pattern repeated, only much more deeply etched, on the rock fissure itself. Next he noticed several little bundles of dry grasses, placed by the entrance surely deliberately. Why, I’m an archaeologist but of the living, said Nat to himself, or a discoverer of some remote tribe, and somehow this was a pleasing thing to think, when all these months, until the Great Plan occurred to him, he’d been feeling rather bereft of satisfying pictures of himself. (His good A’s had made strangely little difference here.)
How orderly, how well cared-for it all was. Nat had arrived, he felt, at a secure outpost of true civilisation kept up (over centuries, not to say millennia) in territory that – those peaks so stark now against the gathering dark – was capable of turning inimical, hostile.
The evening was virtually windless. And warm too, especially considering the altitude of where he was. Good, very good! No elemental reasons for any anxiety… I shall shift myself over to a slab of stone on that little rise just there, said Nat to himself and maintain a position that allows my scent to float way, way above the levels of the animals emerging from the bunker beneath. And I’ll just wait and wait and wait.
Which is what he did. From where he was stationed he could look down onto a line of weather-stunted hawthorn trees march-ing, evenly spaced and still laden with berries, towards a little stream now silvering in the valley as dusk perceptibly thickened. What remained of the day’s sun was blocked from his view by a gaunt, desolate-seeming ridge on his left. It was a waiting, in-between time. Still too light apparently for these badgers underground, preparing for their night activities well below, and dark enough for natural objects that only a short time ago had seemed comfortingly dependable in their distinctness to be cam-ouflaged.
What is it that I really am doing up here in the Berwyns? Nat asked himself as, oddly, he hadn’t done most of that day. Have I some deeper purpose behind all my carefully worked-out strate-gies and my flight into the unknown? Perhaps something you only attain when you’ve broken free of other people’s definitions of your self and what you can or cannot do: the getting of grades, the finding of jobs, the building-up of businesses…
Typically, it was while his thoughts were taking him away from his – interesting and dramatically new – surroundings and into surely rather pointless speculation that the very first badger did venture into the open, from that first hole, the one closest to the crevice. And here she was – for Nat, like his dad before him, knew the first badger out any evening to be invariably a female – lifting her shining white-striped head into the air. Up went her snout, she sniffed the air, once, twice, thrice, as one ascertaining there was no danger nearby. (Either she failed to detect Nat’s presence, he having placed himself so judiciously and motionlessly, or she didn’t rate him as danger!) This done she must have given a signal (some combination of shuffle and the lowest of grunts) which this time quite eluded him, keen though he was, because next – and this time Nat saw it all – out came two rather smaller animals. Were these her cubs? They had sturdy little legs, and short, strong, low-held tails, and markings were definite enough. But there was something about these creatures that suggested they hadn’t yet arrived at a maturity of either feature or movement.
At their arrival a snorting noise issued from the sow-badger, a pleased but purposeful sound, even an authoritative one, a kind of nasal cough. Then off the three went, at a trot, down the very path that Nat had come up. But they branched off from it some fifty yards later, onto a little track that he hadn’t been aware of. This, it was apparent from up here, would take them to the stream.
So badgers had appeared only to disappear! Just his luck! But just as he was lamenting this, two more badgers came out of the sett. Not literally simultaneously, but in such quick succession, that this was how it seemed. These newcomers must have heard and attended to the sow-badger’s signals and trusted her, for unlike her, they gave no apprehending, interrogative sniffs into the air, but, in no time at all – why, get this! – were rolling about on the earthen plateau below the main entrance. They gave the loudest grunts of the evening so far, and turned themselves over and over, revealing their somewhat squat bodies to be remarkably elastic, blissfully contracting and expanding (so it looked) as if to usher in the night with all its invitations and rituals. This, no doubt of it, was fun and games, there were rules to be followed but there were also moments of total and merry abandon. The animals might have been himself and Josh and their mates, a summer ago, down on the beach at Whitstable. Theirs were the wriggles and half-leaps and backward turns of purest enjoyment, and Nat could see the pair knew each other so well that theirs was a veritable unison of antics. And he started to make a verse out of his observation:
‘Yours are the wriggles and half-leaps and backward turns…’
No two ways about it. Day was over, discarded. Its colours had ceased to stand out any longer against the sky, but had surrendered themselves up till next morning to the darkness now in charge… The two youthful badgers proceeded to lose themselves in their own liveliness for far longer than Nat chose to measure by his watch, though when he did eventually look at the luminous dial, three-quarters of an hour had gone by. For here were the sow and the two cubs back uphill from their drink. He positively had to check himself from stepping forward to greet them. Momentarily the boy-badgers (as Nat now called them to himself) stopped their frolics, then, seeing approval in the sow’s benevolent beady little eyes, resumed them. One of the returning cubs picked up a bundle of withered grass in its mouth and disappeared with it, back into the hole, showing perhaps a natural bent for sett husbandry. But ‘it’ (sex was impossible to determine) was back almost straightaway.
Again some signal to the tunnels beneath the ground must have been given – but how by so small a member of the tribe – for now other badgers started to come outside, and were joined by some from the second biggest exit/entrance just below Nat’s stone. The clan had gathered, Nat reckoned – for with so much movement of such a lively kind, counting was hard-to-impossible – that at least a dozen animals assembled.
Nat breaks off from his memories abruptly. The voices in the shop below – his dad’s and Luke Fleming’s, which have been in colloquy for quite a few minutes – are, all of a sudden, clearer, louder, nearer. A decision has surely been reached, even the method of turning it into the best words for its object has been agreed on. Very soon the men will walk over to the staircase up to his bedroom.
What can Nat do but continue with his thoughts? ‘Were you ever, any of you, aware of Nat Kempsey, Human Being, so careful to remain out of sight and even scent? Did you somehow sense my go
od will, and bask in it? No, I don’t think you did, even though it’s a great idea. But there’s one possible exception, though this animal didn’t do any basking…’
‘That exception. My very last night I placed myself closer to the sett even than I had done before. Sleep left me, though not quite fully, in time for me to see your mass return home for the day, your work (digging and eating enough earthworms, sometimes 120 per badger, to add to your fat and to help you through oncoming winter) and your revels (all those games I watched with such relish and admiration) truly done. Over in the direction of England, beyond the shale and bare mountain-shanks, I saw in the sky’s sandwich-like layers of green, rose and yellow the first stages of dawn. I surely wouldn’t be seeing another one break in the Berwyns – not for many years, at least. Then I looked down. I saw a young badger, clearly a straggler from the group, running really quite fast up the path towards the sett’s main entrance. I must hurry, I must join the others at once, he (for I was sure it was a ‘he’) was obviously saying to himself. Then he stopped, only inches away from his destination, tilted his head so that his stripe was brilliant in the lessening darkness, and his snout began busily to quiver. He must, he surely must, have sensed my presence. And judged it benign, for he went back inside after a satisfied little shake of his body, away from the dangers of dawn into the happy security of his fellows and the earth in which they had their being.
‘I felt that badger was myself.’
Nat raises himself up into a sitting, receiving posture. His father and the journalist are mounting the ladder-like stairs, and he must be composed and dignified, ready for them.
About the Author
Paul Binding has lived in South Shropshire for twenty years. He has worked as a literary editor and a university lecturer, and is a frequent freelance contributor to newspapers and journals. His interest in the culture of Scandinavia and the Low Countries, about which he regularly writes articles and reviews, makes him a frequent visitor to both. Animals are of the greatest importance to him, and he cannot imagine a life without their company.
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