The Dig Read Online Free

caught. A single nail was through each skull and they hung as misshaped macabre pouches from the beam below the roof as if some giant shrike had its larder there.
    He put down the bowl of mash and looked once more at the dog Messie. The man in his big coat was like some puffed-up bird. Ag, you’re a special one, he thought. Then he sloshed the leftover water through the door into the run and watched it carry a dog shit away with it in the fog of steam it made across the concrete.

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    Daniel had woken late and for a while lain there almost stupefied. His whole body felt beaten for a moment, as if his muscles were made of plaster, the way they could feel after the first day of haymaking, with the fatigue of some heavy and unusual sport. Only the mild reprimand he allowed himself for missing a shift drove him up, and once he was up he fell into the automaticness of it again.
    He had been in a way reluctant to go to the shed for fear of facing some catastrophe being on the other shift would have averted. A lamb strangled in its own cord; a young ewe—her pelvis too narrow—prone and sloughing blood through inside tears, her lamb drowned in its own bag, the strange hernia of bag split and bulbing from the uterus, the dead lamb’s head magnified in the fluid of its failed birth. All these things he had readied himself for as he put on his boots, went to the shed. But all was well. There was a tiny new lamb just shakily on its feet and still greasy where its mother had licked it clean. He took the lamb and sprayed the umbilical stalk with iodine and made sure the ewe had milk, and then he sprayed the number on the lamb and the ewe.
    The wind soughed through the baffle netting of the shed and every now and then threw a fine rain against the corrugated tin that pinged and tinkered and brought somehow a greater sense of warmth within the shed. Briefly, there weregapes of sunshine through the fast-shifting clouds, but they came and went like laughter provoked in a crying child.
    He did the automatic thing of changing the water buckets and checking the pens and then he mustered energy and cleaned out the stalls, feeling his body loosen under the work and every now and then looked over to the newborn lamb to see that it was drinking.
    He reached in to the empty stall with the rake, let it bite, and then rolled in the trampled, dirtied bedding which moved as a wad, like some foul turf. Those stalls that had not been occupied for long were fine, and the bed came up lighter and more haphazard, some of the dung witnessable as solid objects in the straw. But those that had longer occupation were variously filthy and had a silage heaviness. Some smelt Marmitey, others had the smell of piss and illness. He was convinced he could sense illness in the air in some medieval way and trusted this even in relation to his own body and his personal understanding of his health. I am just tired, he said to himself now, I am not ill. I would sense it, and I am not.
    As the wind soughed through the baffles he felt the cords in his arms loosen, casting out the rake then grubbing in the wet straw and forking it over the pen into the barrow until the act became compulsive and he determined to take up every piece of loosened straw off the dark stony ground beneath.
    He clicked on the kettle and wheeled the barrow out of the shed and took it to the heap and tipped on the rotting bedding. Around the field crows were turning over the dung and taking up the worms. They made a strange black contrast to the fresh white lambs. Even in their adjutant walking they contrasted.
    He stood holding the barrow. The hedges were not yet beginning to green up. It was as if there was a holding back to them. The ewes cried ritually and the lambs bleated back and now and then came in from play and pushed roughly at their mothers, their tails frenzied as they drank, and here and there were lambs sleeping in their mothers’ lee, folded up and catlike.
    He went