The Dig Read Online Free Page B

drifting mist that played with the distance of things. You could hear the tractors working somewhere on the land.
    There’s two spots, said the farmer. He was a magistrate and knew of the man from the hunts. His jaw was sagged from a cynical habit. It gave him the air of being above everything.
    The big man nodded and got out the brutalized chainsaw and began to fill it with fuel. He was gruff and taciturn. He had added too much oil to the two-stroke so that the fuel would smoke.
    The blade of the chainsaw had been taken off and he’d fixed a rubber pipe to the exhaust. It looked a strange, bastardized thing.
    The magistrate farmer took the man over to the big modern barn. After the damp outside air there was a dustiness in the outbuilding.
    The man brought the terriers down with him two to a lead and stationed them about the straw bales. Then he started the chainsaw there on the ground.
    The noise filled out.
    A little straw blew about the floor from the vent of the motor and the big man picked up the saw and revved it, crashing the noise in the barn. The mist had been deadening the noises so it was a very abrupt sound.
    The dogs stood stock still, shaking a little with alertness, their eyes shifting minutely with little rapid surveillances.
    He revved the saw again until it started to choke smoke through the thick rubber pipe. Then with a strange mobilityhe went round the stack and pumped in the smoke to the gaps and runs in the bales.
    When the rats came out they came out with pace but the terriers ripped into them. The dogs were catlike in their speed. When they caught a rat they shook it like they were trying to break its back, which they were. They were yelping. Bites seemed to just drive them on.
    The noise in the barn was terrible and solid. There was the clatter of the chainsaw and the metallic yelps of the dogs. That made a main terrible noise. It was a brief, flurried clatter of killing.
    When they were done the men lined up the rats and counted them. The big man took the rats that were not quite dead, trod on their scaly tails and systematically smashed their heads with an electric fencing spike he’d picked up from the wall of the barn.
    The farmer sickened a little at that brutalism. The dogs were whining and sniffed and their breathing came now in quick loud little pants. You could not smell the straw through the petrol smell and the choked-out smoke drifted about the barn like the mist outside.
    There’s the log pile too, said the farmer. There was a strange hum in his ears after the noise in the barn. He had a disgust now for the big man but understood him as an instrument. He was surprised and impressed that the man could manage such a discipline in his dogs.
    There’s something else too, said the magistrate farmer. His jaw sagged with the habit as he looked at the big man. The big man was experimentally putting weight down on a rat under his foot as if he was testing to burst it.
    I can have a look, said the man.
    Badgers, said the magistrate farmer.

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    Daniel took up the cooled milk mix and took up the black lamb from the warming box. Its head swayed almost imperceptibly with exhaustion. It was like a very old thing asleep.
    The earlier wind had dropped and the rain now settled and gathered into a thickening mist.
    He husbanded the lamb, heard the brief interior gurgle as he fed the tube down and it met the lamb’s stomach. It was a remote sound, like something far off, not there right in his hands.
    As the tube reached the lamb’s stomach there was a brief smell of its insides, then he fed down the milk. The tiny lamb seemed will-less, its eyes just tired. It was as if they did not have in them any witnessable want for life.
    The thickening mist gave an enclosure to the shed. Every now and then the lamb choked back the milk and he fed it with an invasive passivity. He compared this to the willful sucking of the other lambs at the bottle, the way their bellies swelled