English Pastoral by James Rebanks (100 books to read .txt) 📕

a hidden hole he hadn’t netted. He cursed. Then two others were caught in a net and killed. A little while later the ferret emerged, and was caught, hanging limply over his hand, a slightly savage grin on its face. John put it away in his box, and we walked home across the half-ravaged field with the three rabbits swinging from his knuckles.

~

Many years after we caught those rabbits, I read the Roman poet-philosopher Virgil and realized that my people belonged to an ancient farming tradition. Virgil wrote a curious little book, 2,000 years ago, called The Georgics (which loosely translates as ‘farming things’). It is a kind of handbook for how to be a good farmer. In it Virgil lists the modest tools (or ‘arsenal’) available to the Roman farmer: ploughshare, plough, harrow, horse-drawn cart, threshing sledge, horse-drawn sledge, iron bar, hurdles and winnowing fan. Virgil said the farmer must use these tools to ‘wage war’ on the earth. His farming philosophy was that we had to take things from nature by using our wisdom and our tools, because the alternative was defeat and starvation.

If you harry not with tireless rake the weeds,

if with your voice you do not terrify the birds

or with your sickle prune the canopy shading the land,

if with no prayers you call down rain,

O! how you’ll gaze in vain at another’s ample stockpile

and shake the forest oak to soothe your famine.

I didn’t know anything about Virgil as a child, but I did sense then that the rabbits were one small battle in an endless war. A war we had to fight, a struggle without end.

~

We heard them down the field. Kraak, kraak, kraak. I knew the noise and what it meant: corpse-chatter. As I followed him down the field, he saw the birds hopping up and down from some rocks on to something unseen beneath a little thorn tree. My grandfather cursed under his breath. He hated losing sheep. Hated what crows do to the dead or dying. He said Mother Nature was a ‘cruel old bitch’. The crows saw him coming and hopped on to the barbed wire fence, and then over to a nearby oak tree to watch us.

We found the old ewe lying on her side, kicking. She had mastitis, a swollen udder, and it had got into her body. Grandad showed me that the infection had spread up the swollen milk veins into her body. There was no hope. I could see the blood on her face – the thin bright red of squashed strawberries against her white wool. The crows had stabbed out her eyes when she couldn’t get up. Her month-old lamb watched from about twenty feet away and then ran off down the field. He said we would have to catch it tomorrow morning in the pens, by bringing the flock in. But the ewe was in pain and blind. He said that if we left her and went home for a gun, the crows would come back and torment her, and she would suffer horribly.

He gestured for me to stand back, then pulled out his knife and sharpened it on a stone. Then he held the ewe’s head and cut her throat with two quick slits. I thought I heard him say sorry, but so quietly I couldn’t be sure. The blood gushed out, a hot purple-red river pouring down her opened neck into the meadow. She shook a little, legs thrashing, then slowly breathed her last. She was done. Grandad said we would come back for her corpse in the morning. Until we got back, the crows would have their way, but they couldn’t hurt her any longer. He shouted at them. Fuck off. One of them lifted off briefly from its branch, as if listening, before settling again. The crows and my grandfather were old enemies, and as the weeks passed, and I saw what they could do to our work, I inherited his fury against them.

~

My childhood world had become filled with countless cycles of birth, life and death. My days with my grandfather were filled with helping animals to give birth, or stay healthy, or get enough to eat to cope with the weather. At times he could be gentle, with moments of great tenderness and care – nestling a newborn lamb in his hands, gently threading the stomach tube over its little pink tongue and down its throat and squeezing milk into its belly to save its life. But at other times, when he thought it necessary, he could be a tough and almost cruel man. There was a hardness in him that he was neither ashamed of, nor uncomfortable about. To him, death and killing were simply part of his life. At the same time he had strong ethics. Even if an animal was going to be slaughtered tomorrow, it was still our job to do everything in our power to keep it alive and well cared for today. Anything other than treating our animals decently and with care was considered wrong and shameful, and a waste of a life as well as time and effort. There was a time to live and a time to die. When he killed, he did it swiftly, with respect, but without great displays of emotion. Knowing and seeing death on personal terms, he had a kind of reverence for meat on the table. We were told not to leave a morsel, even the bacon rinds. He would have been confused that anyone could be so foolish, or rich enough, to suffer rabbits destroying a crop, or so morally elevated to think they were above killing when it was called for. He existed in nature, as an actor on the stage, always struggling to hold his ground. A risen ape, not a fallen angel.

~

In May the hawthorn dykes around the barley fields frothed white with blossom and hummed with bees. The swallows hunted under the overhang when it rained. In the pastures, bullocks scratched their