I did not know why I had said it. Daddy might have shot it on Mr Price’s land or he might have shot it elsewhere. I had no idea but saying it meant Price’s son thought that we were guilty of something or else knew that it was something we sometimes did. I should have known better but because I had stumbled and because he had remained silent in response, I went on again: ‘He dindt shoot it anywhere near your land.’
‘Well if he shot it anywhere around here then he shot it near our land. He would have had to go very far away for it not to have been near our land.’ Tom paused to laugh at my absurd scrambling. ‘Do you hunt with him ever?’ Tom asked.
‘Only sometimes.’
‘He’s got a twelve-gauge shotgun, hasn’t he?’
Cathy looked up at Tom but neither of the boys turned to her.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He might have one but we’ve never seen it, and he doendt hunt with it.’
‘That’s odd that he’d have it and not shoot game with it. How does he hunt?’
I shrugged. Daddy had traps set up throughout our copse and in the fields around. They were not the sort that killed the animal they snared but those that kept it waiting until Daddy came to collect it and kill it himself. It was better that way. Traps that try to kill the animal usually fail and the poor thing lies there dying slowly until it is finished off. The traps that our Daddy used lured the animal with a trail of food then shut it away in a box. There was room enough in the box for comfort in its last hours and the animal had no sense of its fate. Daddy checked the traps regularly and if he found something he would take it in his hands as quietly as he could then snap its fragile neck. The little creatures never even knew they were dead.
Sometimes he fished. Daddy had rods and tackle but said that fishing with rods took too much time and that it was better to tickle the trout. He knew the places for that.
I told the lads that I had never known Daddy to use a shotgun but that he hunted game with his bow.
‘Rubbish,’ said Tom. ‘Nobody hunts with bows around here. I don’t believe that anyone’s ever been able to shoot a bird with one. Not a bird in flight.’
Cathy placed the half-plucked mallard on a cut section of tarpaulin on the ground by her feet and squeezed her hand into her right jeans pocket to pull out her leather tobacco pouch. She pinched at the dried fibres and placed what she pulled onto a folded paper. She stuck a filter at the tip before rolling it between her fingers and licking then sticking the seal. She lit the cigarette with a well-struck match then sucked on it such that the flame dimmed to glowing ash and smoke seeped from her nose and mouth. She watched the lads.
I shrugged again. ‘Daddy does. Sometimes Cathy does as well.’
‘Is that Cathy over there?’ asked Tom. She was sitting no more than five metres from him but he asked me about her without turning in her direction. For a moment, Cathy continued puffing on her rolly. Then she got up and walked over. She had grown in the last couple of months and had become ungainly in her gait, unused to the new lengths and angles of her limbs. She was upright in everything else that she did, though. She always had a certain direction.
‘I hunt too,’ she said. ‘I’ve shot birds like this bird with my bow.’
Tom turned to her and as he did he became angry. Surprisingly so, considering how small the disagreement should have been. Probably no one ever spoke back to him. Not his little brother nor anybody at his school nor the boys he played rugby and cricket with nor the men in his shooting club, not even his teachers. They were probably too taken with him. Him and his confidence. Him and his arrogance. That charm that he walked around in like a swarm of horseflies about his head. Nobody probably ever told him that he was wrong. Nor would they ever, it seemed. For his whole life. He would always get his way. Always be right. Always get to bat first. I doubted even his dad questioned him much, even his own father, Mr Price. And then on the occasions that he did they both knew that they were upholding the proper order of things. When his father asked him to explain himself, or rethink something, or when he questioned him or told him that he – Tom – was incorrect, it served to strengthen Tom’s position, as second only in the universe, to be first when the time came. In those moments his father was putting Tom Price in his place but that never constituted a slight.
But with Cathy talking back at him, when he had not even been talking to her in the first place, well, it must have been frustrating. I could see it in his face. He clenched his jaw and blinked rapidly, as if trying to blink her away or blink away the thoughts he was being forced to have now that his train of conversation had been minutely offset. ‘I just brought it up because it seems odd – counter-intuitive even – that your father hunts with bows and arrows when he could be hunting with a gun. Regardless of whether or not he does have a twelve-gauge shotgun lying around, he could just get one, couldn’t he? Or some other kind of gun? I don’t understand this predilection for old technology. What’s the point?’
‘Well what’s the point of any of this?’ said Cathy. ‘We could just live in a town and Daddy could get a job and we could buy all our food in a supermarket like everyone else does. And go to school and have friends, and that. I mean, you might ask why we don’t just do that?’
Tom laughed. And I knew it had been coming. ‘You’re right, I could just ask that. Why are you living here in the middle of our wood?’
Cathy had opened her mouth but the other son, Charlie, quiet until this point, stepped in. ‘Tom,’ he said, ‘we don’t need to get into that. Don’t be an idiot.’
Tom looked startled at his brother’s intervention but said nothing to him and nothing more to Cathy. He again turned away from her and directed his comments to me. He asked about the copse. He asked about the trees within it, the types and the ages. He asked where we had lived before we came here. He asked why Daddy had chosen this spot. He asked how long it had taken Daddy to clear the land and to build the house. He asked about our mother. He asked whether we went to school. He asked how long we would be staying.
I did my best to evade the questions and, after a time, he became frustrated.
‘I’m just curious about your lives, that’s all. You must admit that it’s unusual, you lot living here. And in the way that you do.’
I looked about myself. Cathy had returned to the bird. She took it again in nimble hands, her plucking more resolute. She tore at the creature with the quiet fanaticism of a flagellant at his own skin but though her fists pulled at the downy fluff with pressing haste, she did not draw blood nor did she damage the flesh. She doused it with the water, though it had cooled, and wiped off the stubble and residue that marred the otherwise pristine carcass.
I answered the tall, smart lad as best I could. ‘Daddy thinks it’s important we learn to live with things we ourselves can make and find. That’s all. We just want to be left alone.’
‘You mean you don’t want to be friends with me and Charlie? Did you hear that, Charlie?’