Later, the cow got too hot so she got onto her feet again and she could feel the calf moving inside her. She lifted her tail and let out a long wet pat. Then she went on. By now she was hanging her head when she walked and just ambling.
She walked into the bog, which is where all the cows seem to go, when they go, following their nose downhill, one foot in front of the other and other, wide hipped and plodding. When they get into the bog, they actually have to think. It wasn’t so bad now, because of the un-easing dry weather and the constant sun, but mostly there was still mud, dotted with green weed and the footprints of birds and it wasn’t the solid ground of the fields.
Thin willow and hazel was everywhere, so soon the cow started to crash and snap through it, but it confused her and took her strength. Underfoot, where it had dried, the bog was a funny shape and difficult to walk on. Going through the bog was very loud and sounded like twigs in a fire.
She walked into the bog for some time. Here and there a big oak tree had broken through the wicker of branches, and lifted up like a man standing on somebody’s shoulders. Most of the bog was bare, the actual mud of the bog, but there were carpets of bramble in places, and tough sedge.
The sedge had dried and paled in the sun and was warm and long and the cow curled round and round in the sedge until it was a nest, and there she lay down.
Gareth lifts the cloth absently from the old table and smoothes the smooth grain with his hand. Some people like brand new things and other people like the things they’ve had for a long time. It is nicely cool in the house. They brought the table to the farm from the old house when they moved here. It was a big thing, putting the important table in the house. He looks at the plate of crumbs and the unwrapped cheese, starting to look plastic. Before, the family ate in the kitchen on the smaller table and the big oak table was reserved for Sundays and special dinners and guests. Emmy’s drawing makes scratchy noises. When they moved to the farm, the family ate at this big table. He was thinking that it was not good that two calves had died, and there might be disease in the cattle. The cows were an indulgence, really. They grow just stock cattle now, which they raise and sell on to be grown up for beef, so it’s important to have good calves.
Gareth looks at his daughter drawing — such a ferocious little sleeper — how importantly she ran. He smiles gently. Nine days from now she will start to die.
__ the Mushroom
Some of the bluebells will still be out.
Emmy will go into the woods with Zebra to play and she will find a beautiful white mushroom, come up after the rain. It looks to her like the dove that came. She will sit Zebra down, with the fairies around her, and have lunch off the table of a fallen tree. This is a secret place of hers.
She will think that she should not eat the mushroom, but she loves mushrooms very much and it is white like the ones in the field. It will taste different though, sweet like it smells and bitter all at once, and she will stop eating the mushroom and feel bad for picking it, so she will hide it, because it was such a beautiful thing before she picked it, like spoiling a flower.
The mushroom will be as big as her hand across, and shaped like the floppy felt hat one of her dolls wears, but shiny — like waxed paper. Its stem will look sort of shaggy (she will think, like the skin by Daddy’s nails, peeling off), and there will be a big bulb at its base, as if it’s in a bag. The white gills and the pure white of the mushroom will be like an angel.
She will find the mushroom nine days from now. In the night, she will wake up and vomit violently, and will be very thirsty. Like she’s burning. She will call her mother and father. They will sit on her bed and pull up the covers round her and arrange her dolls and talk to Zebra while they touch her gentle head but she will not stop vomiting. Then the diarrhoea will start and she will mess the bed. The diarrhoea will come with great pain and it will feel to her as if someone is pulling her stomach with a huge, uncareful hand.
She will move into her mum and dad’s bed. She will start to sweat hard and in hours she will look pale and haggard. She will look dangerously ill and it will happen very quickly.
They will call a doctor who will come out and know it’s some sort of poisoning but will tell them that she is over the worst. That children’s bodies react violently to even the little things to keep them safe. That it looks alarming, but it will be okay. He will tell them to try and let her sleep.
The vomiting won’t stop and by the morning her hands and feet will go ice cold. She will be scared and anxious, like you are in fever, but she won’t tell anyone about the mushroom because it was so long ago.
In the hospital where they take her because she will not stop trying to be sick and her whole skin will look pellucid and unnatural they will try frantic tests. They will also put a pipe into her stomach through her mouth and pump out the contents of her stomach but by then the poison will be in the other places of her body. Gareth will be sick with worry for her, and will not go to the auction. Then, two days afterwards, she will seem okay.
They will take her home and she will seem okay and the doctor will say that he was right and that she was just reacting violently to something because she was so little. There’s all sorts of things on farms, he will say. It will seem strange and odd to them that she was so ill. Then violently and unquietly she will die.
__
Amanita virosa is deadly. It’s the amatoxins which kill you, like the Death Cap. The other poisons, called phallotoxins, do nothing serious. Amanita virosa is called Destroying Angel.
A-amaritin — which is one of the amatoxins — hits the nuclear RNA in the liver cells, causing protein synthesis to stop, so the cells start to die.
When the poison moves through the kidneys, they try to filter it, but it attacks the convoluted tubules and, instead of entering the urine, it goes back into the blood. So it attacks everything again and again, breaking it down repeatedly and mostly it is better to die then. The little boy she sees comes to talk with her while she is dying, but it is still very bad.
Chapter Seven
There is an electric sound of birds.
The cow slept for a while, or slumbered, chewing the cud of the Timothy grass it had taken from the hedge, at the edge of the field. When she woke she was spooked. Birds hopped and snipped around her. She felt watched. She was very warm from the sun and she slumbered for some time. Then she got up and moved on. She clattered on, breaking back through the thick dry growth.
From the mud, like a broken machine, a cage of bleached white bones stood up. Many a cow had died in the bog, stuck and having to be shot where they struggled. You couldn’t tell if the cow thought of her own death when she saw the bones. She left another long green pat as she walked; and for no reason, in no particular way, went on over the fields.
__
Gareth walked down to the bog. The heat is crazy. Everything seems subdued. Walking out after lunch was like walking into a wall of heat, and he couldn’t see very much for a while, until his eyes accepted the light. He said: ‘if the vet comes, you have to get Mummy.’
He went the way he thought the cow had gone, across the fields. He didn’t know if the cow was in the bog, but the last time a cow did this she was in the bog. She’d made a nest and bedded down and had her calf quietly there.
From the road, above the land, he hears a dog barking, his neighbour’s vicious shouts. The anger that is in him turns on them — the anger that is really because of the cow, and the rabbit, and his hurt ankle. He tries to put it on his neighbours. They are fat vicious people who don’t know very much and don’t like anything and it shows in their dogs. They came here some time ago, to Bill’s farm, with the idea of using the land. But they did nothing, and let it ruin. He had tried to like his neighbours, but they were just not people you could like, in the end. He was sure one of their dogs had taken the cat.