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The rain came down on the tin roof and the shears buzzed slightly. It was very calm.
The three men — a father and two brothers — came only to shear the sheep. They made a living this time of year moving round the farms, taking the fleece off the sheep and taking the money per fleece. So they worked quickly. The fleeces came off and Emmy and Dylan and Kate gathered them and rolled them into bags, fastening the canvas with wooden pegs. Gareth caught the ewes, and Bill helped, while the shearers worked quickly. (His name was Gwilym, but they called him Bill.)
Now and then the men would stop to oil the shears, or, the sheep still held sitting comically against their legs, would reach languidly behind them for iodine so they could dress any cuts, if they had made them badly. They were quick but moved easily, as if their bodies were made only for this purpose. They might have been — a long line of sheep shearers. Genetic. When they stopped to eat there was no talk. Pleasant thank yous, humble and clear, but no talk. They were men with no unnecessary thing.
Chapter Three the Ducks
He’d got in at three in the morning and he wasn’t happy about going to get the duck.
‘You’ll have to go and get the ducks,’ his mother had called up. ‘The cow’s gone and you’ll have to go and get the ducks.’
Dylan shouted and then swore at his mother because he knew his father was out in the fields — he’d heard him go out after breakfast again to find the cow. He’d sworn quietly at first so his mother had to shout up ‘what did you say?’ and then he’d repeated it at a scream because he knew it annoyed her more this way.
He was angry but it was mainly out of habit; and he was only angry because of getting out of bed not because of having to go and get the ducks.
Now he was in the Transit and he drove it quicker than he’d drive his own car down the busted lane and enjoyed the tuck and muffled rumping of the ducks in the bread crates in the back. With the windows down the smell was still bad but it was good to be in the Transit.
If you’ve never been in a Transit you don’t know. You sit up high like you’re in a dining chair and there’s even arm rests if you want them. And you see things you haven’t seen before or don’t see often. You can even see more of the road somehow, and because you’re up high you’re not so scared. You’re not scared when you drive a car maybe, but you know if you hit something it will more or less hit you at eye level and it will be like being shot out of a low pipe at the mess.
He was relaxed and happy in the Transit.
He drove the van past the barn and down the track and into the long field. The ground was so dry you could take the van in the fields. When he got out to open the gate into the long field he did it angrily in case he was seen. He thought he should be angry because he usually would be because he had to unload all of the duck on his own; but he wasn’t angry and driving the van was good and the heat of the day was already in him and quietly he loved being in this place despite the belt of the music and the white breasts of the club last night still hefting round his mind. He had to like the club and he had to want to go away from here.
He took the duck down to the pond.
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Every year they put a hundred duck down on the pond. There are already moorhen on the pond, and coot. Other wild duck join them, and teal — small and dart-like things that are beautiful and fast and violent, not at all like ducks. They feed the ducks grain and cut down the reeds so the fox doesn’t get to them without them seeing, and they care for them deeply. Then they shoot as many of them as they can.
This is a good thing. Ducks can be a menace.
People are seduced by ducks; by their seeming placidity. They fall for the apparent imbecility of their smiles and their quietly lunatic quacking. But they are dangerous things which plot, like functioning addicts.
In the local town — a beautiful Georgian harbour town which is not lazy and which is very colourful — the ducks got out of hand.
The river comes in from the low valley, collapsing slowly over the old weirs, under the road bridge and into the harbour to the beach. There’s a place on one side of the road bridge where you can sometimes see the current going backwards when the tide comes in, and there are sometimes big crabs and mullet in the salt part of the water. And the ducks come down the river.
As part of a move to make a continent look better, money was given to the small town to improve itself and they built a holding pool for the smaller boats and fishing boats that would still work in the winter when it was too rough to have expensive things like yachts still in the harbour. The holding pool filled with ducks and they shat everywhere. There were hundreds of ducks. Sometimes you had to stop your car to let them cross the road.
Given the way they have to have sex, it’s remarkable there are any ducks. More remarkable they have sex often. The male more or less drowns the female, who has to focus hard on staying afloat, and they both have to deal with wings and beaks and water and feathers and it looks nasty and they still have sex. So there were a great many ducks. And they all shat everywhere.
It became a problem for the tourists and the locals didn’t like it. People talked about the ducks in pubs; and if you stood in lines at the local shops you heard people talk about ducks. About the latest violence they had committed.
If you tried to drink a quiet pint on the harbour the ducks were there and they sat squatly and looked up at you and seemed to chuckle superciliously, which was off-putting. If you put your washing out, somehow the ducks knew, and by some defiance of physics managed to crap on it. And duck crap isn’t nice. It’s green like baby-shit. If you fed a baby on broccoli for a week.
The ducks were all over the expensive yachts and got in around the car wheels and even climbed into prams or anything that was comfortable and abandoned. Cats were scared of them and they wouldn’t run away from children so children didn’t chase them. They even sat stoically through the frankly vicious din made by the local band who played hymns on the harbour every Sunday night. They seemed to be invincible. A committee was drawn up.
The reason why they shat so much thought some of the committee, was because ‘the people’ fed them chips, whoever ‘the people’ were. A duck should eat things from the water, that’s what they’re designed to do. But they were lazy and so hoovered up whatever people threw them, fighting off the seagulls and the errant starlings and the pigeons and, if they had to, fighting off each other too. This poor diet is making the poor ducks poo. That was one take. Answer: we should give them proper food. Genius. So they tried. It was not the answer. They ate the food put down and the fish and chips and had sex even more. Ducks’ arses were no tighter than they’d ever been. There were simply too much ducks.
Shoot them was another angle. Poison would kill every other thing, and the ducks would go on living, cunning as they were. So shooting was the only sure-fire way.
Now it’s legal, more or less, to shoot a duck yourself, provided it’s below the line of the low water. Or so the fable goes. It’s one of the many rules few people really know. At this point the duck belongs to the Queen — a spurious ownership anyway. Unless she’s there, the chances are she wouldn’t know or wouldn’t mind. However, no one’s ever done this and you wouldn’t want to be the first. If you walked around a quiet Georgian town blasting ducks you’d be quickly locked away.
And this was the chief qualm against the ‘shoot them’ plan. Shotguns are very noisy and would not be good for business. If you opted more subtly for a hunting rifle there’d be another problem: you’d simply be too close. A rifle is designed to counter a human’s lack of tact: it kills things far away. If you shot a duck from far too close with one of those machines you would obliterate it. Which would make as much mess as the poo, only harder to clean up.