Terroir by Graham Mort Read Free Book Online Page B

soldier – the King’s bloody fool – then mended shoes for a living, a trade he’d learned in the army, then travelled the country from north to south. He’d been a sailor for one God - forgotten voyage. Then he learned his real trade – the taking of hares that is – and here he’d wink and put a finger to his nose – from gypsies in Kent when the hop - picking season was on. They taught him to walk on stilts to get the highest flowers. They showed him the art of mole trapping, and that earned him extra cash when the farmers were plagued. And it gave him a chance to spot where game was being raised. What he brought home from the woods and estates around the village had kept them from hunger – though not from harm.
    A few times he took her out with him. Usually when the moon was full and there was a high wind that tore the hems of clouds and drew them over its glare. The more noise weather made, the better. One night they climbed up to Reys plantation and went a few yards in to wait. The trees were mainly oak and beech with some elm and hazel. Her father taught her their names by showing her the shapes of their leaves. A ride was cut through the trees, strewn with straw. There were some feeders made from half - sawn barrels. It was here that the keepers put down grain for the pheasants to feed. They came out in the late afternoon as the light was fading, then roosted in the trees. The cock pheasants gave out a brazen clucking cry if disturbed, leaving their perches to crash through the branches. She loved their princely colours, like the pictures of Mughal emperors she’d once spied in a book at the Manse when she’d been helping to keep house for the vicar. It was hard to imagine they could belong here in the grey Yorkshire dales when their colours were so rich. Brought from beyond , her father reckoned, and regarded more than starving women or children. They were living brooches for the land – and as stupid as the lords were rich.
    He took them with a loop of snare wire attached to a stick, guiding the noose over the bird’s head as they rooted for the grain he’d dropped. Then a sharp yank and the bird was choking, all feathers and commotion. You had to snap their necks quickly then. He taught her to kill quickly and mercifully; never to be greedy, to take only what you could carry, to carry only what you could eat or sell or give away. How to wear a cap and beard or blacking to take the glare off your face, to wear boots not clogs, to work alone. Long netting in gangs was a fool’s game for you could trust no one. The other man will always let you down in the end. He never poached for profit. Hares he killed on the ploughed land, or after hay time, catching them silhouetted against the sky and bringing them down with a single shot. He said the moon mesmerised them, that the man in the moon was really a hare if you looked properly. That’s why they got drunk on moonlight, standing up on their hind legs to give him a clear shot through the heart.
    Her father told her stories about his one time at sea. How he got drunk in a quayside pub in Bristol and got tricked onto a slave ship that was trading beyond the law. Not that he knew. They’d taken a hold full of brass pots and pans to the Gold Coast in Africa, then on to El Mina fort where pirogues rode the breakers all around them, and the natives cast out nets, their boats rising and falling, appearing and disappearing in the high seas. There, they took on a cargo of slaves. Her father described how a line of negroes covered in sores from their chains stumbled down the ramp, dazzled by the sun after days in a dungeon. They’d never seen the ocean or a great ship before. Next minute they were being roughly doused in the sea, then taken up and chained in the hold. He told her how he’d lived a life of shame to see them suffer in their own filth and blood, men and woman alike. Every day started