Tivington Nott by Alex Miller Read Free Book Online Page A

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    I look away and drink some tea. It’s a little late for him to be asking questions like that. I could have told him long ago. If he were smart he wouldn’t be here. He’d be at home in Australia.
    I’m enjoying watching the Tiger exulting. Digging himself confidently into this one! He should have got to know Kabara while he had the chance. But he let that slip and it’s not going to be as easy now as he thinks. When it’s too late it’s going to hit him that he was right about one thing anyway; the horse may have the blood to give him superior speed and stamina, but it would take an extra-special horseman to make an Exmoor deer-hunter out of Kabara.
    It’s a dream that’s drawing him in now; seeing himself right up with the leaders, in at the death, going the distance in the winter with the hinds, when things get really tough, when only the fanatics, the silent obsessed hunters go out on the moor and pursue their crazy passions. Worse than gamblers! The old Tiger’s been seduced by a dream: the greatest hunting farmer Exmoor’s ever seen! And now here he is hooking himself firmly on getting a bargain out of Alsop’s weakness. Sidetracked. Too smart for himself. He’s going to have that stallion for a hunter! Well, let’s see if he can coax Kabara across the bogs and channels of the Chains without coming to grief! Let him wade in! We’ll see what happens. He’s going to wish he’d forgotten all about Kabara and stuck to his chestnut nags.
    But I shall say nothing. He is supposed to be the master of his situation.
    A day off tomorrow. Everyone is going to the Winsford meet. So Morris and his wife are out there in the kitchen with the stove hot and a midweek bottle of stout between them. Something special. Nattering. The place is being torn apart by an Atlantic storm that came roaring in over Dunkery an hour ago and it’s still pounding and ripping at this prefabricated junk heap. Blasting its way across the empty moor! My room’s the place to be! Sitting on my bed with my legs drawn up and the eiderdown round my shoulders. Trying to read Ewart’s Elementary Botany , and being distracted.
    Boom! Crash! Smashing into the ridge! Inches away! It’s a blitzkrieg! We’re being pounded and deafened by the lightning explosions. Our ridge cops it. It’s an attraction. A natural conductor. Bearing the full brunt of the ocean-bred storm. There’s a piece of tin going smash, smash, smash on the roof but I can only just hear it for the wind.
    But we haven’t blown away yet!
    And here comes the cold air. Whoosh! Like a big door opening and driving through the cracks and joints. There goes the last of the warm air!
    The Tiger’ll be over there all nicely tucked in with Roly-Poly, gloating on his good fortune. Every last scrap of his corn packed in under the tin. Safe and sweet. Acres of the stuff round here are being blasted into the mud tonight.
    Well, too bad . . .
    I keep looking at this same page without really taking it in: GYMNOSPERMS —Pines, Firs, Larches, Yews, & Cycads. Synopsis of Description & Classification. The more important natural orders indigenous to Britain. That’s Ewart setting things up to be as exact as it is possible to be; scientific in other words. Leaving nothing to chance, hearsay or tradition. But checking it all out. Which is just what I want. I can do without guesses. Folklore, chit-chat, rumours, gossip. They’ve got all that stuff at their fingertips round here.
    They know it, I don’t.
    It’s imparted by word of mouth and sign language. You can never be quite sure what they mean. Nothing clear-cut and final about their answers. Everything’s got to be spiced and packed and knotted up with ambiguities before they’ll let you have it. And even then they grudge it. Ask them a straight question and they’ll spit and cough and look over their shoulder, then say something you can’t understand and move away. After he’d put the scythe into Solomon’s the other day and