Читать книгу The Man Who Lives with Wolves - Shaun Ellis - Страница 10

A part from playing on the school sports teams, which I loved, my time at Litcham Secondary School was undistinguished. I had friends, but my best friend died of an asthma attack. I remember the headmaster calling the whole class together one morning and breaking the news. I felt at that moment as though I were destined to lose everything.

I was a regular visitor to the headmaster’s office, so it was unsurprising that I left with no qualifications at the earliest moment I legally could, when I was barely sixteen. I needed to get out and earn a living and I wanted to get away from home. I was still angry and hurting and wanting to forget. So rather than look for jobs on the land, I joined a roofing company called Western and Bolton Roofing. It was hard work, carrying tiles and running up and down ladders all day, but it made me strong and fit and it took me to building sites all over the county. Sometimes we would be on a job for weeks if not months and I’d stay in a bed-and-breakfast or in hostels, only going back at weekends, and then I wouldn’t necessarily go home but often would stay with friends.

It was through work that I began to make my first friends and develop a social life, which largely revolved around pubs. There were a lot of good pubs in the area and once every three months, on a Saturday night, there was a disco in the little community center in Fakenham. It was the place to go. All the top DJs in Norfolk played there and people came from miles around to hear them. There was great music, drink, pretty girls that we’d take outside and kiss against the wall, and plenty of fights—all the good things in life. Then we’d make our way haphazardly home.

I remember one night the fog was so thick you could scarcely see your hand in front of your face and one of my mates said he knew the road so well, he could do it blindfolded. We all followed him on our little 150 cc motorbikes—I was on the back of one, as I usually was—and he missed a bend. He drove straight into a deep ditch and we all followed him into it one after another, no one noticing until we were up to our axles in water.

Fakenham was the fashion capital of Norfolk. On disco days, we would go into town in the morning and buy all the gear we needed, have a few pints, go home, play soccer for a couple of hours, change into the new clothes, go back to Fakenham, have some fish and chips in the early evening, then move on to The Crown for some beers, then to the Rampant Horse, which was as rough as hell—anytime you wanted a fight, you’d go there—before hitting the disco later.

One of my best friends was a tiler named Benny Elson, who lived in Weasenham, a neighboring village, and through him I met my first girlfriend, Michelle Pearce. Benny was older than I was, as most of the guys I worked with were, and Michelle was his wife Jac’s niece. She was visiting their house one day when he and I were getting ready to go out and asked who I was.

I started frequenting the Fox and Hounds in Weasenham, where she lived, and she would come in after school and hide behind the bar, and Skiffy, the landlord, would signal to me and we’d go off into the woods together and sit and talk for hours. We wrote each other little notes and I used to walk her dogs for her. She said all the things I needed to hear, and life didn’t get much better. Her father was one of the Queen’s pigeon keepers—I built him a pigeon loft in their garden—and I remember arriving at their house one day to collect Michelle and finding everyone in a state of great excitement because the Queen had just been to visit.

I fell madly in love with her, but she was too pretty for me and in the end she left me for someone else and broke my heart. We were both very young, but there was definitely something there and I often wonder how things might have been if I’d pushed a little harder or been less of a prat.

Skiffy’s real name was Freddy Scarf and he was a character. He didn’t turn a hair when I celebrated my eighteenth birthday in the pub—after years of illegal underage drinking—but then he had been regularly paying me in beer for the game he had on the menu that I and a couple of mates had brought in through the back door in sacks! I had been taught to poach by Pete, someone I knew from working on the land. He was married with a family—I never really knew much about him except that he was an expert on pheasants and how to get them illegally, which he had learned from his grandfather.

Pete had a brother and the three of us used to go out with an old 4-10 double-barreled shotgun, a genuine poacher’s gun that broke apart so you could conceal it. It had been handed down in his family from one generation to another. It went off with a terrible crack and smoked like mad, so the safest night of the year to fire it was November 5, Bonfire Night, when everyone was setting off fireworks.

Pete tried to make a silencer for the gun but the first attempt, out of copper pipe and baffling, was too heavy to lift. The modified version was much more successful until one day Pete was shooting a bird directly above him. The silencer must have become misaligned as we climbed through a hedge and ended up right in the line of fire. So when Pete pulled the trigger, flames shot out of the barrel and the burning silencer shot into the air and came straight down on his forehead, almost knocking him out.

It was dangerous business—and not just because of flying silencers. If we had been caught, we could have gone to prison—and we came close time and time again. One night I felt a massive hand in the small of my back push me down into the hedge. I knew better than to yell. Pete and his brother were lying flat on the ground beside me, facedown, and I lay there not moving a muscle for several minutes. There was not a sound to be heard; then I saw the outline of two pairs of water boots walk past on the track less than five feet from my face—gamekeepers patrolling their patch. My heart was pounding; I was convinced they’d hear it. It must have been four or five minutes before we dared move again. I asked how on earth they had known the gamekeepers were coming. They knew all the tricks; Pete’s brother had smelled the gamekeepers’ cigarette smoke.

We always tried to avoid the areas where the birds were released because that was where the gamekeepers expected poachers—they put down traps and they patrolled. And Pete taught me never to shoot a white pheasant, although they were obviously easier to see in the dark. Gamekeepers bred them specially, he said, because they were easy to count and if one was missing, they’d know a poacher was in the area and would intensify their patrols.

So we walked for miles across fields, heading for pits, then we’d crawl through the undergrowth to the bottom, which was usually filled with water, and lie there out of sight. You could look up through the trees above you, where roosting pheasants were perfectly silhouetted against the sky and shoot them straight off the branches. As the youngest, it was my job to pick them up from wherever they fell, which was usually in the water, and put them into the bag. Pete did the shooting and his brother held the torch and did the spotting.

I was enjoying my new life, but there was always something missing. I was one of the lads and I liked getting dressed up to go out and having a good time—they used to say I looked like George Michael in my white jeans—but I never lost the need to go off on my own with the dog and roam the countryside, watching foxes, spotting birds, looking for signs of other wildlife. There was always a part of me that remained separate from my mates.

One day I took the bus and went to visit the local zoo, just outside Thetford. I saw animals I had never seen before. I was so excited I felt like a child—and then I came to the wolf enclosure, and standing less than ten feet away were the creatures that had filled me with such terror night after night.

There was one in particular, a beautiful creamy-colored male with lovely golden-yellow eyes that immediately locked onto mine. We stared at each other, and in those few seconds I felt that he touched my soul. I felt as though this magnificent creature understood everything about me, knew my secrets, could read my deepest thoughts and fears, and could see all the hurt and pain. I felt he had the power to heal those wounds and make me whole again. It was an extraordinary connection and I knew that what I was looking for in life was right there in front of me.

He probably looked at every member of the public in that way in the hope that they might throw him a piece of food, but I don’t imagine that everyone would have felt what I felt, or have seen what I saw. Maybe it was all those years spent with dogs and with foxes, living with one foot in their world, always being slightly at odds with the human world. Or maybe it was something deeper. Whatever it was, it was the beginning of a lifelong contract. I knew that everything I had been told about this creature was a lie and that he and I had a lot in common and were both living out of our time.

I felt I needed to get back to the land, so I gave up the roofing business and applied for a part-time job as a gamekeeper’s assistant on an estate that ran a big commercial shoot. It was good to be back among the hedgerows, but the work flew in the face of everything my grandfather had taught me. He had ingrained in me that you kill to eat; you don’t kill for fun. On this estate, so many birds were laid down, you could scarcely put your foot on the ground without treading on a chick; and when it came to the shoots, there was no skill involved—it was slaughter. It was harder not to hit a bird than to hit one. They didn’t want to fly; you had to throw them in the air to get them to go anywhere.

I stuck it out for about sixteen months, but when I heard on the grapevine that Morton’s farm estate, a much smaller enterprise, was looking for an assistant gamekeeper, I went there. It was one of the farms in the village where I’d worked many times over the years, and the job came with a little one-room cottage, which was perfect. Monty, the head gamekeeper, was a craftsman of the old school, and I knew I would learn a lot from him. He trained me and was very good to me; he put a lot of trust in me, which to my shame I abused. But I was in the wrong job.

He wanted me to kill the foxes to stop them taking the young birds. Instead, I killed pheasants and the rabbits and fed them to the foxes. There was a particular vixen I had watched over for months. She had built a den on the tree line where she raised a litter, and I watched her move the entire litter to another den she built on another tree line in a different field, across a road about five hundred yards away. For some reason she must have decided they were no longer safe at the first site, and so carried them one by one, holding them by the scruff of the neck in her mouth, across the fields under cover of darkness.

It was four months before I was caught. Monty found the evidence one day and confronted me. I felt I had let him down badly. When I told the story to Pete, my poacher friend, he said, “You can’t run with the fox and hunt with the hounds.” He was right, and the episode did nothing to improve my popularity among the locals. To them, foxes were vermin and I was despised for my views.

I was out of a job and a house, but very quickly found work in the building trade again and rented a little cottage in the village, which I moved into with Sue, a girl I’d been seeing for some time. I don’t think it was a passionate love affair for either of us, but we got on well for a while and we married, without a great deal of ceremony, and had a little girl together, Gemma.

During that time I started studying foxes in earnest. I knew I wanted to work with animals, not bricks and tiles, but I couldn’t see how I was going to do it, and the laboring jobs paid the rent. So I read books and went into the forest at night and on weekends.

One evening there was a knock at the door and I discovered that not everyone in the village was against me. A woman stood there with a young fox kit hidden under her coat that she presented to me. The kit couldn’t have been more than two weeks old and she had found him starving, cold, and close to death. His mother had presumably been killed. I told her I would keep him until he was old enough to fend for himself and then release him into the wild.

I named him Barney and made a little den for him in the barn out of a large drainage pipe lined with straw and set about teaching him what I’d observed vixens teaching their young. When he was old enough for solid food, I fed him on rats, mice, and rabbits, which I skinned and minced, making the meat as much like the nourishment his mother would have regurgitated, and gradually introduced him to fur and whole animals. I then showed him how to defend his food—I opened my mouth wide and made a fast cacking sound, which is what I had seen wild foxes do. He picked it up quickly and was soon defending his food from me. I played with him as I had seen so many kits do with one another: chasing him, rolling him over, and having mock fights.

Eventually I decided he was ready to be released, but first I spent several nights out in the woods with him so he could listen to the sounds and get his bearings before I left him to fend for himself. When the moment came to release him, I had no idea whether my training would be of any use to him. He made a dash for the trees, turned for an instant to look back at me, and was gone.

Imagine my joy when I spotted him again many times in the next few years and knew that all those hours as a child spent sitting, listening, watching, and learning had saved this young creature’s life.