B ADGERS During training, on the Cows Lawn, one of the
smokers, a boy from Ballylongford, coughed up blood, black clots of it. We stood on the sidelines, clear of the awful mess.
This was the time O’Hare, the Border Fox, was on the loose. That day, arriving home from school, who didn’t promise he’d never ever take a pull again? Not in the school bog, not in the back way; not in the fag-breaks at the petrol station. But another rumour released us. It was the farm and badgers: brock, feral, slow-clawed terror of the ditch and yard, wind-pissing shit-spreader, emptier of field and house. Its fellow travellers, then as now like garrulous crows, swore the opposite, the blood-dregs nothing to their stone-silent survivor, who was ever in the right and us and the herd safer. Or so they would say, even if the epidemiologist, barely visible behind the numbers, predicts a new reservoir, the level critical.
O’Hare could not be found by the guards: that smokeless week, I stood in the porch (under a new, secure intercom), rubbing a leaf between my thumb and index finger, noticing a little movement in a Volkswagen parked, like it had been all along, down our road, as if this were a pitch or a garage forecourt and not a dead end, a river facing it, its animal sentries unvisited as those on many another road.
John McAuliffe
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