Mr Darwin's Shooter Read Free Page B

earned them, in the boy’s honest estimation.
    â€˜My boy,’ said his Pa in return admiration, ‘is a true old-time Covington, the most willing soul that ever lived.’
    The steamy-breathed old man had bristly eyebrows flying back over his forehead, and prominent front teethshowing yellow and flat when he drew his lips back. Standing in his blood-brown boots he rocked back and forth as if hammered to the ground and twanging slightly with the force of his opinions.
    He liked to call his son over and hold his head back in a playful grip, trickling bitter ale into his mouth and down his chin. Their people, he liked to boast, were Bedford notables in the time of Oliver Cromwell and their line went back past 1199, when they owned half a virgate of land. ‘Of all the children of my bowels, Simon is the one that God has chosen to better his self, and lucky for us and ours.’ His brothers passed the boy the ale-pot in the same rough animal-play. After drinking it down companionably, and staggering around to make them laugh, Covington returned to his sweeping with a light head. The others stood in shabby doorways with their shirt collars open, their belts loosened and slippery leather laces dangling. They were ready to kick their boots off and go crawling in a corner when they were too drunk to stand. But it would be a good long while before they were felled. Something about the Covingtons recalled animals associated with primitive man. The barely domesticated. Those spirits to the end. Say bullocks with clear foreheads and curly scruffs of hair from the ancient cave paintings of Spain and France—they were found in their lifetime—or strong-necked ponies from the same smoky walls, ten or twenty or thirty thousand years ago, pale-eyed and bristly-maned in the dawn of the roping, the taming, and the hard use of innocence in the aims of civilisation. Covington would one day think so, anyway. They were dirty-fisted hard-working men given to their pipes, their ale, their loud opinions— likewise to their routines of sudden mayhem, sharp knives, rolled back horses’ eyes and clattering hooves. Being horse-butchers they were lower-placed than those who dealt with finished hides. But Covington never felt shame and pity for them, for while they were mired in blood they rememberedthey had souls, and Covington was of them truly—except that if he was to spend his whole life around them he would never find what he wanted.
    In the deepest part of himself he knew what that was, and it meant setting off on a journey. A story tingled his arms to the fingertips and shook his shanks down to his toes with anxiety and restlessness. It was the Pilgrim’s Progress that belonged to their town and countryside, telling of a sally away from Bedford in a great undertaking. It was all about walking and peering and finding, coming out from behind trees and passing down narrow rocky paths into darkness and light. It was all a great test for goodness of heart. Obstacles were to be met, most horrendous, and there were dangers of falling into an abyss. Black rivers were to be crossed. Vain and foolish strangers were to be put to rights.
    John Bunyan’s book was devotional reading in the house in Mill Lane from the time they were small. It cleansed them just to think of it. In Bedford and the nearby countryside you would think the very air breathed was old John Bunyan’s. The long, sky-wide quality of the light and the feel of the chalk and clay came from Bunyan’s pages. Likewise the water meadows and the winter floods, they all squelched and trickled with his words. Bunyan was preached without cease in their chapel and his language, whether imbued with ale or milkmaid’s curds, always had the taste of the countryside and its pleasures and pitfalls in it:
    The next was a dish of milk well-crumbed. But Gaius said, Let the boys have that, that they may grow thereby.
    None of them took it quite as