The Dig Read Free

to come close in to get mine. The way you can only get the smell of some things when you touch them. Even when she is asleep she comes nosing in and it’s like she breathes me in and seems to change and settle on me. I don’t understand how a woman can like the hard, angular body of a man.
    He made soft fists of his hands, stretching the weariness in them. I wonder if she feels from me the thing I feel about her when I touch her. Not in sex, which he understood now was a different thing from everything else. Ijust mean when I touch her skin before we sleep and I understand all the things beneath it. Animals can’t have that. They can’t hold their loved ones that way and feel right through their skin. That’s never worn off, whatever else. He looked at where she slept. I can’t imagine living without that.
    He went into the bathroom and did his teeth and realized in his stupefying tiredness that he would never get to sleep in the bed so he went quietly back into the bedroom and took the clock downstairs and sat numbly on the sofa. The fire was burning out. He knew he should keep it in but he was just too numb. He sat with his elbows on his knees and held the clock and listened to the pinging and ticking of the stove cooling, the last settling embers shifting down through the grate, the metronomic ticking of the clock. Three hours. He didn’t even want the television on. He stared at its vacant, dark cataract.
    They had been through much together, being with animals. Working as a team was a thing in itself most couples do not face constantly, but given working with animals, the small pressures were insistent and regular.
    She seemed to suffer more under the smaller problems than the larger, and it always surprised him when she drew on wells of strength to face the bigger crises.
    They had both grown up on farms and knew what to expect, but often it was the modernization which weariedthem. The paperwork and cataloging and form filling their parents had never had to face, and which confused and sometimes swamped them. Every time an animal was moved it had to be noted, a vaccination given they had to record it. It made sense, perhaps, on the big wide farms the other side of the border, with their managers and offices and employees. But the weight of paper was crippling to a small farm, and neither of them was built for it, so it was a great burden.
    They wondered constantly how to improve the return on the farm, thought wildly of turning the outbuildings into accommodation for holidaymakers. But the idea of having these people come into their lives for weeks at a time, of clean, expensive cars on the yard, a ruddy, loud-voiced family all in pristine country gear. He had nothing against these people but they were different and it was impossible to imagine them here, at least yet.
    They thought about going organic, but by the time they looked into it with conviction organic lamb was fetching only a fraction more than nonorganic, despite the finalized organic products selling for far more in the supermarkets. The stress and extra controls were not worth it. So they resolved to follow the principles they believed in and ignore the rest, and sold what they could locally through the slaughterhouse.
    They looked into direct sales, into doing the butchery themselves, but a licensed vet had to be present when youslaughtered an animal and their fees for this were prohibitive and the cost of setting up a hygienic place for the butchery was out of reach; ultimately, the animals had to go through the slaughterhouse, and they were at the mercy of the market price.
    Sales of the fleeces worked at a loss, the shearers and transport coming to more than the check for the wool; rearing the stock cattle more or less covered its costs. He thought of running a shoot on the farm, but the landscape wasn’t challenging enough on one level or expansive enough on another to bring in the rich guns. They thought of specializing