The Lost Art of Gratitude

She went back to stand next to Jamie. He had picked Charlie up out of his cart, and the small boy was watching his mother intently as she approached.

“Did you see that wound?” she asked.

Jamie winced; he was more squeamish than Isabel, who could look at blood dispassionately. “Think of it as tomato sauce,” she had once said to him. But that had not helped, and had made him think of blood when he saw tomato sauce, which was hardly the desired result. “It looks nasty,” he said.

“Has somebody shot him?”

Jamie shook his head. Brother Fox had his enemies in the neighbourhood, for sure, but he doubted if they were armed. “Maybe a dog.” Will there be dugs?

Isabel shivered; she did not like the thought of fox hunting. Why dress up, she wondered, to kill something? If foxes had sometimes to be killed—and farmers had to protect their lambs—she felt that it should be done with regret rather than delight. “His balance seems affected. When he came out he was … well, it was like a lurch.”

It seemed to Isabel that this was no different from any other situation where somebody needed her help. “We have to do something.”

“Yes.”

They walked back towards the house. She remembered the man in Dalkeith with his traps; she had never thought that she would have occasion to contact him, but now perhaps she did. They would never be able to catch Brother Fox unless they could get him into a trap. If they did that, then they could call the vet and the wound could be cleaned out. If they did not do this, then Brother Fox would either get better himself, as happened in the wild, or die a slow and painful death, as also happened in the wild. It seemed to Isabel that the second possibility was the more likely.

“I’m going to phone the man from Dalkeith,” she said. “His number must be in the yellow pages. Under Pest and Vermin Consultants.”

“Rat catcher,” said Jamie.

They went inside. Charlie was beginning to niggle, which meant that he was ready for his morning nap; he had been up since six that morning. While Jamie took him to his room, Isabel went into her study and took out the heavy volume of yellow pages from the drawer in which she kept it. She paged through it: Painters and Decorators—Quality Work Since 2001. And before that? Potato Merchants, Pipers—who would pay them? she wondered. Finally she found it. Pest and Vermin Consultants. She saw the distinctive advertisement, with its picture of a small army of cockroaches, wasps and moles in panic-stricken retreat. Moles? She did not think of them as pests, but then she had none burrowing under her lawn; her attitude might change if moles were actively undermining her. So William McClarty of Peebles Street, Dalkeith, was a mowdie man as well. The mowdie man was the mole- catcher in Scots, the subject of a poem she had once known by heart. The mowdie man came on to the land a figure of vengeance, and stalked the mole, the mowdie, whose velvet coat and tiny paws would break the heart of anyone, the poet said—except the mowdie man’s.

There were two numbers—one with (house) beside it; the other with (all other times). She telephoned the house first but there was no reply. She imagined the phone ringing in the empty corridor of the mowdie man’s house; a dog barking perhaps at the insistent ring, but the mowdie man himself out, stalking the land, driving off those armies of pests. She dialled the other number and the mowdie man answered immediately, or so she thought. But it was not him. “It’s his brither,” came a voice. “You wanting Billy?” She explained that she was, and she was asked to hold the line. So the mowdie man had a brother, she thought, who …

“Billy McClarty speaking.”

She told him who she was. Then: “I have a fox.”

“There’s a lot of them in Edinburgh. They’ve been breeding like Cath …” He stopped himself. “Like nobody’s business.”

Isabel was astonished. She had heard that a long time ago, but nobody said it these days, she thought.… And yet, his name was Billy McClarty and the Billy could be a giveaway. An Orangeman: Billy McClarty was an Orangeman.

“Like rabbits, you mean,” she said.

Billy McClarty was silent for a moment. Then he continued, “You want him away?”

She caught her breath. She felt as if she were a conspirator, contacting a hit man with a view to a contract killing—which it was, in a way. Their victim was a sentient being, with memory, plans, a family—with some sense of who he was. For a moment an intrusive, unwanted thought crossed her mind: one might invite Billy McClarty to take Minty away; to set a large trap in her walled garden, baited with … What would one bait a Minty trap with? The answer came to Isabel almost immediately: money.

“No, I don’t want him away.”

Billy McClarty continued. “Cannae kill him there,” he said. “I get into trouble with neighbours. Where are you, by the way?”

She told him, and there was a grunt of recognition at the other end of the line. “There are lots of folk there who encourage foxes,” he said. “I’ve heard of a daft wumman there who gies chicken to the fox. Those dafties wouldnae like it if I killed him, ken?”

Isabel said nothing. She was that daft woman. So one of the neighbours had considered trapping Brother Fox, for how else would Billy McClarty know about her? It was a very uncomfortable feeling; Brother Fox belonged to her.

She decided to explain. “I like him,” she said. “I know you won’t sympathise, but I actually like this fox. And yes, I do give him chicken. He has as much right to exist as you do, Mr. McClarty.”

Billy McClarty sounded unsurprised. “Oh, aye?”

“Aye,” said Isabel. “So we understand one another now.”

“I think we do.” He paused. “Nobody’s asked me to trap that fox.”