‘Your nan used to say that if you hang horseshoes upside down your luck falls out the bottom, but I think it’s nonsense,’ my mum said as, once again, we walked past the wooden African head that my mum did not like but would not part with for fear it would unleash terror on anyone who owned it.
Although we’d only been outside for ten minutes, I felt refreshed. Every time I see my dad, he tells me dozens of great new stories – about Nottinghamshire, about history, about who he is, about who I am – but the narrative is of such a loud and experimental-jazz nature that I get easily tired. The theory has been put forward before by those close to him that my dad does not speak words; he haemorrhages them. I don’t need a long breather from his lectures, but small breaks help, as they would anyone listening to someone holding six conversations at the same time, all on their own. Now, after clearing my head, I was ready again. I sat down in the perfect place to absorb the next part of his story, which would no doubt lead to another, and another. I was keen to find out what else he had to tell me about his new possession.
‘OK, I’m all ears,’ I told him. ‘Go for it.’
But he did not reply, and when I looked more closely at him spread out lengthways on the sofa, I noticed he was fast asleep. He wasn’t speaking or snoring or singing. For the first time that day, he looked totally serene. Beside him on the arm of the sofa was the novel he’d been reading, its spine bent back on itself, like every book he enjoys. Held tight in his arms, like a favourite teddy bear, was the chunk of medieval limestone.
3
TWO OTTERS, SEVEN BEAVERS, TWO RIVERS AND A LYNX
There was an escaped lynx on Dartmoor so I went up to Dartmoor, alone and unarmed, to try to find the escaped lynx. I took with me a map, an old book about ghosts, a bottle of water, a packet of crisps and some past-their-best walking boots. In packing for the trip, I had given arguably less thought than I should to the lynx’s needs, but I was carrying a rucksack with a long piece of elastic attached to it that I could forcibly remove and coax the lynx to chase, in the event that the lynx turned out to be playful. The elastic – which formed part of an exterior compartment intended for the carrying of drinks or maps – hung off the rucksack in a perilous way and had been irritating me recently so it would be a relief to remove it anyway. The previous week I had been walking down the high street in town in the sun feeling fairly decent about myself when the elastic had caught on a pedestrian bollard, twanging me back up the high street four or five feet in the direction from which I had come, like a small allegory for the experience of being human.
Dartmoor Zoo, to which the lynx had been exported from Kent immediately prior to its escape, has a fairly infamous history, having been the scene of a few other animal escapes, including that of a jaguar in 2006 and a Canadian timber wolf called Parker in 2007, which was recaptured outside the pub in the local village and further emasculated by being described by the zoo’s owner Benjamin Mee as ‘a big girl’s blouse’. A marginally limp film was made about Mee and his zoo by the mostly excellent director Cameron Crowe in 2011. The film was set in California, but Dartmoor Zoo is not in California; it is on the edge of Sparkwell, a few minutes’ drive from the twenty-four-hour Tesco at Lee Mill.
In attempting to locate a Carpathian lynx on a 65,000-acre high-altitude moor, the most important thing to do is to try to think like a Carpathian lynx. Using my new lynx brain, my firm instinct was that the lynx, whose name was Flaviu, would head north from Sparkwell, away from Tesco and towards Burrator Reservoir, which was a good place for Flaviu to have a nice big drink. Flaviu, following his instinct, would then head to the very highest part of the moor, approaching Okehampton, where there would be snow later in the year, enabling him to put the large pads on his feet to use in a way that he probably couldn’t in a zoo. En route he might well pass Raddick Hill, where a distraction could occur in the form of a sizeable population of sheep and a few wild ponies and cows. It was here that I planned to intercept Flaviu.
I parked in Princetown, a settlement architecturally anomalous to most of Dartmoor and Devon, where the greyness of the pebbledash houses and a sky colour that often matches them can make me forget I am not on a journey from Mansfield to Worksop in 1986 with my dad to buy some Swarfega and gravel. Here, like some part of industrial Yorkshire that went off on a downcast inward-looking wander and never came back, looms Dartmoor prison, scene of even more escapes than Dartmoor Zoo, including that
