I set off in the opposite direction to the prison, towards South Hessary Tor. It was a curious experience temporarily living inside the mind of a lynx, as it not only made me quite good at tracking but gave me a strong craving for chamois. You don’t get chamois in west Devon and I am a vegetarian so I settled for the packet of crisps in my rucksack. The packet was one of those with GRAB BAG written on it, a thoughtful and liberating gesture from the manufacturers granting permission for assertive action to people like me who’d previously been hesitant around crisps and afraid to admit what we truly wanted. I climbed the tor and scanned the blasted and desolate surroundings for the lynx. I could not see the lynx. I sat for a small number of minutes and admired the new iron cobra head on top of the tor, which stood next to the stump of the previous iron cobra head. The previous cobra head – one of four erected in 1867 to mark the boundary between Walkhampton Parish and the Forest of Dartmoor – had been snapped off by thieves a couple of years earlier. I puzzled over the mentality that had led to this surreal, nonsensical act of vandalism, conducted out of sight of any building save for the abandoned farmhouse down near Foxtor Mire. Did the thieves later transport the cobra head to Bude on the north coast and sell it at the sprawling Sunday car boot sale there, being haggled down from an ambitious show price to the one they’d actually hoped for? Or perhaps they listed it on eBay, with a ‘Buy it now’ teaser price, in the hope that somebody just happened to be using ‘cobra’, ‘blacksmith’, ‘retro’ and ‘Duchy of Cornwall’ as search terms that week?
I turned south-west in the direction of Raddick Hill, following the course of the Devonport Leat, which dates from the 1790s and was for a long time, before the excavation of Burrator reservoir and its accompanying dam, the principal source of water for Plymouth. There is rusty metalwork in the ground here from the Victorian age that can trip you up, and I hoped that if he followed this route Flaviu had been careful, since he was only two and, having lived in captivity his whole life, would not be used to negotiating rusty Victorian metalwork.
Via the local and international media, Devon police had been keen to get the message out that members of the public should not approach the lynx. Presumably this was for the normal lynx reasons but also perhaps because the lynx had a store of remarks that could be very cutting. I felt pleasantly alone in this region, where the moor gets big and yellow like a monster range of algaed sand dunes and begins to swallow a person. I thought of my phone, also alone, where it currently sat, on top of a cupboard in my living room. I often feel bullied by my phone and spend an increasingly large part of my life wanting to throw it forcefully into a builder’s skip, so I frequently leave it at home when I walk, but it did occur to me that, were the lynx to corner me, I would not have any means of calling a friend or an appropriate authority and informing them I had been cornered by a lynx.
Dartmoor, like all three of the major moors of the South West Peninsula, already had its big cat legends: blurred sightings of big dark shapes slinking through the heather. Sheep carcasses too expertly mutilated to suggest the work of even the biggest domestic dog. In the late 1970s Mary Chipperfield, animal trainer and circus owner, set out to transport five pumas from the old Plymouth Zoo to Dartmoor Zoo, but only two of the cats ever arrived; the others, it is thought, were released, or escaped, onto the moor. A zoologist who lives on the moor – an acquaintance of my friend John – claims that she categorically identified a puma slinking across her driveway during the early nineties. The average lifespan of a puma in the wild is no more than thirteen years, but if Chipperfield’s pumas bred, Flaviu might not be the only wild feline up here.
Near the aqueduct where the leat crosses the River Meavy I checked for lynx droppings, although I found this tough, having never previously seen any lynx droppings. I was so busy looking for lynx droppings that I dropped my OS map in the leat. The map flowed west with the current towards Tavistock for a few yards before I retrieved it. I shook the water off the map and skirted the bottom of Down Tor then headed over the high ridge to Crazywell Pool, another great potential drinking place for a thirsty lynx. For a long time there were claims that the pool was bottomless and that when all the bell ropes from Walkhampton church had been tied together and lowered into the water they still did not reach solid ground. But this was disproved early in the 1900s. Crazywell is in fact an old flooded tin mine no more than fifteen feet deep and, if you are someone like me who doesn’t mind getting pondweed stuck to your legs, looks quite inviting for swimming and diving. Dusk was edging closer now, and as I sat by the pool I could not help remembering another legend: the one that said if you visited the pool at this time of day a ghostly voice would whistle along the wind and inform you of the
