The Dig by Cynan Jones

the stack, the mutilated lamb monstrous within it, its twin heads bagged together as if there was some conversation, some horrible severed dialogue. She didn’t have to see that, he thought. She always hated that. Those terrible operations. Then he looked over to the gate where the tools lay, looked at the grotesque hacksaw.
    He wondered what to do with the lamb and knew he would take it to the edge of the wood and just throw it there. He was supposed to declare it, do some paperwork, incinerate the carcass. But there was a pointlessness to that, and however unfarmerly it was to encourage them, he preferred that the dead lamb was taken by a fox, or buzzard perhaps. Perhaps the kites that scanned up the ground and wheeled always over the higher fields in the evening.
    He put the sack in the bread crate at the front of the quad and cracked the bike on and went over the field. The gateway was soft and cut up and beneath him the pasture was spongy with the sitting water of weeks of rain.
    He got off and swung open the bottom gate and sucked back through the mud to the bike and went through and down to the edge of the wood.
    The field here was scrubby and drained into a small splash and as he dipped over on the bike a flight of teal went whistling into the air, crashing off the pond with the special vibrancy of smaller birds. He watched them go up at the extreme angle they took and wheel above the woods, piping and whistling with energy, before they cut away out of sight.
    The teal were wild birds and followed the colder weather down as it crept south. When you held one, you understood how delicate and fine they were, and it was difficult to believe they could survive on the water.
    This was the field where she had died. He looked back up to the farm, at the strange kelp of the tire tracks the bike had left in the wet fields and tried not to think of it.
    He took the sack from the bike and undid the cord and tipped out the lamb. He shook the sack again and the severed head fell out and rolled a little like some grotesque ball. He had a moment of sickness, then he bent and picked up the loose head by the ear and threw it hard over the pond into the woods beyond.
    He had the image of her lying there with a smashed head. His knees were in the wet ground and part of her face had gone like a crushed carrier bag and the blood leaked thickly in the surface water. He had heard the crack, had sensed it almost as something that shouldn’t be in thepanoply of sounds about the farm. It had been the speed of it. And then he had heard the horse run. There had been a split second as he registered the sounds, and then he had become this thing that just tried to get to her as fast as possible. She lived for five minutes maybe, that was it. She couldn’t speak.
    He sat down on the ground by the lamb. It started to rain again, the rain falling with a susurrating sound into the surface water of the field, almost hissing into the grass. There was the odd burst of water as a few stray teal returned into the pond.
    The weight of the rain, the place he sat, some combination of things about him balled into another memory, of standing with the gun as they pushed the dogs through the woods. He could smell the foily metal of the gun, feel the rain soak into his hair and run down his skin, hear the snap of the rain on his waterproofs, waiting, focused and ready with a sense of strange timelessness, every now and then checking the position of the other guns waiting in the field. There was a shout of “over” and a cock pheasant came climbing out of the trees and he shot it as it accelerated, dropping it in the rushes that surrounded the pond. It was a direct and full shot and the bird had balled and fallen.
    When they went to pick it up they couldn’t find it. The bird had fallen like a stone and he had marked it, butwhen they went into the rushes they could not see it and the dogs were mad with the too-many scents that crisscrossed the