The Uneatable
I opened the door.
'It's about the Beagles,' he said. He was large and bonny: A Devon lad brought up on meat and lots of it all washed down with gallons of creamy custard.
'The Bester Beagles,' clarified his sidekick, a spent matchstick of a man with scurf and nasal dewdrop.
'Hello, Mr Bozer,' I said to the bonny man. 'And Mr Trist.' Mr Trist acknowledged my acknowledgement with a nervous forward head tic. I swayed back from the waist to avoid dandruff flakes and mucus.
'I thought fox hunting with dogs was finished,' I asked. 'I thought the government had banned it.
'With hounds, yes,' said Mr Bozer. 'You can't hunt foxes with hounds.'
'Not with hounds, no,' said Mr Trist, sadly.
'But we can trail. The dogs need work, you see,' Mr Bozer was in his stride. 'They need to work.'
'Work,' echoed Mr Trist hollowly.
'Come in,' I said, ' and tell me how I can help.'
The Bester Beagles have hunted our land ever since Father's father's father bought the farm seventy seven years ago. We have some of the last few acres of rough left between Totnes and Dartmouth. Being a farmer I'm ambivalent about foxes. Part of me thinks they are clever creatures that deserve to live wild and free. Part of me hates the way they decimate my chickens only taking away one to eat leaving the rest lying floppy and dead with Mother crying buckets over them and digging tiny graves marked with crossed hazel twigs. The Bester Beagles had hunted on our land once a month for seventy seven years and caught nothing. There was a time when I sat on a rise and watched the hounds chasing their tails and rabbit and goat smells in the valley and a dog fox sat on the rise opposite me and we watched the hounds together. Seventy seven years and the only foxes caught on our land was a pair dug out by a snappy terrier with 3 legs and halitosis called Judy.
'Mr Smith,' Mr Bozer began, his beefy paw wrapped round a mug of Bovril.
'Zebediah,' I admonished.
'Zebediah. The hounds they need to hunt. But we want to keep in the letter of the law. So we set up a trail for the dogs to follow.'
I nodded. A trail. Made sense. 'What kind of trail?' I asked imagining sprinklings of paper or flour or aniseed or Winalot meaty chunks or what ever a beagle couldn't resist.
'Urine,' said Mr Bozer. 'Fox's urine.' He pronounced it to rhyme with fine.
'Piss,' said Mr Trist, perhaps he didn't think I knew what urine was. 'Fox's piss.'
'They follow the urine,' added Mr Bozer. 'That's what they be used to. 'Cos when the fox hear and smell and see the hounds he pisses himself. Just a trickle. And he carries on this trickling and the trickle is what the hounds follow.'
'I didn't know that!' I exclaimed, truly enlightened. 'So no p - urine no trail. Can't you use synthetic urine?'
'No,' Mr Trist shook his head. I hurriedly covered my mug against errant dandruff flakes and nasal juices. 'It has to be the real thing. It has to be.'
'Fox's urine?' I asked. 'Where on earth do you get fox's urine from?'
There was a pause. A pregnant pause. A pause laden with intent. I'm not going to like what comes next, I thought.
'Why, we get the urine from a fox, m'dear,' explained Mr Bozer patiently. I didn't miss the eye-roll he gave his diminutive partner. Farmers! The eye roll seemed to say.
I felt a fool but I had to ask, 'And how do you get the urine from the fox?'
'We shoot him,' said Mr Trist. ' We be allowed to shoot him. Not breaking the law to shoot him.' Both men shook heads. The vagaries of the British justice system lost on them. 'We shoot him and we get the urine out of his - ' Mr Trist floundered. Looked to his partner for aid.
'His bladder,' I said, helpfully I hoped. 'You get the urine from his bladder.'
'Aah, his bladder,' said Mr Trist amazed that a farmer knew the technical term.
'We shoot the fox and we take the piss out of him,' said Mr Bozer with no irony whatsoever.
'We take the piss out of three foxes,' said Mr Trist with even less irony. 'It takes the piss of three foxes to lay the trail.'
'Let me get this right,' I fought for clarity. 'You shoot three foxes to get the urine to lay a trail for the hounds to follow. But when you hunted the foxes with the hounds on our land before, you caught nothing, not a one, for seventy seven years. So more foxes are being killed this way than ever before.'
'Pissing hell, man,' said Mr Bozer admiringly, 'you have got a way with words. That's just the way it is. So - can we trail on your land?'
What could I say? I nodded my assent. I was lost for words. But not so Mr Trist. As I got up to show the men out he turned to me and said in all sincerity.
'It's not right, you know. Having to shoot the foxes.'
I had to agree. 'Why?' I was foolish enough to ask, though I knew I would pay for it.
He sighed, sniffed mightily and said, 'Cos soon they'll be no pissing foxes left.'
