‘It’s a warren’ I said.
‘Set the snares then’ said Peppa.
‘You can’t set snares by the warren, they’ll go round them. Bear Grylls said you have to walk away from the warren along a run and set the snares away.’
‘I saw that one Sal and he didn’t even get one! He had to buy a rabbit to cook. Wanker’ she said.
She was right but he still knows what he is on about because he was in the SAS and he has survived everywhere and he jumps into bogs and frozen lakes even if he doesn’t need to. But he is a wanker but that is probably because he is posh and English. Most of the survival people on telly are posh and English like Ray Mears and Ed Stafford and most posh English people are wankers. But I had got a Bear Grylls knife off Amazon and it was brilliant, the same one he used, with a full tang.
‘Don’t call Bear a wanker Peppa’ I said.
And she went ‘Wanker’ again and ran off down the slope.
I picked a run and followed it through more brown bracken, I kept looking back to the rock and approximately fifty metres down I came to a bit where there was just grass and it was that velvety thick bladed grass that is light green and the run went straight through the middle of it. Then I heard Peppa shout ‘Rabbit!’ and she was running back up to me chasing one. It smashed up through the ferns and into the clearing where I was with Peppa almost on it, but it turned sharp when it saw me. Peppa had the face on she always has when she runs, like she is biting her bottom lip and pushing her tongue out under her lip. When the rabbit swerved she tried to change direction and she was going so fast she toppled and rolled into the bracken and it cracked and hissed. ‘Bastard’ she said.
I said ‘Run up to that tree and get some twigs’ and she took off towards the oak. You need twigs to hold the snare open on the run and you have to set it a hand’s width above the ground so it is in line with the rabbit’s head. I got the first snare out and rubbed a bit of mud on it to mask the human smell but rabbits don’t have a really keen sense of smell like rats or moles, they have good hearing and they communicate by thumping the ground to warn each other. They also have good eyesight so I wrapped long strands of grass around the shiny brass to make it more camouflaged.
Peppa ran back down with the twigs and I pushed them into the ground and set the snare open across the width of the run and then hammered in the peg with the butt of my knife. Peppa said ‘Will that get one?’ and I said ‘Aye it will. We’ll have to leave it overnight, but it will get one.’
And I believed it would because if you believe something will happen then it does, so you have to be careful about what you believe will happen. I believed that I would stop Robert and make Maw safe for nearly a year and then I did.
We set three more snares, one on the run we’d followed further down and then two more on another run that went parallel to the loch at the bottom. Then we went out wide of the area where I thought the rabbits were so we didn’t scare them back down the slope to the loch.
Peppa said ‘Let’s go down to the loch’ and she started running down through the ferns and trees towards the water. I tried to estimate how far I was from the loch in metres. I estimated it was seventy metres, and I knew my stride was ninety centimetres because I had measured it. So I worked out that if I took seventy-seven strides going straight down it was more or less seventy metres. (You divide 7,000 centimetres by 90 and that is approximately 77.7.) This is one of the things I learned to do, estimate distance, and I am good at maths and I know times tables and how to divide in my mind. So if I need to I can work out how far away something is or how long it will take to get to me and that is important for survival. I did seventy-seven strides straight down and got to the lochside and the little beach of flat stones and the water was about fifty centimetres from where I stopped so that wasn’t bad.
The loch was long and turned a corner so from the beach you couldn’t see the end like you could up on the slope. Trees came all the way down to the water all around except on the bit we were. There was a little beach and because of the angle of the slope behind me I estimated the depth to be about a metre and a half deep three metres out, but you can’t really tell for sure because there could be holes or gullies in the rock under the water which would make it deeper. It was flat calm and still. The north breeze had dropped from the morning and the water was like a sheet of glass or highly polished steel.You could see it was yellowy brown in colour but clear quite far out because there had been no substantial rain in this area for close to three weeks. I had checked every day before we came.
Peppa was balancing about three metres out on a rock she had jumped to from some little stepping stones that went out from the beach.
‘Don’t get your trainers wet Peppa’ I said.
‘Alright. Hey Sal I can see fish here . . . wee stripey ones.’
She could actually get her trainers wet because they were made of Gore-Tex which is both waterproof and breathable but if water got in over the top we’d have to dry them out on the fire or they would be dangerous to wear for too long and cause athlete’s foot and other fungal infections. We had to be careful about infections, I had told her this.
Even wee cuts and grazes, because I only had four Amoxicillin tablets which I found in the bathroom cabinet. In my first aid kit I had plasters, iodine, cotton wool, two bandages, safety pins, scissors, Savlon cream and some antidepressants called Citalopram 30. I thought they might come in handy if Peppa got depressed like Maw.They never seemed to do Maw any good but that might be because she was drunk so much they probably didn’t work. Like, you can’t mix antibiotics with alcohol because the alcohol stops the antibiotics from killing bacteria which cause infections. But we didn’t have any alcohol and we weren’t going to get any, even for medicinal purposes.
I also had some paracetamol and ibuprofen and codeine, which is the best painkiller available without a prescription, in case we got hurt or got a sprain or a twisted ankle or I got my period and got period pain. We did periods in P6 and I am thirteen which is the age they said you mostly started getting them. I hadn’t got it yet but planning for potential problems is an important part of survival. Also we could use sphagnum moss, which was everywhere, as an antiseptic on wounds like they did in the First World War.
The wee fish were Perch. The loch is called something in Gaelic like Dubna Da and it contains Pike, Perch, Brown Trout and Eels. We were going to fish for all of these with the rod and reel I nicked off Robert. He most likely nicked it anyway.
It was a ten-foot telescopic spinning rod with a screw reel seat and the reel was a fixed spool Shimano loaded with 10lb line. I had other fishing stuff too. Size 10 and 12 hooks, BB split shot, and some small trout spinners and lures in a plastic pack I nicked from the tackle shop. I also had two Pike plugs and three wire traces, which you need for Pike to stop them biting through the line.
Robert sometimes went down to the wall in the summer to spin for Mackerel and he once brought three back and Maw shrieked and he didn’t know how to gut them or cook them and he just stood there waving them about with Maw shrieking and going ‘Fuck off with them Robert’.
So I watched a YouTube and then gutted and baked them with salt and me and Peppa ate them while Maw and Robert were at the Fishermen’s. And they were lovely and tasted sweet.
The sun was fully up now and it was warm on us and Peppa skipped across the stones to the beach and unzipped her Helly Hansen and chucked it down on the rocks and then jumped up onto the grass and started pulling at it and overturning wee rocks and stones.
She is nearly as tall as me and she is only ten and her skin is the colour of dark honey and in the sun it looks gold. Her hair is frizzy and afro and ginger and she has freckles. I think she will be very, very beautiful when she is a woman. Her teeth are very white and she loves cleaning them and biting things with them. She bit Robert’s hand once when he was hitting Maw and he backhanded her across the room and called her a wee cunt and I jumped