Peppa stopped crying the same time as I did when she was about eight and we neither of us have cried since then. If she is angry she looks down and bites her bottom lip like she does when she is running and if she is sad I make a cradle with my arms and rock her.
She shouted ‘Sal . . . worm!’ and held up a lobworm she’d found. Lobworms are very good bait for Perch and Brown Trout and are unusual in acid soils like the area we were surviving in. Peppa skipped back across the rocks and onto the big stone out in the loch and held the worm over the water. She called across to me ‘See if he’ll take it . . .’ and she dangled the end of it into the water from her fingertips. I was just going to say there was no point without a hook when there was a swirl in the water and splash under the worm and Peppa shouted ‘Bastard!’ and looked over at me with her eyes wide and her mouth open. ‘He took it! He was a big one Sal. Get another worm!’
For the first time since we came here I missed my phone. I wish I could’ve filmed her squatting in the sun on that rock in the flat glass water and beaming and looking happy. I decided to remember it there and then in my mind in case it didn’t happen again. The sun was in her face and she called across ‘Nice here innit?’
And I said ‘Aye’ and jumped up onto the grass and started pulling tussocks up to find a worm. It took ages and the one I found under a rock was flat and reddish and I don’t know what species it was. I jumped out on the wee stones and jumped up next to her on the rock and now she was an expert and she took the worm and went on in a sing-song voice ‘. . . you just dangle it like this and let the wee fishy see his tail in the water . . .’
I said ‘Was he spotty or stripey?’
She said ‘Spotty. Gold and big red spots. What’s that?’
‘Brown Trout’ I said.
‘Can ye eat it?’
‘Aye. We can catch them with spinners too.’
‘We should’ve brought the rod.Why does he eat spinners?’
‘He doesn’t eat them, he thinks they are prey.’
‘But they’re metal.’
‘Aye, but they flash and look like wee fish when you spin them.’
She turned her head and stared at me. ‘You know everything’ she said.
‘Aye, I do’ I said.
But the big Trout didn’t come back so we dropped the worm in down the side of the rock and watched a wee Perch dart out and take it. This would be a good place for fishing and we would come back tomorrow with the rod.
We started back up the slope with the sun high above us. Peppa walked until we came up to the clearing in the bracken where the grass was greenest and thick and we’d set a snare. Two rabbits sprang out of the grass in front of us and tore off up towards the warren and Peppa took off after them. I watched her springing along through the fern with the rabbits, two brown blurs in front of her and their white arses flashing.
Then Peppa stopped dead and shouted back to me there was a rabbit in a snare we set. She went ‘Sal. Sal lookit!’ and I sprinted up into the clearing.
It was a big long one caught perfect round the throat and bucking and jerking against the cord and the peg. Peppa said ‘I chased him in, I saw him go in it. There’s blood!’
A dark ring of blood was emerging from the throat where the snare wire was clenched tight like a ball, the blood started spraying and flicking in drops on me as the rabbit bucked and I knelt down next to it. I have never killed anything apart from Robert but I was not bothered about it and this was going to be our first kill surviving and I’d seen it done loads of times on telly and YouTube. I grasped the rabbit round the throat and lifted it tugging the snare peg up. It was letting out a high scream like air hissing. I squeezed the neck and the snare ball and felt warm blood flood out onto my fingers.Then I got its back legs that were kicking and caught them in my other hand and pulled as hard as I could and felt a crack under my fingers round the throat and the rabbit hissed and went stiff and then flopped.
Peppa said ‘Fuck me.’
And I said ‘Don’t swear.’ I dropped the rabbit down on the grass and it jerked once when it hit the ground and then went still. It was a big buck. Plenty of meat and a great first snare for us. I felt brilliant.
Peppa stroked its fur. She said ‘He’s warm. Is it a boy or a girl?’
‘Buck or a doe’ I said.
‘Aye. Buck or doe?’
‘A buck. And he’s gonna be our tea.’
‘I chased him in didn’t I not?’
‘You did aye.You herded him like the Sioux with Buffalo.’
‘Did I? Tell me about them.’
‘I’ll tell you stuff later. Tonight when we go to bed.’
She said ‘Okay.’
We walked back up the slope towards the thicker woods and the burn and I held the rabbit by his legs and he was heavy. Then I remembered you’ve got to de-pee them, so I held him by his head and ran my hand down his side and over his stomach and the pee came out from between his legs in a dribble.
Chapter Two
Shots
That afternoon I made a barrier to go behind the fire and reflect heat back towards the shelter and Peppa practised with the slingshot after she had finished the belVitas. With a Bear Grylls knife you can either use the serrated sawing blade to cut wood or you can use a stone as a hammer and hit the blunt side of the blade into a branch at the bottom until it is mostly cut through and then rip it off. I used living branches from birch for the uprights and cut points into the end and then hammered them in with a stone until they were about a metre high. Then I wove branches in between, mostly smaller birch, some alder and some hazel sticks from a pollarded hazel by the burn. The barrier was curved and ran along the front of the shelter about two metres back from where we slept on a raised bed made from birch and alder poles and covered with spruce branches which made a very soft bed and they also insulate and they smell nice.
Peppa collected small round stones from the burn and used them as ammo to practise with the slingshot and I explained the principle of trajectory to her which is that as the speed of the projectile drops the force of gravity comes to bear on it and it falls at a given rate per metre that it is travelling with the fall rate directly related to the speed – so the slower it gets the faster it falls. If you can work out at what point in a given distance the projectile starts to drop then you can make a basic estimate of its eventual position in relation to the target. So that means you can adjust your firing position relative to the target so it is going at maximum speed when it hits it, or you can alter the angle of the aim up or down to make the projectile go in a rising then falling trajectory towards the target.This means you can stand further away and calculate the angle you need to hit the target, but the further away you stand the higher the aim angle needs to be and the less velocity the projectile will have when it hits the target.
So I told Peppa all this about the slingshot and trajectories and she looked at me and frowned and then said ‘Righty-ho Sal’ and started firing stones at the belVita box.
There is an optimum distance from target you can eventually find which ensures the necessary velocity for a kill, the least falling trajectory and the necessary distance from an animal or a bird so you don’t scare it. I told Peppa to try and find that. I