Praise for How to Catch a Mole
“How to Catch a Mole is a beguiling mixture: part autobiography, part handbook, part travel book, part philosophical treatise. I’m happy to report that it succeeds on each level.”
CRAIG BROWN, Mail on Sunday
“Not only a compelling meditation on the ‘little gentleman in black velvet’. . . but also a fascinating, lyrical account of the loneliness and beauty of life on the margins, a memoir of vagrancy.”
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
“[How to Catch a Mole] has the feel of an enduring classic. It is the testament of a man who has learnt to see, who has the nerve to interrogate his own annihilation, and who handles language superbly.”
CHARLES FOSTER, Oldie
“How to Catch a Mole is a honey of a book. Hamer is one of the last of Wales’s traditional molecatchers. His narrative parallels his fieldwork, tunneling ever deeper into the natural history of his bounty and into his own conflicted role as their hunter. The result is a sumptuous meditation on beauty, marriage, aging, and a life outdoors.”
KELLY BARTH, Raven Book Store
“For years now, Marc Hamer has slaughtered what most people consider to be furry nuisances for a living. After all, it can’t be all celebration out in nature. There's life. And there's also killing so that other lives can go on. How to Catch a Mole is a book of hard realities that somehow add up to a deep beauty, told in poems, woodcut prints, and to-the-point prose.”
CAT NICHOLS, Bookshop Santa Cruz
“It’s not often you meet a molecatcher, let alone read their story. Marc Hamer’s uplifting writings shed some light on the velvety creatures burrowing beneath our countryside.”
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELER
For Kate
(Peggy)
To whom I owe everything
There is a man who haunts the forest,
that hangs odes upon hawthorns and elegies on brambles.
As You Like It, Act III, Scene 2
I love my Peggy’s angel air
Her face so truly, heavenly fair
Her native grace so void of art
But I adore my Peggy’s heart.
Robbie Burns
Sunday I’ll go molecatching
hang their smooth soft bodies
from the thorns
where farmers can see my work
and shiny crows can gorge.
Contents
Golden Moles, Star-nosed Moles and Famous Moles
Mole Traps and Breaking Things
The Fortress and the Worm Larder
Prologue
I AM A gardener. I have been catching moles in gardens and farms for years, and I have decided that I am not going to do it any more. Molecatching is a traditional skill that has given me a good life, but I am old now and tired of hunting, trapping and killing, and it has taught me what I needed to learn.
To protect their livelihood, molecatchers have always kept their knowledge hidden. I don’t want to let that tradition disappear, so in this book I am going tell you about the behaviour of moles and how to catch them, should you want to do so, and a little about what you can do instead. Wrapped around this tradition is the story of the mole itself, and also of my life as a molecatcher: what that life was like, the long route to getting there, how it affected me, and why eventually I decided to stop.
I feel some conflict about stopping. To the core of my being I love the life that I have been given. A life that encourages a passion for nature, for its functional beauty and its violent brutal energy – even for its decay. It has been a reflective life that has affected my view of the wider world and how to live in it. It changed my relationship with myself, with my personal history and with my family. So here there are fragments of my life, too, and some of the things that led me to