How to Catch a Mole. Marc Hamer

but it is inevitable, unavoidable, inescapable. I have to go to work. The light has at last appeared (darkly) in the Rookwood. My year’s work is nearly done. It is cold and frosty, a typical molecatching day.

      When I am out in the countryside, walking or hunting, I become solitary and leave my man-nature behind. I become a different kind of creature: something more fluid, free, adaptable and instinctive. This is something that developed in me when I was young and living in the wild. Living moment to moment with no thought or feeling, no ideas or obvious mental process going on, just instinct, an awareness of the field, but not a separate awareness of myself being in the field. We seem to become the same thing. Me, the field, the weather, the scents flowing in and out. Tracking an animal requires this level of awareness, and losing myself like this is an important part of my existence. Not knowing, not thinking, is for me a most desirable state of awareness. Any thoughts I might have seem to be just a reflection upon that awareness, a step away from direct experience that insulates me from the electricity of the moment.

      The rusty steel spring latch creaks as I pull on it. It is cold, and the top of the five-bar gate has tiny ice crystals growing in the splitting green wood. It is probably half a century old, and will last at least another fifty years. The gate falls open, driven by its own weight, and it rattles as it hits the earth. I plod through and close it with a metallic clang as the catch strikes. These are the only sounds. Looked at closely, the green cracks in the wood are dark, damp ravines filled with a forest of pine-like lichens where a man could get lost for years. I like to look. Nature repeats itself in all different scales. It leaves a green stain on my hands as I close the gate.

      By the gate there are bare willow trees with a small flock of tiny long-tailed birds flicking through the dangling yellow catkins – black and beige, perhaps, a flash of pink or green? They are too fast, and in the dawn under the trees it is too dark to see them properly, but I think I know them. My memory for the names of things is not what it was: it doesn’t seem important for me to try and remember. The answer will come of its own accord, or it won’t. Words have a different existence to the things they name: they live in different places, have different lives.

      In quiet moments like this, there is a sense of completeness: nothing else is needed to make them whole and perfect. I start my work, looking down the field. I go quiet inside; the silence seems to pour out, filling any cracks or flaws in the perfection. Once you experience this feeling of simply existing you lose the need to ask why you exist.

      LIFE CHANGES AT the solstices and equinoxes. In another winter long ago, the winter of the year I turned sixteen, my mother died, and at the beginning of the following spring my father told me that I was ‘surplus to requirements’ and should leave. I had no sense of being wanted or being cared about, and so I agreed with him. I packed my rucksack and left early the next morning. I didn’t announce it. I didn’t leave a note. My few books stayed on the shelf. Family photos, clothes and childhood things still in the drawers. I left my key on the table and closed the door quietly so I wouldn’t wake anyone, so I wouldn’t have to speak. I am a coward. I left behind all the things that I had accumulated, and I obeyed the call of the void.

      I was an apprentice and I earned too little money to rent a place, so I slept out my welcome on friends’ parents’ sofas, then in derelict houses and an abandoned warehouse. Lying unsleeping through the night on the deck of a half-sunken narrowboat on the Leeds-Liverpool canal, right outside the steel shop where I worked on Wigan Pier, looking up at the stars I decided that I would do what I was good at, which was walking, and that I would do what I enjoyed, which was wandering about and looking at things and trying to figure them out. This was something about me that my father hated. I remember him saying once that I was ‘too stupid to come in out of the rain’, and thinking, ‘But the rain is interesting’. I was a dreamy kid.