Odd dogs and Englishmen

In my experience a long coat on a man is often a sign of mental instability. Frankie’s brown woollen overcoat was so long he kept stepping on the hem and treading it into the mud. Jim did the introductions. Frankie took no notice of my name, calling me ‘laddie’ instead. Then he said he’d got the kettle on and led us into the house. His hunting dogs had the run of the ground floor and there were little piles of their excrement on the bare floorboards. In the kitchen a tractor tyre was leaning against a wall, and there was a chainsaw leaking oil on the kitchen table. We took our coffees outside and drank them standing up in his backyard.

In the backyard, a tanned, dark-haired man was sitting on a log splitting hazel poles lengthways with a machete. Split four ways, hazel poles make durable thatching battens. Chained to the back of a wrecked lorry was the most powerful looking pit bull terrier I’d ever seen. It had such tremendous presence, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The stick-splitting man was disinclined to speak, but nodded assent when I asked him whether the pit bull was his.

With his coat trailing in the mud, Frankie led me into the workshop, where he kept his ferrets. ‘That pit bull. Is it a dog fighter?’ I said when we were out of earshot of the stick-splitting man. Frankie stopped and looked appraisingly at me, assessing my worth. ‘Butterflies mostly laddie,’ he said. ‘But Tyson’s got it in for crane flies at the moment.’

Frankie kept his ferrets in clean straw at the bottom of an old chest freezer. I reached down for one, a young polecat jill, and it bit my hand.