Daniel Carpenter grew up in Manchester and now lives in London with his family. His stories have been published widely in The Lonely Crowd, Black Static, and in a number of years best anthologies. He is a former critic and now works as an editor. Hunting by the River is his debut book.
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Stink Pit
I
The car is a rental, and though Alex tried to pay in cash, they only took card. That’s that part of the plan fucked, thinks Lucy when he tells her. The others don’t seem to care so much. They’re fired up: Oppo has a leg twitch that comes alive when he’s excited. Rob’s taken to fiddling with the lighter he keeps in his pocket, the one that Oppo gave him the night before they set off.
‘Why’d they call you that again?’ asks Alex from the driver’s seat, even though everyone in the car has heard the story before over clandestine drinks in The Bleeding Wolf.
‘Army’s fucked,’ Oppo says, ‘full of fascists and Tories—’
‘Same difference,’ Rob chimes in next to him.
Oppo grins, ‘It wasn’t like that for me. Joined because of my old man. He was straight in at sixteen, never left. Died on the Galahad in the Falklands, burned alive. Don’t think I was ever cut out for it, but I joined anyway. It was like, that was my way into him, you know? To understand him. But I couldn’t get on board with it, could I? They said ‘jump’, I said ‘fuck off’. So they called me Oppo. Then it’s about the little things. Someone gets a round in, ‘oh, didn’t get Oppo a pint, just got him a coke, ’cos he likes to be different.’ Then you worry about who’s got your back, who you can trust.’
‘You trust us lot though, right Oppo?’ Lucy leans over from the passenger side and squeezes his knee.
‘Yeah, well enough.’
The car ploughs through a thick morning fog, dew coating the windows. The woods hold an eerie silence at this time in the morning. Last thing they want to be doing is disturbing the peace so early, but they have to, if they’re to get this sorted before the hunt kicks off.
Rob brought Oppo in to all of this. They started drinking together at the Wolf a few months ago, the two of them just a couple of lost, lonely blokes stood next to each other at the bar. A few dirty jokes, and some slightly aggressive political fights, and they found themselves perfect company. To Rob, Oppo seemed to be looking for something that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. When Rob mentioned what he got up to at the weekends, that was when Oppo got excited.
‘Fucking pricks,’ he’d said at the first proper meeting of the four of them. Lucy had some of the pictures she’d taken the last time they’d tried to sabotage a hunt. They were too late, or word had got out.
‘They think they can just get away with it.’
‘They can,’ Alex replied, ‘that’s the problem. That’s where we come in. You too, if you’re up for it. Christ knows we could do with some army training on our side.’
Rob had been doing this for as long as he could remember, used to arrange the buses that took groups of sabs all around the north: Yorkshire, Prestwich, even out to Wales sometimes. Mostly grouse hunts, the occasional pheasant. But it was getting harder. Too often they’d get there to find that whatever hunt they’d been after had rearranged, planned a bye day or rain had called it all off. The worst times, they’d park up and hear the familiar buzz of a drone hovering somewhere above them; that’s when they knew the police were coming for them. Once, at a court hearing for an old friend, Rob watched as a member of the hunt said to the solicitor questioning him that they’d had a tip off from a local officer that sabs were on the way.
It was all a game to them, and Rob needed to up his.
Oppo learned from them just as much as they learned from him. They showed him how to spray coverts to confuse the foxhounds, how to set false trails and pre-beat the area. Classic stuff really. Oppo brought in the tactical side of things, showed them how to cover their tracks. Hide their identities.
After the first meeting, at Oppo’s place, they met in the open, at a table in the Wolf, but they wore sports gear. If they travelled anywhere, they would do it by rental. He was smart and organised. They all got the sense that the next time they went out, they’d have a fair amount more success than before.
It had been Alex who mentioned it quietly, when Oppo had gone for a piss.
‘You think he might be a cop?’
‘Seriously?’ Lucy wasn’t having it, and neither was Rob for that matter. He knew the stories; they all did. A guy called Mike who’d been going out with a mate of theirs for years turned out to be undercover, trying to get into the inner circle of a local Greenpeace branch.
‘I trust him,’ Rob said. ‘What would they even want with us? Must cost a fortune to place someone undercover like that. Are we even worth investigating?’
‘Rob’s right,’ Lucy said, ‘there’s barely any of us.’
That had been the extent of the conversation. It seemed enough for the lot of them. Chat moved on to the usual – Rob’s mum’s health, the lack of funding at Lucy’s school and the state of the kids there. By the time Oppo came back, they were laughing about something or other, and the whole thing had been forgotten.
Anyway, Rob had been round Oppo’s place, a few times, after they’d all been there, and that was normally a big no-no in the undercover world. It wasn’t anything fancy, just a studio in the Northern Quarter, behind Odd Bar, but it felt like Oppo’s home: couple of dirty dishes sitting in the kitchen, the same smell of stale smoke that hung around him (a holdover from the army where he got taught to smoke and keep calm with the best of them), Madchester posters blu-tacked to the walls, peeling off with damp. The two of them had finished off the best of a crate of beer and played god knows how many rounds of Tekken that night, and Oppo hadn’t once tried to ask questions about the sab side of things. It had just been – and Rob hated the word – banter.
The day rope bangers were Oppo’s idea, so was the place to go. Lucy rented a Jeep and drove out to the countryside in the Cheshire wilderness to buy them. The way she told it, she’d gone fully undercover in the countryside alliance, donning a quilted gilet and a terrible posh accent.
‘It’ll be like, insurgent tactics and shit,’ Oppo said, ‘Buy a few of the bird scarer ropes, string them up around the woods and light them up. They burn for about half an hour each, so set them up to go off over an hour or so and that’ll scare off any wildlife in the area. They’ll all go to ground.’
They’d need to keep the ropes away from the ground to keep the dry and brittle leaves from catching, and they’d need to time it perfectly, but it was a good plan.
Fucking up the car rental isn’t the end of the world, they decide. It only becomes a problem if someone discovers the car and jots down the number plate. Rob’s worry comes from that day stood in the back of the court. The way the bloke from the hunt so brazenly admitted to the cops feeding them intel on the sabs. He never thought it was that bad, but there it was. What if they took the plate number and gave it to some mate working high up in the police? They’d be able to track the car down no problem, then it’s just a hop, step and a jump away from linking the car to Alex, Alex to the rest of them.
The worry clings to him, but there’s nothing they can do now. It’s 5a.m. and they’re already at the edge of the estate. Alex finds a good spot to park the car, behind a spinney of oaks and far enough away from the roads that it would be difficult to spot. The covert is only a mile or so away, near to The George and Dragon, where they know the hunt is going to start from.
They walk in single file, Oppo at the back, monitoring things. Alex is up front.
‘Sorry about the car,’ he says to all of them, and none of them. He’s already apologised umpteen times this morning.
‘It’ll be fine,’ Rob says. ‘If anything, we’re being too precautionary, you don’t need to worry so much.’
The ground is bone dry, thanks to weeks of horrible, cloying heat. Whatever was growing in the fields they cross is browned and dying. Somewhere distant, Rob hears the scream of a sheep, the rumble of a tractor.
Soon enough, the single file arrangement is lost. Rob catches up with Alex at the front whilst Lucy and Oppo share a cigarette.
‘The story is always the same, isn’t it?’ Alex says.
‘How do you mean?’
‘With Oppo like, about his name, he never changes it.’
‘Yeah, I know. What do you mean by that?’
‘I mean Rob, it always stays the same, word for word,’ he stops and looks dead at Rob, ‘like it’s rehearsed.’
Rob looks behind him at Oppo and Lucy. She’s laughing at the punchline to some stupid joke. No, Alex is wrong. Suspicion is good, it’s healthy, but he’s wrong. The way they met, the things they’ve done together. The way Oppo just sort of hangs around, doesn’t press for anything. If he was undercover he’d have wormed his way in more. If he was undercover he’d be with some other group, like Chris’ lot over in Cumbria. They were the real fighters. One of Chris’ lot had torn the earlobe off a pretty prominent Lord at a grouse hunt back in December. That was where the trouble was. Not here. No. Alex is wrong.
He hopes.
They find the covert beyond the field, a patch of woodland, bristling with dry, almost dead looking wych elms.
‘Once the rook scarers go off, they should echo around this place pretty good,’ says Oppo, removing his bag and opening it up. ‘No real need to worry about where we put them, but spread them around a bit, just to be sure. And keep them up off the floor. We don’t want to start any fires, do we?’
Lucy mock salutes him, ‘Safety first sarge.’
They start setting the first rope up. Oppo climbs a nearby tree, finds a sturdy branch above head height, and shuffles along to the end of it. He ties one of the scarers around it, letting it dangle down.
‘When we’re ready, we’ll light the bottom. Has a burn time of six hours this, and one of these,’ he points at one of the shotgun shell-shaped bangers attached to rope, ‘will go off every half hour or so.’
They make their way around the woodland, taking it in turns to clamber up the trees and attach one of the banger ropes. Rob hasn’t climbed a tree since he was a kid. It feels oddly freeing. As he’s tying the knot in his rope he looks down at Oppo, pouring coffee into paper cups for the rest of them. There’s silence all around them. If something were to happen, Rob thinks, now is when it would. Before they lit the ropes, before the hunt even began. They’d be caught in the act right now before any damage was done. That there is silence can only mean Oppo is okay.
Then Lucy says, ‘do you smell that?’
Rob climbs down. He holds his head up and sniffs the air. Yes, there it is, unmistakable and horrific. Death.
‘It’s coming downwind,’ Oppo says and points to his left. ‘Over there, I think.’
The four of them pick their bags up.
At the edge of the woodland, they cross a splintered tree trunk and wade through a low stream. The smell is getting worse, thick in the humid morning air. Rob pulls a headscarf up from around his neck to cover his nose and mouth.
They find it beneath the trunk of a tree, where the dried leaves have turned to a horrible mulch. Lucy turns away immediately, Alex holds his arms out in front of her as if to absorb the sight. Oppo… Rob doesn’t see what Oppo does. Rob is far too busy trying to comprehend it.
(C) Daniel Carpenter 2024