The Secret Surfer by Iain Gately

Author:Iain Gately [Gately, Iain]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784974992
Publisher: Head of Zeus

1 Sir James Clark was physician to Queen Victoria and reckoned to have killed the poet John Keats earlier in his career when treating him for a malady he’d diagnosed as caused by thinking too much. Clark put Keats on a diet of one anchovy and one piece of toast every day, and the poet died hungry and in agony from tuberculosis shortly afterwards.

12

Down the Line

July 2016

We went to the house in Galicia for our summer holiday. The Texans who’d viewed it in March had decided to buy in the Ukraine instead of green Spain, and it had been shuttered up ever since. Wild boar were mauling the lower boughs of the apple trees in the orchard on the night we arrived. We could hear rather than see them and they sounded like cartoon hogs, grunting loudly and savagely, shaking the trees and crunching unripe fruit in their jaws. When I opened the side door to the house bats flew out, then followed us in and wheeled around our heads. As I hunted for the power switch to turn the electricity on, they passed so close to my face that I could feel the wind from their wings. The temptation to drop my torch and swat them away from me was strong. Bats are not as passive as their admirers claim. Although their sonar allows them to judge their position to the nearest tenth of a millimetre, they can still choose to bite. In some parts of Europe, they carry European Bat Lyssavirus (EBLV), a strain of rabies, and even a scratch from one can kill. A Scottish batworker died from EBLV in 2002, disproving – tragically – the myth that Great Britain is free of the disease.

The next morning, I took Rosy to the stream at the end of the garden and we met Paco, who lives a few doors down from us and whiles away his retirement by walking around the village. He slipped into Galego as soon as we’d finished the courtesies of greeting and started digressing immediately afterwards, so that he was hard to understand, and the question Rosy had asked me to ask him – if the village had, or had ever had, any wolves? – was answered only after the matter of whether the stream, el Colchon Fria, had had more trout in the past, which, apparently, it did, for he had once caught a hundred in a single afternoon, although it had been deeper then. And as for wolves, they say one had killed a goat, but where were the goats?

‘Taken by wolves?’ I suggested.

Paco shook his head. There had never been any goats. Falta uno. Carmencita brought a kid into San Salvador on the other side of the valley before she was married and a bear ate it.

‘How did they know it was a bear?’

‘A truck ran it over the very same night. It was the last bear in Galicia.’ Paco raised his walking stick in salutation and resumed his circuit of Couzadoiro.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.