How to Catch a Mole Read online

  Marc Hamer

  HOW TO CATCH A MOLE

  And Find Yourself in Nature

  Contents

  Prologue

  Daybreak

  Scything a Meadow

  Golden Moles, Star-nosed Moles and Famous Moles

  Molehills – Leaving Home

  Earth

  Tunnels and Sleeping

  Getting Old and Walking

  Reproduction

  Oxygen

  Gas and the Dead Past

  Poison and Winter

  Deterrents

  Mole Traps and Breaking Things

  Finding and Kneeling

  Setting the Traps and Leaving

  Killing

  The Fortress and the Worm Larder

  The History of Molecatching

  The Future

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Marc Hamer was born in the North of England and moved to Wales over thirty years ago. After spending a period homeless, then working on the railway, he returned to education and studied fine art in Manchester and Stoke-on-Trent. He has worked in art galleries, marketing, graphic design, as a magazine editor and taught creative writing in a prison before becoming a gardener.

  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.

  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 becoming a molecatcher.

  Each telling of any story seems different, and this is true of my own life. When I was sixteen I left home and started walking. I walked for about eighteen months, and lived wild with the animals and birds, sleeping under hedges, in woodlands and on riverbanks. I will try to be as truthful as possible about this too, but not all the facts are clear. There is much that I can’t remember. Sometimes the two stories of mole and me seem to be inextricably intertwined. There are echoes and reflections. But the dance between these two vague tales has become a way of living that I find simple and beautiful and has given me everything that I could ever want.

  I wonder about truth and what it is as I chase it around and play with it. Recollections rarely come in chronological order. Memory wanders in the darkness, and the harder I try to remember, the more it seems to dissolve in front of me and take a different direction. As soon as I start to examine a story with anything more intense than a sidelong glance, it shifts in reaction to the scrutiny, reconstructs itself and then changes again, like looking into a kaleidoscope: the colours are identical, their patterns slightly different every time, their detail constantly changes yet the picture remains true to itself.

  All the facts that I recall easily are just high points and low ones, bits remembered only because they have some emotional impact or connection to something seen or remembered. They are like a string of pearls: tarnished pearls that have been shut in a drawer and rarely taken out. As I pull them out and look at them some of them are missing, and life seems like mostly string without a pearl in sight – and then a cluster of them appear, tangled and out of sequence. There is no certainty there, and yet, I will try to unravel the strands.

  Often I do not disturb myself with language and I just look and enjoy. At other times words come silently creeping in on insect legs. Some start to build a nest, develop a theme – a twig here, a bud there – so I let them. I like to write bits, tiny bits of stuff that fly by like leaves, insubstantial, scattering, and could be gone if I didn’t grab them out of the air. Bits of ordinary stuff that I see and that I can hold in my head in their entirety. Like individual memories or the fragments of pottery that I find in the molehills. Here – alongside and flowing sometimes in and around the simple yet often bizarre facts about how to catch a mole – are these fragments, sometimes sharp, sometimes smooth, written for the most part while wandering across a field with a bag of traps.

  Telling the whole story of the life of a mole is equally impossible. Hidden in the darkness, his story is created from myths and a handful of observations passed on from person to person, each with their own point of view. The moles, like us, are deeply mysterious creatures, and we will only ever catch a glimpse of their truth.

  What things seem to be matters far more to me than what things actually are. What they actually are is unknowable. I don’t like that prison of hard and cold facts. Facts do not set you free, they trap you into a constructed view of reality that is final. The only truth is here, and here, and here in the three seconds before it becomes a reconstruction. Really I want to forget. Forgetting is freedom and forgiveness but more than anything it is a process of immersing myself in what is happening now.

  I could tell this story with myself as the villain or the hero, innocent bystander or agent provocateur, and each time I’d be telling a form of the ‘truth’. What is the value of a truth that has an infinite number of forms? There is a difference between truth and honesty, so I am going to tell you one of the millions of honest stories that I could tell you that might be good enough to call ‘true’. One of the stories that led me to the point of kneeling in a muddy field in December with a dead mole in my hand and deciding it was time to stop killing.

  How to catch a mole, life as a molecatcher. Written in the season of catching moles, instead of catching moles. I think the only certainty I can give you about this book is that by the end you will know a lot more about moles.

  Daybreak

  As I sit here writing at my kitchen table, a ladybird is crawling on my leg. I accidentally bring a lot of wildlife home from work. Beetles and spiders, the occasional grasshopper under my collar, ants in the creases of my work trousers or fallen into my boots.

  The ladybird on my knee is trying to unfurl her wings. The red wing cases hinge open and the black, fly-like wings come out – but the right one is broken, bent back, and will not unfold. She tries three, four times, slowly folding it away and then trying to open it again. She wants to leave. Perhaps I damaged her, I don’t know. It is easy to damage the quiet fragile things carelessly, to break and maim without eve
n noticing.

  Yesterday I was clearing away fallen leaves; a robin hopping behind me was eating the beetles and the worms that I exposed. I uncovered them; they were eaten; the robin ate. Things break, things scar, and scars are healed, but they twinge from time to time. Every small step we take on this earth has consequences and each evening when I get home I scrub out from under my nails the messy business of birth and sex and death and decay and I try to wash it all away.

  It is easier not to think.

  I get my hands dirty every day nurturing seeds and pulling up weeds. Playing with chaos, tuning it up slightly to make it a bit more exciting; planting a red garden or a white one; sometimes embracing chaos because we think it is beautiful, and sometimes destroying it because we decide that it is messy. Destroying moles and their apparent chaos is one of the seasonal jobs that comes around every year in a predictable way.

  There are intertwining rhythmic cycles that thump along: a weekly mowing of the grass; a yearly pruning of roses; trimming the wisteria three times a year; the annual laurel hedge cut in August; picking apples in the autumn when they tell me they are ready; waiting for the frost before I prune the fruit trees; digging up and storing dahlias after two frosts, then replanting them when the risk of frost has passed. Making compost, planning flower beds, choosing plants and buying seeds in the winter. Planting, weeding and clearing, managing annuals, biennials and perennials, and trapping moles in the winter and the early spring.

  The year is marked and celebrated in quarters at the solstices and the equinoxes, and these points mark out the year for anybody involved with nature. They are the beginning points of the seasons. Rhythms, long cycles and short ones, interweave, driven by the ever-changing weather, the duration of daylight and the temperature. Every point is the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next. Each autumn I rake the red leaves from beneath the same maple tree and put them on the same compost heap. Except, of course, they are not quite, not exactly the same leaves, the same tree or the same compost heap as they were last year. The moles I catch in the same tunnels are not the same moles that I caught last year.

  These overlapping and intertwined cycles cannot help but take me inside myself to whatever is there on any given day. All I can do is reflect. My wife, Peggy, goes away for her work often, my children are grown and living their independent lives in homes of their own, and I regularly spend days without seeing another human being – two, three, four days in a row sometimes – and am unable to use my words aloud. I have my cat.

  I am cold like a spider this morning. It is still very dark. Perhaps I’m too old for this kind of early, but sleep’s no longer my lover. I have lost her for ever. She rejects old people like me. The internet says it is because chemical poisons in the environment have calcified my pineal gland. That’s how it goes, it says. Mercury, calcium, fluoride. It says I need to eat more chemicals to detoxify. It prescribes yet more turmeric.

  My incomplete dreams break into my half-waking life, I’m lost in tunnels alone and chased, I lie there as cold as a frog. I struggle with blocked nostrils (I’m allergic to something indoors), and I watch for a long time while the dark decreases, and seems from blackness to break into fragments, microscopic dots of grey floating, ungraspable, before the dawn, before the sun rises. My muscles hurt and lack strength – I worked all day yesterday and last night I drank whisky. I ponder lifting the covers. I pull myself down into the warmth for just a moment, just a tiny moment. My slow eye transitions from monochrome to colour vision. I think I can see it happen. There is no colour in the world until the daylight comes.

  A touch of pink in the grey air and I start to think about coffee, and the thought drives me from my bed. While the coffee hisses into the jug I pick up my cat, who mewls for attention, and we share warmth as I look for a radio station that will give me neither unbearable news nor offensively chirpy music. I’ve lived through the lives of many cats; I haven’t been without one for over thirty years, since Peggy and I have been together. We became a couple and we got a cat. This one, Mimi, is fat and sensuous; she writhes on my lap while I stroke her.

  My coffee nearly gone, I feel a little sick; perhaps I am allergic to coffee too. A comedy on Radio 4 Extra about the troubles of a family who have never known fear or hunger.

  It is almost properly light now. The dark lasts longer than the light, it is cold, it is December. The breeze is rattling the crisping leaves. I could light a fire and stay inside with Peggy and the cat and watch the day, but I am drawn out as always. I’m not for the indoors, and there is work to do: traps to set, traps to check.

  4 a.m.

  I woke in a cold dark room

  unable to breathe from a bad dream

  in which I couldn’t breathe

  with distance between us

  feeling homeless and full of flight

  my head beached on the white pillow

  like a sand-clogged conch

  breath’s tide flows in and out

  noisily

  working through the blocked chambers

  drowning

  In 2 hours the heating will click on

  In 4 hours the sun will start to rise

  In 5 hours Peggy will wake up

  I look out over the thin winter wood

  where buried things will remain buried

  until the land is full

  and the houses come

  and I feel like I am drowning

  With a click then a boom

  the heating comes on

  two quick dark hours gone already

  I’ve been watching the stars

  cold and distant yet always there

  did I sleep again?

  I’m not sure

  from a clear starry night the unwanted dawn

  crawls across the Rookwood

  and beneath the handful of frosted rooftops

  in the bare branched wood

  the people are waking

  and scraping their cars

  the rooks perch

  and wait for the warming sun

  and I struggle to breathe

  Peggy stirs

  and her head rolls onto my shoulder

  heavy and warm

  while the scraping continues

  and the crows crowd a bare ash

  the beetles beetle

  and the crows start to crow

  and the nearby river

  not yet frozen still runs in its flow

  while Peggy’s stale morning breath

  steady and deep

  keeps me anchored

  with comfort to blanket and pillow

  and flow, I think about the flow

  and try not to drown

  light comes in blinking

  and Peggy opens her sticky eyes

  and in from chasing woodmice

  across the frosted grass

  my icy cat curls her cold fur

  against my bare feet.

  Scything a Meadow

  Molecatchers produce advertising flyers and build websites. They tell you that moles on airstrips can cause serious problems for landing aircraft, that the tunnels they dig can cave in under the weight of a galloping horse and riders can be thrown. Horses in paddocks can break a leg by tripping in a collapsing mole tunnel and have to be shot. A handful of moles can cover a vast area of arable land with molehills which are quickly covered in weeds, and so crops and yields are reduced, land becomes useless for grazing and farmers suffer financial loss. Moles make more moles, which move to fields next door and spoil yet more crops and grazing.

  It used to be that molehills ruined the cutters on the farm machinery used for harvesting grains. Soil from molehills mixed in with grain will spoil it and make it worthless. When this earth is accidentally harvested in animal feed used for silage it can cause listeria in cattle and their milk, and make it unfit for humans. For these reasons farmers have paid out of their profits to employ molecatchers. For hundreds of years, it has made financial sense for them. But thin
gs change over time, and farmers are now advised to raise their cutters to avoid many of those problems. Modern machinery is designed to do this, and it works well.

  Most gardeners manage a kind of frustrated acceptance of the continual bad weather that can flood a garden for weeks on end. Creatures like rats seem to be universally despised, and will be trapped, poisoned or shot; woodmice are usually enjoyed, hedgehogs are loved. Bee and wasp nests colonising a garden shed and making it out of bounds can be frustrating, but the actions of none of these invaders seem to be taken as personally as those of a mole.

  Apparently sane people lose sleep over the chaos the moles create. We do not like to lose control of our property: it makes us feel uncomfortable, impermanent, weak. Moles can ruin domestic lawns, and I have seen real hatred developing in homeowners as they lose control and ownership of their gardens. I have seen people in a temper cursing across the garden. An obsession grows and an endless, unwinnable war can take over their lives.

  Moles are tiny, they are cute, and like the rest of nature they do not care what we feel. They are devastating, and they always win. Perhaps some of our anger comes because we like to think of them as being gentle and kind, with an individual personality like Mole in The Wind in the Willows, with his big glasses, his good-natured bookishness, his innocence and eagerness to please. Yet in reality the mole is not as introverted and self-effacing as we would like him to be. He takes advantage of us. Maybe we come to think that he is cleverer than we are. Or maybe we have a deeper relationship with and a pride in the things we own and display to others. Ownership of things that appear permanent gives us a sense of permanence. We feel ourselves immortal because of our possessions and the mole coming in and damaging them, taking them away, challenges something buried deep within us.