Free Parrot in the Pepper Tree by Chris Stewart

found him a quiet, reserved sort of a man. I liked him. Petra went on to tell me how she had cast her lot with him and moved into his ramshackle cortijo to share the shepherd’s life. Sometimes I would come across her in town in her van, loading up with sacks of feed and shepherd’s necessities. And then she told me how the two of them had left the flock in the charge of a cousin or two, and headed off round Spain in the van for a holiday — a thing Juan never would have dreamed of doing before.
    So, all in all, it seemed that Petra enriched Juan’s life, and Juan and his pastoral existence was really something of a revelation to Petra. ‘Oh, it’s wonderful, Chris,’ she would tell me eagerly. ‘It’s opened out a whole new world for me. I can’t tell you the pleasure I get from living up on the mountain with the sheep, getting to know this new way of life.’ Her eyes would glisten with excitement as she said this, so I knew it was so.
    And now here I was, alone in the moonlight with my mattock, waiting for Juan, who was on his way to kill me. I couldn’t help but feel disillusioned about it all. I rolled over and listened to the sounds of the night. An insect hummed, another whined and stopped near my ear. A scops owl started its monotonous booping from the river — boop…boop…boop — a noise to drive you to distraction. Ana’s Aunt Ruth from Brighton came to stay with us one weekend. ‘Are you sure there’s not a factory of some sort around here?’ she had asked, peering fearfully into the unrelieved blackness of the mountain night. ‘Not as far as we know,’ said Ana acidly. ‘But that noise,’ said Ruth, ‘it sounds so like people clocking off.’
    I listened to the scops owl and thought a bit about Aunt Ruth’s visit. She had enthused about the farm: ‘How wonderful to live so wild and free in the mountains, drinking water from the spring, so far from the hurly-burly, the hustle and bustle, well out of the rat-race, and not stuck in the concrete jungle in an endless traffic jam.’ She hooked one cliché after another. Later we discovered she had so feared the water from the spring that she had cleaned her teeth in lemonade.
    I fell asleep for a while, but all of a sudden I was aware of the dogs barking furiously — the intruder-bark. Back into the trousers, grab the mattock, feel around for my glasses by the bed-leg. The dogs were going crazy; somebody was lurking around the house. This was it. ‘Right, you bastard! Come and get it!’ I said out loud to myself, taking courage from the ring of these words and their sense of impending violence. I peered down from the roof. Nothing, not a sound. Still the dogs were at it, infuriated by some presence.
    And then I heard it. It was the call of a fox in the valley, that little howl of feral yearning, the distillation of all the wildness, savagery and horror of the night, a call that thrills your very blood — and drives the dogs bonkers. It’s the call of the wild and it makes the dogs feel guilty of a moral dereliction as they slumber on the rug by the fire. It reminds them of the way they should be — not consorting with cats, slurping dog-food and biscuits for breakfast, and walking to heel on the end of a lead. ‘Come to me,’ the fox calls, ‘this is how life should be lived, racing through the woods on starlit nights, massacring runs of obese hens, delighting in their cries of terror. Come on, you unfit, molly-coddled slobs, come and get it.’ Of course it drives the dogs to distraction.
    I returned to my bed, almost regretful at the lack of action. And sleep did not come easily. The night was just too exciting and, besides, if Juan did succeed in sticking me with his knife, then this might be the last night I would ever see. It seemed a pity to waste it in sleep.
    The moon moved on down and slipped behind Cerro Negro, ‘Black Hill’, and the sky filled with stars. I gazed up at the Milky Way, and remembered when I was a child