Grotesque encounter · 4 min read · Set in Pinfold Lane ·
Wire at the Gate
A farmer repairing his boundary fence at Pinfold Lane finds the wire already strung, the posts already driven, and a stag made of barbed wire standing in the field watching him finish.
Gareth Lowe had repaired the boundary fence at Pinfold Lane every spring for twenty years, and he knew the line the way he knew his own hand. Four hundred yards of posts and wire between his land and the Ashby glebe, rusted in places, slack in others, with the occasional gap where the sheep had pushed through or a branch had come down in a storm. He could walk it in a morning. He could fix it in a day.
On the first of March he walked it and found it finished.
Not patched, not mended. Finished. Every post stood plumb in its hole. Every strand of wire was drawn taut and tied off at the corner with a neat double twist, the kind he had been taught by his father and had not seen done this well since the old men died. The line ran straight across the bottom field and up the slope to the stone stile, as clean as a ruled line on a survey sheet.
He stood at the gate for a long time with his hands in his pockets. Then he saw the stag.
It was standing at the top of the field, on the far side of the wire, a hundred yards off. It was the size of a full-grown red deer and it was made, as far as he could see, entirely of barbed wire. Its body was a loose wicker of twisted strands, rust-brown and silver, and its legs were fence posts sharpened at the bottom and driven into the grass. Its antlers were the most intricate thing he had ever seen: a branching of wire and staples, each tine ending in a neat hook, like the frame of some elaborate cage. In the early light they caught the sun in a thousand tiny glints.
It was watching him. It did not move.
Gareth had heard the old stories. The Marchwarden walks the boundaries at night and sets the lines of the farms straight, and the farmers who see it in the morning find their fences mended and their stock kept in. The old men said you should never speak to it. They said that if you thanked it, it would take the thanks as a claim and begin to move your boundary a yard further into your neighbour's land, and that you would spend the rest of your life fighting over a line that had never been yours.
He did not thank it. He did not speak at all. He turned round and walked down to the gate and opened it and went in, and the stag's head turned slowly to follow him, the antlers ringing faintly, like a spoon struck against a rail.
He spent the morning in the far corner of the field, where the wire had been fine but the posts had rotted at the base. He had brought a new post in the truck, and a bag of staples, and he meant to set it straight. When he got there the post was already in the hole, plumb and tamped, the staples already hammered home. He heard the sound of wire being drawn tight behind him, a slow sweet twang, and he did not turn round.
By noon the work was done. He had not lifted a finger. He stood by the gate with his coffee going cold and looked at the line, and at the stag, which had come a little way down the slope toward him and stopped, its wire legs braced in the wet grass.
He wondered, for the first time in his life, where the boundary actually ran. Not on the deeds or the survey sheets, which had never agreed with each other. On the ground, under his boots, where his father's fence and the Ashby glebe fence had both been set by men who had walked the line and disagreed about it. He had always assumed the line was a fact. Standing there, he could feel it was a conversation, and that the stag had been taking part in it for a very long time.
He lifted his cup to the animal. It did not respond. But when he went back to the truck he found, on the seat, a single hook of barbed wire twisted into the shape of a small stag, the size of his palm, and very carefully, very quietly, he put it in his pocket and drove home.