The Blue Mountain(88)

‘Someday I’ll leave you this collection,’ he informed me. ‘You deserve it.’

He often consulted with Grandfather, who was an expert on tree pests, and together the two taught me to identify and eradicate them. Taking me to the orchard, they put their hands on my shoulders and pointed me at a pear tree.

‘Watch carefully,’ said Grandfather.

The two men, both in grey work shirts, one wearing a worker’s cap and one a floppy-brimmed straw hat, looked down at me ceremoniously. I could feel their emotion, although I did not understand the cause of it.

‘I don’t see anything,’ I said.

Grandfather knelt and showed me a round hole, about a quarter of an inch in diameter, in the trunk of the tree. Directly beneath it on the ground was a little pile of sawdust.

‘Such a predator can eat a whole tree,’ Pinness said.

Grandfather took out a long, thin piece of wire that was coiled like a spring at one end.

‘The planter’s fishing rod,’ he said. Slowly but surely, he inserted it into the caterpillar’s tunnel. A yard and a half of wire disappeared gradually up the tree as Grandfather sighed quietly, realising the extent of the damage.

‘Damn you!’ he swore when he felt the tip of the wire pierce the caterpillar. He gave it a twist, corkscrewing it into the grub’s flesh, and gently began to retract it. The caterpillar let out an eerie squeal and a soft, repulsive whistle as its jaws and nails tore loose from the pith of the pear tree, scraping the sides of its wormhole on its reluctant journey to the sunlight.

‘Aha!’ exclaimed Grandfather, pulling out the last of the wire. Impaled on its tip was a soft, black-spotted, yellow-orange blob that squirmed and wriggled as Grandfather held it up to me. I felt a wave of nausea and hatred.

‘Take a good look, my child,’ said Grandfather. ‘This is the enemy. The tiger moth.’

That was my first lesson in agriculture. Thenceforth I was sent to the orchard twice a week to look for the telltale sawdust at the base of the fruit trees.



I can still remember fishing my first caterpillar out of a Rennet apple tree. The feel of the monster writhing and gnashing its teeth inside the tree trunk ran along the steel wire into my fingers and up through my wrist to my spine.

‘Don’t be afraid, Baruch,’ said Grandfather. ‘You’ve got him where you want him.’

I dashed the grub to the ground and stamped on it with my foot.

When a tiger moth murdered one of Liberson’s apricots, Pinness chopped down the dead tree and tunnelled in its trunk with a little axe until he found one of the caterpillars.

He cut off a section of tree trunk with the caterpillar in it. ‘We’ll add you to our collection,’ he smiled, ‘and burn the rest of your comrades at the stake.’ We dragged the tree’s carcass out of the orchard and set it on fire.

‘So long, you scoundrels,’ said Pinness as the screeches and death coughs rose from the burning branches.

He took me home with him. Removing the caterpillar with a pair of padded pincers, he wrapped it in blotting paper. ‘Some larvae secrete a staining substance when they die,’ he explained.

He put the still wriggling caterpillar in a test tube, added some petrol-soaked absorbent cotton, told me to have a seat, and gave me a biscuit and a lecture.

‘This is the true test of every collector,’ he said. ‘Nothing is harder than preserving a caterpillar. It’s so juicy that it decomposes easily, and there’s no exoskeleton to keep its shape.’

When the caterpillar had been gassed to death, Pinness took it from the test tube, laid it on a glass slide, and made an incision near its anus with a sharp little surgical knife. ‘I stole this knife from Sonya in the clinic,’ he confided, his body shaking with suppressed mirth. Rolling a pencil down the grub’s body until the intestines were squeezed out through the opening, he severed them and tossed them out the window.

‘For the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the earth,’ he intoned.

He took a small straw, inserted it into the caterpillar’s hollow corpse, and blew gently, his eyes blinking behind his concentration-fogged glasses. As the caterpillar slowly expanded, Pinness rose carefully and bent over the table lamp, rotating the larva above the hot bulb while continuing to blow softly.

‘A hot iron will do the job too, but not an open fire.’

Within a few minutes the caterpillar’s skin was dry and hard.

‘The purists coat it with clear varnish,’ Pinness said, pouring a drop of diluted glue into the cut in the caterpillar’s rear.

He took the section of the apricot tree, sawed it lengthwise to expose the tiger moth’s tunnel, blew away the sawdust, and restored the now immortalised pest to its former residence. After writing down the date and site of its capture on a slip of paper, he opened a little box, took out a large, hairy adult moth with spotted wings, and placed it on the tree trunk still pierced by its pin.