21st-Century Yokel. Tom Cox

every book he enjoys. Held tight in his arms, like a favourite teddy bear, was the chunk of medieval limestone.

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      TWO OTTERS, SEVEN BEAVERS, TWO RIVERS AND A LYNX

      There was an escaped lynx on Dartmoor so I went up to Dartmoor, alone and unarmed, to try to find the escaped lynx. I took with me a map, an old book about ghosts, a bottle of water, a packet of crisps and some past-their-best walking boots. In packing for the trip, I had given arguably less thought than I should to the lynx’s needs, but I was carrying a rucksack with a long piece of elastic attached to it that I could forcibly remove and coax the lynx to chase, in the event that the lynx turned out to be playful. The elastic – which formed part of an exterior compartment intended for the carrying of drinks or maps – hung off the rucksack in a perilous way and had been irritating me recently so it would be a relief to remove it anyway. The previous week I had been walking down the high street in town in the sun feeling fairly decent about myself when the elastic had caught on a pedestrian bollard, twanging me back up the high street four or five feet in the direction from which I had come, like a small allegory for the experience of being human.

      Dartmoor Zoo, to which the lynx had been exported from Kent immediately prior to its escape, has a fairly infamous history, having been the scene of a few other animal escapes, including that of a jaguar in 2006 and a Canadian timber wolf called Parker in 2007, which was recaptured outside the pub in the local village and further emasculated by being described by the zoo’s owner Benjamin Mee as ‘a big girl’s blouse’. A marginally limp film was made about Mee and his zoo by the mostly excellent director Cameron Crowe in 2011. The film was set in California, but Dartmoor Zoo is not in California; it is on the edge of Sparkwell, a few minutes’ drive from the twenty-four-hour Tesco at Lee Mill.

      In attempting to locate a Carpathian lynx on a 65,000-acre high-altitude moor, the most important thing to do is to try to think like a Carpathian lynx. Using my new lynx brain, my firm instinct was that the lynx, whose name was Flaviu, would head north from Sparkwell, away from Tesco and towards Burrator Reservoir, which was a good place for Flaviu to have a nice big drink. Flaviu, following his instinct, would then head to the very highest part of the moor, approaching Okehampton, where there would be snow later in the year, enabling him to put the large pads on his feet to use in a way that he probably couldn’t in a zoo. En route he might well pass Raddick Hill, where a distraction could occur in the form of a sizeable population of sheep and a few wild ponies and cows. It was here that I planned to intercept Flaviu.

      I parked in Princetown, a settlement architecturally anomalous to most of Dartmoor and Devon, where the greyness of the pebbledash houses and a sky colour that often matches them can make me forget I am not on a journey from Mansfield to Worksop in 1986 with my dad to buy some Swarfega and gravel. Here, like some part of industrial Yorkshire that went off on a downcast inward-looking wander and never came back, looms Dartmoor prison, scene of even more escapes than Dartmoor Zoo, including that of Harold ‘Rubber Bones’ Webb, who gained his freedom by contorting through the tight spaces between some of the building’s heating ducts, and James Jennings, who, assisted by two fellow inmates, stole a tanker delivering oil to the prison and used it as a battering ram: more elaborate procedures than Flaviu’s, which merely involved chewing through a cage.

      I set off in the opposite direction to the prison, towards South Hessary Tor. It was a curious experience temporarily living inside the mind of a lynx, as it not only made me quite good at tracking but gave me a strong craving for chamois. You don’t get chamois in west Devon and I am a vegetarian so I settled for the packet of crisps in my rucksack. The packet was one of those with GRAB BAG written on it, a thoughtful and liberating gesture from the manufacturers granting permission for assertive action to people like me who’d previously been hesitant around crisps and afraid to admit what we truly wanted. I climbed the tor and scanned the blasted and desolate surroundings for the lynx. I could not see the lynx. I sat for a small number of minutes and admired the new iron cobra head on top of the tor, which stood next to the stump of the previous iron cobra head. The previous cobra head – one of four erected in 1867 to mark the boundary between Walkhampton Parish and the Forest of Dartmoor – had been snapped off by thieves a couple of years earlier. I puzzled over the mentality that had led to this surreal, nonsensical act of vandalism, conducted out of sight of any building save for the abandoned farmhouse down near Foxtor Mire. Did the thieves later transport the cobra head to Bude on the north coast and sell it at the sprawling Sunday car boot sale there, being haggled down from an ambitious show price to the one they’d actually hoped for? Or perhaps they listed it on eBay, with a ‘Buy it now’ teaser price, in the hope that somebody just happened to be using ‘cobra’, ‘blacksmith’, ‘retro’ and ‘Duchy of Cornwall’ as search terms that week?