The shadow of the big man

Who is this man i am living with, what does he do, what is he like. Hard to sum up who my father is, he had not been around most of my life but here i am living in a caravan he calls home, why i found out again years later as i did with most questions i had. But the big man as i saw him, scary at times with his dark complexion and staring green eyes and hands like shovels and other times soft and and gentle voiced.He always looked awkward around people if we ever went anywhere in the car, always looking around like a nervous fox. He was gone most mornings when i woke up , either off in a old white transit van or the pale blue ford Anglia. Most of the time he would take Andrew with him and sometimes the dogs, but what did he do for a living, i never worked it out. I never recall him hitting me or shouting at me, i heard him thru the curtain sometimes shouting at his wife and of course the grunt and groaning of them having sex at night, bit hard to escape from with just a piece of red cloth between you. He would often turn up with dead rabbits he would have shot, seemed to be our stable diet with huge amounts of potatoes and bread. His hands were always dirty , ground in dirt and oil and he had this kind of oily workman smell about him. I never recall him having anything on apart from either a tracksuit bottoms, boots and a jumper or a checked quilted workman shirt on like the lumberjacks have. He would always show you things if he was around, although he did not have academic skills he knew everything about the outdoors and would put Ray Mears to shame. I learnt what nuts i could eat of trees, how to treat stings from nettles and insects and how to tickle salmon in the nearby river, so for a young boy pretty exciting stuff really. I often say about the man you could give him a box of matches and leave him for weeks come back and he would have built a house from them. But still what did he do when he was not there and i was left either to go to school or play in the forest and the waterfalls, building shelters and hideouts of my own with Andrew when he was there. Evening times he would wander up the forestry track and come back smelling more than usual of animal, i would find out soon what the smell came from. We never had visitors to the caravan and occasionally a car would pass but would never stop, usually the forestry commission ranger as they had houses and their small headquarters at the start of the forestry we lived in. When a car was heard we were ushered into the nearest bush or in the caravan quiet as mice. Something wasn’t right i hear you say , well i guess not but it was all a little game for me then and any other reason i never crossed my young mind.
So this man , i guess i never really did get to know him, there were so many secrets he carried around with him, he was just dad by name, no emotional bond as such just another man in my life , but on times would spend a bit of quality time with me. As time went on we spent more and more time together but that was for another reason and if i was a bit older and knew better i would realise what his job was.