When I tell my father about the hen harriers he seems pleased.
‘Whereabouts?’
‘Pole House Lane.’
‘Oh, so you’ve been for a walk? Good – that’s where we used to walk when I was a boy. People don’t walk now,’ he says to himself, ‘they just go to Tenerife.’
In his History, he mentions the Haldon Harriers as being, at one time, a local hunt. There was a Haldon Harriers meeting at Little Johns Cross in 1864. Afterwards there was a dinner for more than a hundred yeomen and citizens of the surrounding countryside … The Vice-Chairman was none other than Mr Matthew Milton of Drakes Farm, Ide. To be a farmer was obviously not all hard work in the prosperous years of Mid-Victorian England! He does not expand upon the name, though this clearly relates to the hounds and not the birds. ‘These hounds,’ as H. A. Bryden describes in Hare-hunting and Harriers,2 were ‘big, well-boned … with long falling ears, drooping eyes, deep, thick hanging flews (lips), an absolute dewlap, and a most wonderful voice, deep, mellow, and, as some writer has said, possessing “the true cathedral note”.’
It is an extraordinary description, to the uninitiated. I discover that a dewlap is the loose skin under the throat. That these dewlapped, loose-flewed animals should sing with a cathedral note seems fitting given the location of their hunting ground. From the top of Pole House Lane there is not only a fine view of the Cathedral but an extensive view of the estuary of the Exe. From Celtic times onwards this must have been a fine look-out site for invaders; church song and territorial instincts straining together for centuries in human and hound. I remember seeing the hunt a few times as a child, whirring by in its fanfare of scarlet and thudding hooves. Now the name – and the place – carry bird and hound together.
In the evening, I gather lupins in the spilling sun. A deer flanks through the apple trees. Its golden brass flares a turn, as eye to eye we dance. In the slow half-turn of a drowsy pirouette, instinct tells her to go; appled air ripens, pulling her back. As I follow her down the field, the ground has completely changed in the month since I last crossed it. High roses spill over one another, jostling for the gossip of the day. Camellia leaves lie in full green. Everything is canopied, overhanging with itself. Through the tunnelled shrubs my movements snag and tear an approach. The sound of her bolt bursts across the wood. Fresh tracks in the mud mark her flight over the border. Though I could get nearer, I instinctively feel I shouldn’t.
Instead, I cross the levelled-out grass of the old vegetable garden, where an army of loosestrife sing out their yellow. Streaming with pollen, I break my way through its overpowering trails, doubling and re-doubling in the buttering flowers. The great oak sags with low roses; dog rose floats high over crab apples. Above the loosestrife, the field sways apricot with wheat, terracotta earth freshly fallen from the blade. I sit with words thick and oozing.
Soon, I will take him lupins, gleaming jay-blue. But just now I’m too heavy to move. Everywhere seems swollen and undone. Summer casts a trance over everyone. Lupin. The word rolls languidly around my tongue. From the Latin, lupinus: like a wolf. It is thought the name comes from the way it ravaged the soil, though more recent research questions these violent tendencies. Is it true? I want to ask the ground. Does it take too much from you? As I eventually move off, a hawk drops, a worm lifts, and below and above move together in a second’s spark. Neither earth nor air records it. The sun leaves as usual; the grass waits for its green; birds burrow through the darkness.3
9
Indigo
Morning opens. The most delicate. The depth and the light. If you could pour softness into a flower, it would grow to this. This rooted butterfly. This in-between thing. This vegetable flower; sweet pea. Three shades mingle in petals: pink, indigo, white. I pluck the purple to take inside. A worm coils and re-coils on my calf until intercepted with a twig. Little by little we negotiate from leg to ground. Two cabbage whites spin and twist off the white sweet pea. All the day’s movement is circular.
Inside, my father exercises his legs, moves them out in quick pivots. ‘This is the good leg,’ he says of the dexterous left that strikes out straight and true. The right crooks at the knee, but strikes out all the same. The sweet pea on the dresser pours all its depth into colour. Outside, a small snail clings to my thigh. The white sweet pea holds droplets on its pores. Next to it, a striped flying insect inserts its long body into each flower. A lilac shivers in the sudden air; a glance of rain.1
More than three quarters of flying insects in German nature reserves have disappeared in the last twenty-seven years. Insect catches in southern Scotland have declined by over two thirds in recent years. I watch the sweet peas and think of all the wild flowers depending on insects for pollination; around 80 per cent of them.2 One disappearance triggers another. It is a strange sensation to be watching something coming to an end. How many more summers will the scene before me play out, as pollinators struggle to navigate extreme weather, the depleted flower habitats caused by intensive farming and urbanization, and harmful pesticides?3
I squat on my haunches to watch the deep purple eggs hang in the light streaming through the conifers; this is the time of the plums. Steeped in a warming current of pear and peppermint they swell through the gleam of freshly rolled hay and fat buzz of dragonflies. The two cabbage whites now circle a thatch of thyme, interrupting their dance momentarily to nectar. A third joins them and their shape complexifies. One of the original two flies suddenly away, out across the fields. The other soon flies in the opposite direction, leaving only the newcomer, suckling. Two streams of air – one warm, one cool – mingle, unsure what they become when they come together. A luminous greenfly wanders over my sandy fingers. There is electricity everywhere in the grass.
My pocket hums with its clutch of orbs: the first plums, the first tomatoes. I move towards the bench but find a dragonfly already there. It makes a polite gesture of movement; I retreat, conceding it to have the prior claim. It stretches out its long torso, golden in the evening light. Basking, it glistens, resting glittering wings. In this in-between time, the air is taken over by screeching. The urgent pitching of sparrowhawks maps the fields in circles. Their rapid hawk-fire marks the air, staccatos the landscape. The cabbage whites drift around my waist, tying me with an airy bow, leaving me standing, gift-wrapped in the sun-flood. It is then my brother strides towards me through the grass, gesturing to the pile of debris he has cleared from the field, ‘It’s time.’
As the deep scent of smoke and petrol hits the pink notes of flowering currant and white bluebell, we sink into the ritual. Here on the hill, by the side of the fire, we throw everything in: all the anxious hours, the mourning and the dread, burn and crumble into charcoal. Our digital selves, our avatars lack this lick of fire, this all-out flame. I am glad we have come here together, stepped out of our screens, and gathered. We are only clearing the ground of its clutter, yet how better to bury emotion than to watch it fall into the earth? Even a footstep out of the fire’s microcosm, the air is cold, as if the fire never was. Stepping in, the deep warm boom of being set alight. White worms of cinder snake over black grass, tangling together like fishing net. Thicker logs float fish-like over froths of ash waves, the scales of their bark glow a luminous blue. Mounds that have died down steam in peaty hills and smoke rises like a glacial landscape; all the elements are confused; none of us knows what we are doing.
For almost two hours I attend the fire. Throwing a half-burned branch deeper in, my palm covers in black chalk. Then I see her. Lazily chewing a larch leaf. She chews and watches me. This time, no immediate retreat. I back away slowly, but still she does not move. The last sun spills around her in patches, lighting the white of the clover. I turn to watch my footing as I retreat, look back, and she is gone. The deer that I have been glimpsing since the winter is starting to thaw. Each time her departure is slower. We are slowly coming to know one another, to be at ease in each other’s presence, and I feel as giddy as a lover at her acceptance. Daisie
s glow under her hoofprints where I stand and pulse, tuning in and out. Wind ripples through the poplar. A kestrel lands on its very tip, preening its milkiness in the end-of-day light, before winging away to a further field. It is hard to switch off with so much still on. But as they retreat – deer, hawk, fire, light – so, slowly, do I.
10
July
The Hay Moon calls me from my sheets, spilling freshly over ground. The smell of pressed grass floods in from the neighbouring farm, where the field has been rolled up and left in tight bundles. Meadow grasses, red fescue, sweet vernal-grass lick along the nostrils, each with their own tang, each with their own tongue, saying something distinct about summer. I move down towards the copse when a sudden confusion of leaf, stick and hoof tells me I have disturbed the deer. I pause but don’t draw back, before continuing on along the moonlight.
A rending of bark and bone cracks the air like a gunshot. I am pierced. Held to the ground by the sound. My neck snaps. Garrotted. My head hangs by a thread. I cannot withstand this battering of bodies in the trees, this frenetic beating of hearts. But just as swiftly, I snap back. If this is the time to prove I am alive, then let me look deep into its eyes. But the buck does not turn towards me. I see only the thrust of its antlers skewering the air as it moves away. I stand and listen to its sounds for as long as they come, trying to trace its tracks, to work out where it goes. I hear it burst over the hedge by the stream. I hear it thud over the neighbouring field. I hear the branches nudge back after being disturbed, the leaves return to stillness, the grass inch into its usual height.
I move along its path, fingering the places it has been: the bruised bark, the brushed flower, the silent soil. All seem full of the exchange, eager to share their side of it. The bark bears its marks on its face; the flower seeps it out through its scent; the soil recalls it passing through like a shiver. And I place my palm on the bark and feel the run of it. The blood in the antlers, the sap in the tree, the moonlight in me – running. The trill of the stream, the turn of the roots, the slap of the hooves – running. The blood in me starting to slow, soil settling below, shoulder blades finally letting go.
It is a rare sighting of the buck, as it is the doe that I know more intimately. As well as Hay Moon, the July Full Moon is sometimes called the Buck Moon in honour of the bucks’ antlers coming to fullness. At this time, if the bones have not yet hardened and there is still blood flowing through the velvet membrane covering, the buck is said to be ‘in velvet’. It may take a few more weeks for the bones to harden and the velvet to peel away. Until then, it will be protective of its antlers, avoiding clashes, turning away from contact. Months later, it will shed them entirely. Leave a part of itself on the ground for anyone to find, or salvage.
It was widely thought that fallow deer were introduced from the Mediterranean by the Romans in the first century AD and later brought into parks and forests for hunting by the Normans. But fossil evidence shows that they had lived here earlier, before the last Ice Age, before undergoing extinction. It is hard to think of now, this disappearance of body, when so many lives are at their peak.
Past its halfway mark, the year has let out its belt and all is expanding, all running, all roaming. In Old English, June and July were referred to as Liða, meaning mild, with June sometimes known as Ærraliða, ‘before-mild’, and July as Æfteraliða, ‘after-mild’. And though the air bears a soft, scented light that steeps the velvet bone, the velvet leaf, the velvet flower, the velvet stone, there is a time after mildness, and it is coming. How long can we hold on? The mildness of moon, the bitterness of ice; the certainty of loss, the possibility of life: the deer have known it all. Each year, the antlers come and go, drop and grow in the moonlight. Sometimes the light bathes still-warm skin, a gentle rippling; other times it is a shroud, its covering: a white embalming.
11
Kulungu
She low
She lowers
She lowers her hide
She lowers her hide onto us
She lowers her hide onto us, her self into us, the whip
She lowers her hide onto us, her self into us, the whip of wind beats the scent
She lowers her hide onto us, her self into us, the whip of wind beats the scent of an
She lowers her hide onto us, her self into us, the whip of wind beats the scent of animal.
I see nothing. By now things are starting to hurt. Wet and throbbing from uncertain paths and the tissuing light of dying battery, the track is almost impenetrable. It is so thick with mud I keep losing myself in its suction. I wave my wan light ahead and catch two bright circles. Human? I shine again: two glowing orbs. Then nothing. This show-and-tell repeats on and off for about twenty metres. Then darkness. I can’t tell if I’m hallucinating.
Suddenly the orbs are eyes, and a body follows. A leap, a stop and stare, another leap. Then another set of lights and a huge effort of sinew and hide heaves across the track: two deer crossing. By now the rain is heavy and torchlight all but gone. Telling myself that it is more likely that I will get back to the house than fall forever with the drizzled deer, I keep moving. In time, a glimpse of a familiar landmark, as the rain reaches unbearable levels. But my feet have gone the other way. Back to the far wood, to the deer. I know they are there.
Ever since telling my father about the deer in the copse and his suggestion that they have come from the wood over the hill, now that hunting has stopped, I have wanted to meet them at their source; to see if there are others. I move off the track, into the trees, forward and on into the place I shouldn’t be. I turn off my torch. They are moments away. I stand very still. A large tree calls; a trunk so thick it would fit ten of its neighbours. A high Scots pine, speaking. I remember Beth’s advice in The Magic Faraway Tree, to press your left ear to its trunk if you want to really hear a tree speak. And I think of more recent bioacoustic experiments recording the sounds of the water and air moving inside them. While these are mostly ultrasonic, some sound artists and scientists have managed to alter the frequencies of the signals so they are audible to humans. These whispered clicks and silences can tell us about a tree’s health, signalling, for example, when it experiences drought.1
I squat beside the pine, not quite trusting the ground, and wait. The rain is so hard now, that I’m resigned to illness. I lie flat. Beneath me, pine needles break my back and collapse in the water. Hair begins to matt, rain thickens through my shoulder blades and thighs. If it ends here, what matters? Shapes seem to. The touch of leaf and wood overhead; the texture of rain which beats but doesn’t break. I roll. Press an ear to the base of the tree and hear the whispered water within, and the wind’s whip and the heart’s beat inside the deer, inside me.
The wetness is overpowering and forces me up and back towards the path. I ache with the violence of wind. Soon it is not the wet but the cold that is keenest. In the midnight hour, the cries of the wood are deep and throated. Stars are faint and small, breathing the mineral air that is shaking; the air is shaking and the sound overwhelming. The force of the air gusting through pine, through larch, falls in swathes over the floor. As I stand in the trees, I am one. A vertical body, stretching up to sprinkled dust. My core is strong, though I freeze through each ring; each year of the body throbs with cold.
At this hour, the rain washes the smell of the earth into every crevice. Actinomycetes, with cells like bacteria and filaments like fungi, produce chemicals giving the soil this scent. There is nothing now but cold earth and wet scent. Human skin cannot handle this. Give me a hide that the rain pours off, that insulates the organs. Or let me burrow down, through the topsoil. Let it fall over me and hold while deep-rooted clover opens me to water.
I limp into the house. The wetness that gave way to cold, and the cold that gave way to numbness, is all the body is now. Slick as a slug I pour into shower and tea. Now you would think nothing of it if you saw me, a recognizable human form. The slug that slipped in from the cold; the tree that grew straight and tall in the
grass; the animal that lay soft and wet in the pine, beaten by rain, flanked by trickling hooves. By the time the sun comes I have lived several different lives, yet the body holds them all still.
The bits that I left there, that sank into the soil to decompose and channel nutrients through intravenous roots, are the furthest from me now. Yet I feel them all the time. In the outward part of the skin which goes first, breaking to dust and falling to earth, there is a knowing of what is to come. In the hair that drops, in the nails that cut, there is a schooling in how to lose a body. It is the organs that resist, for the moment, that want to go on in air. But as I think back to that body in the woods, the imperceptible parts that I have left there, I feel as though something slipped. That I let go of something I shouldn’t have. What is this that I am left with? This covering of skin. Where does it begin and end? I edge towards its base: two feet that anchor. What is in them? Bone, joint, muscle? Nerves? Fat? Blood? They barely seem to belong to me.
I think of the last time I really felt them: swimming in the Alphin brook. Then, tail-like, they had propelled me, skin as scales, translucent in the water’s hold. Have they been morphing since then, at some biological rate too slow for the eye, into – what? What do I need a body for now? Only to pass its nutrients on to another who needs them more. But feet are too selfish for that, too out for themselves (stand on your own two …). But I remember how they had begun to soak up water, that day at the brook. How water had turned to grass. Euphorbia and forget-me-nots into a floral sea. How each element had worked for another; and how it had all connected.
The Grassling Page 4