Deep Country

by Neil Ansell

  It was not long before she was back. A pack of fifteen rooks, barefaced and baggy-trousered, were strutting around the back field. They suddenly all lifted into the air, alerting me to the arrival of a hawk — soaring then circling, masterful and elegant. She seemed to have no interest in the rooks, but the rooks were not prepared to let it go. A group of half a dozen split off and made for the trees of Penlan Wood, while the remainder, staying close together, gathered above the circling hawk and began to mob her, making a strange call that I hadn’t heard before. One by one they dived the twenty feet that separated them from the hawk, though they took great care to veer away and up again when they were two or three feet above her. This was a serious business to them, no doubt, though to me it looked like nothing so much as a game of dare. And, in the end, the rooks won; the hawk tired of the game and was driven down into the valley.

  With both the male and female starting to display, my hopes were raised that they might build their nest close to hand, and I began to speculate where might be most suitable. But it was not to be. My last sighting of a goshawk that spring was at the very beginning of April. I was down at the well replenishing my water supply, and when I turned back towards home I could see a whirl of wings racing around my cottage. It was two buzzards and a goshawk, racing in tight, fast circles around the cottage at chimney height. It was impossible to say who was chasing whom; they were equidistant from one another. I had never seen a buzzard moving so quickly, and I could hardly believe they had it in them. Then the hawk suddenly shot vertically upwards, doubling its height in a moment. I don’t know how it did it; it seemed like a physical impossibility. It folded its wings and stooped, jackknifing into one of the buzzards at a forty-five-degree angle. The hapless buzzard was knocked sideways by the blow and fell to the ground like a stone, the hawk with it, carried to the ground with the impetus of its own blow. The second buzzard swung into action, and the hawk raced off along the top of Penlan Wood. The stunned bird stood there motionless just over my garden fence, its wings splayed like a drying cormorant’s, its beak wide and its tongue lolling. This had been the work of the smaller male goshawk; had it been the larger female I doubt the buzzard would have ever got up again.

  * * *

  The goshawks disappeared from my landscape as suddenly as the male had struck down this buzzard. I watched out for them constantly, scanning my horizons, my focus drawn by every distant crow or pigeon, but in my heart I knew that they were gone; their absence was almost tangible. All summer long, while the other birds of prey were at their most visible and active, I had no sightings at all on my hill. And then, come September, they were back, as if they had just been on a summer break. And this became the pattern; in autumn, winter and spring I had goshawks; in summer I had none. Though I never again had such a concentration of sightings as that spring when I first found them. There was a rationale for this seasonal absence: in the breeding season they needed to stay in close proximity to the nest, and they could afford to as their prey was at its most plentiful. So in summer their range contracted, just as mine was expanding.

  I can probably visualize every goshawk sighting I have ever had; each seems unique and unforgettable. My most recent sighting was in almost exactly the same place as my first definite sighting long ago. She flew out towards me from the edge of my pine wood, slow and stately. A massive, powerful bird, how could I ever have mistaken her for a sparrowhawk? She flew lazily and inattentively, and saw me long after I had first spotted her. She was almost on top of me when she finally noticed me; she pulled up sharp, wheeled around and flew away in the direction she had come from. I followed the invisible pathway right to the spot where she had emerged from the wood. Inside the fenced area was a freshly killed rabbit. I had not missed the kill by long; the blood was still flowing, seeping into the grass. The goshawk had eaten nearly half of it, and I wondered whether she planned to return for the rest later or would abandon it now she’d had her fill. This wood harbours more rabbits than anywhere else on this side of the river. They dig their burrows all around the fringes of the wood, and emerge to feed in the fields alongside. They are timid though; they stay close to the edge of the wood, and race for cover at the slightest disturbance. Perhaps this rabbit had thought it was home and dry when it had made it through the fence; its corpse still pointed inwards, towards its burrow, towards safety.

  I walked slowly around the perimeter of the wood, though I knew I would not see the hawk again now; she would be far away from here, resting off her meal in the dark heart of a different wood. At the far edge, almost directly opposite, I found the remains of a second rabbit, perhaps a couple of days dead, its plucked fur sifting through the trees. I wondered if one day the hawks might choose to summer here, and make this wood their own. This plantation is growing up fast, the trunks are stout columns now and it is gathering that monumental solemnity of the mature wood of Scots pine. There are broad rides through the trees that I carved with my own chainsaw, runways down the hill for the racing hawk. And of course it is stuffed with rabbits. The truth is, this wood will probably never be big enough for goshawks, but you can always hope.

  The goshawks should have been the most frustrating of birds; they would disappear for long periods without warning and they would often tantalize with fleeting appearances, which were often not even enough to offer me a definitive identification, and yet I prized these sightings almost more than those of any other bird. Perhaps the challenges were part of the reward; perhaps this is why some people will go to such great lengths to pursue rarities. Of course if I wanted a good look at a goshawk I could easily have gone to a falconry centre and stared at one all day, eyeball to eyeball; I could even have flown one myself if I had taken a little trouble to organize it. I am sure that would have been a worthwhile experience, but in some respects it would not have been the same thing at all. The bird in the bush is worth ten in the hand. We take pleasure from watching birds partly because they are beautiful, but the birds that we see in our minds are more than just feather and bone, their appeal is not simply aesthetic. We watch them because of what they tell us about ourselves, and about our sense of what it means to be wild and free.

  7. The Thief

  There was a ritual I performed late every spring, whenever I felt that the time had come. I would take my bow saw off its hook on the woodshed wall and stroll down the hill to the stream. There I would work my way through the streamside hazels in search of the perfect hazel wand, just the right weight and thickness. I would take my time; the staff I would cut would be my companion all summer long. My summer season was a long one; when it was still spring in the woods, when the birds were still busy singing and nesting, I considered it summer in the hills. And when the leaves and the mushrooms were telling me that autumn had long since come, I would still be holding on. So long as there was life on the moors, and the weather was good enough to walk them, it was still my mountain summer.

  As I wandered around the fields close to my home, I would often run into the farmer, and he would occasionally ask me to lend him a hand with whatever he was doing, if I wasn’t too busy. Which, let’s face it, I seldom was. Perhaps he would ask me to hold a reel of barbed wire while he restrung a fence. Or perhaps I would get sheepdog duties, guarding an open gate to make sure the sheep being rounded up didn’t make their escape. The farmer had two sheepdogs, a dog and a bitch, but the dog he described as the worst sheepdog in the world, and it was handy to have me there in case the dog noticed a squirrel, or had an itch that needed scratching, or felt like a quick nap. While I kept the farmer company, he would talk to me a little, mostly about sheep farming. He would pause and put his hand to his head and tip back his cap so that its peak pointed to the sky, and tell me stories about foot-rot and twins, about gelds and thieves. A geld is a ewe that has failed to produce a lamb, while a thief is one of the year’s lambs that has escaped the trip to market, and has instead been put up on the open sheepwalk to roam free for a season. A thief of time.

  I too
was a thief; I had stolen myself away from the world and had the freedom of the hills, for now at least. When I set off for the moors, often the steepest climb of the day would be my back field. The mountains here are whale-backed, smoothed by time. The sides are steep, but I was already high up on the hillside; once I was on the tops there were hundreds of square miles of rolling moorland, uninhabited and unfenced. The further I walked the wilder the land became, as the number of grazing sheep that had made it this far began to reduce. There were half-wild ponies up here too, with long shaggy manes. They would not run off but nor would they approach; instead they would freeze when they saw me and stare right back at me through their fringes for as long as I was in view. When the weather allowed, I would pack a bag, take my trusty staff, and set off on a sunny morning, not to return home for two or three or four days. I would walk into the westerly wind, with the clouds scudding towards me, making the hills a patchwork of light and shadow. The weather changed so quickly up here, but I could see for miles, and sometimes I would see the showers coming an hour before they reached me. This was a land of rainbows.

  All day long I roamed the tops, then as the afternoon began to wear on I would walk to the first stream I came to and begin to follow it down. I would stop at the head of the valley, as soon as there was the first scattering of rowans and hawthorns, enough fallen sticks for me to build a small fire. Then I would find a dry, level patch of clear ground alongside the stream, light my fire, and boil up water in an old tin can with the lid folded back as a handle. I would make myself tea and eat whatever I had brought with me, and as darkness fell I would climb into my sleeping bag, lie back and look at the stars. I had the tiniest one-man tent too, only a few pounds in weight, as a contingency for a sudden change in the weather.

  It is hard to do justice to the beauty of the night sky in these hills. With no light pollution for miles around, the gaps between the stars seemed to shrink to nothing. If I focused on the space between any two stars, more stars would appear to fill that space, and then still more to fill the spaces between them. The night sky became not a sprinkling of stars against a black backdrop, but a wash of unbroken light. The Milky Way was no longer milky; it had curdled, solidified like scrambled eggs in a pan. I would step outside on a clear night and it would make me gasp. I could never get used to it. And deep in the summer, when the Perseids came, there would be shooting stars every few seconds all night long. Drifting through space since time immemorial, then suddenly burning up in a blaze of glory, witnessed by no one save for me, by sheer chance looking at the right spot in the sky at the perfect moment. One night, sitting by my little fire by a mountainside stream counting off the shooting stars, I noticed a spectral green glow in the bracken beside me and followed the light to its source. A glow-worm, the first I had ever seen here, shining in the night like a star that had come to earth.

  Some of the places I found to camp in were magical, rock-strewn cirques cut off from the world below by deep plantations of spruce, enclosed and sheltered from the wind like an amphitheatre. A tumbling waterfall with a pool to bathe in. The white rumps of the wheatears darting from rock to rock. At dusk the piping of the ring ouzel, the rare mountain blackbird, and sometimes a glimpse of them feeding in the rowans. The bracken buzzing with whinchats. I found the whinchats a mystery: one valley would be full of them, the next empty. I never saw them down in the lower valleys, except at one single location on my lanes, where they nested in the hedge every year. I watched them here many times, asking myself what made this particular length of hedgerow, this particular field, different from all the others, and never finding an answer. On my nights out in the hills, I would wake chilled in the early dawn, and relight my fire to warm myself before I packed and set off for the tops again. I remember one morning waking to see a young vixen prancing through the long grass towards me, meadow pipits fluttering around her head like a cloud of flies. She was far from home, having probably spent the night searching for eggs. There were so many pipits nesting up here that I regularly stumbled on their nests. The vixen spotted me and paused in her tracks, front leg cocked like a pointer. She had probably never seen a human before and didn’t know quite what to make of me. I reached into my pack, found a biscuit and held it out towards her; she came a little closer before retreating, then started to close in again. This approach and retreat continued for a minute or two, with her gaining just a little ground each time. I don’t know if she would have eventually fed from my hand; I thought better of giving her the wrong idea about people and tossed the biscuit over to her. She flinched as I threw, then came and grabbed the biscuit and trotted off with it held proudly in her jaws.

  Sometimes you can walk these hills for hours at a time without seeing very much at all. On these open expanses silence prevails, and they can seem empty, devoid of life. But any longueurs would suddenly be interrupted by moments when a whole host of birds would appear at once: a peregrine dashing over the crags, a hovering kestrel, a pair of soaring kites, a displaying curlew or jinking snipe. Many of our true upland species are rare and spread thinly over huge areas of seemingly featureless moor. The merlin for instance — the moorland falcon — has a population of perhaps only around a hundred pairs in the whole of Wales, so looking for them was like diving for pearls.

  My first sighting of a merlin in these moors has never been equalled. I was deep in the hills, more than a day’s walk from home, and was following the ridge line west. There is a long stretch of concrete marker posts over the mountains, and from each one you can just about make out the next, so they make a useful waymarker across these vast open spaces. I believe they show the limit of the catchment area for the reservoirs many miles below. I was approaching one when a merlin slipped low across the hillside towards me and alighted on the post, ruffling up its feathers as it landed. It was a little male, barely bigger than a thrush, and sat only a few feet away. He was subtly coloured in delicate pastel reds and blues, except for his brilliant yellow legs with jet-black talons that made it look like he had been painting his nails. His minuscule hooked beak made me think of a parakeet or a budgerigar rather than a bird of prey. I had frozen, and he seemed quite unconcerned by my proximity. We waited like this, both still and alert, until finally he took off. He soared in a low arc just above the ground, and disappeared into a nearby bank of heather about fifty yards away. It seemed that I had found not only a merlin, but also a merlin’s nest, though I didn’t follow him to inspect the site, and I never found the territory again, even with the long line of posts to guide me. All that summer I watched out for merlins, in the hope of seeing them once more, but they eluded me until the very end of the season when I had given up hope of seeing another that year. It was to be my last overnight walk that summer; the weather was getting ready to turn. I was far from my previous sighting, having headed out to see the biggest waterfall in reach of the cottage, perhaps ten or fifteen miles out. At dusk, as I was preparing to camp beside the tumbling waters, a wheatear came hurtling down the steep hillside right alongside the falling stream, twisting and swerving and looping through the gorse bushes, with a female merlin right on its tail, just an inch or two behind it.

  Once, early in the season, I was returning from one of my overnight expeditions when the clouds fell, a thick fog descended, and I became well and truly lost for the first and only time. I climbed to a mountaintop cairn to see if it would lift me above the clouds so that I could regain my sense of direction, but it was no use, I could see no further than ten or twenty yards. I looked at the cairn more closely; I had been here earlier, I had just spent an hour walking in a circle. I wasn’t too worried, for I knew that if I walked to the first stream I came to and then followed it down, it would eventually lead me off the hills, and even if I ended up many miles from home I would be able to get a lift back. It was still fairly early in the day, so there was no risk of being stuck here overnight with no remaining food. So I shrugged my shoulders and headed down in a random direction.

  When I had come
down off the steep side of the mountain I found myself in the most incredible blasted landscape that I had ever seen up here: a rolling sea of sticky black peat, studded with thousands of tiny heather-capped islands. The sides of these hummocks were often vertical or even overhanging, so I had to leap from one to the next over the deep runnels between them, or sometimes clamber down and wade ankle-deep through the bog if the gap was too wide. The landscape, lost in fog, looked primeval. I sat down for a while to soak up the atmosphere. A pair of red grouse burst from the heather beside me and clattered away, coughing like old men. Red grouse are a rarity on these moors; they feed almost entirely on young heather and there is very little heather on these hills because they are so heavily grazed. But not so many of the sheep that roamed this moorland in the summer made it out this far, and those that did would have been largely confounded by the steep sides of these mounds of peat. And then I heard it: a spectral wail that echoed through the fog like nothing I had ever heard before. This was the sound of broken hearts, a sound that could make the mountains weep. He emerged through the drifting fog, a golden plover already in his summer plumage, crisp black and white in front, spangled with gold on his back. He stood aloft a little hillock of heather only a few yards away, threw back his head and called to the skies. And then his answer came, again and again. There was a plover on every mound that was near enough for me to see through the fog; I could make out six of them in all, in a perfect circle around me, all facing inward, all calling. I don’t know how long this carried on for — time had stood still — but then they were suddenly gone; they didn’t fly, they just strode off into the fog and faded away. As I started to breathe again, there was a fleeting parting of the clouds and I was able to make out a few distant hills and work out exactly which way I should head for home.