Deep Country

by Neil Ansell

  September, and the sun of summer lingered on. There were still a few wild flowers in the garden: the last fading yellow of the St John’s wort, and a straggle of red campion. There was a surprise tap at the window — a bumblebee that returned again and again to headbutt the glass and would not take no for an answer. There were still butterflies too, red admirals and painted ladies, though the first of my winter tortoiseshells was already asleep on my pantry ceiling. As my harvest began, the birds most in evidence were those that were busy with a harvest of their own. There was the constant tippy-tippy-tap of the nuthatches as they gathered acorns and cracked them open. The jays were out in force too, busily putting together their own winter stockpile, looping from tree to tree. They would drop from their perch, skim along the ground, and swoop up when they reached the next oak along, perching at the same height they had started from, making their journey twice as long as if they had flown straight and level.

  The number of bats emerging from my loft at dusk was at its peak now that the year’s young were on the wing. One morning I went into my woodshed to find that the young bats had moved in overnight. They had obviously decided that they were getting too old for a nursery roost, and were having their first sleepover party. There were probably nearly twenty of them; it was hard to tell for they had all clustered together into a furry brown football hanging from a roof-beam just above my head. These were long-eared bats: tiny, extraordinary-looking creatures, with ears proportionately far larger than those of a rabbit or hare. They were handsome creatures in their own strange way, with sharp foxy faces instead of the snub noses of most bats. They slept with their ears tucked neatly under their folded wings, but they had heard me come in and began to unfold their ears and open their eyes. They started to yawn, their mouths wide in a silent scream. It looked as though they were trying to intimidate me with their minuscule pointy teeth, but in fact they were echolocating me, and it made me wonder how I looked in sound, in the bats’ strange synaesthetic world. When they started to flex their wings, I beat a retreat, for I didn’t want them risking flying outside in broad daylight. I could manage for a day without my woodshed, and I knew they would have no intention of staying there for the longer term — it was far too bright and exposed for them.

  The first mixed flocks began to gather: tits and finches and goldcrests, with a scattering of migrant birds such as pied flycatchers and willow warblers, which I would see only a few more times before they set off for warmer climes. Down on the lanes the swallows were gathering, skittish and restless; one by one they would settle on the wires in a long line, then suddenly all take off again as if on a secret signal. The house martins were flocking too, high above. One year the martins came to my cottage, swooping up under the eaves with their beaks filled with mud that they would use as plaster, but they never completed their nests, and never returned. Perhaps one day. The mountain ashes, the rowans, were so heavily laden with berries that their branches drooped like weeping willows, showing the pale silvery undersides of their leaves. And the woods were beginning to look scorched, with just the outermost leaves of the canopy starting to turn, as if a flame had passed over the trees and singed them. There was autumn song in the woods: robins, virtually the only birds so determinedly territorial that they would set up a winter territory for themselves and not just a breeding territory. It was nice to hear, though — it felt like an echo of spring.

  Down on the river there were still kingfishers and the last of the goosanders. And there were huge gatherings of mallards. In the winter there would be distinctly separate male and female flocks, but for now it was impossible to tell them apart for they all still looked almost identical in their eclipse plumage. In among the flocks were the occasional smaller ducks too: mandarins, also in eclipse, looking as if they were hiding their true colours, trying to blend in with the crowd. All along the banks were stands of Indian balsam, still bearing a few pink-and-white flowers like oversized snapdragons. In sheltered places the plants reached four or five feet high and as I brushed past them the tightly wound seed pods would explode, peppering me with tiny black seeds. They would be propelled several feet; some would end up in the river to start new colonies downstream, while others would collide with other plants and set them off too in a chain reaction, until the whole colony was trembling.

  I sat on a large mossy boulder the size of a small car that protruded into the river, watching the water roll by and enjoying the autumn sunshine; I knew there would not be many more opportunities to sit in the sun for months to come. Every breeze that blew sent a shower of golden coins fluttering down on to the water, the yellowing leaves of the birches that were already beginning to fall. A single bat, a pipistrelle I thought, was following the river, and I wondered what it was doing out and about in broad daylight. A male sparrowhawk was working its beat above the riverside trees: soar, circle, soar, circle. Over in the big wood on the hillside opposite, where I knew that sparrowhawks nested each year, I could see three hawks above the distant trees, the year’s young still not dispersed. These birds needed to be wily; it was almost provocative how close this nesting site was to the keeper’s cottage and the rearing pens. But today everybody seemed to be out enjoying the sun regardless. They all suddenly melted into the trees as another, much larger, bird came cruising over the horizon of trees: one of the newly returned goshawks.

  I made my way back up the hillside in the gloaming after my afternoon at the river, and noticed a mound of fresh sawdust on the track at my feet as I approached the edge of the beech wood. I looked up at the stone-dead horizontal bough that overhung the track above my head. There was a perfectly round hole in it, and as the branch was not thick enough for a deeper hole, I could see its occupant framed: a great spotted woodpecker, a male, its beak pointed straight up as though it were trying to ignore me. It would have been no surprise to find a woodpecker roosting in an old nesting site but I had no idea one would go to the trouble of excavating a brand-new hole solely for use as a winter roost. It would be in residence most times that I passed over the next few weeks, until a storm sent the old rotten bough crashing to the ground.

  The weather held for the harvest moon. As the sun set, a huge, bulbous, blood-red balloon rose on the opposite horizon, smearing the low cloud carmine. By the time of the next full moon, the hunter’s moon, everything had begun to change. The season of fog and wind. There were two distinct fogs here: a rising fog and a falling fog. The first of these would settle above the river on a clear cold night, and would bring me those bright mornings of such breathtaking beauty that as I looked out over the rolling ocean of foam beneath me I would think: forget everything else, it was worth coming here for this alone. In a falling fog, the clouds would drop over the mountains and envelop me. All would be still and grey and washed-out, but when the clouds were on the move, this fog could have its magic too. As I walked on the hill, cut off from everything, with bands and belts of denser cloud drifting in procession through the canopy of the pine woods, the landscape looked primal and mysterious. A dark beauty rather than the brilliant beauty of the rising fog.

  The first frost came. When I went to get water for washing one morning there was the first thin disc of ice floating on the surface beneath the lid of the water-butt; when I tapped it with the edge of my jug it snapped crisply in two, like a poppadom. That first frost always felt like a turning point; there would be no going back now. It brought the winter flocks. A huge flock of siskins, over a hundred of them, was working the line of alders that trailed down the hill, following the shallow gulley of the seasonal stream that originated from the overflow to my well. All summer long the siskins lived deep in the plantations and I would seldom see them, but in winter they emerged en masse from the conifers, were joined by birds from the north, and lived almost wholly on the alder seeds. When at the tail end of winter their food supply finally ran dry, they would turn to my bird table to see them through. There were goldfinches too, a tinkling flock of fifty or so, that fluttered from thistle-head to th
istle-head, and a flock of at least twenty yellowhammers. One year the yellowhammers spent the entire winter within sight of my cottage. If I could not see them out in my front fields, I would wander up the track and look up the hill to see them in the back field. They were like my mascots for the winter. At night they would roost in the fruit tree in the garden behind my bird table. I would wake early on a dull, misty morning, everything grey and blurred and indistinct, and look out the slotted window of my living room to see them, bright yellow flags dotted all over the tree. A string of yellow bunting that almost glowed through the drizzle and the mist, like Christmas-tree lights.

  At the very top of an alder on the edge of Penlan Wood was perched a small bird of prey. A male sparrowhawk, I thought at first, but its posture was too upright, and it was in too prominent a position. Perhaps a kestrel; I had watched a pair of kestrels earlier that day on the hillside by the ravens’ nest, hovering above the collapsing bracken, working systematically and in tandem, each leapfrogging over the other to methodically cover the entire ridge line. As I approached the edge of Penlan Wood to try to get a closer view, the bird flushed. I should have been able to tell if it was a falcon in flight, but it turned and raced out of sight over the trees. Sometimes they are gone before you can be sure what they are. But this time the bird returned and settled at the top of a spruce, and now I was nearer I had enough information to be certain: it was a female merlin. It is not very often you get given a second shot at an identification. The moors, where she had come from, would be lifeless now; the pipits and larks and wheatears would all be gone. The merlin would spend her winter in the lowlands or most likely on the coast, and she would be just passing through here.

  I saw her again the following day. I was visiting my postbox, and there she was, high above the hillside over the woods, harassing a buzzard determinedly. She looked so tiny way up there, and the comparison between her slender curved wings and the buzzard’s square solidity made her look more like a swallow mobbing a sparrowhawk. She was relentless in her pursuit of the buzzard, and though she had only arrived on the hill the day before it was as though she was taking ownership. She stayed on the hillside all month; I kept thinking she had left and then I would see her dashing by again. The next year there was no sign of her, or any other merlins, but eventually the time came again for one to stop over for a while on its way from the moors. It became a feature of my autumns: I would keep an eye out for the merlins, in hope if not in expectation.

  October, and the trees were in full fall. The larch woods were gilded, the beech woods bronzed, and as for the oak woods, well, each and every tree seemed to be a harlequin of every possible autumn hue. Only the ashes would disappoint, their greenery just fading a little before starting to fall. And as soon as the time had come for the ashes to start shedding their leaves, the jackdaw ash on the rocks behind the cottage would give up its struggle; one day it would be in full leaf, the next I would look and it would be totally bare. It would always be the first. All the others would take weeks to surrender to the inevitable and become leafless save for the bunches of keys at their tips, which the woodpigeons would come and unpick, swinging from the slender twigs with surprising dexterity.

  The winds came, and blew in gust after gust of redwings, huge numbers of them but in discrete flocks of twenty or thirty travelling at impossible speed with the winds hard behind them. They came all day long, newly blown in from Scandinavia, and gathered down in the valley. On a bright, sunny afternoon, I followed the flocks down the hillside. Through the old oaks at the bottom of my front fields I paused and sat on the remains of a long-abandoned tractor that gave me a fine view over the patchwork quilt of the woodland canopy below me lit up by the sun. Deep in the drifts of leaf litter beneath the trees, a cornucopia of toadstools and mushrooms would be fighting their way through the mulch. Decay has its own fecundity. There was the white barkless skeleton of a solitary tree in the field by me, and in it were perched a pair of kites. There was a third kite too, flying over the stand of oaks I had come through. The perched birds flew up, and the three birds all made passes at each other, swoops and circles just above the trees at only twenty or thirty feet above me, before settling again. They seemed not to mind me being there watching them, and their repeated sallies didn’t appear to serve any purpose; they were simply out enjoying the sun and the wind like I was.

  A goshawk was flying over the streamside woods, following the path of the stream uphill and straight into the thrust of the wind. He would soar for a while, then veer upwards until he stalled. For a while he would hang suspended, motionless, his broad wings outspread as if in crucifixion. Then the wind would take him, and he would be blown backwards. It was like he was daring himself; at the last possible moment, just as it seemed he would be dashed into the trees, he would flip himself around, make a tight circle, and go back to soaring over the dingle. As he passed over the mottled woods, redwings would dash out of the cover of the trees below and race up to him. As soon as they reached him they would drop immediately back down to safety. There must have been thousands of the newly arrived redwings sheltering in the canopy, and this pattern followed the hawk’s progress all along the length of the valley woods. It was like a Mexican wave of rising and falling birds rippling across the treetops, and the goshawk was surfing that wave in fine style.

  The winds turned storm force. I lay awake that night listening to the howling outside. There was a whole language of wind out there; the gusts seemed to be coming from different directions at once, each with its own voice. I could hear the clattering of the roof tiles and wondered how many I would have to replace. With luck they would hit the ground without shattering; I had no spares left and was already having to use tiles with their corners chipped off. If the ash on the rocks behind the cottage was ever going to come down and take my roof with it, it would have been on that night.

  Eventually I lapsed into a fitful sleep, and when I woke the next day the storm had blown itself out. I went outside to check on the damage, and several of the ash trees in front of the cottage had lost large boughs, but the jackdaw ash was undamaged. Perhaps because it was the only one that had lost all its leaves already, the wind had just blown straight through it as if it had not been there. In the fields both above and below me trees had fallen, but, quite noticeably, it was not the hollow trees that had been overpowered but the sturdier-looking solid ones. There seemed no order to it; some had fallen north, some south, some to face uphill and some down. Their falling had wrenched great root plates out of the ground, ten or fifteen feet across, and where the roots at the bottom of these were still embedded in the ground the trees would not necessarily die; they would now grow horizontally instead of vertically. In the woods the trees that had fallen were much more likely to have snapped right off; surrounded by competition, they would have had to grow faster to reach for the light, and would be slender for their height. The biggest victim was a massive oak on the bank of the stream. As if the wind had blown directly down from above and crushed it, its trunk had shattered downwards rather than crossways, and it had fallen in every direction at once, like a chocolate orange.

  That afternoon I walked up to the summit cairn of my mountain, and looked out to the north. Though it had been eerily still further down, it was still bright and gusty and bracing up here. On the hillside facing me across the valley to the north, almost an entire small plantation had been clear-felled by the winds, and from here it looked like a tangle of matchsticks. It had blown out from the centre, and all that remained was a fringe of sturdier trees all around its periphery: the outline of a wood.

  Two autumns in a row, hares came and bred in the overgrown field in front of the cottage, around my well. Hares were not at all common here; they didn’t like the closely cropped improved grassland of the hill farms, and although hares are active in the daytime and therefore easier to see than most mammals, sometimes weeks would go by without my seeing a single one. They are tough creatures that live out in the open in all season
s, all weathers. They don’t rely on burrows or nests for shelter and protection but on their ability to outrun predators. And they are fast: if they lived in town they could easily break the speed limit. As a child I would see them in large numbers when I walked on the marshes. In spring I would make a point of going to look for them so I could watch them boxing: the traditional spectacle of the mad March hares. At that time their fights were thought to be between the males, known as jacks, competing for the attention of the females, known as jills; now it is believed that it is actually the females, to our eyes indistinguishable from the males, fighting off the premature or unwanted attentions of the males. But here the jack was in no danger of getting his crown broken. The problem for the females here was not fighting off unwanted suitors but finding a mate, any mate, in the first place.

  Hares can breed at any time of the year, and the young leverets have to be as hardy as the adults, for they are left in a form, a hollow in the grass that offers no more protection than the bare scrape of the nest of a wader. Their defence from predators is to stay very, very still until they have no alternative but to run. The fields of sheep-grazing didn’t offer enough cover for them, but the field around my well was becoming visibly more and more overgrown year on year, as bracken spread from the edge of Penlan Wood, along with banks of sedge where the field was boggy, and nettles and thistles in the drier ground around the rocky remains of Penlan Farm. Sheep still passed through, but the field was growing steadily more marginal and unappetizing for them, and steadily more attractive for wildlife. I had no idea how many leverets were in the field, for they were all hidden in separate spots, for safety’s sake, but for a whole month of each of those two successive autumns it seemed as though whenever I walked down to my well, little hares would explode from every stand of nettles, every clump of sedge.