Gods of the Morning

by John Lister-Kaye

  5

  Prints in the Snow

  What freezings I have felt, what dark days seen,

  What old December’s bareness everywhere!

  ‘Sonnet 97’, William Shakespeare

  December is winter, no denying it. If wet November winds pile in, sodden but mild, you can still argue that autumn lingers on, but not in December. November trails its coat; December slams the door. And it isn’t just the long darkness, although its melancholy gloom does smother everything, even hopes and dreams.

  It’s the shopping list winter brings to our Highland glen that becomes so inescapable in December, and any of it can happen at any time: the bone-aching cold, as temperatures skirt around freezing for days on end, a cold that seems to penetrate far deeper than that of harder frosts and from which I can find relief only with a hot bath. Then the unexpected plunge to –15º Celsius of a moonlit night; squalls of merciless sleet; the mess of slush; black ice bringing sudden, bruising falls to the unwary; castigating rain; knife-edged winds from the north and east that slice off your legs at the knees; the absurdly crimped daylight for any outdoor work. As our field centre maintenance man, Hugh Bethune, says of outdoor chores, with characteristically succinct Black Isle sagacity, ‘In December if you don’t get it done before lunch, you’re buggered!’

  Little wonder the badgers stay curled up underground for up to ten days at a stretch. One animal we monitored carefully with stealthcams all winter chose to emerge only as far as the sett entrance, sniff the cold, wet wind and turn back to bed. Even when we put out tempting food for him he would stray only a few feet from the sett to reach it before shuffling back. Yet, for a naturalist, one of the joys of early snows is the chance to read the land and its wildlife in a way you can only dream about until that first tell-tale dusting. Snow brings a new dimension of awareness, a brief window into the other world, the world of animals abroad and of life unseen and uncharted for the rest of the year.

  Last night’s was well predicted. The council gritter came through in the early morning and did its stuff; well before dawn I could see its amber flashing light on the glen road in the distance. An inch and a half at most – nothing, really – but I couldn’t wait to get out. It had fallen wet, not powdery, deep enough to take a full print, and the temperature hovering at zero had just clinched its sharp edges, preventing any melt – perfect tracking snow. It made that rubbery crunch as I trod, packing fast into the tread of my boots.

  It is the silence of mornings like this that always grabs me, makes me stand and listen. It is as though the world has stopped spinning for a moment and everything is still. The birds, those few that are left through the cold months, are also silent. I have to stand for several minutes before I hear the thin seep-ing of goldcrests high above me in a Douglas fir. Then a cock blackbird comes hurtling through, heading for the bird table. He lands with a chuckle, ebony tail erect and his tangerine bill flaring in the new light, like a struck match.

  December is not a month for birds. We have the tits, of course, the busy blues, the bossy greats and the cheeky coals. They all visit the bird feeders and tables together in a flutter of tiny wings, tolerating each other, but only just. Our resident robins come too, prattling and ticking, rather than singing, saving their energy to fight off the cold. The common woodpeckers of the north, the greater spotteds, decked in their livery of black and white and red, like a guided missile, slice through the cold air in an undulating bee-line for the suspended peanut feeder. The woodpeckers always bring a touch of style and regimental sharpness to the group as they cling vertically to the wire. Recently a cock pheasant has been striding in to peck and scratch under the feeders. He doesn’t belong here and won’t stay long, but his extravagant Oriental glamour makes me smile. I’m not out for the birds this morning. I want to see who else has been calling.

  First to the hen run. If we’ve had visitors in the night it will always be to the hens. Over the years I have found the tracks of just about everything with sharp teeth surrounding the wooden hen-house: foxes, badgers, stoats, pine martens, wildcats, otters, weasels, even mink. It must be exasperating for a hungry predator on a night of stinging cold to know that a hot, delicious dinner is only an inch or two away on the other side of slender boards.

  Every once in a while something scores. Usually a pine marten, unless (happily only on rare occasions) one of us forgets to drop the hatch at dusk (Lucy blames me, I her) – then Mr Fox has the time of his life. In the morning headless corpses are strewn all round the paddock, and for weeks afterwards the dogs find straggled hands of feathers, the ragged ends of wings or the odd scaly foot abandoned under dense rhododendrons.

  The pine marten is a different matter, harder to keep out and devastating if he gets in. Martens are intelligent, diligent and dextrous. If one chews his way in under the door, squeezing his liquid body through the gap like toothpaste from a tube, the result is mayhem. Once the killing instinct is triggered, and because he can’t drag a dead hen out through the hole, he fires his frustration and his ripping canines into every last bird. He becomes a terrorist. Mayhem ensues. To open the door at first light is to view Samson’s slaughter of the Philistines. Corpses heaped in every direction. Once it was twenty-seven hens.

  There is extra pathos to a murdered hen. It’s that pale lower eyelid half eclipsing the eye and the slight gape of the beak that does it; the ignominious end to an undignified existence. The majority of hens live lives of witless desperation in batteries, but Lucy’s are the lucky ones, loved and well blessed. A constant cocktail of left-overs from the kitchen is mixed with their corn; let out every morning, tucked up every night, and a half-acre of wormy old paddock to roam and scratch in. But when I’m sent to collect the eggs and I have to sneak my hand in under a hot, fluffy bum, stealing her pride and her only treasures, I feel a clawing sense of guilt, assuaged only by the thought of scrambled egg the colour of dandelions and by convincing myself that the poor bird has neither the sense nor the instinct to comprehend this outrageous exploitation of her most precious assets.

  Not so when the pine marten strikes. Even a hen knows a predator when she sees one. Wild Indian jungle fowl, Gallus gallus, the progenitor of all domestic chickens, have been dreading predators for something close to a hundred and fifty million years since they emerged in the Jurassic as dinosaurs in feathered disguise. There is nothing we can teach them about fear of predators. In that terrible moment of catatonic panic the hen-house flips in an instant from a sanctuary into a bloody death chamber.

  I’ve never witnessed that panic, but I’ve heard it. The cacophony of screaming hens woke me and sent me rushing out, pyjamaed, across the yard to do what little I could. Too late. As I opened the door the marten shot out between my legs and vanished into the darkness. It was years ago and I can’t remember now how many survived, but only one or two. The rest lay twitching and flapping in the sawdust as if they had been electrocuted.

  *  *  *

  This morning, before the lie-abed sun stirred, I circled the hen-house slowly, carefully placing my feet so as not to blot out the tell-tale prints. The day rose around me, pale and silent. The pine marten had called, all right, all round, up over the nest box lids and onto the felted roof. Searching . . . searching . . . longing for the chink of a gap he could work at – to no avail, I’m glad to report. The prints are immaculate. I can see all five toes and the rosebud curve of the centre pad, claws like punctuation marks dotting each toe. I see where he leaped up onto the nest box lid . . . along it . . . and then long scratches, like etched runes, as he sprang up again, as agile as a squirrel, across the roof.

  I try to imagine his every move. I can read the pauses, see the head rise to look around, the front pads pressing further in – martens are as constantly on the qui vive as a nervous meerkat. I see where he has risen onto his hind legs, intelligent pointed little face testing the air, his long tail faintly feathering the snow behind him, then bounding on in the sinuous, looping pace that so characterises all
martens. I guess at the time spent, probably only a minute and a half, ninety seconds of fiercely focused scrutiny, before he headed off again to check out the next best chance of supper.

  A fox has been here too, but earlier, because the marten tracks have crossed on top of the fox’s. How much earlier is anyone’s guess. I stand and stare. A dog or a vixen? I wonder. The sun is struggling through, glowing in a sea of mist. The morning spreads in front of me like a vision. The snow begins to sparkle, brimming with new light. A hoodie crow comes rowing across the lightening sky, sees me and swerves away. As he goes he calls out, once, twice, three times in a mocking cry, rough-edged with contempt. The fox prints weave a thin line across the lawn, purposeful, but not hurrying. They are bright-rimmed, shining with reflected sun, and dark-shadowed in the sunken pads, bringing them into sharp relief.

  He stopped at the base of a large Oriental spruce and scraped at the ground, turning a small stone – a beetle perhaps? Then urinated by lifting a leg – ha! This was a dog fox, not a vixen. He skirted the hen run – tracks now crisscrossed with those of the marten – as I guess he does every night, snow or no snow, so he knows very well that if the hatch is shut it’s not his lucky night. So he passed on, across the paddock and over the broken fence, rear pads side by side, pressed deeper as he springs, touching just once with a scuff on the top rail, then onto the old farm road. I curse silently: I have often noticed those scuff marks before, scratches in the lichen and the green protococcus algae on the rail, and wondered what had made them. Rooks, I had guessed, wrongly. I should have thought fox: I knew this was his circuit, his private byway. I had often caught a snatch of his vulpine scent, as rich as pickle, just here beside the fence. A thought passes through: perhaps the spurt of effort for springing up releases extra scent, or could it be that, because he is raised as he leaps onto the fence rail, closer to the human nose, he laces another layer of air with molecules of animal musk, an invisible stratum that lingers in the static air, wafting like smoke? Hmm. I had never linked the scent with the scuff marks until now. I set off up the hill, following his trail and feeling a little foolish.

  He’s not walking; he’s trotting in a leisurely but springy pace. His oval pads are evenly spaced and almost in a straight line, but not quite, like the repeating pattern of pansies on a quilt. ‘Here he went’ is what I see and I must conjure the rest out of familiarity. Out of film and pictures in my head, out of long-ago glimpses, out of chance encounters, out of that electrochemical album in my brain. Images filed away in my pre-frontal cortex, where he is now and where I want to fix him in absolute concentration. But imagination is not enough on its own. Like Ted Hughes’s ‘The Thought Fox’, I want to think fox and think this fox right into my head.

  Cold, delicately as the dark snow

  A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;

  Two eyes serve a movement, that now

  And again now, and now, and now

  Sets neat prints into the snow . . .

  For a while he sticks to human paths, the old farm track to the top fields and the moor, as though he is travelling somewhere particular. It’s known. I’m sure he does this regularly, relying on opportunism and luck to deliver, or perhaps he’s en route; perhaps he has somewhere in mind; perhaps to the relative warmth of the pinewood beside the loch where foxes know they will find beetles, where there will be good hunting. Somewhere I can’t know; something not my business.

  As a teenager in the sixties, I used to turn out, like most country boys, to watch the hounds of the local Seavington Hunt, which met outside the Rose and Crown in the Somerset village near my home. The master and hunt servants in pink jackets with mustard collars, breath pluming from the horses’ nostrils on a frosty morning and the hounds milling among the crowd. It was a social convention, a ritual mingling of farmers large and small and their many labourers of those days, of gamekeepers, trappers, landowners and gentry, of unshaven old country yokels in ragged raincoats, leaning on sticks, pipes clenched in their teeth under greasy caps, pork-pie hats or battered brown trilbies, weather-tanned faces all smiling toothily, all amiably chatting, all excited at the prospect of a good day.

  Every now and again a hound would stray too far and a whipper-in would call him back, ‘Thrasher, git orn in!’ Their riders immaculately turned out, handsome, heavy-boned horses with huge glossy flanks champed impatiently at their bits, froth dribbling to the ground. Leather boots and saddles creaked through air thick with the tang of hoof oil, Stockholm tar and the rich stable savoury of fresh horse dung. Steel shoes stamped impatiently as the more excitable horses fidgeted, anxious to be off. ‘Steady, Damsel, steady now!’

  It was colourful and friendly and had about it an air of old country stability and of things unchanged and unchallenged in a pre-mechanised landscape of ponds and ditches, of hand-laid hedges around small fields and cows still milked by hand. Its people all knew each other and seemed to me to belong to the countryside in those days, to be immersed in it and shaped by it, no one out of place. The master called for ‘Hounds please!’ The horn sliced through the gossip and, to the clatter of shod hoofs on tarmac, the pack moved off.

  I remember leaning on a gate next to an old character in leather gaiters and a tatty serge jacket with a collar ripped to the ticking that might once have been a postal or railway uniform. In silence we watched the horses streaming across a hillside two fields away on the far side of a little valley. We could hear the thin wail of the horn and the belling of hounds somewhere in a deep wooded covert to our left. A shout went up from some foot-followers in the field immediately below us. The fox had broken cover and was streaking across open ground, heading right. I jumped up and made to run off in the direction it was taking.

  ‘Hold ’ard, boy!’ the old man called out, waving his pipe and pointing its stem to the field. ‘’E’s comin’ back.’

  I stopped. ‘What d’ you mean?’ I asked, puzzled.

  ‘’E’s runnin’ up wind to lead ’em on. ’E’ll double back in a minute, you’ll see. ’E’ll come right by ’ere.’ He jabbed his pipe at the gate and the lane. I waited and watched. The fox crossed the field and sped on out of sight. Just as I was wishing I had ignored the advice and followed the fox, I glimpsed him again as he turned along a dense thorn hedge, ran swiftly up to the field beside the lane, then turned again downwind, heading back towards our gate. He passed only a few feet away, that fox, a russet streak with a bright white tip to his tail, hearts racing, his and mine, his fired with adrenalin, mine with all the pulsating excitement of the moment. Then he stopped, looked back, black ears tilted to the yelping hounds in the valley below, and silently slid away through the hedge and into the lane. He turned downhill and sped off out of my sight.

  That old countryman knew the ways of the hunted fox. Years of watching had taught him what tricks foxes employ when pressed: doubling back, crossing water to diffuse scent, climbing haystacks, even jumping onto the back of moving farm trailers unbeknown to the tractor driver – the tales are endless and often tall. It’s how they came to earn the reputation of sly and cunning. I was glad to learn from him and the fox that day.

  It’s easy to say, ‘I know the ways of the fox. I know what he’ll do.’ The old man did know: he knew exactly what the fox was likely to do because he’d seen it all so many times before. I respected him then and I respect him now, but it would be wrong to suggest he knew the natural history of the fox. We are so often arrogant in our androcentric analysis of the world around us. What we see we think we understand and we seldom give a thought for what we don’t see. We piece together our glimpses, like a jigsaw cut to fit the image of our own perceptions. Then we give it a name – sly or cunning – and it sticks.

  In my lifetime science has come barrelling in, grabbed the knowledge and taken over the name-giving. Our lives have moved away from the farm gate and the hedge. ‘Field’ wisdom has given way to ‘field guide’ wisdom. We look it up or we Google it, blindly accepting the one-dimensional Wiki-wisdom as gospel and al
l we need to know. Oh, yes, they mate in January, gestation is seven and a half weeks and they have an average of five young, called cubs, in a burrow known as an earth. They have a weight and a length nose to tail, a range and a territory and a distribution map. They’re omnivorous or carnivorous or dimorphic or polygamous or double-brooded or something-or-other else. It’s all very matter-of-fact and a bit smug, but not how the fox sees it – not at all.

  Every once in a while I’ve come across a naturalist who really does know at a level that defies science, often dismissed as ‘amateur’ or ‘circumstantial evidence’. The late Eric Ashby, who lived in the New Forest and captured astonishing (for the 1960s) film footage of foxes, badgers, hares and deer, was one of those. He was a shy man with a private passion for wildlife. I met him only once. I went to interview him for a magazine article and walked through the forest with him for a couple of hours one afternoon. He impressed me in a way I have never forgotten. He possessed an almost palpable whole-awareness of his surroundings as though he had become part of the woods, or the woods had somehow become absorbed into his bloodstream. His outstanding humility and modesty were also the characteristics of his work as a naturalist. ‘Never presume anything,’ he told me, with a wry smile. ‘You’ll almost always be wrong.’

  Eric gleaned his knowledge by dogged legwork and with the patience of a gravestone. If it needed a hundred hours of silent observation to find something out, then a hundred hours he’d give it. Another of these was the late Eileen Soper, wildlife artist and author of several wildlife books, charmingly illustrated with her own drawings. She took me badger-watching when I was a schoolboy and introduced me to what I can only describe as another way of being human.