by Rob Cowen
Fringing the ditch are twelve snow-rooted silver birches. They look like apparitions, hard edged but soft-skinned, the luminosity of winter landscape distilled in their cream-russet trunks. The fox thinks briefly of his den; then forgets everything. The rook hops about the lip of the scrape, bending closer, twitching, and ducking back in feathery leaps. Others prowl too, a silky crow and a pair of grey-hooded jackdaws. Through a tangled web of purple birch twigs the firmament changes as the sun becomes a rim on the south-western skyline. Clouds gilded by the dying orb hesitate for a moment in a forget-me-not-blue sky, before it changes to the hue of ripe wheat. Amber comes next, before daffodil and rose, then everything assumes the dark crimson of field campion. This stretches the furthest, reflecting in the ice and snow, turning them bloody. Fading, it leaves only the husks of trees and hills, houses and farms and the smouldering black stems of wind turbines on the horizon. The last colour is the shrinking topaz of the fox’s eyes as his breath dissolves into the darkness.
A month passes, maybe longer, before I find his body. It is a bright, fiery morning, cold and sharp, with snow still on the ground and trees as I wander west from the viaduct, down towards the Bachelor Gardens Sewage Works. I have half a mind to photograph the river, which is shining like tin foil under a climbing sun. Near a cluster of silver birch I pick my way around a ditch overgrown with bramble. Clambering over the last vestiges of a fence, I smell it – a strong, sweet, rotten smell – and glance down to my right. It takes a moment to make sense of the mess of body lying at the bottom of the scratched trench. The fox is sagged, sodden, blackened, caved-in, his back legs stripped to bones and still trussed up in wire. It’s heartbreaking to see and made worse by guilt: I’d almost forgotten him in these intervening weeks. I searched for him after he disappeared, looking in different places and at different times, but in truth I knew his work was done. I am beyond the crossing point now; the edge-land is open to me in a way I couldn’t have understood before. Following him has deepened the map, unfolding it, throwing it into relief. Stories are within reach. But the human world has been pulling at me too. Rosie has moved up from London. Work is picking up. Other exciting news has thawed my loneliness. And now, looking at the fox’s sad, skeletal shape below, I don’t see psychopomp or guide, but a wild animal again. His face is a shrunken and squashed mask, all life pecked out of it; his claws are broken from trying to tear himself free. That flame fur has long since leached into the earth.
When I was twenty-four, I was rushed into hospital for an emergency operation. Three hours later I woke, still blurry with anaesthetic, to find the surgeon who saved my life standing at the foot of the bed, holding the appendix in a clear tube. ‘You’re a new man now,’ he said. ‘I’m giving you back to the world.’ It was a strange moment and a strange turn of phrase, which is probably why it has stayed with me. Seeing the fox elicits a similar sensation, like a part of me removed. At once an ending and a beginning.
Sun rakes the edge-land. New light over this now-familiar ground. It feels so long since the world provided any heat that I put away my notebook and lie down, using my pack as a pillow. Beside me is a patch of coltsfoot, an inadvertent little graveside bouquet. Its flowers, which bloom before the leaves, are the nourishing yellow of free-range egg yolks – an assertion of life. And all around, the sun bleaches buds of birch and hawthorn, its elevation such that it seems to spotlight everything: the edges of stems and stalks, a passing pigeon’s wings, the rooks yak-yakking in the meadow, a lone bumblebee. The curtains have been ripped opened and the dustsheets dragged off. Lying here with the warmth full on my face and the drip-drip of ice and snow thawing in quickening rhythms, I can almost feel the earth turning.
ULTRASOUND
There are owls everywhere I look. Cut from felt and sewn onto cushions, plasticised and stuck on car windows, printed on clothes, curtains and lampshades, encased in children’s keyrings. Walk along any high street and they line up in the furniture and fashion stores, turning retailers into cartoon bird sanctuaries where hawk, eagle, tawny, barn, snowy and great grey owls mass behind the glass. There’s even one in the hospital. Between two blue fabric boards pinned with notices and leaflets, the local primary school has decorated a section of the Antenatal Clinic’s wall with cut-out animals. It’s an odd menagerie: tigers, elephants, lions, a giraffe, a fox, a red squirrel, a hedgehog, and then what looks to be a tawny owl. I say ‘looks’, because it is not much more than a splodge of brown and cream poster paint, but two wide, front-facing eyes give it away. Little hands have captured a subtlety that fashion designers and toy makers usually miss: an owl’s face is curiously human.
After tingling our hands with the gel dispenser at the door, Rosie gives her name to a lady at the desk. ‘Your twelve-week scan, is it, love?’ she asks. ‘Take a seat and someone will be with you soon.’
We sit on a line of smart, red chairs opposite the solitary owl as it stares out from the branches of its broccoli tree. Our fingers are entwined under the handbag in Rosie’s lap, wrists touching, pulses dancing in nervy excitement. She sips water occasionally, to try to quell the ebb and flow of morning sickness. For good reason the Antenatal Clinic is a long stretch from the tobacco fog of smokers at the entrance and the baked-goods and coffee smells of the hospital café. You have to follow a red line down numerous shimmering square corridors. Once inside, this ward seems softer than the rest of the hospital, lighter and more relaxed – all peaches and pine. This is the good end of the human journey, I suppose; a place where the body conforms to its predetermined trimesters and where pain has a purpose at least. And there are plenty of reminders of the prize if all goes well: posters to promote breastfeeding show happy mothers cradling cute babies; cherubic faces crawl across white pillows in adverts for local photography studios.
Had the clinic’s windows faced the outside world rather than an enclosed courtyard, we might have seen the bright, cold morning and its sky of plate-glass blue. Instead, the waiting area’s luminosity comes from wire-waffled squares of fluorescence in a tiled ceiling. Wooden toys stand on low tables by racks of tatty magazines that I’m apprehensive about touching. So we sit and look at the owl, stroking each other’s wrists with our thumbs and listening to the muffled beeps, buzzes and squeaks of shoes striding across disinfected vinyl.
The sonographer, Rachel, is pretty with hair tied back and wearing a fitted white tunic with blue bands about her arms. She carries a clipboard and a warm smile, but is clearly up against it. ‘Would you like to follow me, please?’
We do, to a small but bright room, just enough space for the equipment, a bed, sink, storage and the obligatory multicoloured bins with toxic warnings. It smells clean, surgical, like the hand gel at the door. Rosie lies on the freshly papered trolley bed and rolls up her top, as directed. Rachel turns a pole on the room’s Venetian blind, plunging us into dark, and seats herself at the ultrasound’s kidney-shaped plastic control board. With its big buttons, detachable bits and ergonomic curves it looks strangely childish, a Fisher-Price ‘My First Ultrasound’ toy. That is until it fires up and the screens come alive. Serious beeps and lights. Rachel takes control like a pilot at a console. She looks back at me as I stand nervously, holding our jackets and Rosie’s bag.
‘You might want to sit down.’
Yes. Take your seat. Relax. Prepare for the in-flight movie.
I hold Rosie’s hand as Rachel squirts a big circle of thick, bluish gel over her stomach. ‘Sorry it’s cold,’ she says as Rosie hoots. But it is excitement, not discomfort. From where she’s lying, she can’t see the monitors: Rachel has both of them turned towards her. I imagine this is in case of problems with the foetus; they spare the parents the emotional connection that would be forged by the act of laying eyes upon a life. But I’m tall and nosy so I lean back my chair and get the first views as the torch-like transducer probe nuzzles its way around my wife’s belly, ranging, listening.
Black and silver storm clouds tumble past, swelling and contracting like
squeezed balloons. It takes a second for Rachel to locate the uterus, a throbbing mercurial ring, and then hover over the placenta. She operates the probe expertly, changing direction, clicking its sides and zooming in for a better view, closing on the blackness of the amniotic sac. What I see is even more black and silver circles extending, opening, parting and joining, making shapes. There are all sorts of landscapes forming from Rosie’s workings; we’re flying over the Lake District’s craggy northern fells, winter moors, domed Salisbury hills and above the moonlit Thames – all the places we’ve been together. She carries them inside her. Rosie is watching my face; I squeeze her hand and smile. Then, when I look back at the screen, the snowy pixels have arranged themselves again, forming, for a second, the distinct face of a tawny owl.
‘Well?’ Rosie whispers. ‘What can you see?’
You don’t usually find tawny owls (Strix aluco) in hospitals, although their habitats are changing. They like to roost in woods and the high crevices or branch cavities found in old, deciduous trees, like oak. In our endless skirmishes over land, woods continue to disappear and the felling of dead, hollowed trunks has seen a denuding of traditional nest sites. But being a year-round resident, tawnies hate to concede ground and the stability of their numbers in the UK is down to a willingness to take alternative accommodation in order to hold territory: purpose-built owl boxes; squirrel dreys; unattended crow, magpie or heron nests; even dilapidated buildings. As a student in Leeds I once heard a male calling from a windowless warehouse near a motorway on the long six-mile walk home from a party. Mostly they seem to love the abandoned places, the unmanaged islands where man has temporarily laid off interfering and allowed functional ecosystems to thrive – forests, cemeteries, churchyards and, almost always, edge-lands.
I’ve been watching a pair of owls down in the wood for weeks. About four weeks, to be precise. And it’s probably truer to say listening for rather than watching, as being nocturnal and soundless in flight, they’ve been almost impossible to see. No matter. Their calls sneaked inside me, lingering in my ears as doggedly as fag smoke used to hang about your clothes after a night in a pub. I first began hearing their duets in the wood when I was out looking for the fox. At times they were frightening, like the panicked, gurgled screams of shipwrecked sailors drifting in a black ocean; at others they were the cooing comfort-sounds made by a new mother. Each call carried the natural reverb of the river gorge, lending them a peculiar ‘Wall of Sound’ sonic resonance, like the harmony part on ‘Be My Baby’. Roomy. Spacey. And those shrill, terrifying shrieks and low, loving hoots kept me company at night, growing ever louder in my re-ordering world.
Horizons began to widen in early February. They always do. It is something about the lifting light and sky. Days no longer seem so abbreviated, in such a mad rush to reach their conclusion. Even in the architectural confines of central Harrogate one afternoon, I saw hundreds of high, hollow rectangular clouds stretching off indefinitely with the bumpy texture of old oak bark, filling the air with a psychedelic mauve. Look up, I wanted to say, but no one seemed to notice. People moved from shops and offices to cars bearing mobile phones or stood bored and smoking, playing Candy Crush as they waited for buses. The evening suggested limitless potential, so I walked home past a row of once-pollarded ash growing wild behind a high garden wall. Birds were on my mind already. Robins, wrens and blue tits were out of hiding and contesting territory with such fierce beauty that their calls drowned out the passing cars. Held in their brief tractor-beam of song, I tried to follow each bird’s movements as, every few seconds, one flashed up to the wooden mouldings of a Victorian gable, then dived back into the fray. The sky bled into a soft coral at the crossing point and the black, broomstick-tips of trees along the old railway fanned like capillaries of the heart against it. It was an unearthly window, that changing of the guard – cold, clear day to bitter, black night.
By half past five the light was little more than a blaze of red through the cruciform trees. Dark took the gorge unchallenged. Fallen branches were brittle as antlers but little repositories of life spotted every living shoot of tree. Rock-hard, egg-shaped and bright green, each was an assurance of spring, the promise of life lying dormant. Buds dotted a nearby oak branch. These were different: rounded, rust-coloured and massed in clumps at the end of each meandering twig. A tall beech had pointed copper arrowheads growing from its elegant curved boughs. Perhaps it was just the illusion of their fawn hue, but the leaning pines by the river seemed to retain the faint heat of the day so I hung about their trunks as the last glass bottle-blown notes of a woodpigeon faltered and ceased. Then the river glimmered with the echo of the owls. That extraordinary, aching call. Except it’s not ‘call’, singular. The famous tu-whit, tu-whoo of children’s stories is actually two birds communicating. The female utters less a tu-whit and more a ke-wick, but even this seems a poor transposing of her brief, piercing cry. Similarly, the male’s hoot is not so much a tu-whoo, it is more a syncopated hu … hu-hulo-hooooo. Warmer than it reads. What the simplified reductions miss are the dexterous parts, the deft little trembling descent at the end like a folk balladeer adding emotional gravitas.
Such vocal attention to detail is hardly surprising. Sound is everything to tawny owls. They exist in loose communities but there are strict rules about spacing and tenancy. Territories lock together as neatly as housing plots delineated by the Land Registry, but having no sense of smell (or Land Registry), theirs is a predominately aural world. Calls are territorial assertions – this is my hunting ground; this is my mate – and like a catchy chorus, they are infectious. Hooting leads to hooting. In the pauses between them, I could hear the faint echoes of other pairs coming from downstream and from the west towards the meadow and town. I imagined the vast linguistic conversations that must flow out, around and across our night-drugged world, the silvery webs of chatter via which disputes are settled and breeding determined.
Books tell us that precisely in the same way we can recognise a change in tone in the voices of friends or family on the phone, owls living in proximity know one another through minute differences in vocalisations. Should a male fail to respond or its call sound weak, word will get around and its territory quickly snatched in a coup of chasing and hooting. But their singing is erotic too and, in established pairs, a male’s crooning stimulates ovulation. The two I could hear had almost certainly paired in the autumn and were probably well into the feathery tangles of mating. Or perhaps even past that, relaxing through post-coital rituals of preening, rest and roost, pressed up flank to flank by their nest site. There’s a softening in behaviour after copulation, a shift away from the talon-flashing late-night flirtations towards mutual trust and friendliness. Maybe the calls I could hear weren’t dirty talk; they’d moved on to rowing about kids, mortgages and money.
Although I didn’t see or hear it move, the male’s calls were suddenly directly above me in the black crown of a pine. I’d never heard an owl as clearly or closely, at the level of valves and throat vibrato, of air being worked to an owl’s purpose, but I couldn’t stay much longer. My own mate was calling; Rosie had been at home in bed for two days with sickness and exhaustion. Now she wanted feeding. The text request was unequivocal: ‘please bring pizza’. It didn’t sound much like the flu to me.
A coincidence: snow fell the exact moment I learned I was to be a father. And in that moment everything changed. Entranced by a blue line emerging in the little white window of a pregnancy test, we looked up to find snowflakes pouring into the street as if tipped from the back of a truck, obscuring where the horizon meets the grey roof slates of the terraces opposite. Then we lay together on our bed and watched the snowstorm form. Squalls of silent white swarmed the glass then backed away; flakes doubled in quantity, thickening into conjoined masses like cells dividing. The town was soundless; traffic frightened and slowed. Remember all of this, I told myself. Remember this ethereal quiet and the lines of melting snow streaking down the glass. Remember the heat of Rosi
e’s happy tears dampening my shirt.
After a while, a burst of laughter from guests downstairs popped our bubble. Suddenly our house was filled with life. Friends from London had booked to come up weeks earlier before any of this was on the cards. It was too early to tell them so we pretended our giddiness was down to the snow and suggested a walk in the blizzard. Half an hour later we were wrapped up and battling down Bilton Lane past houses that looked offended by the covering, like pensioners on their way to church unexpectedly caught up in an impromptu foam party. Cars were crippled. The wind rushed low and fast from the north and sent waves of snow upwards so that the storm appeared to be emanating from the edge-land. A sky of white tracer and the land beyond thick and grey as putty. It soon reached its zenith, though, and waned as we reached the crossing point. The familiar topography beyond formed slowly, as if through a demisting shower screen, then the low clouds flared with sun and evaporated into sky. Suddenly, in every direction, there were two tones: the linen-white of fresh fall and the coal-black of under-tree and under-hedge. Chaffinches struck up from hazels as we squeaked up the lane through virgin drifts. From the high rise of the fields the sun spreading over the distant reaches of the landscape made my eyes ache, but I fancied I could see further than ever, an effect wrought by this great levelling. All bumpy ground was smoothed; there was a new coat of paint. Everything clean and clear.
We let the others go ahead and stopped at a gap in the hawthorns at the holloway’s entrance. The edge-land was still new to Rosie and the view had rooted her to the spot. I put my arms around her, over her stomach, and my head on her shoulder so our faces were side by side looking at the same things – the lone oak, the razor-cut line of hills, the pylons, the smothered steeples, domes and towers of town. My mind raced with the power of nature inside and out; joy swelling and fluttering my stomach, happy as a man can naturally be. But it came with worry. I couldn’t shake the thought of how easily things can go wrong. ‘Wrong’ is not the right word, right and wrong being human concepts; what I mean is the sense of how things sometimes turn out differently from what we hope. Nature is impervious to wishes. Cells fail. Life wanes just as suddenly as a snowstorm. I said none of this, of course, but stood there taking everything in. What I remember most is the sound. The sheer, beautiful absence of it.