Tor Falcon: Diary of a Wild Place

A thrush is singing. I don’t know how I know it’s a thrush because I’ve never heard a song so strange, so exciting, so hair raisingly, knee tremblingly exotic in my life. It’s coming from the top of the big ash tree. Cutting through the evening drizzle, clear and high, as pure as oxygen. Quivering, fluting, tik tik tiking. Over and over and over. Honeying the blood in my veins. It’s electrifying me out of my long winter torpor. It quite literally seems to be heralding creation.

“Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!

Listen!

Open your eyes. Look!

Because the magic is beginning beginning beginning”

It’s minus nine, and all I can think about is my fingers. Stinging and brittle, I’m sure they must have fallen off. But as I hurry home to check, I’m jolted out of my self pity by a barn owl. I’ve noticed it all day and all night recently. Motionless on fence posts, then fluttering and pale, curving round and falling into grass, over and over again. I can feel the cold emptiness of it’s hunger. And as I rush through the freezing gloaming and into the certain warmth of my house and the sure knowledge of a hot meal, this bird’s silent tenaciousness shames me. We two creatures, living here, sharing the same time, this space. One, with nothing but it’s wits. Living entirely by it’s own efforts. Leaving no mark on the world (except a few less mice). The other, with everything, but only able to exist by hanging onto the coat tails of human civilisation. A passive receiver of thousands of years of human effort. Without it, would I be able to do even the most basic things? How would I clothe myself? Feed my family, or build a house? I can do none of that, I’ve been made useless by luxury. I’m suddenly uneasy at the easiness of my life and I’m humbled by the barn owl’s singular determination, by it’s not needing and it’s complete lack of interest in me.

I love maps. Ordinance Survey maps, crinkled with contour lines. Ancient maps in museums with obligatory sea monster. Road maps with branches of Ikea marked. I have maps in my head too. Maps of places I know, full of colours and shapes. And maps of places I don’t know but I’ve imagined.

On Sunday morning the snow had laid two new maps over the top of this familiar place. First was a map of every branch on every tree, no twig too small to be included. Everything given equal importance. Nothing in front, nothing behind. Just laid out flat for your eye to travel along. No need ever to end your journey. And the second map is a map of footprints. Each violet mark, part of a ghostly tale from the past, however recent. The meandering rabbit in search of grass, huge back feet in front, front feet behind. The neat pads of a fox, striking out straight across the field, in search of rabbits. The sharp slots of muntjac that slice the snow as they tuck in tight to the bramble bushes. And the slow, splayed toes of a pheasant. You can see his discomfort from the aimless circle he’s trodden. And two otters whose snowy footprints on the ice are surely dancing. But best of all are the minuscule bird feet, hardly a scratch really, with the even fainter print of a wing nearby. And I begin to wonder…. did the snow make contact with that wing in the air and did it fall to the ground as a ready made wing print?…. But I’m getting cold and I decide to walk home, backwards, just to confuse any trackers who come along after me!

The unwelcome arm of the Arctic has been extended to Europe this week. Almost imperceptible at first, it’s touch now feels like a hammer blow. It’s freezing fingers leave nowhere unexplored. It turns liquid solid. Sunlight, which yesterday was broken into a million dancing fragments on the agitated lake is today flatly absorbed by an opaque covering of ice. Soil, usually so yielding is stiff with rigormortis. Woodcock, snipe, rooks have all had to go in search of softer ground. The teal have gone too. Cows don’t move from the hay. Calves lying up next to it are liberally covered in it’s faint warmth by the messy eating of their mothers. Barn owls hunt all day. A heron is the only creature shouting his protest in the biting silence. Dogs curl up in ever tighter balls. And then a mass of bullfinches appear in an empty hedge. As unexpected as ripe tomatoes.