Tor Falcon: Diary of a Wild Place

April, From Beginning To End.

As we walked between fields of sheep, our game was to find the newest lamb. Just as we turned towards the fell a second twin slithered out of it’s mother, a messy miracle, all wet ears and legs, within a minute almost standing. We marvelled at the extraordinary triumph of birth. These crumpled new beginnings all clean and unwritten. And we left them with our hopes and luck for the future, trying to forget the lamb last night, with it’s eyes pecked out by crows.

Half way down, through the larch wood we spied the main footpath to the lake, alive with a procession of weekend walkers. Not wanting to join them we sat and watched. First an enormous wolf hound, scuffing his feet next to a bent old man. Next, a matching middle aged couple with a springy pair of fluffy golden retrievers. Then, someone running with a wet collie. And finally a young family with two terrier puppies, making slow progress and a lot of noise. The seven ages of man with a sort of evolutionary trail of dogs.

We crossed the river at the head of the lake and skirted round to the bottom of Flass Wood. This ancient oak woodland, once coppiced for industrial charcoal burning but now left to it’s own devices is swollen with moss. Two or three foot thick in places it surges over boulders and up tree trunks. New ferns, older than time, uncoiling, wood sorrel, leaves still folded and a bright white skeleton of…… of what? A snake? Just a perfect curved back bone and a head. The size of the head thankfully ruled out a snake. Eventually we found the pelvis, the shoulder blades, ribs and legs. It was the mangled remains of a fox. Curled up, asleep forever on it’s soft bed of moss.

We had started with creation, seen evolution, and come to the end of time in just three hours.

January, How To Get Rid Of A Cow. (That’s Blocking Your View)

As the cows slowly make their way across the field, my dogs warily inch closer to me. By the time the cows have arrived the dogs are tightly wound round me. Tails and feet spilling awkwardly over my paper and pencils. We have become a three headed, six legged creature. Three pairs of eyes covering every angle. One part warm bliss, two parts nerves, we wait while the cows blow and burp and breath over us. Eventually they’ll tire and begin to drift away, all except one who will remain, standing right in front of us. Much as I adore the closeness of my dogs and even the company of the cows, there’s a limit to my patience when I’m in the middle of a drawing. And the best way I’ve found of getting rid of a cow, is to start drawing it. There’s something about the intense gaze of human eyes that unsettle animals. Imagine, you’re used to loosing yourself in the vague, soft depths of your fellow bovines’ dreamy brown eyes, when suddenly you’re caught in the glare of a pair of human eyes. Small and white. Utterly alien. Horrible. But don’t think that just staring will do. No, you have really look at the cow. Notice the position of the ear in relation to the eye. Look at the length of each eyelash…. And the cow will move uncomfortably… Plot the angle between a nostril and the outer edge of the eye…. He’ll be really twitchy by now….One more look, and he’ll be off, keen to get back to the safety of the middle distance. Proof of the fast, effectiveness of this remedy can be seen in the scrappiness of my little drawing.

July, Crunching Butterflies

I am standing by a bramble bush in the sun. I’m trying to draw the hundreds of butterflies on and around it. My two lurchers are chasing each other round and round, burning off some energy after a long day spent lying about. I’m looking at the simple five petal flower of the bramble. It’s as unshowy as the butterflies that are flocking to it. I remember a programme I watched about how insects see. It said that they can see ultra violet light (which we can’t) and it showed a scene a bit like the one I’m looking at, in ultra violet light. Instantly it was unrecognisable. The drab brown butterfly with the pale edges to the tips of it’s wings was now purple and black striped, the plain pink flower was orange and covered in silvery dots. With the lights back to normal you couldn’t see, even the faintest trace of these other, ultra violet, markings. I’m in a world of winged semaphore. Of lepidoptera invisible ink. Silent Morse-code. Glinting flashes and pulses. Signals with urgent meaning. Imagine what it’s like to be in command of the entire light spectrum. To be able to bend it and reflect it at your will.

A butterfly’s experience of here, in this field, right now, is so profoundly different from mine. And that melodious blackbird singing above our heads is having another different, blackbird reality, and the butterfly and I are experiencing him and his singing differently. The butterfly, the blackbird and I, we none of us have the truth of this place, we all have a little part of it. Like the compound eye of an insect, each of our realities is an angle on the lens. All together, they make up the whole.

And then my reverie is broken by the crash of the dogs as they career into the bramble bush and collapse at my feet, panting horribly loudly. The butterflies take off in fright and I stand still, waiting for them to settle. I’m trying to draw the jerky fluttering of a Ringlet over there. Slinky follows my gaze, jumps up, and in one bound…. crunch, he’s eaten it! A prism of sunlight, scratchily (I hope) descending his gullet into eternal darkness.