At the Water's Edge. John Lister-Kaye
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First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2010
by Canongate Books
Copyright © John Lister-Kaye, 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted
‘Crow’ and ‘An Otter’ by Ted Hughes. From Collected Poems © The Estate
of Ted Hughes and reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their
permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for
any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections
that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 890 4
Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,
Grangemouth, Stirlingshire
www.meetatthegate.com
for
Magnus Magnusson
in gratitude
‘Wealth dies, kinsmen die, a man himself must likewise die. But one thing I know which never dies – world-fame, if justly earned.’
– Odin, in ‘Hávamál’ (‘Words of the High One’), from the Sæmundar Edda (Old Icelandic mythological poems)
‘Every once in a while we all need to get out, to give ourselves up to a favourite wild landscape, to explore and experience and to wonder. We should do this in every season and all weathers, by day and by night. We should touch and smell and listen. We should absorb moonlight on water, feel the wind in our hair, and discover the other creatures with which we share the world. We should be forcing ourselves to reconnect with wild nature and our origins. We need to do this before it’s too late.’
Dr Jeff Watson, scientist and conservationist,
1952–2007
Contents
Preface
Postscript
References, Further Reading and Biblioraphy
Preface
January 9th The frost’s sunlit sparkle that opened our year was quickly banished by a shroud of grey. The nights have been raw and the days burdened with icy drizzle. For a week we have shivered in the damp of winter chill. I have left my desk and my fireside only reluctantly, briefly venturing out for my Jack Russell terriers, Ruff and Tumble, and always without conviction. Even they have been happy to scuttle back indoors. But today is different. At last a troubled sun has shouldered through, with bright lances of green striping the river fields, drawing me to my study window. Mist hangs over the river but the sun’s courage is calling me out. It’s not quite ten o’clock.
I left the dogs curled in their kitchen basket, pulled on my old jacket, my boots, hat and gloves, grabbed my binoculars and stick and set out on the circular walk I have done more times than I can count. I turned up the Avenue between the tall trunks of ancient limes and horse chestnuts, kicking the drifts of leaves across the path just for the reassuring swishing sound they make.
My walk takes me gently uphill, northwards with the sun at my back towards high, rocky crags and then turning to face the lurching clouds of the Atlantic west by following the Avenue’s parallel lines of lofty trees, precisely planted by Victorian landscape gardeners. Now, more than a century later, in the reassuring way that nature always does in the end, the trees have broken free. The old drive they lined where carriage wheels once crunched on raked gravel is long disused, lost beneath a blanket of leaf mould, and their stretching, moss-sleeved arms have mingled overhead, forming a tunnel of bosky shade. Only the rigid spacing of the trunks reveals their hand.
In the lower branches of one of the limes a spider’s web caught my eye. It arched from twig to twig in a mist of fine lace. It was strikingly beautiful, so much so that I stopped to look more closely at the intricacy of the design. It was studded with beads of dew. The weak, low-angled sunlight gleamed from tiny prisms, incidentally distilled from the night’s cold air, an unnecessary adornment tipped in for good measure. The spider herself was invisible. She had withdrawn to a bark crevice, where she waited, with one foreleg fingering the pulse of a silken cord to alert her when her trap was sprung. I couldn’t resist jiggling the web with a straw, imitating a moth struggling in its tacky mesh. She was fooled, but only for a second. She rushed out to rope her victim round and deliver the poisoned bite to paralyse her prey. Halfway to my straw she realised her mistake, stopped, seemed to think for a second and then returned to her lair. I smiled. That spider was smart. I knew I couldn’t fool her twice.
That net was a killing machine – I knew that well enough – but that’s not all I saw, nor what I chose to write in my journal. What had stopped me was the beauty of the morning caught in the dewy eye of her device. I was witness to its delicacy, its symmetry and its inspirational cartwheel design. It was