At the Water's Edge. John Lister-Kaye
contracted and the pre-ordained hairline fracture built into its cartilaginous spine suddenly snapped. The blood supply crimped off, the muscles ruptured, the silver scales parted like slates on a shattered roof. It broke as though chopped. It shed the inches it needed least. The body cannot re-grow a tail, but the stump will quickly heal. Tailless, it can still feed and breed and function adequately for long enough to reproduce itself. That’s all that natural selection cares about – one more chance to survive.
So my sun-loving slow worm had played its last hand and won the day. Hitting the grass, it lost no time in disappearing. The kestrel flew off with the tail; I climbed the fence and walked over to the pole. I scoured the long, dead grass, lifted stones and gazed up at the perch above. The slow worm had gone. Its dreams of the sun will never be the same again.
4
King of the Castle
Crow, feeling his brain slip,
Finds his every feather the fossil of a murder.
Who murdered all these?
These living dead, that root in his nerves and his blood
Till he is visibly black?
– Ted Hughes, ‘Crow’s Nerve Fails’
May 12th Regulation has polluted my whisky. The water we drink comes from the loch. The Victorians built a dam to increase its size and piped it to the house and the farm. Before that it came in buckets. Bronze Age children scooped it up in their hands. People have lived here and been drinking the water from this loch for the best part of five thousand years.
The water analysis man who arrives every year with his little sampling bottles tells me comfortingly we have some of the purest water in Europe. But now, suddenly, after all those millennia of drinking and living, it is apparently no good any more. The chemicals are fine: lovely iron and magnesium and other trace minerals shoring us all up; the electrical conductivity is spot on; the mild acidity renders it soft and quick to lather; the bacterial count is nil – not a coliform or an E. coli in sight; no unwanted salts or chlorine, not even a nasty nitrate, but the colour is wrong.
Somebody somewhere else, someone who has never been to the loch, nor perhaps even to the Highlands, has decided that our water looks wrong. Its hazens (whatever they may be – the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary fails to acknowledge them at all) are too high. The Chardonnay-tinted staining that comes with the clouds and the snow and the life-giving rain that gently bleed tiny, suspended particles of peat into the loch from the high moors, and which have graced my bath and my evening whisky for the thirty years I have lived here, is no longer acceptable to someone who doesn’t have to drink it or even see it. ‘You will be required to undertake remedial works,’ insists the letter I have just thrown down in despair. I have another remedy in mind.
It’s the second week of May and I’m escaping again. Some things are better ignored, treated with the contempt they deserve – survival is tough enough without creating problems that don’t exist. The kestrel still burns in my memory’s eye so I’m heading out to see what nature’s wild wheel can uncover today.
It is early. The sun is awake, but still cool, the west wind light. I don’t plan to linger. Sail-white clouds jostle in the marbled sunlight of the morning like club racers. There has been rain in the night and the infusion of leaf mould lifts headily from the scuffles of my boots. I breathe deeply. Last year’s horse chestnut leaves still clutter the path in russet rugs, swirled into low dunes by winter gales. Picking one up, I see that the flesh of the leaf has all but gone, leaving only a filigree of veins and stalk with shards of translucent tissue trapped in the corners like broken glass in a ruined church window.
May’s great trick is movement. It never stays still. No two days are the same, always pressing forward so that yesterday’s images are diffused, atomised in the breathless rush for food, space and light. The new leaf is bolder now; after months of open tracery, shade is arriving to sharpen edges and deepen creases in the land’s complexion. The great tits in the Avenue are silent. I pause to see what’s up.
The hen bird, less custard and more mustard than her mate, comes in with a looping caterpillar in her bill. So that’s it. Her white, speckled eggs – could be five, could be twice that or more in exceptional years – have hatched. I could easily take a look; the nest box has a hinged lid secured with a twist of wire, but it seems an unmerited intrusion at this delicate moment in their new lives, so I abandon the thought. She is in and out in a flash, a tiny buff and black torpedo exploding out of the hole with those white cheeks gleaming like a nun’s alb. She alights for a second on a twig, just long enough to pull focus. She’s as tight as a nut, sleek and pressed together like modelling clay. Did this really evolve from the amoeba by the gradual process of random change? Did Stanley Miller’s experiment running wild for a few million years cause methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapour to fuse and spark into this bright, hot, fizzing fistful of protein; this seeing, singing, dutiful, nest-proud mother of five to eleven would-be replicas, blind and naked and unspeakably ugly, trapped in the moss and down cup she has so lovingly woven?
It’s far too comfortable to live with assumptions. Although adult great tits eat a wide variety of insects, seeds and fruit, they feed their chicks almost exclusively on caterpillars. It is safe to say that without a steady supply of caterpillars they couldn’t raise their young. So all they have to do is lay their eggs fourteen incubation days before the caterpillar glut emerges and that’s them sorted – isn’t it? But how do they know when the caterpillar glut will be? It peaks at widely differing times, sometimes by up to three weeks from year to year, dependent upon the weather, but particularly the temperature in late April.
If it’s very frosty caterpillar eggs won’t hatch because buds won’t open, the leaves will be retarded and there won’t be anything for the caterpillars to eat. These hatchling tits have to be fed immediately. They will quickly weaken, chill and die if each chick doesn’t get a good feed in the first few hours. I do the crude sums in my head: let’s say nine chicks, each needing at least fifteen of these squiggly loopers a day, plus a couple of good fat ones of other species if possible – that’s a hundred and fifty-three caterpillars to be garnered in across the fourteen hours of daylight available to them, as well as food for the parents themselves to keep up their strength – call it one hundred and eighty. That’s ninety per adult bird: six and a half per hour if they don’t rest – a beak-ful back at the nest every thirteen minutes, including travelling and searching time. No wonder they’re not singing. And they have to keep it up for the full twenty days before the chicks fledge and another week after that before they can feed themselves. So how do they know just when to start laying eggs?
Is there some grand programme out here? Are we back at school, obediently plugged in to a timetable? Is there a Fat Controller in charge, keeping everyone up to speed, frantically barking out rules and regulations like the Water Authority? Or is it just chance; are we all a mess of pottage and protoplasm, tossed in together like the kestrel and the slow worm – some you win, some you lose – and you just keep praying that your number comes up? Hmmm. Maybe I should have stuck with the hazens. I walk on, wishing the sun would get to work.
‘Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous,’ wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1836 in his essay ‘Nature’.
. . . The simple perception of natural forms is a delight . . . To the body and mind . . . cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman . . . comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods and is a man again. In their eternal calm he finds himself.
Somewhere in the Massachusetts woods, the cradle of American literature, the transcendentalist writings of Emerson, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau were to change the English-speaking world’s perception of nature. They established a distinctive rhythm for this literature of meditative excursions. They mark a purposeful shift