head, the hazel-ringed eyes and pencil-dot nostrils prise through the grass like a bodkin. He is all metal, the thickness of a man’s forefinger forged in shining blue steel. And he is utterly harmless – unless you happen to be a slug. But before he can do anything else he needs the sun.
I knew none of this. I saw only the statue staring into the grass. Then it fell. It was as though the sculpture had been tipped forward by an unseen hand. Still staring, on closed wings it fell through empty air to the earth. The earth rose to meet the copper falcon in a collision that would surely bring its death. In a single burnished dart it dived to the long grass, head first. I missed the yellow talons thrust forward. I was too slow to see the black-banded tail feathers fan to brake the fall. It vanished. I was sure it must be dead. How could it plummet to earth without dashing out its brains? I stood up. There was no sign of the kestrel. The grass had swallowed it up.
The kestrel is a falcon, a member of that elite of raptorial, hooked beaks, all of which vie with the eagles for precedence. The vain and competitive aristocracy of the raptor world have never conceded a jot. Led from the front by the gyrfalcon and the peregrine, for dash and verve the falcons have it; for power and imperial splendour the golden eagle and its huge cousin the sea eagle cannot be matched. Hardened birders can never agree; the jury has long since given up and gone home. The kestrel and the merlin are the smallest falcons on the British list. Both can dazzle with aerobatic skill. Of the two the kestrel is the commoner, so familiar on our roadsides and motorway verges hovering for voles and mice, hawking the air for insects. The windhover is its old country name. It can face into a gale with wings half closed, holding its position with barely a quiver for minutes at a time. It stoops like a flash of bronze.
I peer through my binoculars. The grass reveals nothing. The whole thing was a sun-dream; I begin to think I imagined it all.
And then this little falcon, this flash of kettle, rises from the earth. It ascends on stiffly flickering wings. It rises and rises. Clenched in one black-taloned fist is a lanyard of legless lizard. Its yellow grab-foot had closed around a slow worm. The needle talons grip its tail. Sunlight glints from silver scales. It rises with the kestrel, twisting its head and thorax in an aimless confusion of defiance and despair. The kestrel circles the pole once and returns to its perch. Landing on one leg it shifts its grip, now pinning the squirming tail down with the other foot too. The slate-blue head bends to its prey and the grey bill opens; the hook curves downward like a claw. The slow worm inscribes one last, desperate loop. Levering against nothing but air it curls and flails and breaks. It breaks free. I see a flash of red and the broken body twists and falls, arcing through sunbeams to the ground.
The kestrel looked bemused. He stood with a squirming tail in his talons. Its bloody stump thrashed even more vigorously than before. The falcon looked first at the tail clenched in his feet, then down at the grass below. A sharp, yickering cry vented his frustration. He seemed to know that the prize was gone; gone the way of the survival game – some you win, some you lose.
The slow worm had played its last card. Its past and its future had collided in a moment of terrible truth. By sheer luck it had been caught by the tail. Evolution had handed it a trump to play when the chips are finally down: cast your tail.
Break free and go forth tailless into the future. Inside its tiny, metallic brain something akin to adrenaline was sending an SOS to its tail an inch behind its last vital organ. Tissues 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,
