Bog Myrtle & Peat

The bull was loaded up and I brought him home in the wagon on the edge of darkness.

His life now falls into two uneven halves. He spends four months at work on the cattle, and the rest of his time he’s back on home turf. I brought one of his calves to keep him company, and so father and son rolled into the yard and waited to see what happened next. I watched their noses snuffing at the vents in the tall aluminium trailer.

This place must smell familiar to him. For all that the scents of grass and gorse are uniform, surely they fall in different ratios and blends between places? And while they have spent their autumn beneath grand oak woodlands, here the wind is laced with flakes of birch bark and myrtle; boggy soil and the crunch of fallen bracken. He came from a hill of whinstone and has returned to a moor where granite is king. Even I can tell the difference between the smell of those stones, so it will be obvious to him. He must know it and recognise this place, even if his only view is a changeless blue slot above his head.

His nose is rough and his whiskers are coarse. I reach up to rub it and find my wrist raked by a dull grey tongue.