Bog Myrtle & Peat

The first lark was heard last week and that was fine. But since then it’s been storms and hale watter on the windows such that the gutters are busted and feed bags blown like a riot in the loaning. 

I found a roe buck lying dead in the sodden field, and I rolled it over with the tip of my toe. Some bird had been pulling its arse and the grass was rank with grey pins and flat tapes of gut strewn about like an afterparty. There was no obvious cause of death until I saw the back leg with its skin peeled off and the broken stump-end gouged with mud.  

Knowing that trucks and buses rush past here on their way into town, it then seemed obvious that he’d been struck and run on, and the shock followed later. Perhaps he’d lain down to find his feet and instead found himself on the cusp of a darkening bruise so big the sky ripened his vision to blindness. His eyes were away when I found him, and the fuzzy cut of his unflustered velvet looked drab in the rain. What a waste, I said, and further up there were more bones from something older. Nothing looks worse than death in the rain, with the undercoat parted in ways that a living thing would never thole. 

That same rot’s stricken the living too, and my cows are a sorry sight in the rush of sleet and high water. It’s that bad, I’ve even stopped taking pictures of them. They hump their backs and patches of hair slip from their hides with lice and all the usual winter afflictions buffed up into a high sheen of horror by the rain and always more of that filth coming up Fastnet to Lundy and Irish Sea. 

Even where it’s warm in the hayshed, I was filling a trailer with bales and pulling them down from the rafters when I fetched a litter of pealing ratlets into the mud at my feet. Their mother had made a fine nest in the stack, and she never imagined that I’d be on my way. The hairless babies splayed and steamed like dumplings in the mud, and then a dog had eaten them and sent them dreaming home. 

So when five larks began again above the yard this morning, they came in a break in the cloud. It did me good to hear them, right enough, but rot’s been on a roll these last few days – it’ll take more than a moment’s birdsong to put that right.