Bog Myrtle & Peat

Back in the spring when anything was possible, a hare came out of the fields to the house. She would have been welcome in the kitchen, but she turned on the doorstep and slipped under a hole in the fence to the kailyard. The grass was well advanced in there, and it hustled around the fallen glory of last year’s vegetables. One night, the hare produced four immaculate leverets in a scoop of the drills where the tatties had been, and she left them lying together like eggs in a nest. Nettles rose around them, and they vanished.

I found them by accident on the way to do something else. It can be embarrassing to stumble upon wildlife, not least because it highlights the chanciness of our engagement with the natural world. Just as I was delighted by the discovery of those leverets, I couldn’t help but wonder how many times I’ve walked past the same or better without even noticing. On that basis, I reckon animals are far too wary of human beings. They’re often prepared to run or hide from people who never knew they were there, and if only they could understand how little we see or smell in the landscape, they’d sleep much easier at night. The irony is that while they work hard to avoid being noticed, the greatest harm we inflict upon nature is often accidental – the consequence of a failure to see things which have been painstakingly concealed.

All operations in the garden were cancelled or postponed until further notice, and I closed the gate behind me to ensure that dogs or sheep or any threat would be kept at arm’s length. In the evening, I checked the youngster’s progress with a thermal spotting scope, and while the grass was already too tall to see them in person, a little white glow revealed that all was well at eleven o’clock and then again at five.

These were gentle, dulcet days, but soon there were clouds which began to pile up in the west. They rose and darkened by the hour, and then rain began to fall in a blur which baffled the horizon. Night fell with the weightening rain, and soon the lambs were wailing and the gutters chattering in the darkness. It was too loud to work in the tin shed, and the dogs were soaked when I walked them at midnight. By the time I was up to check cattle at dawn, the rain had come to a halt, but water ran in chaos on the cobbles and in the channels of the track. The river had risen, and ducks clattered above the alders which rise from the bridge and the wetlands.

In the aftermath of the rain, I stepped out to check on the leverets. Even when I looked through the thermal scope, I could not find them. They were crouched where I had left them, but every single one was dead and cold as the ground beneath it. Immaculate camouflage is an investment to deter predators, but it doesn’t matter what you look like when the chilling rain arrives. When I went back to see their bodies again after an hour, something had taken them away. Their little nest was empty, just like every other ding and divot in the drills.

Much later when I saw him, my father said the overnight rain had been sore on the lambs – but only because lambs are white and their bodies shine brightly in the sodden grass, even when they’re cold. Of other things drowned or washed out in the darkness, there was no news.