Bog Myrtle & Peat

A stranger came to the house with two little dogs in the back of her car. I gave her something to eat, and we held a constructive conversation about the work we have in common. But she had a long drive home, and I suggested on the edge of darkness that she should walk those dogs in the stackyard and out to the field below the house. A hare showed itself in the nettles, and another ran before her as she set off. Not trusting her dogs, she kept them on leads and they circulated themselves in tight, concentric orbit round her feet.

Coming back through the gate, one of the dogs plunged suddenly into the grass and pulled up a well-grown leveret which had been trying to hide from her disturbance. She couldn’t have done more to avoid the accident, but the evening wept for the sound of a stricken youngster. She told me that she was sorry as I recovered it from the dog’s mouth and felt the casualty for signs of broken limbs or punctured skin. But even as I ran my fingers along along its saddle, it died in a puff and bubble of blood.

I’m well provisioned with hares this year, so it was little more than a pity. I reassured her, telling her that it could have happened to anybody; and hares are fragile things after all. But coming back into the light of the kitchen afterwards, I found that my trousers had been sprayed with blood. Nothing bleeds like a hare, and while the damage had seemed superficial in the gloom of a mid-September evening, something irreparable had burst in the dark insides. I changed my clothes and found the stains had leached right through to the skin.

Once dead, animals always retain some value or purpose. So I placed the leveret on the bonnet of my car and reckoned that it would come in handy for something. Then rain fell in the night, and next morning I found a sorry spectacle laid before me. Streaks of watery blood had run down across my numberplate to the ground – the leveret’s fur was matted with patterns of pinpointed hairs which showed how the rain had pooled and naturally run away from the skin. The wide, bewildered eye retained a startled expression, but there was nobody at home.

Leaving it bedraggled and washed out by the rain, I was surprised to pass by later in the morning after a few hours of fresh southwesterly wind. The fur was bright again as if it had been blown dry in a salon – it rippled like a field of ripened barley. And when rain returned in the evening and was heavier than before, the process was repeated as if by magic. Feeling more than normally fascinated by the changes which played upon this hare and the illusion of movement back and forth between death and life, I drew it twice and painted it. I’m not morbidly fascinated by death; I worked that out as a child – my approach is more pragmatic, but I was curious to see the body transformed by alternating waves of rain and fresh wind like a barometer, with the same startled expression wearing ever more wearily in the drying eyes.

And this evening I took the leveret down to the river and butchered the body into five parts as bait for mink traps. Useful after all, and food for thought besides.