Bog Myrtle & Peat

A bright day fell like an intermission in the rain, and an owl came hunting through it. Not for him the sodden vulgarity of redwings and fieldfares newly fallen from the east; they were easily pleased by the clouds and the wetness of berries. No, he preferred to make his arrival alone in the sunshine, and the loaded light turned around him as the wind blows through naps of pegged-out laundry. 

I was looking bullocks when he came, down where the river rolls through fallen stands of ragwort. He could only see what lay beneath him, and I was distracted. So we took each other by surprise in the iris beds; I stood, and he recoiled. His face was dished upon itself like the topside of a saucer, wearing black lunettes around his flaring yellow eyes. Stalling briefly, his legs lowered and the tail beneath them fanned. Then he huffed and turned to quarter back the way he’d come, wearing all the colours of a season’s change on his back. I saw the gold and glow of apples; the buff and tumble of discarded beeswax. His darkest notes were borrowed from the edges of alder leaves and the torn-out haggs of summer peat, and even the pig was in those feathers; the autumn’s pig whose flesh-red skin will soon be cold and folded in a barrow by the sty. They say that pigs cannot look up, but if mine did he’d certainly see something of his own colour in those richly rusting wings. And failing to observe that owls arrive as pigs are killed, he’d only bump his gums and foam a grin of welcome.

Away from me, the owl turned three times and passed towards the moor. Cool and coloured by the sinking sun, he began to hunt across the dew. And when the moment took him at last, he showed his hand as a rascal after all. Stateliness abandoned, he stamped on mice with all the brassy excitement of a boy who stamps in puddles.