Bog Myrtle & Peat

It was hot on the comeback from Carlisle, and somebody had opened the windows in our carriage. As we poured across the bridge of the Esk in the sunshine, cows stood beside the railway line like dabs of fresh paint. The shoulder of Criffel rose beyond them, and for a gap of several miles, there’s only open country in this borderland; pylons and vees of geese above the Solway. And on this day, tall palls of heavy cloud walked in from the Isle of Man, miles high and black as a stack of old tyres. Three of these columns moved across the landscape like giants striding, and rain trailed behind them in veils. But it was bright in the comfort of my table seat, and as the train buried itself back into cuttings and deep foliage towards Gretna, leaves clattered against the open windows and the carriage was flushed with the nipped confetti of rowan blossom. Óró sé do bheatha abhaile. 

I killed a buck in the b’lo-home fields, and the shot blackened his heart to a standstill. You can’t kill a buck like a cow or a pig; they never fall, no matter how carefully the shot is driven home. It’s no sign of suffering or inefficiency on the part of the rifle – it’s just that a deer’s whole life is lived with energy queued for the next ten seconds. It takes that time for stillness to find them in the end. Running dead in the dusk, my buck charged a hundred yards before his chin failed and his forelegs crumpled under his chest. For several bounds, he was driven only by the strength of his haunches, pounding a gust of pollen into the dusk. An hour later, I was drawing his pluck into a barrow when a hare walked into the yard and found me plastered with blood to the elbows. In that moment, she understood that the rumours were true – and she ran back through the close with her eyes widened. Slack time fell upon me the following day, so I cleaned the buck’s head and scrubbed his antlers with a brush. They’re little more than brick-red beams with nothing to celebrate or write home about in terms of size or grandeur. But it was a neat project, and I made it slower by trying for the finest and most perfect finish. Even the meanest antlers are interesting, and every pair is like the palm of a man’s hand – the whole life story’s there if you know how to read it; and each one differently impossible.

An otter passed below me on the tiny metal bridge. I was looking elsewhere at the time, but there was something more than water in the slap and bother of song from the running stream. The sound slipped over upon itself like treacle, and then I turned and found him within oar’s reach beneath me, vertically below, sliding past between streaming trails of crowsfoot. I could’ve dropped a bunch of flowers upon his head for the sake of shameless adoration – a dish of butter-gold irises or a bouquet of vetch – but he never saw me. He was downbound for the pools, and he pulled himself between two rocks in the shallows as he went. I caught a glimpse of his back from his shoulders to the root of his tail; biscuit brown and lit with the rose-gold dusk. Then he was gone, and wasn’t I glad of the chance to have seen him? A sedge warbler sang above the sound of river; the same manic cacophony which cannot even contain itself in the darkness. I hear these birds from my bedroom window at two and three o’clock in the morning; the clashing of pans and the jittery squall of crockery dropped on purpose. Sure there never was a bird for a din like a sedge warbler, and this performance was rich and chaotic. Minutes after the otter had passed, there came a narrow line of bubbles which trailed back towards me in a slow questionmark from the tail of the pool. A head emerged again – and the hump of a back. Lank and heavy as hose, his tail flopped over the first small rippling chevrons of the run as it sinks for the flat slacks. And this time he really was gone.