Bog Myrtle & Peat

The sedge warbler sings all night on the burnside, and by three o’clock when gleams of dawn begin to swell in the far northeast, he’s only just hitting his stride. It’s a rattling chaos of birdsong in the darkness, like a child on a drumkit oversupplied with cymbals and snares – and beneath his bending stem, the burn walks slowly off towards the town in a mess of willow down and silky folds of pollen. I sit and listen with my bare feet trailing in the water and for a moment there is a glimpse of movement in the gloom of the rising meadowsweet. It’s a subtle, silent gesture – but it shines like a spark above the celandines and the sprays of campion; in the blackness of shadows which fill beneath the monstrous frosting of may blossom. The solid, horny old trees should be ashamed of themselves – they’ve turned into wedding cakes beneath the stars. 

The movement is brief and might have been easily missed, but I have seen it. A roe buck is grazing gently above the water, slightly further out than I could throw a stone. And as I reach for the rifle by my side, he looks clearly up in my direction, flushed with the whiteness of his mask, more curious than afraid. At this range, I can see his antlers rising above the height of his ears like two slanting exclamation marks; straight beams with the dot for each eye. 

He’s dead in no time at all, and afterwards I am bitten by midges and crusted with peat-black blood as a yellow moon slumps beyond the horizon. I drag the carcass home through whips of flowering broom and tussocks of grass which will crawl with ants when the sun finds them. I wouldn’t dare to make this walk barefoot in the daytime, and by the time I am home, swallows are waking up, chanting like loons in the rafters and the yard. The first larks try an experiment with song in fitful bursts, and as the day breaks towards dawn, the buck is turned upside down and then I can see the watery, washed-out blood which drips from the whiteness of his chin. And that’s when the sedge warbler stops, leaving a space through which I can fall into bed.