Nature Notes

Wild Light, Weather, Portals.

In the last hour of light, I walk along the high chalk ridge to a spot where I’m hoping for closer views of fallow deer.  I find I am walking between storms; the loose flint vertebrae of the whaleback rattle away from my boots. The hill’s spine soars clear of the cloudbursts that obliterate everything below and in turns, either side of me. The view is whitewashed out, then revealed again in shimmering light, as if someone is playing with the curtains. I walk deliciously between the lot, feeling hidden then highlighted; as if I’ve been invited onto the stage of a show I don’t entirely understand.

Low weather shape-shifts above me into the deep, pendulous dapple of mammatus clouds. I watch them grow heavier, like drops bulging from a yard tap, before they burst individually in washing line sheets. A short, bright rainbow forms at one corner.

A spell of calm follows and I tuck in against the trunk of a beech tree. My dog leans against me. We can both hear the belching grunts of fallow bucks far below. They are still in their rut.  

There is a slight noise to our left and, unexpectedly, a big chestnut buck comes pronking on his hooves, wild-eyed out of the woods and almost upon us. In one great move he shies and cat leaps the fence behind us, all four feet off the ground at once. He stops in the wood and turns to face us. For a reverent moment, we are held in the magnificent cradle-gaze of his antlers. The yellow glow of the hazel trees around his head seem to emanate from the pale tines of them, like lit candles on a Hanukkah Menorah.

The spell is broken by more noise to our left: another, big dark buck comes out of the wood, sees us and plunges downhill, his splayed hoofs sliding on the steep slope for purchase, his shoulder blades coming up like pistons  working to control the weight of him downhill at speed.

Back on the track I pick up pace as the world seems to darken and go molten at once. The sky swirls around the sunset of an exhilarating Turner painting and I feel caught up in it.

A wisp of snipe arrow through it after their long, sharp bills, like a shoal of unearthly fish – I expect the cloud to burst. 

Over my shoulder, the setting sun ignites the flooded track ruts into long mirrors of gold. In a trick of the light, they seem to stand upright, like gleaming wet sarsen megaliths, or a glowing absence of them: mirrors stood on end, portals back to a world I seem to have just left. Between them, reflected on the chalky mud, the first pale stars appear.