On the idle hill of Summer
Sleepy with the flow of streams …
A.E. HOUSMAN
The hill slopes steeply down through the green woodland mist, the uncertain haze of spring. The air above seems slowly to descend. A footpath gleams and dwindles between plantations of dense fir, dark reluctant trees in sombre strata, where poplars faintly shine. The pale coppery-yellow poplar leaves are still uncurling. Under the soft grey of the early morning clouds, they shine with their own perpetual sunlight. They are large enough now to flutter vaguely in the rising breeze, moving on their flattened stalks like bronze-coloured butterflies.
The path sinks through woods of twisted oak and thin silver birches. The green light of the leaves is tentative. A cuckoo calls, submerged in summer warmth. A brown stain in the path ahead becomes a dead long-eared bat. It has the mysterious, secret look of recent death, as though it were a discarded chrysalis. The tender parchment wings of its membraned hands have crumpled, shrivelled up like burnt paper. The long soft-furred ears are still erect and listening, but the small face is strangely blurred and incomplete, blunted and empty among the fallen leaves. In my hand the bat is weightless, frailer than a bird, less than a mouse. It is fragmentary, like something drifted down through time from a forgotten way of life.
Robins sing, and occasionally the air glitters with the brilliant trill of a wren. A wood ants’ nest rises among the bowed white heads of the windflowers. It is a shining dark-brown pyramid, two feet high, three feet across. It ferments, hisses quietly like the distant steam-sound of the sea upon shingle. The ants swarm over the dead leaves and the bracken. They move up into the trees and along the branches, out to the smallest twigs. There is something volcanic about these big ants’ nests. They erupt in a slow brown lava. One expects to see them kindle into a gape of hoarse red flame. The dark and many-jointed mass of ants shines with an obscene cellular life. It festers. I edge forward to look closer, then shift abruptly back. It has the malignancy of a compound eye. I throw a twig, an offering into the writhing cauldron. It bubbles, seethes higher, subsides. The twig has gone. It has been absorbed, sucked down. I walk quickly away from this dryly crepitating brain of ants, so endlessly signalling, making, and becoming.
Ten jays chase one another through the wood, dipping and bowing between the mossy oak branches. Their blunt wings row heavily from tree to tree. Their high streaked foreheads give them a puzzled, quizzical look. All birds wear false heads, feathered domes masking the mind beneath, ritual faces nodding on the stick of the spine. The jays’ demented calls tear at the silence, destroying the robin’s delicate song.
The cuckoo calls again in the reassembled air. Walls of red brick, mellowed by golden lichen, enclose a forgotten garden, the hush of an empty house. The white blossom of a pear tree clouds above the wall, burning white on the blue of the sky. Bullfinches call within, softly, made distant and exotic by the pored redness of the wall. I can imagine the cock-bird’s breast, brick-red, clean and unstained and softly pure. This seems to be the heart of the wood. The light is deeper here, and there is a feeling of imminent revelation. But it is illusory. Far down among the trees, spaces appear between the misty leaves, like wisps of curling smoke. The path widens, and suddenly ends; the grey smoke thins away; the spaces become gaps of grass and sky where the sun is shining. The distant gorse blossom floats like a yellow haze on the hot blue swell of the gorse. There is a smell of grass. Abrupt slopes and deep gulleys rise and fall between clumps of bushes, copses, and small woods. Beyond them is the shining eastern sky and the sea-haze of other hills.
Swallows curve and sweep low over the mown grass, their blue tangents darting away. Their smooth flight is really an endless glide. The steady wing-beats seem too slow, never catching up with the speed of the bird. Almost an afterthought, they appear to have no power of propulsion, touching the air lightly, like oars waving idly over green water. It is a luminous, silken flight: the blue and purple back of the swallow swooping forward through the surface of the air, the air rushing away green and fresh behind the flowing motion of the bird.
Beneath the intense glow of the warm yellow blossom, the gorse bushes conceal caves of shadow, dusty airless places where rabbits live and man cannot penetrate. The thick colourless stems are fibrous, like the legs of owls. The choking darkness is full of dust and night, very remote from the galaxies of blossom that smoulder above.
The morning brightens slowly as the wind freshens. There is less haze. The air is warm with the songs of distant blackbirds. A willow warbler drops down into the gorse, leaving a birch-twig trembling. Its dark-shining eye scans the bushes above. It leaps from spray to spray, peering intently, snapping up small insects with its narrow bill. This is its life, this tireless fluttering and falling, the effortless, jaunty song forgotten as soon as uttered, the leaf-shadows moving endlessly over the indifferent face.
Two long-tailed tits are carrying feathers and grass to their nest in the gorse. One has a seed-head of burdock embedded in the feathers of its breast. Small birds are so vulnerable to everything that grips. A green woodpecker calls, close, but hidden; a sunlit voice muffled in a cloud of shade. The haze lightens, revealing the high air, the emptiness. The grass smells stronger as the dew dries. To the east, the land falls away, ends suddenly in unseen water; then it rises, changed, into far hills, remote and foreign, which become familiar as they harden in the strengthening light.
Many birds are feeding in the grass. Starlings run and probe, thrushes and blackbirds bound across. The big, pale mistle thrushes stand still and rigid; then they advance with great frog-like leaps. If I lie down, eye on a level with the grass, the mistle thrushes spring up tall and gaunt, hiding trees, towering above the jungle growth, terrifying as dinosaurs against the sky. This place is like a clearing in a primeval forest. There is a primitive feeling of security, as though one were out of reach of the suddenly-flung spear, of the stunning leap from darkness. The procreant spring air is soft and warm. At a distance, where fans of sunlight slant down from breaking clouds, the air seems to glitter in fiery grains.
Swallows call sharply, thrushes scatter. Long wings thresh in dark curves above the gorse as a hawk rushes past in pursuit of a swallow. It was a hobby, a hawk with a slender body, thin tapering tail, and narrow pointed wings that slash the air. It was diffuse, whirling, fragmented by speed. I recall a yellow-ringed eye, a white hawk-profile marked with black, a flicker of grey or dark-blue wings. Then it was smaller, whole again, swallow-coloured, flitting low above the field, raising spurts of dead grass that drifted slowly down. Suddenly the two birds tower up together into the southern sky, the swallow looking like a small replica of the hobby. They vanish in the sun.
The hobby is a rare summer migrant. It is mainly a hawk of the sandy country, of the heathland, as the merlin is of the moors. It often nests in a Scots pine. Its back is the colour of pine-needles, its fox-red flanks are like the pine bark. It is midway between a merlin and a peregrine in size, with longer wings and a more attenuated look. It preys largely upon insects and insect-eating birds: dragonflies, grasshoppers, beetles, moths, butterflies, and bees, are among the insects taken; swallows, martins, and swifts, among the birds.
The dream of the forest clearing has flown into the wood. The thrushes have gone, the starlings scatter. Slowly the fields resume their peace, or a different peace, for now there is a wariness, a new alertness. The quiet morning cannot be restored.
Beside the hedge I find a dead snake, an adder. Its head has been crushed. It lies curled up beneath a bush, where it was flung aside as something that could do no further harm. It has virtue now, being dead. It is hard to believe that this dry coil of piped skin contains a heart’s red tentacles, the convoluted vine of blood, the shattered temples of white bone through which the sun is shining. It is coiled like a hangman’s noose.
Above a small stream that is hidden by a golden dazzle of marsh-marigolds, there are two small woods; one of pine, one of larch. I sit at the edge of the pine wood and listen to the trees. The tall pines move in the wind, and bend; their branches heave. Then from deep inside the wood, moving slowly out towards the edge and rising in volume, there comes the long, hollow, booming sigh of the wind, like a distant train emerging from a tunnel. The sound hisses in the outward branches, and washes away to a sea-shell whisper. The afternoon light is pure and shadowless, the sky is hidden by high cloud. Small birds sing in the thickness of the wood. It is good to have trees at one’s back, to feel that everything that does not matter is on the far side of the trees.
As the sky clears, birds sing louder and more often, silvering coldly the warm and resinous dark of the pine wood. A kestrel soars, gliding over the smooth sky, brown and fox-coloured in the sun. A fox comes out of the wood, flows across the grass, stops, looks round, then runs back to the trees. It is a lean, dark fox, a stained and luminous vein of red quivering away through the green bracken.
At the side of the wood there is a hawthorn hedge. The thousands of small leaves are scalloped ovals of polished, sun-reflecting green. They shine, as though each curved palm held a spark of brilliant water. They look so diamond-hard, yet they are soft and papery to the touch. The blossom of a gean whitens the air above; the fallen blossom beneath the tree is like a circle of white shadow. To the east, the tumbling decline and the diminishing rounds of tree-tops are fading from green to grey, and the misty turrets of the distant town rise slowly yet gain no height above the long sunlight of the estuary.
Within the hawthorn hedge a lesser whitethroat is singing. For ten minutes I keep pace with him, moving backwards and forwards along the thick hedge. He flits among the leaves, feeding on small insects. He is seldom visible, and never comes out into the open. He sings loudly, regularly, a harsh brief jingle of notes followed by an emphatic four-note trill. Occasionally he changes to a loud, melodious warble, like the song of a blackcap. Between these louder songs I sometimes hear a faint sub-song. It is a strange, faraway sound, as though the bird were talking very softly to himself, breathing and sighing out a rambling incoherent whisper of song. When he is more than a yard away, the sound is quite inaudible. Urgent, rushing, endless, it is like the fretting of twigs in the wind, like the faint scratching whimper of a hibernating dormouse. I put my ear close to the singing bird, and he is not afraid. Six inches away from me, behind the bright leaves, the song is no louder than before. It is a sad, disturbing sound, like the soft and breathless plea of something that has been shut out.
I cross the hill towards the larch wood. A hare crouches upon the horizon, then runs down into the sky. The wood stands high above the valley of the stream. A tree pipit stops singing as I approach. He is perched on a larch-twig at the edge of the wood. He has a startled and uneasy look, as though he were unaccustomed to the light, a migrant from a time remote. Then his appearance alters, becomes intent and purposeful, as he gazes upward. He launches himself from the bending twig, and flies steeply up, rising silently, deliberately, and without haste. He turns at the top of his hundred-foot slant, faces towards the wood, and sings as he slowly descends to the exact point of his departure. He drifts down with his wings and tail spread wide and his legs dangling loosely beneath him. His loud, cadenced song sinks down. But gradually it lingers behind, so that when he alights on the twig he left a minute before, the last phrase of his song seems to be still suspended in the air above.
The green of the fields is soon lost in the marine yellow light of the larches. A peacock butterfly wavers between the trees, like a brown leaf with eyes of dark purple velvet. The dead bracken has a living warmth. There is a sudden fire-light of wings. A redstart perches in a larch, shining through a moving lace of shadows. Below the pale grey crown, the redstart’s forehead is a slash of pipe-clay white gleaming like paint laid on thickly with a palette-knife; the cheeks and throat are a deep cindery black, the chest a segment of rich orange, the belly a clear white like the white of an egg; the back is grey, the tail a copper gleam. When the redstart twists out after insects, dipping and swerving from his perch, the orange-tinted wings and tail open and flash in the sun like flame-reflecting sprays of water. He sings, and feeds, choosing high perches, moving round the edge of his territory, rapt in a priestly ritual, alone in the quiet wood. One envies the perfect solitariness of a bird. Occasionally he flies down to a dead birch, and dips his head forward into cavities between the bark and the bole, spreading his tail against the silver scales of the tree, like the fins of a goldfish. He is finding nest-sites, and showing them to his mate.
In the middle of the wood, the bracken is beaten down, and there is a hole in the dry earth that looks like an empty eye-socket. Something gleams there for a moment, and then goes out. There is a noise in the bracken behind me, like a blackbird raking through dead leaves with its bill. The noise comes nearer, rising up the slope. It is louder now. It is a human sound, a crawling sound. A badger comes into sight, backing laboriously up the hill towards me. It rises in short jerks, dragging a bundle of dead bracken between its bowed forelegs. When it is only a yard away from me, it suddenly stops. There is a long pause. Then the narrow, triangular, tunnelling head turns slowly round, as though fearful of what it will find. The small eyes shine in the black stripes that cross the staring whiteness of the face. Divested of darkness, the head has an appallingly vulnerable look. It is as though the badger had suddenly fallen through night’s cold surface into the blaze of day. It leaves its bundle of new bedding and runs heavily down into the hold, shaking the ground with its wildly plunging feet.
Badgers are always noisy if they feel they are safe. They blunder and crash through the bracken. Man is their only enemy. Where a wire fence crosses their path to the stream, they have beaten it down by falling on to it with their heavy bodies. Each evening, when they go to the stream to drink, they push the fence farther and farther down. People follow this path. They pass through the gap the badgers have made.
On the far side of the wood, a goldcrest sings among the larches, hidden in the high green light. He hops and flutters quickly along branches, singing from bare dark twigs. It is a thin song, but vehement, emphatic, ending with a flourish. Occasionally his shrill call-note pierces down, a sound very close to the silence. The larch wood holds the wind gently persuasively, the high branches sifting it with a sound like the hiss of falling sand. The hot sun, and the big white clouds returning, are far beyond the tree-tops. The light under the trees is green and yellow, like the bending reflections of trees and sunlight in green water. Two swifts, the first of the year, hawk for insects in the upper sky. One rushes down at the other; then they sweep upward together in a rising arc, and fling themselves apart. Their distant screaming trails across the blue. A fox walks past, reddening the shadows. Then all is still; and there are only the nets of sunlight drifting over the dry bracken, and the green bracken growing, and the soft sifting, the endless sifting, of the wind in the feathery larch leaves.
A kestrel circles above the trees, gliding and fluttering. It soars higher, twining around the smooth column of the rising air. Above the dark crescents of the swifts it dwindles, feeding upon insects, swerving and half-hovering to catch them in its talons. Swallows rise to mob it; gently it rocks itself up beyond their reach. It floats up till the sky heals over it. It descends, and is visible for a moment, but it rises again to blue. Under and over the blue dust of the air it gleams and vanishes. Then suddenly it turns entirely into light, and is seen no more. I stay in the larch wood, drowsy and at peace, while the quiet afternoon subsides into the song-lit April evening.
Loud whistling calls, shrill and explosive, begin in the western sky and come nearer, till they are overhead, and passing quickly to the east. These harsh sounds are so abrupt and penetrating that for a long time I do not look high enough for the birds that are making them. Eventually I find six hawfinches, small, bulky birds with thick necks and short tails, bounding rapidly away into the wind till the blue haze muffles their piercing ‘zeenk-zik’.
The evening light sinks slowly down to gold. The air is heavy with the last warmth of the sun. But winter rises in the hollows, like a shining mist. The woodpigeons begin to come back to the woods to roost, diving down through fathoms of sunlight to settle in the bare oaks. They sidle along the branches, glowing grey and white and mauve, sun-breasted against the night of the trees.
The strong upward glow of the grass, and the downward shining of the vivid larches, reflect green light on to the polished birch-bark. My feet crisp in the dead bracken as I walk towards the edge of the wood. Bird-song ends in questioning silence. A shadow sinks from a larch. The thin legs of a sparrowhawk gleam like yellow fangs, under long tail, blunt wings; then they close up into shadow. Softly the hawk draws away over the short grass, skims low, moves into the sun but does not shine, is lost in the long shadows hanging from the pine wood.
The open land between the woods is now dark and intimate. There is a feeling of enclosure, a shutting-off of sky, a softness of wood-dusk; just as the coastal hinterland is haunted and arched over by the far-reaching glare of the sea. I cross to the pine wood, passing through layers of cold light. The sky is cold, mauve-rimmed, yellowing towards sunset. The night air is rising, but among the trees there is warmth and stillness. The wind does not enter.
Inside the wood, the time is an hour later. Dark pines enclose me in a sudden swoop of dusk. The air smells sweet. It seems to move upon an inward breath. All is quiet, yet something is withheld. Robins and willow warblers sing in the brightness of the outer trees. A pheasant crashes upward, drilling a way through the soft branches, snapping off dead twigs, leaving the branches softly waving. The wood seems hollow as the light sinks down. Grass shines white in dark shadow. It gleams like water at the narrow end of rides. The luminous sky beyond shines and whitens in the earlier time. There is a smell of summer under the fragrance of spring. Slowly I walk towards the outer light. A brown wave spreads widens to fanning wings. I stop. A tree in front of me grows higher by a foot. The yellow eyes of the sparrowhawk pulse into the gloom. The air is still. The wood seems to fill with the mill-wheel sound of our blood. We lean forward upon the silence that divides us. Then part of the tree moves back, diminishes. Dusk flies into dusk. Birds call in the fading outer light. The hawk has gone.
I take the steep path to the west, between the dim, contorted oaks. The windflowers are closed now, and the wood is grey. A weasel runs silently through the bracken. It burns, like a reddish-brown flame, along the fuse of the scent it follows. A few robins and thrushes still sing in their shrinking territories. Two kestrels fly from tree to tree. They settle in a big oak, ethereal against the eastern sky. The branches frail away to twigs, the twigs to brown light. The kestrels’ bell-like, tremulous calling frets in the pearl of the sky, a sound of high innocence dwindling from brutish beaks. The tree hides the arrogance of hawk-shape, is itself half-hidden in grey air.
Little owls begin to call, their soft curlew-voices rising in pathos from the smoke of the trees. The air is very cold. There is only the look of warmth upon the early leaves. I enter the forgotten garden, now quite rank and wild with dusk. The white pear tree stands in mysterious stillness. I have to touch and smell the white blossom before I can believe in the spring. As though released, the white shape of a barn owl floats from the ruined house. Its long, barbaric shriek is drawn out and flung upwards to shine among the early stars.