The forgotten path is hidden beneath grass and campion and cow parsley. Above it, the hawthorn is warm with the white ash of its blossom. The song of the greenfinches is as slow and sleepy as the languid air, as the warm southern breeze. A cuckoo calls endlessly in the distance, a soft-echoing voice that faces and returns but comes no nearer. These sounds deepen the quiet haze of the may.
Under the splinters of the numbed hedge, a whitethroat sings. He creeps among the nettles, furtive, wandering, seen here and there like glimpses of a pouring snake, making the red campion flowers nod and quiver. He will be here throughout the summer, feeding, nesting, singing above his meagre territory, glad of the growth to come, this ragged remnant of a hedge.
The small woods of the upland plain, where sparrowhawks once nested, are a brown mist in the summer heat of the still afternoon. The white blossom of an orchard has risen in slow flight. It hovers low in the shimmering haze. I sit on a fallen tree at the edge of a pine wood. Many birds are singing in the clearings. Between the trees, the bluebells are like a film of lilac smoke that has no definite outline. The scent is much sharper and more palpable than the drifting colour. A garden warbler flies into a tree above. His whole body shakes with song. His throat leaps and flutters with the strangeness of it, the syrinx inhabited by an inexplicable joy of music. The feathers of the bird’s throat and nape part in dark rippling lines. The song flows on, with only brief pauses. The colour of the bluebells intensifies, the thick scent droning with a sleep of bees.
The pine wood is motionless, withdrawn. The vibrating wings of a bee stir the dry leaves and twigs beside the log. A faint breeze-lifted trail of sawdust whirls up and slowly sinks again as the bee drones higher and spirals away. Then nothing moves in the windless air. The brown mist of the distant woods is slowly becoming sky. The curved heads of the lost sparrowhawks seem to ascend from the horizon’s dusky haze. Their harsh calls ring again in the heat and the silence.
Fear grew like a fungus upon the green surface of the woodland air. The violent flight of the sparrowhawk throbbed through the nerves of the dark rides. The hawk was fugitive, wild, a creature of shadow, doomed, dim with the power of death. It was distance, mystery, hope, the hidden heart of fire from which the green leaves burned and fluttered. The violence was hidden, transmuted into threat, into the clouds of uneasy birds rising like smoke over the bright clearings. The hawks themselves were seldom seen. I found the nebulous ring of blowing feathers or glimpsed a grey thistledown of wings drifting through a sky of leaves. The hawks only became real when they hung dead from the gamekeeper’s gallows tree, the wild spirits transfixed into solidity at last.
To be in these woods then was to be in a beyond world. Towns and people had no meaning. They were shut out by the horizon, by the shining rim of the trees. The distance that separated me from them was like a slope too steep ever to be scaled again. I could only go forward, treading stealthily through the mossy gloom of the summered rides, lost in the dusty smell of the hot leaves. The sense of violence was muted, dimmed, yet it was always there, breathing upon the stillness. Then would come the minatory crash of the gamekeeper’s gun, the sound threshing away, echoing from wood to wood. And then the soft whisper of flying wings, the grey wraith passing swiftly down the dark ride, the hawk seen close yet never really seen, the presence abiding when the bird had gone, hanging in the green air like a mist, palpable as the smell of a fox yet never condensing to any certain shape.
Against every sky, I saw then the curved and inflexible line of a hawk’s bill; the lack of a face; the glittering opacity of an eye that had the glare of the sea, intense and implacable, with something shining beyond. It was as though the body of the hawk were merely a larval stage, the feathery integument of some unknown creature of the trees.
The hawks were already pursuing before they could see their prey. They flew fast and low across fields, along hedges, down woodland rides; they twisted nimbly between trees. Small birds bathing in water or in dust, or singing from a twig, or feeding away from cover, were startled into flight and were snatched suddenly from life. Sometimes they waited in ambush, or pounced downward from a height, but most of their hunting was an endless silent rushing towards something they had not yet seen. The adult male was more grey than brown, with bars of rust across a whitish chest, but in flight he could look as brown as the female. One saw these birds so briefly, and in such gloomy light. The yellow iris might gleam momentarily, the long yellow legs might flash and snap across the dark, piny air: the rest was a wild blur, a huskiness of wings trembling down through the wood, like brown water receding into haze.
Sparrowhawks hide in the dusk; in the dusk of great speed, in evening dusk, in the dusk of height and distance. They are the unseen, who come so close – till the eye touches them – then they are gone, leaving the air vibrant with their passing. Each summer I searched for their nests. I followed them from wood to wood, finding their kills, finding their bodies dangling from dark boughs, like Saxon poachers turning in the wind.
Again the crash of the keeper’s gun, nearer now, and the sound of feet approaching. Hidden deep in bracken, I would watch him go by. I never saw his face. I saw only the glint of the gun-barrel, the dead birds swinging from an unseen hand, the stained boots swishing through the grass of the ride.
Clouds deepen over the shining sky. A faint breeze comes from the south and moves the leaves of the taller trees. There is a premonitory murmur of distant thunder. The pine wood is warm and dark. The narrow columns of air between the small close-growing pines are spiced with a smell of resin. It is a strange air. There is a hovering in it, like warm breath. The woodland floor is soft with decaying twigs and pine needles the colour of dead grass. It seems porous, as though it were a lung of the earth beneath. Rabbits live here. They are feeding in the grass of the ride that shines beyond the deep pine shadow where I stand. Their ears twitch to the volcanic growl of the thunder that is nearer now and more full-throated. A hare passes close to me, unsuspecting. The sunlit edges of the northern clouds float in the liquid miniature of his eye. He bears their brightness into the shadows of the wood.
The sky darkens till it is duller than the dense blue-grey of the pine needles. The narrow boles of the trees, and their lower branches, are a purplish fawn colour, goose-fleshed and hard, like dead bark beneath a living canopy. I walk deeper into the wood, and lose my way. All is symmetrical, equally spaced, the same. There is no sky now, but at the perimeter of the wood, at the end of every line of trees, bright ovals of sky-lit country glow like fires in the mouths of caves. A few stunted birches grow between the pines, their silver scales moving before me, like a stir of fins in dark water. The fallen pine needles have their own faint shine, which the clouds cannot dim. There is no pine-smell at the centre of the wood. It was gradually lost as I walked inwards. Thunder crashes above, and slowly the rain begins. I stumble towards the last light of the north. The wood fills with the sound of rain. The air is colder, driven down by the storm. Lightning darts and flickers, like a white deer leaping between the trees. The pine boles are bleached to a dazzling whiteness that bruises to purple as the gloom returns. The thunder booms. Dense thickets of rain grow between the trees, grey and impenetrable. Beyond the wood, there is a cold smell of drenched grass and fallen bluebells; within, a warm smell of bark and leaf-mould. A garden warbler sings in the caves of darkness under the misty birches, sings endlessly over the arches of bramble. Through the hiss and roar of the rain that bows the trees, the bird pours out the pure breath of his song. It flows unbrokenly, loud and mellow and far-echoing. He sings in the shining green bubble of his own world. The whole wood is an exultant respiration of storm-driven wind and rain. It is like being inside the hollow bones of an immense bird, listening to the sudden inrush of the air and the measured heart-beat of huge wings.
A robin comes into deeper cover, and sings above my head. Bullfinches call. The bird-song has not ceased since the storm began. A willow warbler sings among the rain-quivered leaves of a sycamore sapling at the wood’s edge, where the light is gathering slowly like a pool of rainwater. The willow warbler’s tail fans out and closes against the light as he flits from twig to twig, searching for insects. He sings as he feeds, and his peering eye is like a pine-darkened rain-drop. Very far off, a turtle dove is cooing. Each pine needle is beaded with silver rain. The blue-green colour of the trees is concealed by webs of shining crystal. Slowly the light increases, but the rain falls steadily for half an hour more. The thunder comes from the north now, and the occasional blink of lightning no longer stains the retina with a tree of green veins. The light increases like the imminence of sunrise. Rabbits still feed in the sodden ride, crouched deep in the steaming grass, their fur dark and felted with the rain. A final cannonade of thunder reverberates through the wet air.
I look to the north, across the crushed bluebells of the clearing. The light, which had steadily increased as the skylarks rose again behind the passing storm, is now slowly changing. It thickens into a mist, a dim mysterious vapour that becomes a silvery fog in which the distant trees loom large and indistinct, the poplars shaped like firs. Water streams down the mossy stems of the trees. The pine needles glitter with innumerable small reflected suns. The pines have their own rain now, but in the open the rain has ceased and the sun shines coldly. Blackcaps and garden warblers sing, as they have always done, though now the song is no longer enhanced by the rain. The bluebells have a sharper scent, less cloying, cold and piercing like the water of a spring. The distant woods, which rose into heat-haze only an hour ago, are gathered away into the mist. They are autumnal, of the dusk, although the sun still shines. The woodland day is over. A tawny owl calls among the pines, where the rainy night has already begun.