The beech wood towered into the sky above the sunken road. The knuckled roots of the beeches grappled the crumbling earth of the steep bank. They were like exposed muscles, so tense with power that I expected to see them flex and tighten, taking a firmer grip upon the yielding surface. The road was hidden from the wood, and the hollow of air above it was soon overgrown by grey branches and green leaves.
It was a June morning, and the sun was warm. The tall beeches had a watery shine. Three hundred yards away, the boles of the trees – both near and distant – formed an encircling palisade of grey light rising and falling. The rust-coloured floor of the wood was covered with a tessellation of seed-husks and dead leaves. There were a few large oaks among the beeches, and a shining darkness of holly. Where the trees were widely spaced, there was a dense undergrowth of brambles, crossed here and there by the fish-like gleam of a fallen beech.
The stifled, emotional voice of a stock dove throbbed in the beech-dusk. The tall columns of the trees rose into vast cupolas of empty air. A nuthatch sang, loud but secretive, like a child pretending to be lost, scampering carelessly over the smooth pathways of the branches. The high canopy of small lime-green leaves, opaque and dark under cloud, became luminous and almost transparent when the sun shone. This tracery of leaves seemed to exist apart, as though it had sunk down from above to be sustained upon the fountains of grey branches rising from the pillars of the trees.
There were no paths. I wandered through the wood, going neither forward nor back. The fluctuation of the sunlight seemed to become as regular as the sea-breathing of the leaves. I had no sense of the passing of time. I felt insignificant beneath the heroic gestures of the trees. Chaffinches and mistle thrushes sang, green woodpeckers called, and there was the constant seething sound of young starlings begging for food.
Dark against the bright rust of the dead leaves, an unfledged starling lay flabbily upon its back. It was loose-skinned, helpless, and frog-like. Its eyes were closed, but twitching; its whole body twitched, its legs moved feebly, pathetically, feeling for foothold upon the unresisting air. It had probably been dropped there by the jay I had disturbed a few minutes earlier. It is sad to see life ending before it has really begun. So much apparent cruelty is mercifully concealed from us by the sheltering leaves. We seldom see the bones of pain that hang beyond the green summer day. The woods and fields and gardens are places of endless stabbing, impaling, squashing, and mangling. We see only what floats to the surface: the colour, the song, the nesting, and the feeding. I do not think we could bear a clear vision of the animal world.
The seamed and hollow cave of an old oak leaned out above me. A pipistrelle bat skittered up into the sunlight. The small twigs that still had leaves seemed to be clinging to the bole like parasites, like new trees growing from the dead and wrinkled hide of the old. The bole was tusked with the stumps of long-dead branches. The sky gleamed down through holes that were like empty eye-sockets. A wren walked over the wooden surface, its song echoing frivolously in the cloistral gloom of the friar-waisted tree. The oak was dying into a different life. Embossed with a gloat of goblin faces, it seemed to have assumed an animal existence, as though it might go crashing through the wood in search of prey.
Suddenly the song of a tawny owl trembled up into the sunlight, like a dark bloom. The monotonous sound of mobbing began; the screeching of jays, the scolding of blackbirds and chaffinches. The owl glided from the leaves of an oak, as though it had been ejected from a tunnel of shrill sound. It beat away between the tree-tops, glowing rufous and brown in the light of the beeches, looking paler and less real as it rose higher. The darkness seemed to dry away from its wings. Then it was gathered into the green lustre of a holly, where it could resume the leaf-starred night of its sleep. The sound of mobbing faded, and dispersed, and the wood was quiet again.
I walked on, moving slowly between the petrified saurian limbs of the trees. The boles of these beeches varied greatly in contour and texture. Many appeared smooth, like grey satin, but some had a sandpaper roughness and were covered with a shadow of moss. High in the green sunlight of the leaves, the trill of a wood warbler was faintly shimmering. Gradually the sound came lower, and closer, as the small green and yellow bird descended to some low-sweeping branches near the ground. He fluttered out briefly to take insects from the air; he picked food from the surface of the leaves with his bill; he peered under twigs, and tweaked gently at the bark. Occasionally I heard the softer, more reflective, four-note song, very remote and melancholy, the mandibles of the bill hardly separating. The main song came loudly, frequently, and at regular intervals, sometimes ceasing abruptly when the bird found food. It was a stuttering, slightly sibilant sound; a pleasant dry cascade, rather mechanical in timbre, beginning slowly, then descending and hastening into a cadence, a vehement trill. It is a sound one always associates with the shining green sea-light that moves endlessly over the pebbles of the beech leaves, with the mossy grey branches and the smooth boles mapped with shadow. The wood warbler’s singing ended as suddenly as it had begun, and soon the bird was hidden again and forgotten, absorbed by the high leaves.
Many times during the morning I had heard a dry scuffling sound in the trees, but had seen nothing. Now a grey squirrel suddenly appeared on the lowest branch of an oak, eight yards in front of me. It seemed to condense there out of the yellow woodland light, squatting immobile, rigid. Another squirrel flashed up on the side of the tree, ran downwards, then stopped. Its legs were spread wide apart, looking as though they were webbed, and its long claws gripped the fissures of the bark. Both squirrels kept still for a few minutes. Their large blue-black eyes, bulging from whitish fur, were dark and unreflecting, curiously dull, dimmed by a moleskin haze. They blinked frequently, their eyelids fluttering down like moths. I walked towards the tree. For a few seconds their lean shapes seemed to recede into grey blurs that slowly diminished. Then they were suddenly sucked away, hidden by the oak.
The squirrels leapt across to a beech, and ran up and down the bole, hiding from each other, squeaking and grunting. One ran out on to a branch and hung down by its forelegs; the other sprang from the branch beneath, clutched upward, and swung upon its tail. Then they both swung up on to the higher branch together. The larger one jumped over the smaller, scratching its face lightly with an outstretched paw. They chased again, purring with excitement, their claws scuttling crab-like over the smooth bark.
I was suddenly aware of a coldness in the sunlit glade. There was no movement. The squirrels stopped chasing, became sleek and watchful, looking upwards. Far off, the alarm-note of a chaffinch, the screech of a jay, the clatter of woodpigeons rising: closer, the calling of blackbirds, the inane laugh of a green woodpecker. Then a silence, a stillness like night descending. Under the canopy of the leaves, between the bars of sun and shadow, the wings of a sparrowhawk came gliding and dilating, ferrying a sidereal dusk through the green and tawny sunlight. It was a large bird; the broad wings resting upon the silence, the curved prow of the head riding over the still air. The fiery cornelian eyes were kindled with a glow of orange flame. The white keel of the chest was barred with darkness. The sparrowhawk had heard the squirrels, and had come to search for them. They had gone. The rigid shape tilted over, and circled slowly round the tree. It was a female, looking more like an owl than a hawk. It was brown in the sun, pearl-grey in the shadows. For a minute or more it twisted between the trees, fanning its wings and gliding. Then slowly it sailed out into the distance, dwindling and darkening up through the beeches, like a cloud lifting. The songs of birds shone again in the sunlit glade.
The afternoon was hot. The sunlight had a hard metallic glitter, the shade sank deep beneath the trees. The cooing of woodpigeons wafted sleepily through the warm air. I came to a clearing, where blackcaps sang among the brambles and a swallow flew above. A tall dead beech had the chimerical gleam of a lost city in the jungle, a city for birds and insects. One branch still had leaves; the others were truncated and decayed, flaking into dust. A treecreeper slanted up the greyish-white cliff of the bole, peering into crevices. It sang; a thin vehement tingling, like the melting of an icicle. It seized a caterpillar with the sharp pincers of its bill, banged it against the tree eight or nine times, presumably to kill it – in the same way that a kingfisher kills a large fish –then swallowed it in one gulp. The treecreeper moved upward again. After much hesitation, it followed one of the tributary branches to its source in the sky. Suddenly finding that its curved bill was tapping only the air, it seemed bewildered. It still searched for a higher way, looking up at the sky. Then it peered over the edge, saw the ground below, and flew down to the foot of another tree.
A green woodpecker appeared on the bole of the dead beech. I did not see it in flight. I saw only its shadow, and then the bird itself superimposed upon the shadow, as though its colours had materialised from a print on the sunlit bark. It moved upward in slow jerks, watched by a starling. Its eye shone dark, a dark stone within the white eye-ring and the surrounding patch of black. The scarlet feathers of its crown gleamed in the sun. The long, heavy-looking bill, greyish-white and tapering to a point, was sheathed into the narrow red and black head that bulged out, bullet-shaped, above the flexible neck. The large feet were laid flat on the side of the tree, with the toes stretching upward. The chest was a pale greenish-grey, brightening at the centre to a smudgy whiteness, a mossy shading that matched the beech-bark. The woodpecker drew its head back slowly, far back, leaning out from the tree; then it bowed slowly forward again. Its bill moved through a long arc, like a gun being slowly raised and lowered. Suddenly it flew off into the wood, dipping and rising silently between the trees. The red-feathered crown of its head seemed to fleck the green beech leaves with splashes of shining blood.
I sat in the shade of a holly, watching the dead beech. Jackdaws sometimes perched there, a wren sang, blue tits and nuthatches searched the bark for food. The hot sun tinted the tree with pale violet light. A grey squirrel crouched low along a dead branch, looking like a flake of grey bark. I kept still, and the squirrel became less wary, sitting up to wash its fur with its tongue, as a cat does, and to scratch its back. It moved to the bole of the tree and crept slowly downwards, head foremost, body and tail flattened against the bole, till it reached the roots. It lowered itself to the ground, till only its tail was stretched vertically upward. It was completely hidden, perfectly camouflaged. Through the binoculars, I could just see that it was a squirrel; without them it looked like another tendon of the spreading beech roots. Its eyes closed, and it seemed to be sleeping. But soon it crept away under the brambles, and I did not see it again. Like many animals, when they do not know they are being watched, it moved slowly and with apparent difficulty, as though its limbs were stiff or broken.
A jay screeched wildly in the beech wood, and fled into the open clearing, pursued by a sparrowhawk. The hawk drew in behind the jay. Its foot reached forward like a yellow hand, bony, febrile, clutching air, like an old man feeling in front of him. It clutched again. The talons hooked into the tail of the jay and crawled forward till they reached his back, like a climber hauling himself up a steep rock-face with his fingertips. The jay’s flight was broken. His wings moved feebly, spasmodically, like the oars of a boat whose rower has suddenly collapsed. Then they drooped listlessly in air. The two birds sank together like a crippled biplane, tilted, then dived into the brambles. The jay struggled, heaving up in a delirium of fear, but he was underneath and could not overthrow the hawk. He seemed defenceless. He had begun to die at the first touch of the knifing talons. Soon he was dead, and the hawk stood breathless above him, curved like a claw.
I heard the dry snuffling sound of feathers being plucked. It was like the crackling of a distant fire. A smoke of small feather-fronds drifted away in the breeze. The hawk’s head rose and fell, stabbing and wrenching. There was a sharp snapping of bones. The jay was lifted, and transformed. The feeding hawk seemed to glow with a fierce, infernal heat. The yellow eyes flickered and pierced. Fear could be felt in the quiet air. It bristled in the heat, like a faint cloud of frost-needles. The sun moved slowly through the beech leaves, and shone across the clearing. The hawk rose, and flew silently away into the wood, carrying the remains of its prey.
At four o’clock the green woodpecker returned to the dead beech. It landed on the bole, and stayed motionless for a long time. This lizard-like immobility is a characteristic of the species. One sees nothing curious in the complete stillness of a resting hawk, yet a woodpecker always seems odd unless it is moving. One forgets that this clinging to the side of a tree is the woodpecker’s natural perching position, in which it is quite relaxed and comfortable.
While the woodpecker remained rigidly still, as though it had been hypnotised, the jackdaws called above the clearing, circling and tumbling in a noisy flock. Bees crept among the faded blue flowers of the ground ivy, and a chiffchaff sang. Gradually the chiffchaff came lower in the trees, carrying food in its bill. It called softly, then dropped lightly down to its nest in the brambles. A jay flew to an oak, and sank silently above the chiffchaff, a bright shadow falling through the sunlight with sinister ease, foxy-red and fawn, staring-faced, flourishing its brilliant blue-eyed wings. I disturbed it before it could find and carry off the young birds.
At last the green woodpecker moved. It climbed slowly upward, and began to dig its bill into a cavity in the bole. It dug with tremendously fast stabbing movements. Its head vibrated violently into a green blur as it swung in and out. It attacked the tree, leaping at it savagely, hitting into it with destructive force. Its feet were glued to the bole, but its legs flexed and extended outwards like springs as it leant far back and then came pickaxing forward. At intervals it would stop abruptly, freezing into a posture of mute aggression. When the starlings came near, the woodpecker fluttered at them, lunging fiercely with its bill and clashing its wings among the leaves. It landed on a swaying twig, and its wings and tail spread out to an astonishing width, making it look large and formidable, a green and yellow brilliance, like a huge tropical butterfly.
Eventually it stayed on the living branch of the dead tree, doing nothing, apparently exhausted. Occasionally it moved a short distance up or down. The big crinkled toes, like grey spiders, reached a long way in front of the resting bird. They rose or sank for several seconds before the bird itself began to move. Its legs were thick and sinewy, bouncing and springing as though the tree was a trampoline. They moved like the hind legs of a hare; sometimes slow and crippled, sometimes boundingly light and supple. When I went closer, the woodpecker sank over the side of the branch till only its steeply-pointing bill, red crown, and bright eye, were showing. When I moved back, it flew away.
Now that the woodpecker has gone, I am able to relax, to stand freely at the foot of the beech. Two starlings are feeding their young in the hole where the woodpecker was digging. It may have been trying to enlarge the hole, which could have been its nest-site before the starlings dispossessed it; or it may have been trying to kill or eject the young starlings. The violence of its action suggested assault, but woodpeckers are extravagant in all their movements, flinging themselves about with melodramatic zest or remaining motionless with a woodenness that is like a rigor.
Behind me, as I stand concealed by the dead tree, I can hear the hesitant blundering sound of a timid animal moving through the brambles. A roe deer has come out into the cooler air of the clearing. It is a sudden glow of colour, a rich chestnut-red, like a long-legged fox. Its nose twitches, and its big ears move nervously. It is the size of a large dog, very tremulous and slender, with docile, wondering eyes. This is a different place. The deer looks up at the dead beech, listening for familiar sounds. It watches me for half a minute; then it turns, and trots back towards the trees. It stops, and looks round. Then it gallops, leaping like a lamb, bounding away into the beech wood. It has been to the edge of the world.
I go back into cover, waiting for the woodpecker to return. The boles of the trees are softened by a mellower light. High above, a heron is circling slowly to the south. Its long bill shines like ivory in the evening sun. I look down to see the sparrowhawk gliding to the top of the dead beech. Its brown wings flutter mistily as it perches, facing the sun. It relaxes, shakes out its feathers, and sinks down upon the tree. It now looks smaller, hunched and dumpy, with a narrow head that is flattened slightly across the crown. The large eyes are the centre of the bird. Their dark pupils are encircled by glowing irises of brilliant citron yellow. They are like savage stone-age eyes staring through the mask of the present. The resting hawk is like a wooden idol that has been carved and varnished and set in the sun to dry. It looks primitive, tongueless, huge-eyed, and glaring. Cuckoos call in the distance, thrushes and blackbirds sing. The air is quiet, the breeze a far sighing in the beeches. The life of the wood is unchanged, but it seems to have dwindled, to be strangely remote. The sparrowhawk does nothing, does not move its head, glares as though blind. It is volcanic, smouldering with suppressed violence. The green woodpecker flies back to the beech, dips abruptly as it sees the hawk, and lands near the foot of the bole. The hawk looks down, the woodpecker stares up. The two prehistoric profiles have the profound stillness of weapons in repose. Slowly the sun sinks below the trees and the shadows rise over the dead beech. The woodpecker darkens, but the hawk still shines. Suddenly the woodpecker has gone. The hawk dives down into the submerging shadows. Only the man remains.