The smooth road to the south shone in the sun with a dense violet glow. Suddenly it stopped, turned right, and plunged steeply down. A deep valley was revealed. The heat and glare of the road seemed to float forward, dissolving slowly into cool green air. Beyond the deep hollow of the valley, the long ridge of a distant forest rose across the sky like the bristling, muscular spine of a huge animal, chained by the gleaming highways.
I looked down into a vast listening of pines. They were attentive only to the air above. Towns and villages had sunk deep between the trees, dark with finality. The small copses of Spanish chestnut were creamy with blossom, whirling up from the sombre valley like meadowsweet swaying over dark water. A flowering lime tree drifted the air with a clouded honeycomb of cloying fragrance, nostalgic with the closed cells of hopes forgotten, a mirage of time lost. The brilliant green of the heart-shaped leaves was darkened by the shadows of nectar-seeking bees.
The morning slept like a snake in the unaccustomed warmth. To the east lay the dreaming heath. There is always a dry, withered smell in the heathland air. The heat above the bushes glitters like frost, a spiny furze of hovering light. The air rises into the shapes of flame. The senses are parched by a bronze glare, an acrid metallic taste.
I followed the path across the heath, passing through heather and bracken, between green birches and thick clumps of blue and yellow gorse. The sounds of the road were soon hidden and lost. Willow warblers sang among the balsam-scented birch leaves, a cool watery sound cascading down. Occasionally I heard the dry declining cadence of a meadow pipit, the remote song of a yellowhammer, or the bright fluttering of nomadic linnets. The air had a peculiar density. It was perfectly clear, and the blue sky shone above, yet there seemed to be a silent downward pressure of invisible branches. The air was inhabited, heavy with an unseen presence.
At the highest point of the heath, five Scots pines stood alone, looking remote and withdrawn. The sun was behind me, shining upon the trees. Their lower branches had been broken off many years before, leaving short, blunt curves of dead wood, dry and grey, like the petrified horns of bison. For the first twenty feet from the ground, the bole of each tree was scaly and brown; but above – up to the highest branches – it was a smooth and glowing golden-red, both gold and red, so that one could not tell which was the dominant colour. The trees did not reflect the sun so much as glow from within, as though their bark was of parchment, a membrane through which a steady flame was shining. They seemed to have their own light, absorbed from the sun, and retained. When I went past at dusk they were still shining with a strange, almost gaseous, incandescence, a reddening luminosity that only faded, and then quite suddenly, when night came, as though the colder air had frozen it away.
The tall pines rose from the heath in complete stillness, unmoved by the wind. The bark of one tree was peeling, and the eye winced from the flayed look it had. Slowly I saw, really saw and did not simply know, that these pines were living things, standing like emaciated horned animals, maned with their dark green or dull blue clusters of narrow leaves. Their deep piny smell was the smell of living beings, anchored by their roots, able to move only upward or outward as the sun ordained. They were not dead, but merely prisoners, land-captives, with the sound of the sea in their leaves.
I picked up a fallen twig. The tassels of its leaves were very cold to the touch. The trees themselves had a cold glaze, in spite of the heat of the sun, like the cold surface of an earthenware vase. The sun made all things clear, as though it might dry away even the black shadows of its own creation. The highest branches of the pines shone white, like the soft damp flesh of mushrooms. The curving branches crystallised out into the similarly-curving leaves, whirling the pale sky beyond into a deeper blue, making it come nearer.
For an hour I sat and watched the unchanging pines, watched the light ascending their tall boles and leaving their contorted branches. Bees droned in the heather and the gorse, red admiral butterflies rested in the sun. Swallows and martins fed on insects rising high above the heath. Nothing disturbed my vision of these ancient Nordic pines, herded together here like the last buffalo, living their own intense life, the slow fire that can never be seen. Cut where you will, you cannot find that flame. It can never be seen, any more than you can see the spirit, or soul, of a man.
I heard a faint drumming sound. Glancing over my shoulder I saw the dark shape of a hawk descending, and sharp wings expanding and contracting. A male hobby alighted on a dead pine branch, sinking down and becoming a surprisingly small bird. His breast was leopard-coloured, mottled with dark brown and white. His upper parts were blue-grey, the colour of a lowering thundercloud. The crown of his head, and his moustachial streaks, were black, contrasting with the dazzling whiteness of his cheeks and throat. The yellow orbital rings, and the large brown eyes they surrounded, glinted in the sun as he turned his head to watch me. He looked arid, burning-eyed, a hawk of the heat, an emanation of the hot pine bark. It was as though the dead branch had suddenly opened to show a dark nerve quivering within. He was restless, staring past me, and glancing at the sky. He leapt upward, rising steeply from the tree, his long wings lashing and twitching with fierce spasmodic power. A black flame burnt swiftly across the heath. Then it was suddenly quenched as it dived through a shining fall of martins and swallows.
Beyond the crown of pines, the path sloped down to a small stream. Woods rose on the far side, and the landscape slowly changed. The air was very still. Thousands of insects rose from the heather that hummed and crackled with life under the hot sun. The path was white and stony; the turf beside it sounded hollow to the tread. A sleeping adder lay coiled among the stones. The black zigzag markings along its back looked like a thin dark snake resting upon a larger, yellowish one. The drowsy scent of the gorse blossom seemed to shine; the burnt gorse smelt black and bitter. The dark shadows of the first small clouds fanned slow-sweeping arcs of rich maroon across the pale rose-coloured dunes of heather. The droning song of greenfinches came dryly, sleepily, from the deep green shade by the stream.
The stream was hidden beneath a dense tangle of hawthorn and briar. A strange ticking sound emerged from this impregnable zariba. It was like the churring of a very distant nightjar, but drier in timbre, and more continuous. It resembled the rapid mechanical communication of an insect. It fluctuated in volume, and seemed to waver in direction like the fluttering of a compass needle to either side of north. For five minutes this thin thread of sound endured, always about to reach the moment of cessation yet never actually ceasing. It was the soft, introspective, reeling song of a grasshopper warbler. When I went nearer, it stopped; when I retreated, it began again. It was unreal, a sound embedded deep in the silence, masked at once by the slightest tremor of a breeze in the branches. It seemed, at times, to come from within my own brain, a faint alarm-note endlessly signalling through the nerves of the ear, very close and intimate, but also infinitely far off, receding, and elusive. It was impossible to be certain when the song really ceased. Suddenly I realised that I could no longer hear it, and soon it was fading, forgotten, hard to recall. The small bird itself, olive-coloured and slender, remained in cover and was never visible. But even if I had seen it, I would still have been unable to associate that faint huskiness of sound, ascending so steadily into the summer air, with the attenuated warbler flitting and feeding in the dry, sunless world of the thorn-stems.
While I was listening for the song of the grasshopper warbler to begin again, I heard a curious alarm-call that I did not recognise. It was close to me; a harsh and sibilant impact, like a scythe being sharpened on a whetstone; ‘sheerk, sheerk, sheerk’, repeated many times. It came from a male red-backed shrike, perched high in a dead birch beside the stream. He was very alert, glancing rapidly from side to side as he watched for prey. He was like a sudden flow of cold air piercing the warm current of the summer afternoon. A small bird, hardly bigger than a chaffinch, yet predatory, rapacious, like a hawk unfrocked and diminished. Whitethroats and linnets fluttered about his head, calling with anxious fury. The shrike’s throat contracted and distended. He cast up a shining black pellet that swung beneath his bill by a thread and then dropped down into the stream. He flew off, pursued by the mob.
Ten minutes later he returned to the same perch. He scanned the sky, stared all around, watching every movement of bird or insect. He would hop up from twig to twig till he swayed at the top of the bush, spreading out his wings and tail to keep balanced. He spent most of his time in the numerous small dead birches, but occasionally he perched in thorn bushes. Once he perched high in a rustling poplar. The leaves glinted and turned in the rising wind. Among the shining brown-tinted leaves, which his colour matched so well, the shrike was hard to see. Sometimes he would be silhouetted against the brilliant deep blue of the cirrus-flecked sky, where snowy corals of cloud curled high to the north-west. Beyond the watching shrike, very small and distant, two hobbies circled slowly down wind.
Many whitethroats sang, or grated out their hard, stone-gritting alarm notes. The shrike chased a singing bird, driving it higher when it tried to descend to the bushes. But the whitethroat evaded easily, dropping into cover before the shrike could come within a yard of him. A blue tit and a yellowhammer gleamed among the hawthorns, carrying food for their young. Linnets twittered in the gorse. A jay lurked behind the screening leaves, watching me closely, peering down at the bushes, skulking through thorn and briar, searching for nests. A flock of lapwings flew slowly northwards, black against the intense blue of the sky.
The shrike came near again, returning to the birch where I had first seen him. He perched only ten feet away, apparently indifferent to my presence. The pale blue-grey crown of his wind-ruffled head was almost powdery-white in the sun, curiously unreal, as though it were of felt instead of feathers. The predatory head look disproportionately large compared with the slender body and longish tail. The wide black eye-stripes had a silken shine, like a rippling mask. The chest was pink and white. When he turned away from me, I could see the rich, glossy, fox-red of his back, and the black and white tail that was never still. A chiffchaff sang to the south, and the shrike’s head swung round to watch and listen. The high domed, blindfolded head moved constantly from side to side searching for suitable prey. It resembled the hooded turret of a gun, turning and turning, then suddenly revealing the glint of a metallic eye, beetle-like in the dark mask.
The shrike dropped lower in the dead birch. He swept downwards, and hovered above the bracken, two yards in front of me. His wings beat very fast, blurring and gleaming like a dragonfly’s. Then he fell like a kestrel, plunging down as though he were seizing the prey with his feet. He rose at once, and flew up to the poplar. His flight was surprisingly fast, undulating like a finch, but faster, and with a strange rippling effect. When he alighted in the tree, I saw that he had a stag beetle in his bill. He looked around for a long time before he eventually swallowed the beetle, biting it into three pieces and gulping it down. After five minutes, following a slight relaxation of his rigid alertness, the shrike flew from the poplar to a small oak. From a crevice in one of the branches he picked out an insect, whose movement he must have seen from thirty yards away.
When I had been watching the shrike for half an hour, I heard a sound like the wheezing of a starling in a small blackthorn bush nearby. I went closer, and saw two young shrikes clinging to twigs six inches above the nest they had just left. They called constantly, and the adult male began to bring food to them. The female I saw once only, when she perched on a dead tree. She was a speckled, chestnut-brown bird, looking slightly smaller and less conspicuous than the male. She was not so tame, and I did not see her feed the young.
The young shrikes were reddish-brown, the same colour as the adult female, and they were remarkably well-hidden among the leaves of the bush. They could not fly, and their wings and tails were still very short and stumpy. They clambered higher in the bush, clumsy but persistent, often falling back as far as they had climbed. Sometimes they fluttered from twig to twig, half-flying, half-falling. Their bills opened wide to show a bright orange gape and to emit their hoarse wheezing calls for food. They pecked at the blackthorn leaves while they waited. They were frog-like, with big heads and small bodies. Their huge saurian eyes gazed at me, or at the blue and green world beyond, with a wide, unfocused, uncomprehending stare, like that of a human baby. But when the male shrike was coming back with food, the eyes of the young changed at once, focusing on the returning bird long before I could see him, following every movement of his flight until he arrived in the bush.
When the male was very close, the calling of the young birds became a single prolonged speech. They would scramble as high in the bush as they could. One was slightly smaller than the other, and less active. For over an hour the male brought food to them at least once every five minutes, sometimes more often. Near the nest he became cautious. He would dive into a neighbouring bush, and would fly low to the young, suddenly appearing beside them. He would push an insect violently into an open gape, and would fly off again at once. The larger, noisier bird was fed more often than the smaller one. The screeching of all three birds would rise to a crescendo as the male landed in the bush. He had difficulty in perching on the same twig as the young, and he sometimes hovered as he fed them. There was much confused fluttering and jostling, and occasionally the food was dropped and not recovered.
The male shrike caught many beetles, taking them from the bracken, or from twigs and branches. Many insects were allowed to pass unpursued. Diptera did not interest him at all. He killed crane flies and great green grasshoppers, and – on one occasion – a golden-ringed dragonfly. The food he brought to the young birds was always the largest of his kills, not the smallest as one might expect. He often banged his prey on a branch, presumably to kill it quickly. His black bill shone wet with the juices of insects.
Suddenly he flew steeply, almost vertically, up into the air, rising high and fast. He seemed to ascend in long jerks, undulating upwards as though catapulted. He darted and jinked from side to side, beating his wings in rapid, irregular flurries. His pale head, bisected by the black eye-bars, shone conspicuously in the sun as he rose. There seemed to be no purpose in this violent upward dash. But high above the shrike a bumble bee slanted quickly away to the north. It had obviously seen its pursuer, and was trying to escape, but it was overtaken in ten seconds. The bee swerved and dodged from side to side, erratic as a bat. The shrike rose steeply above, and poised there for a moment with his black and white tail outspread. Then he swooped down in a flashing crescent, like a stooping hawk. His tail rippled up and fanned out above him as he dived, his head shone black and white. He snatched the bee from the sky, seized it with its bill as though it were motionless. It was a graceful and sudden end, a flourish of brilliant feathers in the sun and then the released pollen drifting up into the blue air. The shrike parachuted down to the poplar, falling in long slants and sudden vertical plunges. He killed his prey on a branch, and took it to the young birds, who had watched his upward flight from their eyrie in the blackthorn bush.
A sudden small shadow swung across the sunlit bracken. The shrike looked up, then dropped down into a hawthorn. A male hobby flew above, dashing forward and rolling from side to side, cutting into the wind like a swift. His wings were bright with speed, shearing the air, shedding light from their dark blades. His downbent head looked powerful and menacing, like a clenched fist. His tail pointed backwards, very still and rigid, sharpening away from the tall flicker of his wings. He was a lean, narrow, and high-shouldered hawk, shaped like a swift, bow-shaped; but the bow had bulges in it, the protrusive head, the elbow-like carpal joints. He glided smoothly, evenly forward, flowing over the air, skidding over its smoothness like a stone skimming across ice. His hard anchor-shape floated away, dark and sharp-edged. He seemed to be flattened against the sky, without depth. The tips of his narrow wings hung loosely down, like fingers trailed in water. Occasionally the long, curved primaries flexed with a quick swimming movement, like a fish waving itself forward with its fins. He began to catch insects, seizing them with his thin flexible toes and eating them as he glided, bending his head down to meet his upraised foot with no change or check of motion. Sheathed in his swept-back wings, he dived at a dragonfly that shone above the stream. His extended talons seemed to tear the sky down with him. Speed shattered his shape. I saw only fragments of grey and white and orange. The he swept upward, shaking the sky from his wings. The broken colours closed to black, and shrank small, as the long wings scythed and scythed him away towards the distant eastern pine wood.
The hobby is always the perfect epitome of the places it frequents. On the downs it is a hawk of the open land, of the grassy air and the singing light, a hunter of pipits and larks. By the river it is a water falcon, shining and rippling through the reflections of its prey, capturing dragonflies, spearing swallows and martins. Here on the heath it is like an intense flame that has cooled and condensed to the hard form of a falcon. Its wings are like the dark chitin of a beetle’s shard. It is a bird of the dry gorse, the pines, and the heather, feeding mainly upon moths, beetles, linnets, and warblers. The hobby has a liking for the astringent juices of insects, and for the bitter flesh of the birds and bats that prey upon them: though whether a hawk can actually taste its food can only be conjectured. It lives in those places where the late summer is richest, where birds and insects abound. It is a hawk of the south, startling and beautiful as it suddenly hurtles above in the violent flamenco of its flight.
By four o’clock the wind that had risen at midday had declined to a faint warm breeze from the south. The heat-haze hovered and glittered over the white path across the heather, like the gleaming wings of innumerable dragonflies. Many grasshoppers sang in the gorse, but most of the birds were silent. Occasionally I heard the muffled cooing of a turtle dove, or the dry-throated, difficult song of a reed bunting. The air smelt and tasted of the heat, arid and dusty as dead bracken. Far to the west, beyond the clump of pines, red and yellow spires of flame bled slowly up into black smoke. Trees flared like torches of pitch, and were left autumnal, their leaves fading from brilliant orange to dull brown or black. Rainbow streams of water curved up from hidden hoses. Soon there were no flames, but only the black smoke rolling upward with vicious speed, the heath slowly dying into the devouring air.
I followed the stream to the north till I came to a pond. It was roughly circular in shape, not more than fifty yards across, dark and still, with a fringe of green marsh. It was surrounded by small birches, gorse, and a few dwarf oaks and hawthorns. There was a smell of fox in the brackish air. The vanishing white scuts of rabbits flashed and bobbed in the sun. Willow warblers sang, and a solitary bullfinch called.
On a post beside the pond, sprung upward like a brown fungus in a green lawn, a sparrowhawk was perching. The black pupils of his eyes were small in the sun, deep sunk in the yellow smoulder of the raging irises. His thin toes clutched the post, like skinny yellow hands. Swallows and sand martins swooped and chattered about his narrow head. He crouched low, and squinted up at them. He watched the dark green of the gorse, waiting for a wing to flame. At the same moment I saw the white speck of a stonechat’s rump and the hawk’s reflection cleaving through the water. The stonechat tumbled into cover. The hawks’ foot trailed over him, swinging emptily, scrabbling loose air. The hawk flew on across the heath, without looking back. The stonechat flitted up on to the gorse again, the swallows and martins descended to the pond. I remembered the sulphurous glare of the hawk, and I touched the post where he had perched. There was of course no mark, no imprint on the wood. So intense a bird, breathing out such a heat of hunger, yet he left no mark. It was as though fire could be as cold and printless to the hand as water.
I stayed by the pond, while the sun sank below the heat of the day receded into the cool blue evening haze. More birds sang: willow warblers, whitethroats, a hedge sparrow, and a wren. The heather darkened, becoming greenish black, as it is in winter. I could smell the birch leaves. The dry earth was still quite warm to the touch. The call of a curlew rose from the sombre heath, like the sad voice of a shadow, proclaiming solitude, the passing of day, night’s wilderness returning. A small breeze ravelled at the water’s edge, and the calm reflections began to tremble like dark sails.
Swallows and swifts were still hawking for insects when the first nightjar sang. Daubenton’s bats flickered low above the water, their wings creaking like harness. A white migraine of ghost moths fluttered in the black gorse. With a hollow whistle of air, the sharp wing of a hobby skated over the shining skin of the pond. Then there were three hobbies, curving, darting, snatching at the dusk. The swallows disappeared, but the swifts remained. The hobbies fed upon insects, chased the swifts, pursued one another. They flew through an endless labyrinth, a maze of shuddering wings. They rose higher as the insects rose. They circled among swifts. The fretted surface of the pond seemed to float up into the sky. The sharp outline of the swooping wings contracted. They blurred, became small and misty, hawks of dark air. Then they vanished. The wild screaming of the swifts faded quite suddenly. Up there it was still day. I was in darkness, but they had found the light.