The thick fog smells stale and rusty, like old metal. Trees reach up into webs of fog, and their branches touch away to nothing. The condensation falls from them like rain. Birds are tame. They fly low and carefully. There is a deep vibration of distant traffic. My clothes bristle silver-grey with fog, like a growth of rimy beard.
The lane to the hillside farm rises steeply, and the fog begins to shine. The hill air is lighter. Glistening cobwebs trail from the hedges and flash in filaments of green and copper as the sun comes through. A chiffchaff sings. There is a thin whisper of bird-sounds, husky in the wet trees.
The tall hedges are vined with clematis, bryony, and bindweed. Woodpigeons clatter from the unseen fields. Robins and starlings sing in the white cloud of an oak. Magpies chatter. Linnets and goldfinches flutter from the swaying thistles, and are lost in the grey dusk of a hawthorn hedge. The mealy white flowers of the wild angelica look like flowers of mist.
The whiteness darkens into the shapes of buildings, the brown and yellow breath of a barn, the ruined grey of a farmhouse. The gate has crumbled down into the nettles and cow parsley. The mouldering stables smell old with emptiness. Swallows and martins are dark sounds in the white air. The barn is still used. A dusty sunlight of hay rises up into shadow, shouldering the cobwebbed rafters. There is a leather gloom of sleeping bats.
The fog is warmer here. It drips from the ivy on the roofless walls of the house, where sparrows are chirping. The scent of a fox drifts in from the rutted yard. Each object, clear-centred but with dim contours, is so much more itself now, isolated in the opaque milky whiteness of the fog. The owl-soft air of desertion, of abandonment, grows taller, denser, as the years pass. Lightly as a fox, as a fox in a farmyard, I tread past the empty stable, the still barns, whose silence seems to tingle with just-departed footsteps. Man has no place here now. He is a migrant only. He does not stay.
The sun shines beyond the fog, and there is warmth in the moist woody pith of the air. The song of a swallow ripples above. A moorhen calls from the smell of a pond. The praying shafts of a cart are white with the bird-droppings of many years, and there are owl-pellets in the grass beneath. The head of a shire horse comes forward from the fog. It stares in from the mist of the past. Its breath is a starry vapour. The blaze upon its forehead has a supernal shine. The horse seems to be waiting still, after a lifetime of waiting, as though it were watching the inexorable approach of something far-off. Whether it hopes for release, or fears some further bondage, the great eyes cannot reveal. I move nearer, and the head vanishes.
The ruined farm is only a mile from the sea. It has a pelagic air, as though it were an abandoned wreck, the bones of a stranded Viking ship. Above the farm, a small field slopes up to the north-east. The dropping yellow petals of the ragwort lighten the stony grass. The field narrows to an overgrown bridle-path that rises steeply into the fog. I pass the single leaning gatepost, dim and grey with moss, like a weathered menhir, and go up into the green rain of the overhanging bushes and trees.
The aspens are still. Their leaves look limp and disused. It is as though something inside the tree had been broken. Near a small pond, an accumulation of water in the undrained humus of the dead leaves, I hear the nasal call of a willow tit, a narrow parsimony of sound. The tall hedges on either side of the path are like lines of dense woodland: oak, elm, elder, willow, hawthorn, hazel, bramble, and briar, are entangled together. The ground has been trodden into a morass by the hooves of cattle. This is the only path to the hill, but there are no footprints in the mud. No one comes here now. There is no spoor of man; no litter, no cartridge-cases, no unwanted metal. The unseen hill stands above me in the fog, like a lost land.
Many birds are feeding in the hedges. They flutter and call ahead of me as I walk slowly upward. A wren sings. Pale sunlight gleams occasionally through the drifting fog. A spotted flycatcher shines under an over-arching canopy of oaks and maples. It darts sudden curves of light through the deep, insect-humming shade. Its looping flight is like a fisherman’s cast line, whirling, falling, returning. It catches small insects, closing the thin mandibles of its bill upon the prey with a loud decisive snap, a sharp and clearly audible sound, like the clink of stone on stone. It perches on low branches, an upright, pale-chested, faded-looking brown bird, its high-domed head shining in hazy sunlight. A hunting swallow flits through the same deep air. The flycatcher darts up into the dusk above and loops back and down to its perch again with a dry whirr of wings and a snap, as though it were attached to the tree by elastic. The small rodent-like face is turned towards me, but the eyes are oblivious, insect-intent.
The path widens, then suddenly ends. The hedges thicken, and become a wood. There was a farm here once. Not a stone remains. A robin sings in the wood. Fog swirls through the opaque yellow sunlight. It is midday. The air smells of imminent heat.
I scramble into the wood, forcing a way through the dense undergrowth. Whatever paths there may once have been, trodden by foxes and badgers but never by human feet, are hidden now by the rank summer growth. The whole wood seems to be falling inwards, caving in upon the light. It is a fly-ridden wilderness of oak and maple, bracken and willow-herb, holding up empty nests and the soft calling of young birds. The trees droop heavily with the drowsy song of the woodpigeons. The glaucous leaves of the tall thistles have a rigid, attentive stillness. The call of a jay rasps through the quiet air. The woodpigeons clap their wings as they rise and sink in their display-flight, tracing steep gable-shapes from tree to tree. Here and there, to the south, a vapour of blue distance floats between the trees and the drifting fog. Suddenly, unexpectedly, a blackcap sings, a loud, clear, fresh sound, brightening the dim late-summer haze, the stillness no breeze can dispel. Then the dark shadow of the hot silence closes in again.
At the bottom of a slope the air is green and stagnant, like still water. The curdled smell of the meadowsweet seems heavy and despondent. The silence of the air, the silence of the trees: two silences leaning together, leaning up towards the hot sky. The place smells sour. There is a subdued twitter of distant birds, but near me nothing moves. The trees are rotting, and many fallen branches crumble and snap beneath my feet. Stinging nettles bristle upward, filling the open spaces with their bitter green. Above them are elder-bushes, twisted and splitting, smelling of dust and age. A tall spruce rises into a green gloom. Its pendulous branches seem to hang down into deep water. They are the colour of water-weed. Satanic ivy hides the bole of the tree, and I cannot see the summit.
The fog has gone, and the green headland of the hill rises above the blue glitter of the distant sea. Long thorn hedges, crowned with oak and ask, divide the hill into many narrow, undrained fields. Lines of small elms mount the steep slopes, their dark summer green looking almost black. Between the wood and the hill, there is the shallow valley of a small, winding stream, dark with alder, then silvery with sharp-leaved willow. The unchecked growth of many summers, rising and declining, has lessened the penetration of the light in a way one rarely sees in farmland now. The hazed-over raggedness of sky above these lush, neglected fields gives a sense of mystery, of something rare and wild that has run away to hide, of something infinitely regretful fretting at the edge of the light, like a big moth fumbling at a window. This is a place where the last of the persecuted may for a time find refuge and seclusion. In the amber of the sunlight that lies between the high hedges, there is preserved an air of the past, the presence of an older summer. Under the surface of the visible world I can always hear the soft wolf-stride of the rapacious world beyond.
I leave the wood, and go down towards the stream. The fog lingers in the hedges, and in the tops of the trees, but there is blue sky above and a haze of sunlight. A covey of common partridges whirrs away over the drying grass, beating their wings quickly and then gliding. As they glide they force their wings down in hard, drooping curves, as though they were holding buoyant pieces of wood under water. Their primary feathers seem to curve involuntarily, like curls of burning paper. Dragonflies glisten in the misty light. The traveller’s joy shines over the hedges with the glint of thistledown. The bruised hemlock has a high and lonely look. A grass snake lies coiled in the sun, close to a hedge. It makes a sudden green scribble over the dead leaves, and then a dry rustling, as it slithers from sight beneath the overhanging brambles.
Two bullfinches are calling in the quivering moonlight of a white poplar. Their muted voices are plaintive, receding, muffled swiftly into silence by the soft white fur of the trembling leaves. They sound like question and answer, or questions expecting no answer. First the clear, delicate, fluting whistle of the female, a single sweet note, very pure and deep: then the male’s rippling response, two notes, a cadence, husky and slurring, yet jaunty, like the soft accents of a forgotten dialect. The bullfinches are subdued, secretive, deep in their own distance, mellowed by the sighing of the leaves.
I cross the stream, and ascend the arc of the hill. The dull green hedges are flushed with red: the vermilion of the rose-hips, the dark crimson of the haws, the orange-red arum berries under the ragged elms. A pond is hidden by clumps of leaning willow-herb. The oxidising dock and sorrel seeds stain the grass with dark brown rust. Scarlet pimpernel sleeps among stonecrop, shadowed by the warrior thistles. The aromatic white air of the chamomile and mayweed is darkened by swarms of flies. The fences and stiles have been hidden and crushed down by the insurrection of the weeds.
Woodpigeons sing in the dark shadow of the elms. A party of tits and tree creepers is travelling through the hedge, searching the leaves and the bark for food. Crane flies trail up from the fibrous grass. Starlings and swallows circle in the misty sky, feeding upon the insects that are rising into the dank warmth above the fields.
This hill is like the rich, impossible land that was depicted in the bird-books I saw as a child. The smell of the past rose from those musty pages, like the smell of forgotten hay. Men stood in their stiff-looking elderly clothes, their swart, hairy faces suffused with the summer sun. Dragonflies coloured the swaying marshes; the kite, the raven, the buzzard, shone above; the wide hayfields paled to the skyline; the high woods murmured beneath their beckoning trees. I saw the clean rivers, the forests like comforting fur, the silent sky. Guns fired, but there was no sound; birds fell, but there was no blood. It was a country of unchanging summer peace, a place I could never find.
I have reached the top of the hill. The sea rises to the south, sparkling with green and silver light, ascending into a mist of blue. The land shines clear and wet. Far below, the long wind-rows of the late summer hay are whitening in the sun. The south wind brings the scent of hay to the hill. The heat-haze quivers upward, like the filmy wings of a dragonfly emerging from their larval darkness. The fields have a leisured look, cattle-slow, swallow-enchanted.
The rusty call of a green woodpecker, sounding hoarse and unpractised, rises from the line of dark elms, whose crowns are just visible above the steep downward curve of the hill. High over the sea-plain, swallows and martins dive deep into the hazy pool of the air. A few late swifts circle above them. Grasshoppers sing in the withered fields. Butterflies hover above the thistles and the ragwort, haunting the bright air. Linnets and goldfinches cling to the bending thistle-flowers, scattering the white down as they pick out the seeds. Skylarks flutter from the grass, rising quickly and then slowly subsiding, as though bewildered by their lack of song.
The wind is rising in the tall black Italian poplars that tower above the hedge behind me. I can hear the wet rustling of their leaves. Weirs of air pour through them, and their endless water-tremble is a cooling sound. The glossy grey-green leaves shimmer in the sunlight like rain drifting through the sound of rain. Light flickers over the trees as the leaves turn on their thin and flattened stalks and flutter against one another. Poplars breathe the wind, and then slowly exhale it. A gust enters a tree, rushing into the lyre-shaped filter of the leaves. Then it moves slowly through to the far side in a long sighing of departure, till it is released to fade and tremble out across the fields. When the wind rises, the leaves surge like the roar of pebbles dragged down by the receding of a wave, and the branches strain upward as though the whole tree were about to take flight.
Rabbits feed in the grass above the brambled darkness of their burrows. The subdued song of a willow warbler flutters softly in the hedge. Something white moves low and wavering across the fields at the foot of the hill. Slowly, steadily, smoothly, like a globe of snow-white thistledown rising and falling in the wind, it sweeps over the bleached hayfields and the sudden gleam of a lane. Through the binoculars I can see that it is a hunting barn owl. Its wings beat evenly, without haste or effort, but the apparent ease is deceptive. It swerves and hesitates like a white lapwing. The sunlit haze seems to impede its movement. At such a distance it looks entirely white, luminous, without stain. It seems to fly slowly, but in fact it is flying faster than the swallows, as fast as a hunting hawk. It moves with infinite leisure through the flat world below, strangely unreal. From here, it looks conspicuous. But down there, as it passes over the lane, it must be merely a phantom whiteness, a breath vanishing at once from the shining mirror of the heat.
I lie on the hill of grass, letting the idle day flow down towards the west. The domed mole-barrows rise against the blue. The high air becomes purer, lonelier, as the wind moves through the grass and the travelling poplars strive. A kestrel soars, revolving the sky through the vanes of his wings. Swallows are fluting the air with the dark blue vapour of their flight. It is an effort to descend down the hand-holds of memory to the plain beneath, to recall the lost future, the dusk hovering above the sunken cities, the dim western world of fallen light and broken skies. My life is here, where soon the larks will sing again, and there is a hawk above. One wishes only to go forward, deeper into the summer land, journeying from lark-song to lark-song, passing through the dark realm of the owls, the fox-holdings, the badger-shires, out into the brilliant winter dominion, the sea-bleak world of the hawks. Something lingers in the air above the east country, a dust that never settles, a mist that no illumination can disperse. It is like the sea shining down from the sky.
The afternoon light declines, and the west becomes a dazzling sunlit haze, in which colour and distance slowly disappear. Idly, inattentively, I scan the undulating surface of the wood, letting the waving branches flow swiftly through the lens of the telescope. Suddenly, barbed in the moss-green plumes of the spruce, a sparrowhawk is perching, an adult male. He rests in the sun, loose-feathered, dishevelled, like an opening fir cone. By the magnification of the telescope, the hawk is lifted from distance, hallowed in an orbital ring of frosty light. He rises from the wood, huge and heraldic, like a phoenix from green flame. The yellow stems of his legs seem to be rooted in the rough bark of the tree. He looks primitive, archaic, more remote from man than a falcon. The sparrowhawk is uncompromisingly alien. It seems to have a vegetable existence, the barbarism of the sundew, as though a carnivorous plant had taken flight. The golden eyes are shallow, a raging surface, like a storm-driven haze of Magellanic water.
Below the perching bird, ten feet from the top of the tree, hidden from the ground beneath by the dense branches and the overhanging ivy, there is an untidy crown of twigs, the nest of a sparrowhawk. It is empty now, but the twigs are still white with the droppings and down-feathers of the young birds that have flown. I can imagine their sharp-edged hunger-calls rising into the hot summer sky, yellow-beaked flames of sound burning up into the cold light of the sea from the snowy nest in the dark spruce.
The hawk has left the tree. Flicking his wings lightly till they shine like birch-twigs in winter, he descends to the slope of the hill. The glide begins, the blurred wings spreading out upon the surface as though upon water, as though the air had suddenly begun to flow forward like water, bearing away the winged seed of the prone hawk. The rushing torrent tilts between trees, along hedges, down the steep hillside. The grey-brown tail of the hawk extends, fanning open and shut, streaming out gaseously like the tail of a comet. The green land swims back into the brilliant crater of the hawk’s luminous sun-gold eye, the retina rippling with images, reflecting trees, hedges, grass, and the flicker of sudden birds. It is motion, endless motion, smooth-flowing; an imperceptible movement, a haze of blurred wing-beats; then the flow resuming. The grass glides back beneath with a faint susurrus, leaves stir, twigs wave in the wind. There is a rapid burr of quills stiffening and fanning open as the hawk turns abruptly, swings up, then lowers to the surface of his glide again. All is flux, passing away, the soft breath of the hawk’s flight cool on the tall grass, the still thistles, the swaying nettle-towers whose green dust stays undisturbed. The air is fanned aside, the whole land is in motion, planes of earth and sky tilting away from the travelling grey wings of the pilgrim hawk. It is like a beating of bounds, grey lines drawn and expunged by the map-making bird as he contours the sunlit hillside with smooth unwavering flight.
The human eye moves with the hawk, swinging easily over the surface of the hill. Then it is alone. He has swerved aside. The eye has to go back, darts back to the hunting hawk. The haggard foot plucks idly at a singing robin; the robin falls, survives; the hawk drifts on, unregarding. Starlings dash up from the fields, and are passed, and forgotten. A startled rabbit runs down through the grass, leaving a dark green furrow with shining edges. The fanatically tireless flight of the hawk is like a wind of mortality, but it seems to lack purpose. It is merely a pondering of possible prey, monkish, dream-like, a contemplation of killing.
The hawk traverses the hill, sweeping low, rising, pausing, gliding away; but always he seems to descend, to go down into deeper and deeper green, endlessly falling through the slow summer air. And summer flows back through the flight of the hawk, the season unreeling, the splendour returning. And these things glow in the wake of his flight: thrushes eating haws in the hedge; magpies half-hidden by grass; moorhens running back to a pond; purple wine-streams of swallows over white clouds of hogweed; partridges whirling away; a shimmer of blue tits in the leaves of an aspen; a tree creeper sliding smoothly under the bough of an elm; a singing yellowhammer suddenly silent; a wren dropping down into brambles; sparrows and lapwings rising from the hayfields far below. Over the sea-bed of the late summer hay, the gliding hawk withdraws, till the eye loses him at last, and he sinks in the grey of the sea.
The grasshoppers no longer sing, and there are fewer insects in the cooling air. The sky to the east is very clear and blue. It has a cold, uninhabited look. Many rabbits are feeding in the shadows that now reach half-way across the fields. Woodpigeons are already flying to roost. Their soft cooing rises from the heavy elms and the subsiding wood. The swallows fly faster, flashing dark between the hedges. The leaves of the poplars move gently, idly, like the sea at low tide. The singing of the robins is unbearably clear and poignant. The hill shines with an elegiac autumn light.
A tawny owl calls from the bridle-path, and the shrill sound of mobbing begins. Blackbirds, thrushes, chaffinches, and sparrows, chatter and scold in a rising helix of hysterical clamour. The owl floats upward, rising buoyantly from the submerged green twilight of the trees. He glides down to the farm, glowing chestnut-red in the dark shadows. He rises to perch on the roof of the barn, and is changed by the late sun to a gable of fire, flaming on blue, cooling to stillness, the earth drifting down beneath him. His eyes close. He seems to be sleeping. Then he has gone, suddenly and completely, as though absorbed by the light. The sun lifts from the tops of the trees, from the roof of the barn. The hill sinks down, and the farm is in shadow. I hear the far call of the owl, very far now, far down in the dark valley.
The penumbra of dusk moves slowly westward. The owls of Europe are already hunting. The zoo owls will be waking now as the light declines and the grey Victorian brickwork glows with evening gold. Trees drift in the wind above the roar of traffic in the road outside. White mice lie dead on the floor of the cage. The eagle owl will not feed till dusk. He is waking as the people watch him, stretching his neck and uttering a soft call. His sunset-coloured eyes are kindling, the light coming slowly forward from within. The owl looks outward, beyond the watching faces. They have no significance for him. He is waking to his own world, to glooms of spruce or desert rock. He does not see the dull metallic chains that fence us in. His mind is still unscalable, a crag from which he can look down at the captives gazing up at him.
Here on the hill the day is almost over. The light flows down to the west, and the grey sea rises. The air is autumnal now. It smells of dusk. The sparrowhawk flits low beside the hedge, and is suddenly still upon a dead oak, growing to greyness. His yellow eyes look small and hard, like the sun shining behind mica. They seem to scorch my skin, as though the sun’s rays were focusing to fire through a burning-glass. His pale red chest is barred with white. It is like a red heart shining between white ribs, like the setting sun that gleams on the blue thorn of his bill and the yellow scales of his scourging feet. His cruelty – if it exists – is something given, like an eye or a voice. It does not grow – as it does in man – like a cancer of the spirit. He has no hiding-place. His refuge is in flight, in his own shadow. He lives in action; there is no before and after. The love of man can never spoil his will. His mind filters the landscape for movement, for shape; it reflects the rest. When I saw him first, at the top of the tall spruce, he was idle, calm in the night of his sleep. His long flight to the sea was like a moonlit meditation. But now the sun of his hunting rage is slowly rising into the last flame and clarity of day. His eyes glare round, darkening to the colour of fire. They leap. His wings follow. He is flying. He sinks to the west, moving fast and low. His shadow runs upon the earth beneath him. He courses along the misty hedges. He draws his precise grey lines across the summer land. Like a dark ray, he strikes into the sunlit straw of the barn. Sparrows break into brown clouds. A feeding pheasant calls, lifts his jewelled head, then crouches low. The hawk sweeps over the lane, slashes through the hedges, glides over farms, between bushes, round stables; then glints away over yellow stubble. His reflection flickers through dark farm ponds. He bisects a wood, but does not pause. He flows. He is a blade of a shadow, a bloom of soft grey light. He does not attack. For the moment he seems content merely to moving, receding, always receding, before he can be known.
A flock of lapwings flies above the hill, circles to the south, and then descends, the birds falling slowly to the hayfield, rocking and swaying through the air, running forward and calling as they land. Magpies chatter in the elms, where some woodpigeons are still singing. One swallow remains, hunting over the steep grass. There is no wind now, and the poplars sound very far-off. A faint scent of honeysuckle wanders from the hedge. The spear thistles are assuming the stillness of night. The grass is wet with dew.
There is a sudden haunting whiteness to the south. It seems to hover on the shining surface of the sea. Then it descends, and comes closer. It is a barn owl. He glows in the last sunlight, like burning snow, a white incandescence casting a black shadow. He flies quickly through the cooling dusk of the fields, and his whiteness is strangely difficult to follow. Some of his owl-shape seems to ebb away into the ambient air. He turns in the darkness of an oak, and floats forward over the fading giraffe-skins of light and shade that still dapple the sunlit field. Over the wet grass, through the thorns of shadow, the owl advances, his wings waving softly in the damp green dusk. He flies a yard above the grass: ten high wing-beats and then a drowsy glide. His flight is fast and even, yet every wing-beat jolts him slightly, making his body rise and fall in a smooth undulation. The edges of his wings are constantly feeling the air. Their silky fringes, like antennae of thistledown, impose a white silence in which all sounds are magnified. The glides are sudden and brief, slow-moving, with the long white wings held upward and changing shape, like listening ears. The broad head looks down, hanging like the globe of a giant puff-ball below the moth-like fanning of the wings. The soft ear-coverts lift in a wind of sound, and the cavernous ears beneath them echo with the endless rustling of the running mice. The white facial disc of the barn owl is a corolla of shining feathers, a radiance of petals that beams the diminishing light down to the dark-channelled calyces of the owl’s huge Lebanon eyes.
Suddenly he looks up, scanning my dark shape with bland indifference. Under the pale sunset glow that shines beyond the stained-glass sky of the hawthorns, the owl has the face of a saint. A mouse squeaks, a frail bud of sound, deep in the long grass. The owl stops abruptly, wheeling aside, like a white cloth flicked across my eyes. He thumps down, and the grass swirls open beneath his spreading wings. The mouse is dead. The owl stays in the grass for a moment. I can see the crown of his head, gleaming white, dusted with golden-brown. He rises heavily, carrying his prey, and flies to the west. He is black against the sunset, then grey, then gone. The dead mouse droops in the slack of his skin, and drags against the air.
Summer is fading now, into the mist of the fields, into the steep dusk of the valley. The voices of departing birds circle in the bright zenith of the after-sunset sky. Later, in the still night, under the rising of the winter stars, the voices of birds arriving will drift down to the tremble of the star-lit shore, tired from the long dark north of their journey.
A magpie mutters in the elms, but the robins and woodpigeons are silent. The scolding blackbirds fly to roost, and the stillness deepens. The last gleam of sunset lifts upwards from the sea. The air is suddenly colder. The song of a tawny owl rings out from far below, down in the damp autumn of the valley, and its smouldering moonlight burns through the dark trees.
The heavy shape of the tawny owl rests lightly at the top of a dead ash. The indigo dusk of his grey world is now the dusk of the fields. He sees the shrouded eyes of the roosting birds as they watch him from the hedge. For him the earth is a glittering firmament, but the sky above is shadowed. The pale fore-feet of a mouse reach up to a blade of grass, like a flutter of praying hands. The muted wings of the owl plane out on to the surface of the dusk, passing palms of darkness over the late sky. He floats through a labyrinth of air from which all sounds have fled. Swathed in black silence, he suddenly falls, extinguishing the faint spark of a strangled cry, killing the voice before the dying face is seen.
The hill reposes in a stratum of deep silence. The light of the sea beats in with a brightness of pale wings. The poplars are still. The smooth leaves of the silverweed glisten. Tall spear thistles stand in the hay-light of the fields, towering like desert cacti above their diminishing shadows. A weasel’s dark eyes glitter in the hedge, like small elderberries. The rose-hips have a fading sunset glow. The striped face of a badger shines in the path to the wood, then vanishes. The paths have no ending now. They seem to go on beyond the wood, across the misty plain, to find fulfilment in the distant sky, where dusk is bright upon the flying hills.
The darkness is returning from the sea to the mysterious, unloved lands of the east and the wood has a waiting look. I step softly through the reeds of silence. A fox glides past, a febrile warmth in the cold flow of the field. The wings of a mallard fret among the stars. Bats flutter their dumb language above the dark trees. A partridge calls. The slow dusk of the farm moves in the respiration of the sea. A curlew’s voice curves up into the night. The cowled hayricks glimmer, and grow large. The ferny darkness has a feral breath, but the visionary white owl shines again in the fronds of the air.