What we were after there, in the horn and vellum

shadows of the wood behind our house,

I never knew.

At times, it felt like bliss, at times

a run of musk and terror, gone to ground

in broken wisps of ceresin and chrism,

but now and then, the beast was almost there,

glimpsed through the trees,

or lifting its head from a stream

to make us out:

a coarseness on the wind

and brittle voices sifted from the morning.

We tracked the scent through barley fields and hollows,

we followed it into the spinney

with billhooks and sickles,

but nothing was ever there, save the codling moon

and, far in the meadows,

the one field of nothing but grasses

where something had lain,

in a fetor of blood-warmth and pollen,

before it moved on.

Still, we continued;

when one man sickened and died,

another would take his place in the wandering column,

blacksmiths and lawyers, orchardmen,

butchers in waiting,

lost in the fog, or hallooing after the pack,

and all of them friends of my father’s; though, needless to say,

in a country like this, the dead have more friends

than the living.

We were the men you saw

on a winter’s morning:

cumbersome bodies, shrouded in gunsmoke and cyan,

we went out every day, in every season,

falconers, rat catchers, deerstalkers, whippers-in,

plucking at shadows, purblind, afraid of our dogs,

and if, on occasion, I never quite saw the point,

I was always the first to arrive, with my father’s gun,

bound to the old ways, lost in a hand-me-down greatcoat

and last among equals – flycatcher, dreamer, dolt,

companion to no one,

alone in a havoc of signs.

One year, the reservoir froze.

I walked out to the centre of the ice

and gazed down through a maze of gills and weed

to where a god I’d read about in books

– sweeter than pine, but stone-hard in his tomb –

lay waiting for a gaze to curse with knowledge.

The ice was clear as glass: I hunkered in

and dared him, from that unreflecting world,

to pull me through, in one bright flash of rage,

no crack, no sudden drop into the cold,

nothing to witness,

nothing to remember.

Minutes I waited; then the others came

and called me back, the dogs a swarm of noise

and worry, old men’s

faces in a mist of their own breath

ashamed for my father’s sake

and his father before him.

We carried on; I walked off to one side,

and halfway through the white of afternoon,

I slipped away, unwanted, or unnoticed,

taking a road less-travelled through fields and yards

of stunted brassicas and rotting tyres,

strangers in coveralls or leather aprons

stopping to watch as I passed: no hand raised in greeting,

no dog come out

to see me on my way.

That was a foreign country: snowdrifts, then sand,

blotted and kissed with yew-drupes

and windfall holly,

spotted owls hunting for beetles along the hedge,

smoke in the distance, nether roads,

passing bells.

I walked for hours, yet it was light as noon

when I came to a place I thought I had seen before

through a lull in the weather:

nothing to speak of,

a dirt track and sheep in the woods,

and that sense of a burial, under the moss and ruin,

but something was present a few steps into the treeline,

one of those creatures you find in a children’s album,

a phantom thing, betrayed by smoke or rain,

or glimpsed through a gap in the fog, not quite discerned,

not quite discernible: a mouth, then eyes,

then nothing.

It lingered a while;

and then, as if it wanted me to play,

it shifted away through the trees – and I followed after.

Crashing through cover, ducking through sumac and maple

it leapt and ran, though never so fast or so far

that I couldn’t keep pace

and when I paused for breath, it also paused

and stayed,

as if it wanted me to follow.

I never saw it clear, but it was there:

sometimes the brown of a roe-deer, sometimes

silver, like a flight of ptarmigan,

it shifted and flickered away

in the year’s last light

and I came after, with my heavy gun,

trudging for miles

through meadows laced with rime,

working by scent

and instinct, finally

true to myself,

with the body and mind of a hunter

and, by the time I stepped into a glade

candy-striped with light and frosted grass,

I knew exactly what a man should do

in my position – lucky, singled out

by death and beauty for the blessèd kill,

assenting to the creature’s dumb assent

to blood and darkness

and the life

beyond.

I took a bullet,

loaded it with care

and aimed with an intent that felt like love,

though I only knew love

by hearsay

and stubborn lack.

No sound, no movement; all the world was still

and not a creature in it

but ourselves,

me taking aim

and the animal stopped in its tracks,

waiting to see what would happen, unafraid,

a deer, I thought, and then I saw a fox,

and thinking I knew what it was

I pulled the trigger.

The old days were better for mourning;

better for tongue-tacked women

in ruined plaid

climbing a hillside

to gather the rainwashed bones

of what they had lost, that winter, to the cold,

and men in the prime of their lives,

with dwindled sight,

dreaming all night of that slow white out by the river

where, once or twice a year,

a girl would drown,

pledging her heart to a boy she had mostly imagined.

I remembered the flow country, then,

as the gunsmoke darkened:

I’d go there as a child on Sabbath days,

my father asleep in his church clothes, a fret of chickens

wandering back and forth

at the kitchen door,

a lull in the house and that emptiness high in the roof

as if someone had frittered away

in a summer wind.

I’d go out in my Sunday clothes and shoes

to the shimmer and dart

of sticklebacks threading the light

and search for something I could never name,

the blue of a smile, or the curious

pleasure of the doomed, as they go under;

and that was what I hurried out to see,

crossing the space

to where the beast went down

but all I could find when I got there, standing dismayed

in the stopped air of afternoon, with smoke on my lips

and my heart like a fettered thrush in the well of my throat,

all I could find was an inkwash of blear in the grass

like the fogged stain after a thaw,

and a ribbon of musk

threading away to the trees

and the distance beyond:

no body, no warmth, no aftermath, nothing to prize,

and the night coming down all at once,

like a weight at my shoulders,

settling in waves, till all I could see was my hands.

Everyone becomes

the thing he kills

– or so the children whisper, when they crush

a beetle or a cranefly in the dust,

feeling the snuff of it bleed

through the grain of their fingers;

I’d always thought of that

as superstition:

a wishful thinking, how the spirit moves

from one shape to the next

like breath,

or warmth,

infinite kinship, laid down in the blood

against the sway

of accident and weather;

yet out in the woods that night, as I dug myself in

to wait for the day, I felt it in my gut,

a gravity I’d never known before

dragging me down

so it seemed I would cleave to the earth,

the life I had taken

snug as a second skin.

I should have died, if not for the faint warmth

that held me there, unseeing, in a night

so utter, dawn

was like a miracle:

the trees emerging, piecemeal, from the cold,

a snowflake here, then there, then everything

arriving all at once, as I awoke

and, never having slept, began to walk.

I didn’t know how far I was from home,

but nothing looked familiar

– not the woods

and not the road I found that afternoon,

dizzy from cold and hunger, hurrying on

through empty yards and desolate plantation,

nothing alive

as far as the eye could see,

only the white of the sky, like a wondering gaze

pursuing me from one field to the next,

from ditch to ditch,

from wall to broken wall.

I walked like that for days. The road led on

through spruce and lodgepole pine, then dipped away

to where a village lay, warmed in a crook

of hills that seemed familiar, suddenly:

a spill of lights and woodsmoke and a kirk

that made me think of something in a book

before I made it out. My dead were there

among the tilted stones;

I knew the market cross; I knew the spire;

but everything was strange, even the house

I came to at the far end of the lane

that passed the abattoir then crossed the brook

and finished at the unclipped cypress hedge

where no one lived next door,

though there were ghosts,

so frail, I only knew them by the sound

the wind made

when it worried at the shutters.

Nobody lives

here now, it’s only

crows and bees

and every shift

and slant

is an event,

historic

in its void

of mud and wire.

Yet now and again

I have turned

in a falling shadow

and caught a glimpse

of something

at my back,

not heard, or seen,

but felt,

the way some distant

shiver in the barley registers,

before I can think to say

it was never there.

The hunters pass at daybreak, casting

curious looks at my door, but no one is here

to see, as they enter the mist

and disappear.

Nobody lives here now, not even me,

and yet the house is mine – a net of dreams

and phantoms

and that living animal

I followed through the woods: locked in my bones

and calling for the life it must have had

far in the green of the pines, and the white of the snow,

where I am hunting, hunting even now,

hearing that cry

and turning my head,

for an echo.