Winter
my long-listed entry for the Nature Chronicles Prize, part one
Early last year I entered an essay into the Nature Chronicles Prize, my first and probably only ever entry into a writing competition, and made it onto the long-list of twenty-two out of I don’t know how many entries. It’s a big competition, so I’m quite thrilled to have made it that far and for my work to have been up in the running with some big names and incredible literary talent. I promised I’d share the essay here on Substack as soon as the non publish clause is up. Well, here it is. The whole thing is a bit long for a single Substack post, but I conveniently wrote it in three short parts, which I’ll share over the next three weeks. Part one sets the scene, parts two and three build upon the first. Here is part one, lightly edited for Substack.
She sees me before I see her. I turn to see what the sheep are staring at and there she is, staring back at us with deep, black eyes like inkwells spilling into the lengthening shadows, elegant and unblinking, still as a statue, as though chiselled from the craggy hills she haunts. Her colour deeper, browner, blacker than the dusky, flaxen gold moor grass she stands in, her form a solid silhouette against the shimmering grass, easily as tall as one of my goats, and as heavy. Moments pass, neither she nor I daring to breathe nor break our locked gaze. She wins. In the split second I glance away to the sheep waiting for their hay beside me she turns, and bounds to the rocks, white rump and black tail flashing. The sheep and I watch, enthralled, breaths held, frozen to our spots, as she breaks off the hoof-trodden path that would have brought her over our stone boundary wall under the downy birch, now standing stark, dark and naked but for a few tattered, yellow leaves that flutter weakly in the chill, evening breeze, at the edge of the old flax pond just below us, and instead climbs the steep ridge through dark, spent heather and gorse to a safer distance, and neatly jumps the old, sagging sheep-wire fence into our side at the top of the rise. She pauses to glance back at us, relaxed and defiant in her gain, before crossing the hill track and trotting off over the heath. She heads east, away from the setting sun. I can just make her out as a darker shadow against the darkening sky, until she disappears over the brow of the hill.
Sometime later, gunshots sound in the valley. Have they started the deer cull? My breath rises and sticks in my throat. No. Breathe. We see bright lights flashing across the valley, piercing through the thick black of November night. They’re dazzling foxes. Some nights they drive by here slowly, flashing lights into our roadside fields, and we rush out with torches waving, no! No shooting here! And they drive on.
We see the foxes hunting frogs and voles on our heaths some evenings, and scurrying around for mice under the feed troughs among the sheep that half-eye them nonchalantly as they sit relaxing on their briskets, ruminating on their cud. At night the scent of them prowling close outside the confines of our yard winds our dogs up into frenzied fits of barking, and sometimes, if we go out to check, we catch them in our torchlights: pairs of eyes slinking, blinking, away into the dark. Brazen, our foxes, but they haven’t given us or our sheep any trouble. Not yet.
An Cnoc Rua, the old guy who stops by here sometimes, whose lively, gleaming eyes belie the years told by his deeply creased, leathery skin and toothless grin, calls our hill. An Cnoc Madra Rua, The Hill of the Red Fox. He would climb to the top, long ago, he tells us, where two giant boulders sit side by side on the brow of the hill as though dropped there, like relics of a land carved from ice and aeons, to watch the foxes play in the fields below. One of those boulders is cracked in two, a clean split cleaved by its impact, rock heaved upon rock, many millennia ago. One half is slid down against the other, revealing twinkling stars of silica in the exposed face of its pair. It faces north, blasted clean by icy winds that hurl sleet and hail. On a fine day you can see for miles around, up there, from atop those boulders. East across patchwork farmland and up along the valley, always green, with its hedge-lined fields and farmsteads and pockets of woodland scrub, and down southeast to the village sprawling crossways over and along the river. South over low, green hills, and southwest across the wooded river valley and beyond, to Shehy Mountain peaking through his double ring of wind turbines. West across heath and hill, an open, roughhewn landscape of crags and valleys now in its winter hues of slate grey, russet, mulberry, charcoal, brown and gold patched with dark green heather and cut with stark, uniform blocks of silvery, evergreen spruce plantations, and on to the distant Kerry mountains. I can gaze for hours across those hills, watching the light shift, every passing cloud and season and touch of sunlight casting a painting of colour and shadow and form, lose myself in the mesmerising pull of a landscape that is ever-changing and as old as time. And north, the rugged hill of rain-washed shale, tightly grazed, sloping green lawns of creeping fescue and sweet vernal grass, and sparse dwarf scrub, rises to meet the sky, with only the blades of the wind turbines on the high hill topping the brow above us. When the breeze is right we can hear them: swooshing great aerodynamic shards of precision engineered, white steel cutting through the wind across our nearest, grey horizon.
He told us where they cut turf, too, the old guy, on our bog, long ago, and where they dug water holes for the cattle, down by the willows, in times of summer drought. You can still make out the old, shallow turf banks, edges softened by the decades and carpeted over with a thin sod of dry, heathy scraw, cut back above the flooded, squishy, welly-deep mire of sphagnum moss and mud. Our peat is shallow, the old turf banks on the bog only a foot and a half, maybe too feet deep in places, but built from centuries of moss, roots, and rain. The bog is quiet now, dark and silent under a light, flaxen thatch of fallen moor grass, a few ragged white flags of bog cotton still clinging to its stems, fluttering in the cold November breeze.
Continued next week…