Winter pt 3

finale

Here is the third and final part of my long-listed entry into the Nature Chronicles Prize. You can find parts one and two here.

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Early December, and a brisk, icy morning. The first hard frost of the season. The kind that crunches under your feet and nips at your toes, with a dampness still clinging to the air that works its way through to your bones. I trudge across semi-frozen mud, watching my wool-socked and welly-booted footing as I clamber between the rocks and up the steep climb, the weight of my load of sheep’s hay slung over my back and the wet ice lending treachery to the rugged path. A thin film of ice has set over the bog pools and water troughs, and the sheep, impervious to the chill, have left little round beds of green where they slept on the grass as the frost settled and wear ice stars in their fleeces that sparkle in the low, winter sun.

It takes days for the frost to thicken. Night upon night it builds from a thin, translucent sliver over the water troughs until I have to carry an ice pick to break holes through slabs as thick as bricks so the sheep can drink, and I can walk, gingerly, right out onto the frozen flax ponds. The running streams slow to lazy trickles as the wetlands that feed them from above, and that they feed below, freeze over, water gurgling languidly beneath the ice. And the hoarfrost grows from a thin dusting of glitter until the hills and all the naked trees and heather are covered with a sparkling lace blanket as thick and white as snow. When the snow comes, it comes in driving flurries, fierce and soft and silent. It sticks to the frozen hills like icing, blotting the landscape under a soundless quilt of white down. But the frost is late and the snow hasn’t come yet. The day is softening, but for a light nip in the breeze to remind us of the season, last night’s freeze already beginning to thaw.

“C’mon, dog,” we leave the sheep munching summer hay spread over the frost, and trudge on down to the creek. A trio of wood pigeons see us coming and lurch, flapping, across the treetops, alerting the woodland to our presence, before resettling in the hollies further down where the creek runs into next door’s young spruce plantation below us.

The steep, wooded creek that runs along our southern boundary is an impenetrable jungle in summer, thick with thorny undergrowth and rampant, sprawling willow branches intent on tripping and whipping any who dare try to enter. Only now, when the trees are bare and gaps have opened in the thicket, can I slide down the bank through a tunnel of gorse and under the willows, into another world. An old, earthy world of mosses and mycelium, soft and still and green, even in the depths of winter, where the trees maintain a constant ambience that contrasts the stark exposure of the open hill. Bramble and honeysuckle run rampant and riotous across a thick carpet of leaf litter, over the soft, fertile compost of the fallen leaves of winter upon winter. Bright green mosses clothe the boughs of sleeping and decaying trees. Epiphytic ferns hang lush and dripping from hazel poles that reach skyward and fall from rotting stumps off the old stone boundary wall that runs along the stream, crumbling, half buried and lost to the mosses and the undergrowth. Ivy climbs tall birches and fills the bare, winter canopy with bushes of dense greenery, its blackening berries offered to the birds it shelters, and drops long ropes back to the soil that tangle in the willows sprawling below. Oak stands thick, solid and gnarled, as old as the crumbling wall. A breeze whispers through the tree tops and they sway in unison. The stream tinkles as it meanders aimlessly between roots and fallen wood. Unseen birds chirrup from the undergrowth, and the air smells alive, of wood-moss and humus and decay. I sit awhile, resting my back against an old, recumbent willow, gazing, hypnotised, through swaying treetops against a bright, white sky. I could stay here, sitting in the compost with the fungi and the woodlice, moulding into the moss, feeling the Earth spin, becoming land.

Something happens when you spend enough time on the land, with moss in your hair and mud between your toes, listening to the trees’ soft whisper and the stag’s bloodcurdling roar. The wildness creeps into you. Un-tames and reclaims the parts of you that the wild lost, and you remember from some tiny spark deep within that fires through your cells at the touch of soil and sunlight that you, too, belong to the land, are part of it, just like the sheep in colours of stone that drink the rain and eat the gorse, softened by the frost, or the foxes whose eyes slink, blinking, into the night, or the raptors that ride the upland currents, the rodents torn between their talons, just like the sika hind with eyes like inkwells, chiselled from the hills she haunts. It unravels the threads of your being and blows them like ribbons into the wind, and they tangle in the gorse with the tufts of sheep’s wool and wrap and twirl into the moor grass until you’re not sure anymore where the threads of you begin and the wild ends, where your human threads separate from the fabric of the land, its minerals, moss and mud, sunlight and rain, composted birch leaves and cottongrass and kestrel’s feathered wings. When did your human-ness separate from the fabric of the land?

A red-breasted robin, plump and fluffy, hops cautiously closer, eyeing me in case I might drop a worm. Badgers have snuffled in the leaf litter, cleaned up the autumn glut of acorns and hazelnuts, grown fat on the kernels of calories, fats and starches stored from summer sun and given from the trees to see them through the depths of winter, leaving little nose pits in the soil. They say, when the wild flora give such a glut as they have this season, that we are in for a hard winter. The flora gives so the fauna may grow fat and spread their seed, survival in symbiosis. The sign of badgers pulls my awareness to the dog’s boisterous disturbance. Time to leave, let the woodland sleep.

I climb back up through the gorse tunnel, spikes tugging at my hair, cold earth dampening my knees and working its way under my fingernails, and step out onto the hill. The open air sends a shiver down the back of my neck and the frost, still lingering in the shade of the European gorse that runs up the outer edge of the wooded creek, where the soil is soft and deep, crunches under my boot. I pull my collar up against the chill, and begin my trudge back up, over the open, winter hill.

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