Common Ground (11 page)

Judging from its width, my guess would be that the oak is around 250 years old. Easily the oldest I've found here. A survivor. For a moment I wonder at how many red squirrel drays and wryneck nests it's held across the vanished centuries. Maybe wildcats scratched claws down here among its adolescent roots. Today its choirs are in full voice: wrens trill, there are the bicycle-wheel squeaks of great tits and everywhere pours with the thick flute-notes of blackbirds, like blood flooding back into numb limbs. The exodus from town is unstoppable and the meadow throngs with people. Hands red raw, children roll up the snow in creaking channels to make the bodies of snowmen, leaving deep trenches behind them. Their brightly coloured coats and hats bob as they squeal and dip in and out of their burrows. I squint into the glare and imagine time slipping back to a late-August afternoon when the oak at my back was an acorn. Instead of the snow, I'm watching families harvest the plaited-hair spikes of silver-gold wheat. Boys and girls are tracing ancient patterns over these fields. We've all been here before, sweaty, bent and hacking with hand scythe and sickle, cutting callous-forming avenues through whispering stems, reaping, rolling and stacking sheaf. For a moment I'm part of another union, a brief and rare return to the earth for us landless masses.

Perhaps those old enough to remember might carry this moment with them through largely room-bound futures. Dispersed into offices miles from here, the dim recollection of it may manifest sometimes in a bright wash of spring sun falling accidentally across a desk. Pausing, eyes will look out through the glass and feel a sense of belonging to a larger world. Or when old and alone in a nursing home, a window opened a crack for air may fill the room with the smell of swelling life and fresh snow. That aged child will sense the union of seasons again, close their eyes and escape through the gap.

Such golden moments pass, evaporating into air, melting into earth, leaving only that which we carry with us. It's midday and already the faint watermark of a moon is imprinted in the milky blue to the east. Children are rounded up, brushed down and carried back along the old railway, placated with promises of chocolate and TV. They cease struggling and slump dull-eyed on shoulders. Time's up. The drug is wearing off. Conversations dwindle. Laughter ceases. I see why. Combined with the heat of the sun, their relentless industry has revealed divisions again. The gardens, fields and roads are exposed; snow has melted off the walls and fences and been stacked into gritty piles; enmeshed wires and concrete stanchions are uncovered. This is mine; that is yours. Shut the gates and doors. Slowly the town reabsorbs its populus, sorting and separating down freshly shovelled driveways, sluicing from minds this morning of freedom, turning thoughts to urgent bills, unanswered emails and phone calls. And I can feel this gravity too but I resist and remain, here beneath the oak. The day has something more to show.

Later, I'm walking with a wilful sense of trespass through the wood and up into the fields. There is that same smell as when you rub dock leaves on bare legs. The sun has faded large tracts of snow; the land is blotched by wet wheat gleaming with an unearthly light. Out of one patch, a hare emerges. At first I assume it's a rabbit until it rises tall, sniffs and hoists those long, Indian-ink-dipped ears towards the sky. Framed by the chequerboard town and purple-white of distant moors, I watch it hop in a circle then fling itself towards the field edge, through a blackthorn and out of sight. Most memorable is its coat: the gingery dun of high summer soil still brushed with the grey flecks of midwinter camouflage. The hare, the
common
hare: a hybrid, a union of opposites running through the edge-land.

Winter and summer. In the wheel of the year, these are the most distinct seasons, the opposites. Everything about them is contrast: darkness and light, cold and heat, life and death. Winter even looks like the photographic negative of a summer day. Where these meet in the spring and autumn come days of union. You find flashes of both extremes. Falling snow becomes foaming blossom; rain is suddenly refracted by bright sun; morning frost fades into water-colour evenings of peach and pale yellows. Balance is everywhere, and not in some wishy-washy sense. I'm talking planetary equilibrium.

The word ‘equinox' derives from the Latin
aequus
(equal) and
nox
(night) because in the northern hemisphere these are the moments in March and September when day and night are roughly the same length. Briefly the sun sits exactly over the equator and the tilt of our planet's axis is neither away from nor towards it. The north and south poles stick straight up and down, like a cocktail stick through an olive.

We live in a world where the shift from dark to light is nothing remarkable. It is a constant process. The switching on and off of electricity falls to fingers countless times a day and we conjure heat at the touch of a thermostat. At hundreds of miles per hour 35,000 feet up we move between hemispheres, passing from winter to summer in minutes. It makes it hard to conceive of the impact the spring equinox held in earlier times. To eyes long tired of merciless winter, a strengthening sun returning to banish the darkness was a supremely powerful moment. As the icy crust split, destruction gave way to re-creation. Land was miraculously fertile, fecund and full of energy. The equinox saw the arrival of a resurrecting light and, to a species dependent on earth and animal, it simply meant survival. Understandably we sought symbols that embodied this sequence and associations flowed and formed. As is our habit, we needed to identify and name the unknown, to give it shapes and representatives. Among all the candidates one creature was a front-runner. Widespread across the northern hemisphere and thriving with the birth of farming, the hare leaped into our consciousness and imagination.

For an animal that spends its existence above ground in all weathers, the ‘brown' or ‘common' hare (
Lepus europaeus
) remains a mysterious and perplexing thing. Usually nocturnal, solitary and almost always in hiding, it is practically invisible most of the year. In winter it seeks refuge in woodland, hedges or its well-concealed ‘forms' – the shallow scrapes it makes in soil. By early May its activities are lost again among the crops and grasses of arable fields. As such, it appears to belong entirely to the spring, materialising from the substratum and congregating to play out energetic breeding games. Promiscuous and highly productive, it is new life in fur form.

In several languages the hare is, literally, ‘the leaper', one who springs up, with the connotation extending to the dawning of being, as much as a new season. In Egyptian hieroglyph the symbol of a hare denotes ‘to be'. It is persistence made flesh. The name of the god
Michabo
, creator and personification of the sun, regarded as a common ancestor across all Native American people, is a compounded version of
michi
, meaning ‘great', and
wabos
, meaning ‘white hare'.
Michabo
– the Great White Hare, God of the Dawn.

Closer to home, over the same parcels of earth I've known at sunrise, the Anglo-Saxons worshipped
Eostre
, the Germanic Goddess of Dawn. Her name changes depending on location – Eostre is Northumbrian dialect; Eastre, the Old English of the West Saxons; Ostara is Old German – but all are thought to derive from the ancient dawn goddesses Eos (Greek), Aurora (Roman) and Ushas (Indian). The eighth-century English monk Bede notes in
De Temporum Ratione
that before Christianity absorbed Eostre's name and rituals for its own celebrations of resurrection, April was ‘Eostre-monath', the dawn month. Some claim Eostre had the head and shoulders of a hare, even that the animal was her attendant spirit, carrying a procession of lights or torches into the world. Others believe this is merely revivalist neopaganism, popularised in the twentieth century. Whatever the truth may be, the evidence of the hare as an early and enduring cultish figure is testified to by its Christian associations with witchcraft. Its demonisation, and later appropriation, by a newer religion tells of an existing position of reverence in people's minds. Certainly by the time of conversion this symbol was too engrained to be lost; it's tempting to imagine the hare was simply baptised and born again, neutered, turned to chocolate and re-imagined as our harmless Easter Bunny.

There is also a connection between hares and that other Easter tradition, the giving of eggs, a custom that dates back at least a thousand years. Brightly coloured and reputedly delicious, the eggs of the lapwing were traditionally collected by adults and children and eaten around April, becoming so popular throughout the Victorian period that preservation orders became law in 1926 to protect the bird. This precedent to the modern Easter egg hunt was made easier by the fact that the bird nests on the ground. Much like hares, lapwings prefer fields for their large range of vision, vital for detecting approaching predators. So similar are their habitats that hares have even been known to borrow lapwing nests to hide in. People disturbing a hare might have found a nest of eggs beneath. It's understandable that they would leap to the conclusion it was the hare that had laid them.

Despite being a creature of the field, the hare springs up as the hero in many flood myths, including folk tellings of Noah's Ark.
⁶
The flood itself is, of course, a metaphor for new beginnings, symbolising the world's resurrection from death – the stormy darkness giving way to renewing light. In some narratives, the Devil tries to scupper the Ark by creating a succession of holes in its hull. Noah plugs each one until, running out of suitable materials, he cuts off the female hare's tail to use. In another version, it's the hare's foot that Noah uses to plug the leak, driving away the Devil in the process. The superstition of carrying a hare or rabbit's foot for luck persists, but in the story the act kills the animal. God repays its sacrifice by granting the remaining hare on the Ark – the male – the power to give birth.

Until as late as the nineteenth century in Britain, this wouldn't have seemed as ludicrous as it might today since it was widely believed that hares were hermaphrodites. Since the time of the Greeks the animal was said to have the ability to change between male and female from one month to the next. Pliny, Philostratus and Plutarch all ascribed to it. Old Welsh law accounts for it in its assessment of animal worth, specifying how ‘for one month it becomes male, and the other female'
⁷
. This duality was likely a legacy of earlier cultures and religions that regarded hares as being both masculine and feminine, an embodiment of the equinox's moment of balance, the union from which creation breaks forth into life. Myths of mutating sex are also probably down to the hare's physical similarities. Males and females are almost indistinct and, despite what we thought until relatively recently, the females box away the advances of prospective mates. If you believed, as most people did, that it was solely males boxing each other for the right to mate, it would be easy to mistake female for male and vice versa.

Over time an even wilder fertility myth took hold: that the hare was capable of self-impregnation. Through association, rabbits too were said to possess the ‘gift' of reproducing asexually. This reputation for virgin birth saw their stock rise in Christian symbolism, explaining why you find hares and rabbits cropping up in sixteenth-century religious paintings. Although incapable of immaculate conception, the workings of the hare's reproductive system still fascinate. Recent scientific studies claim to prove that the hare is capable of ‘superfeotation', the ability to become pregnant a second time while carrying a first batch of young. In other words, two eggs from two different ovarian cycles can develop simultaneously in the same body. But not all scientists are convinced. The debate rages; academic fur flies. One thing is sure, however: the hare as mythical life-bringer and fertility icon remains irresistible. No matter how fleet-footed it may be, Britain's fastest mammal can't outrun its past.

It comes to me out of the blue. A memory. It must have been fifteen years ago. Further west and north of here in hill-farming country I was out walking on a day so hot the horizon trembled. I had stopped for a drink near a field where an old hand was cutting hay. Seeing me, he swung down from a tractor cab, tanned as a cornhusk, and leaving his rusting Massey Ferguson idling, lit up and sauntered over. I'd just watched a leveret – a young hare – sprung by his mowing. It darted silkily from the approaching storm of seed, metal and machine, zipped over the cut stubble and plunged into the fog of grass again. I told him as much.

‘Aye,' he said. ‘Good when she runs.'

She
, I remember that. The hare was feminine.

‘Don't they always run?'

He shook his head. ‘Hit two this year s'fa. Terrible.'

We sat for a while as he worked through the last of a crumpled pack of Silk Cut. He smelled of hay and earth and engine oil. Whether true or not, he was adamant that male hares – he called them ‘Jacks' – ranged great distances in their pursuit of mates, but that ‘Jills', the females, remained in the area they were born. A ‘matter of fields', as he put it. It was clear that even an accidental killing made him uncomfortable. There was an unspoken reverence at the edge of his words, a sense that the hare was something other, a creature with knowledge that runs deep.