Common Ground (17 page)

Ahead the field rises into a gentle, tree-less hump from which the land stretches away. To the north is an unending plateau of farmland scattered with isolated clusters of corrugated barns, machinery and farmhouses. To the south, the town's chimneys, antennae and the tessellated slate roofs, turned to black mirrors by the rain. I pull up my hood and press on towards the wild middle ground in-between.

On the nursery wall above the Beatrix Potter rabbit I'm putting up a child's alphabet sticker set.
E is for Earth
, it says. Well if E is for Earth it must stand for enclosure too, for these are inseparable concepts now. In many ways it was this union that kick-started a worldwide process of commodification and dispossession, of debts and dollar signs. Has it all been bad? Far from it. Other letters in the packet spell out the benefits:
H is for House, X is for X-ray
. It's a cold morning, but I can hear the boiler downstairs huffing and puffing. If it didn't, I could call someone to come and fix it. No, it's not all bad, just more complicated.

There's a great phrase. I must've heard it or read it somewhere: ‘we gained unimaginable freedoms; we lost unimaginable freedoms'. That's the hand we were dealt, you and I, the game in which our parents and their parents before them found themselves embroiled and, by hook or by crook, staked us in too. What concerns me though, as I peel each letter from its white backing and climb the stepladder, is what kind of world will exist by the time this baby lays eyes upon its grandchildren.
What world will I leave? What kind of game am I dealing it into? Is it any different?
For just as previous generations enclosed the land, the sea, the air, the atmosphere, we're surely enclosing ourselves. Every year we become more insular and inward-focused, at once connected to an amazing virtual global multiplicity yet often detached from the world in any physical, emotional and moral sense. Every decision, from buying food to switching on a light, is mediated by so many logistical, institutional and technological layers that we have no sense of what our actions are responsible for. Our profound alienation from the earth continues. We're the landless and listless, so estranged from our planet, so removed from the decision-making that governs it, so isolated from each other and the life we share this world with that we're seemingly unable even to come together and prevent global human and environmental catastrophe. We're still being divided and conquered by enclosure, only now the fences are invisible and internal too.

Through the bedroom window, birdsong. It is louder than the traffic. Penetrate-your-dreams loud. The sound of spring-morning sunlight, of a world waking. Twittering squeaks and wolf-whistles from starlings massed on chimney stacks and TV aerials; house sparrows fizzing between the little front gardens; a blackbird claiming a shaggy leylandii in the corner of a concreted backyard. I want to run to the edge-land, but Rosie reaches out and holds my arm. It's Easter Sunday. Old rituals to be upheld. Family duties. A roast to be cooked. Chocolate bunnies need relocating from the kitchen cupboard to their overwatch positions on the mantelpiece. Egg hunts have to be conducted over the carpet with my nieces. It's not until sunset, as the family dozes contentedly on our sofa watching
Fantastic Mr Fox
that I can slip away through the door.

Night thickens along Bilton Lane. The warmth of distant blackbird song soothes air heavy with cars returning from family functions. Grey-black cumulonimbus big as mountains run along the horizon. Mountains beyond mountains. A pylon stands stark but beautiful against them, like the mast of a tall ship. There is that rich smell of wood and, from the houses, the clean linen aroma of washing detergent swilling down drains. Our tangle with the land is a messy business. Look close enough, back a few generations, and there's soil under everyone's fingernails. Mine as I write this; yours as you hold these pages. Equally, there are no landscapes in Britain, and few in the world, that aren't managed by our hands in some way. Despite their differences in appearance, rural and urban are not opposing states; our prints are all over both, whether from keeping nature at bay or from nurturing it into being. And there's been good and bad come of these tussles. For the Enclosure Acts heralded a boom for the common hare; it thrived with the control of its natural predators and new fields of more intensively farmed crops to feed on. There are voices today that call for ‘re-wilding', the removal of the human hand from land altogether, a restoration back to ‘natural' habitats where vanished species are reintroduced, trees spring up over sheep-cleared hills and the threatened might thrive.
⁸
It's a beautiful idea and part of me craves this too; I want to believe this could only be a good thing, but there are nagging doubts: where are we in this picture? Isn't this just another process of clearance? Won't we still have to maintain these places to ensure only the ‘right' type of nature abounds? And what about the space required for sustaining ourselves? Where will we grow – and who will grow – all the food our expanding population requires? Mostly, though, I'm troubled by the thought that when acres of wood, fen, mountain marsh, coast or grassland become designated wildlife sanctuaries, they also become another type of no-go area, enclosed by a new class of landowner – countryside managers, conservationists and large charities. No one would question that theirs is noble, well-meaning work, but it's still shutting us out. The human is reduced to the neutral observer, removed and peering in from the prescribed path, the car park, café or picnic table. ‘Environmentally friendly' subjugation of land is still subjugation, the process of shaping it to conform to what we want it to be. And who decides at which epoch we stop the clock? Which moment in the story of this constantly changing earth gets preserved in time? Which of nature's myriad forms and ecosystems make our privileged lists? No, it's a messy business this and, whatever we like to think, we are part of the tangle, ever staked at the table. Removing us only redraws the idea of a separating line between human/nature. And for my money, that's the line that has always done the most damage. That's the fence that needs taking down if we're going to stand any chance of making it.

The sky turns a soft black and prickles with the glitter of stars as I walk from the old railway over the meadow and through the wood to sit at the field's edge again. My feet slither on the sticky earth and I brush along the glowing blackthorn, releasing its musky sweet scent. Stacked up on the hill, the lights of Bilton look like a ferry in dock. From the trees drift the cold calls of owls; above them, like a silver button on a black tunic, sits a freshly polished moon. When they rise from the wheat, the hares look pewter in its light. I wasn't expecting them and don't have my binoculars but can clearly see three limping after each other, feeding then suddenly turning in belts of speed, darting off in one direction and disappearing, only to resurface somewhere new. Moon and hare have long been associated and that's partly because of their inconstancy: just as the hare flits about the field, the moon seems to travel through the sky from one night to the next. The association was also to do with madness. From ‘luna' comes ‘lunacy'; the hare's irrational behaviour in the mating season is in stark contrast to its usually timid life, causing it to be labelled ‘moon-struck' and mad. And yet, despite this, in previous cultures the hare was representative of intuition too, the manifestation of a wise thought leaping suddenly into the mind – the light of knowledge appearing in the darkness. Enlightenment. Madness and genius wrapped up in one.

As with the hare, the spring, the dusk and the equinox, this edge-land is a union of opposites, a meshing of lives human and non-human. It is a paradigm for where past realities meet our now mediated existences. Perhaps there's something in that. Of course we have to live in this modern world, but we must get our boots dirty too. We need to slip between these semi-permeable states, for just as we need our homes and X-rays, we need the intimacy of nature, the empathy and the sense it brings of our participation in a larger, living world. Crucially, we need to be
in
it in order to connect on this physical, emotional level, down among the soil and the stems.

Here on Easter Day less than half a mile from town, hares run through a field of possibilities. Like the land itself, this animal remains enchanting, shifting, imaginary, unknowable, ever-appropriated. Well, let it stand for something else then, a new, modern symbol of balance, personal and global. Find it, watch it, follow it and we begin to experience our own un-enclosure, a vital re-grounding. We come to know the value of every rut, blade and furrow. We may experience our own renewal.

All this in an eye
. I wake. Or rather, am woken. The stirring of limbs in the ashen light as the cold passes from the earth. My pupils dilate in a quarter-second and I lift my nose to the air: death drifts on the bleak wind over the wooded hills, a thousand puncture points of snarling fangs and stabbing spears, as yet invisible but infusing everything, changing the trees and the air, altering scents and colours with the same silent menace of fresh blood blooming in water. The hunt is coming and it is coming for me.

I feel my heart quicken, thump and prepare for flight. Snorting to clear wet nostrils, I stand and breathe, pulling air into my lungs to determine direction, but I find only the clean, safe scents of the forest again. Things are restored. The wave has passed; a cloud across the sun.
Was I mistaken?
Song thrush, wren, robin and blackbird interweave their melodies; nothing seems disturbed. No pigeon flaps in fear from its perch. So I too remain hidden here in the holly and sniff, and sniff. Soon there is the smell of growing warmth as dawn uncurls its long fingers further into the wood, gilding moss and cracked bracken undergrown with fern. An early hoverfly is held in a sunbeam, an insect in amber. I wait as the light rises higher and turns silver-gold, shortening the tree shadows and leaving a trace of itself in the prisms of dew dangling from leaves. A nuthatch loosens a string of them as it streaks along a hazel bough probing for insects, gripping in its beak the spoils, the mess of snapped legs and wings and crushed elytra. Then death touches my tongue again, a charge in the air.
Danger. Closer.
I feel it in the same way a dandelion root senses a fly crawling over its flower.

Concealed, I edge forward to take in the full sweep of my rut. Down from the rise on which this holly grows, through the thick trees and cover, the river is in spate with spring rain. On the large swathe of flatter ground between here and there, grass, gorse and shrub have been thinned and trampled in places by the passage of beasts; I smell bears on these meadows some days. Wolves, too, in mid-winter when they float weakened from the hills to pursue my kind through the river culverts and valleys, bringing down our young, old and lame, tearing open our throats and bellies. It was down there in the meadow in the silver-dark that I walked earlier to feed on hazel leaves, and bilberry shoots; it is there now that a man crouches over my slotted tracks.

He is one with the woods this man, this huntsman; he moves so silently that even the birds don't notice him in his tall brown leather-leggings and thick green jacket. A fleet-of-foot approacher, harbinger, deliverer, tracker, venery scout and shit-smeller; there is more animal than man in his slow-slow actions, bending nose to the ground, inspecting every leaf and stem, rubbing my droppings between thumb and finger. He is a broken-branch-reader brought up as a boy to know the dogs and the forest better than his own kind. At seven years he cut the toenails of the brachets and greyhounds over at Kennelhall and lay down in the straw among their barking, farting number to sleep, changing their piss-posts and filling their water troughs until he'd learned the flick of the tail, the bob of the jaw, each of the hundred hounds' quirks and traits. Apprenticed from page to varlet to groom, he brushed the horse coats and cut the dog collars from the stretched dried hide of my kind. He bathed sore feet in vinegar and walked the dogs in grass-circles, feeding them bread only to keep them ravenous for flesh. And those beasts he once served obey him now like a dreadful god. Even that free-roaming bloodhound beside him, his lymer, the thick-headed, dead-eyed black and tan, won't run its rope until the order is given – the quiet
tsssssss
through the teeth.

The man looks up towards the rise and I know he sees me, not with his eyes but in the same way that I see him, a collusion of senses and instinct. He knows I am a strong roebuck, thick-necked, powerful enough to flee like a young hart and test his finest hounds. And it is that he seeks for his masters. The chase. The lymer sniffs and turns its head in my direction. It craves my lithe perfection. It wants to master my wildness and tear through my tissues and bones. I feel a flicker of fear about my chest, but not the sort that freezes some animals; fear is my kind's gift. It is the force that drives us and keeps us alert. To lose it is to die in these woods, leaped on by unseen shapes from the back and the side, held as you try to run, dragged down into the thrashing maelstrom of teeth and claws.