Meadowland (29 page)

November is one of my favourite months, with its faded afternoons of cemetery eeriness, and its churchy smell of damp musting leaves. November suited perfectly poor crazed poet John Clare, who limned it so:

Sybil of months, and worshipper of winds!

I love thee, rude and boisterous as thou art;

And scraps of joy my wandering ever finds

Although some do feel, with Thomas Hood:

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,

No comfortable feel in any member –

No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,

No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds –

Flint winds from the east cut us irrevocably from summer.

Hunger makes the hunter. From the house I see two male pheasants in the field, perambulating across with the dignity of Ming emperors. Even at hundreds of yards the low weak winter sun burnishes them into coppery magnificence. They are past the moult, they are in their feathered prime. Occasionally they stoop to peck at some flower or grass seed.

I get my shotgun from the gunsafe. By the time I reach the field, they have disappeared. I catch sight of
their quick shadows in the copse but they slide away before I can get a clear shot. In the copse they are in their natural habitat, for what are pheasants but ornate jungle fowl? The first pheasants were brought here by the Romans, but probably did not go feral;
Phasianus colchicus torquatus
, the pheasant with the white ring collar, is an eleventh-century introduction. And after nine hundred years and annual releases of 30 million or so for shooting, the pheasant still looks gaudily out of place.

On a hunch I wait in the field, just under the overhang from the copse alder which bulges over the wire stock fence, loitering against it, the barrels of the gun nuzzled between neck and shoulder, more reassuring than a father’s hand. With my left ear pressed hard to the trunk of the alder, I can hear every internal stress and strain as it shifts about.

The doleful day ticks down. The wren, cock-tailed capo of the copse, tells me off for loitering. When American poet Robert Lowell wrote ‘For the Union Dead’ and needed an image to explain the righteous Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, killed leading a regiment of black soldiers, he settled on ‘an angry wrenlike vigilance’. I know precisely what Lowell meant; the wren continues its scolding staccato as I watch out over Lower Meadow while it prepares for bed. A tawny owl ker-wicks up the wooded stream, a robin warbles a few wistful bars from the Grove
hedge, the sheep edge up the field to where it is highest, from where they have the best view of any approaching predators. The ancient Escley gurgles contentedly. The leaves of the hazel glow, the chill aches my face.

Then I hear the pheasants. A brief, proud ‘cok-cok-cok’. They have left the copse and slinked next door to the Grove.

The light has gone to ashes. There are only seconds left in the day. I slip back the safety catch.

Up flies a pheasant from the Grove field, up, up, its tail streaming like the wake of a comet. I step forward and take the poacher’s shot, the shot that is not for sport but for the kill. I shoot the silhouette just as it spreads its wings to break its speed before landing in the tree.

The bird falls thump into the field. Dead. As dead as though it had never lived.

The graffito blast of the shot is still echoing in the green valley, the blackbirds still squirting their alarm calls as I slip a length of bailer twine around its neck to carry it home. The sheep, momentarily disturbed from their eating, put their heads to the field once more and carry on mowing.

The smell of gunpowder is thick around me, and masks out even the rotting incense of the autumn leaves. A child’s full moon is struggling to break through the gloom.

How did I know the pheasant would roost there, on that bare branch in the alder? It is where I would have chosen to sleep if I were a pheasant, a place too high for foxes but not so dense with leaves that I could not see into it.

Rationally it seems fair, even appropriate, that if one farms for wildlife one can eat the wildlife. The justification does not stop me suffering the agonies of sentient killers and those unforgiving lines from Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’ start to spool:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

A Robin Redbreast in a Cage

Puts all Heaven in a Rage.

A Dove house fill’d with Doves & Pigeons

Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.

A Dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate

Predicts the ruin of the State.

A Horse misus’d upon the Road

Calls to Heaven for Human blood.

Each outcry of the hunted Hare

A fibre from the Brain does tear.

A Skylark wounded in the wing,

A Cherubim does cease to sing.

The Game Cock clipt & arm’d for fight

And on, on until:

Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly
,

For the Last Judgment draweth nigh.

6 N
OVEMBER
A squirrel walks towards me through the grass of the meadow. The dogs bark on the yard at the arriving postman, which alerts the squirrel; then he sees me and disappears in a mercury rush. A flight of ducks (their dart-shape issues a squeak – mandarins) comes up off the river. I am checking the rackety troublesome riverside stock fence, to stop the ram escaping. The badgers have pushed under the fence to eat the acorns.

The cattle are back in the field, taking a last ‘bite’ of the grass growth brought on by a sequence of muggy days. Then it rains, and quickly the ground becomes too soft to support their weight; in the jargon of farming they will ‘poach’ the ground, turn it into a sea of mud. In a squinting downpour I herd them to their winter quarters.

But the remains of the autumn sun set November alight again. The days brighten up from elements of sun snagged in the spiders’ webs in the hedges and tussocks. The ash has been denuded by the downpours, but the alder and oaks are still holding on to their greenery.

I like the Braille of bark, the way that – with eyes closed – one can identify a tree by touch. Oak trunks have rectangular mosaic tiles; the old ash has latticework for skin; the slumped elder by the brook gnarled longitudinal fissures in polystyrene; silver birch the smoothness of silk stockings. Then there is the last hazel in the Bank boundary, gone from shrub to tree in the hedge that is no longer a hedge but a plodding parade of bowed single sentinels; it is worn smooth and polished by cows’ rubbing over ancient summers. They have done the same to the two oak-trunk gateposts, as they have barged and passed by, so that the bleached-out wooden pillars are glossy to sight and feel.

Margot will no longer be adding her polishing. The great beast is dead. I suppose, as this is a death announcement, she should be titled properly: ‘Worlingworth Margot, daughter of Woldsman King Harry and Woldsman Ember’. She was a Red Poll cow
with pedigree. She has been arthritic for two years, and has fallen over from time to time, always to be hauled upright by many hands or the jeep, to plod on happily behind the rest of the herd.

This morning there is no Lazarus moment, there is no miracle. She has fallen into the paddock ditch, and it takes the tractor – fumes powering out of the bonnet exhaust – and a chain, the industrial one with links the size of fists, to get her out of the sucking mud. But hauled and beached in the field, even my words of love will not make her rise. She is lying on her side: her eye, white and marble and veiny, stares up. She is dressed embarrassingly, a grim mud shawl over her gorgeous coat. Her struggling front hooves cut small crescents in the sward, so there is no grass, there is only more mud.

Her daughter, Mirabelle, moseys over, and noses at her mother. She can smell death on the mist.

I begin to walk to the house to call the vet to administer death by injection, then stop. Margot hates vets, with their personal deodorant of ointments and ailments. She is an old lady expiring naturally, and I let her go from the world this way. All the wan morning long her daughter stands next to her, but never again looks at her. The other cows one by one pay their curious, sniffing respects. I am there at the last, when shit and life leave her. She dies in an afternoon sky painted in heavy purple oils. I cover her face with a
plastic sugar-beet sack so the crows won’t peck her eyes out.

Margot. My lovely, cantankerous old cow, a true beast of the field.