Meadowland (31 page)

24 N
OVEMBER
A dead badger on the lane; I am certain it is the old boar. The victim of a car. Badgers are not cute to look at: the pig snout and pied facial stripes are weirder still up close.

I drive on, leaving the badger on the verge of the lane. There is nothing as lonely as death.

The next morning I go back with a plastic feed sack (from the inevitable beet pellets) to collect the badger and bury him in the field.

The body has already been removed, probably by the Council, who have someone who collects badger corpses. But I like to think, in a wave of sentiment, that the badger’s family took his body and buried it. The naturalist Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald once saw a badger funeral. It was 1941, the middle of World War Two, and the badger family dug a grave, dragged and shoved the deceased into it, then covered it with earth. Dust to dust. The sow wailed throughout the moonless night.

27 N
OVEMBER
Tonight I see something I have never seen before, something I never even knew of. It’s late, and I have gone for a moon-time walk around the fields, because I love the solitude of the dark. While I am looking to the west and the unbroken night of mid-Wales, an arch of white light suddenly appears in the sky and spans the earth before me. I feel afraid, as though I have been singled out for some almighty moment of revelation, that I have been entrusted with some Damascene vision, and several seconds pass before I understand what it is I am looking at.

I am looking at a rainbow at night. A moonbow.

28 N
OVEMBER
Note: ‘Morning in the field: jackdaws at 6.45am in great squadrons, wheeling. More join in. Lots of noise. Then fly off en masse, aside from a few persistent individualists who go their own way.’ Two hours later there is mother-of-pearl sunshine.

There are birds calling greetings and alarms, but in the field only the robin
sings
; even in winter the robin will defend its smallholding. For all its charm as the pin-up of the Christmas card industry, the robin is a vicious little thrush. A dead robin lies on the grass beside the thicket, its head battered from pecking, one eye burst by a torturing, puncturing beak.

This is a dying world. A nearby farm is diversifying into holiday accommodation. Their field of the beautiful aspect will grow tipis. Which is like a dog shitting on a white Berber carpet.

The wind rakes the valley, searching into every fold of earth and unbuttoned flap of coat. There is Reynard the dog fox digging excitedly. His fur is in bloom and has the scorching-red hue of a fire ember. But so strong is the wind that it is ruffling his hair; a cartoon fox plugged into the mains would look sleeker. He does not hear or see me as I walk up behind him. The soft ground absorbs the vibrations from my feet. Childishly I cannot resist giving him a fright, and when I am almost within touching distance of his white-tipped brush I cough loudly.

Foxes can run.

30 N
OVEMBER
Warm, orange glow in the afternoon. The sigh of my feet in the frosted night grass. Wrap my coat closer, wrap myself into the ground, fold myself into the earth. As night descends I can hear the shiftless hunting of voles, shrews and mice in the hedge. Shrews do not hibernate, as they are too small to store
fat reserves sufficient to see them through the winter. And spangled is the only word for this starry night of seeping cold.

Fox

THE FIELD IS
dead. A single snap. A soundless photograph. An inverse of the bustle of summer. The grass has stopped growing.

A black-and-white picture too with this lifeless mist. In the bottom of the Grove ditch the red campion that clung tenaciously throughout the wrong season has, at last, given up. Only in the thicket and hedges do I find colour, in the red of the holly, hawthorn and rose hips. In medieval times the holly was the Christmas tree, its scarlet berries held to be the resemblance of Christ’s blood. There are other reds in December. Robin. Hunting jacket. Fox.

The mist wanders away, to be replaced by an exhilarating week of hoar frosts and blue skies, and the barking of a fox at the crescent, huntsman’s moon. Venus is out in the sky even before the sun goes down over the mountain. Then it snows at night.

In the morning, there is the peow of the buzzard over the bed-white field and a tell-tale streak of urine on a tussock. Through a gap in Bank hedge I can see the fox walking gently over the snow, ears alert. The fox stops, turns its head, all the better to hear with. Takes another few paces forward. Listens. Then
rears up on its hind legs and does a diving pounce.

A flurry of digging snow.

A caught field vole, which is swallowed whole.

When I was about ten my father brought a redhead home in the back of his yellow Rover 2000. The redhead, on closer inspection, turned out to be the stuffed fox that graced the window of the gunsmith’s in West Street in Hereford. The fox was more than stuffed, it was the centrepiece of an Edwardian field sports monument, a complete scene in which the snarling fox looked down on two rabbits emerging from a burrow. (The edifice was constructed from some sort of early painted plastic.) The gunsmith’s shop was closing down, and my father, sweetly, had thought I would like the fox.

I did. So did our Labradors when it was installed in my bedroom; they used to sneak in and chew the stuffed rabbits.

I would spend hours gazing at the fox. I would measure it, from clee to shoulder, the tip of canine tooth to jawbone, from the end of the brush to the back. The fox set me off on a trail of nature reading from the public library in Broad Street, during which (with the guidance of a master from school) I stumbled upon
Wild Lone: The Story of a Pytchley Fox
by BB. In a sense I owe that stuffed fox a great deal, because it was BB who, above everyone, inspired me with a spiritual respect for nature, as opposed to simple
admiration or sentimental regard. (Though I can do both of those too.)

While I liked my stuffed fox, I have never been quite so keen on the real thing, the killer of our chickens, ducks and lambs. Respect but not love. My ambivalence is perfectly incorporated in the fact that I am the only person I know who has both hunted foxes on horseback and ‘sabbed’ fox hunts.

Only today do I fully understand why foxes make me uneasy. For a canid, the fox is disconcertingly catty. Aside from the feline mouser pounce, foxes have vertically slit pupils. The Edwardian taxidermist who stuffed my fox gave it appealing amber dog eyes.

The fox trots off through the snow, aware of his handsomeness. He is a proper country fox. Given half-decent light I can distinguish him from all others by his size, and the possession of the purest black legs. He is three, and the father to the cubs born back in February. Sometimes I watch him from the house when he is on a circuit of his territory, which is, roughly, two and a bit farms, about a hundred acres, the main borders being the river and the road. Although he trots, his progress is slow since every fifty yards or less he stops to scent. Reynard, as I always
think of him, is doing well to reach three. The mortality rate for adult foxes is 50 per cent per year. The mortality rate for cubs and juveniles is 60–70 per cent.

I know that one of the cubs from the copse is dead; it crossed the river and entered the territory of the quarry wood foxes. The body was in plain view in the middle of the sheep field across from the finger two days ago. When I reached it, I could see that it had been badly mauled around the neck.