09 10 07

To walk across the coruscating mile of the bay in October sun, between land & clear sky, is to walk on rippling quicksilver. A heron stares at a limpid & disappearing rock pool. The pure, bubbling, unworded call of flighting curlews curves down to my ear. Halfway across I’m a tiny figure in reflected light, walking, walking, just one foot before the other.

***************************************************************************

a brindled hound
a lichened oak

Inside a wood, it is hard to see it for the trees which overwhelm with their forms, twisted, broken, growing one in the other. The curling holly finds shelter in the oak, rowans crawling decade on decade round the rocks send out more roots, grip tighter, a birch trunk springs back on itself in a slow double bend; a complete alphabet, a language of forms & lives. I find it hard also to see the trees for this reason. It’s infinitely more complicated by the lichens & mosses. Mosses are knee deep in places and year on year take themselves further up into the trees. Where the mosses are not in evidence, the lichens bubble across trunks. Ferns, too, in the crooks formed by the reaching out of limbs. & of course, the old nurse trees will have saplings growing in them. Sometimes it’s possible to see what appears to be two or even three types of leaf on the one tree until the intertwining trunks, like ivies, can be separated from the moss & the ferns by the recalcitrant eye.
In places where we wander, say at Sailean nan Cuileag, the inlet of flies, there’s no such problem for the hound. She’s suddenly there ahead of me on the path, her eyes undeceived & undeceiving, she follows me, now to the east, then the west, ahead, behind, plaiting around me like a sapling alongside a veteran oak. She’s perfectly disguised for this woodland, soft footed, & in the October colours & light, all but invisible in her fur lines of broken amber & darker brown. We don’t take the same path - she has long delicate limbs, built for the speed of the chase, which would catch in the cracks of those mossy rockfaces I scramble up & down - but we end up in the same place – she’s a gaze hound: from within her grace she can see my upright lumbering form as surely as I see the bunching leathery lungwort on the oak trees we pass.