28 10 07

Two days’ heavy rain, driven by westerlies, & the burns overspill & topple white & fast down the hills. The bare rock faces gleam in lulls & rainbows flash on & off as the sun & rain chase across the heights, mostly north, sometime south. The ant colony nearest is sodden & quiet. I suppose the ants to be in hibernation. In what way they hibernate, Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Ant does not recount. It’s my ant bible; though it’s stuffed as full of myth, suppositions, parallels, wishful thinking & righteousness as the Christian bible, it has an easy story-telling & at times, elegant prose. Materlinck only writes of the ant at rest:

“When after a long adventure, burdened with booty three or four times her own weight, she returns to the nest, her companions who guard the entries hasten to meet her and . . . cleanse her of the dust that covers her, brushing and caressing her, and lead her to a sort of sleeping-chamber, far from the tumult of the crowd, which is reserved for exhausted travellers. There she soon sinks into a slumber . . .”.

I had visualised ants hugger mugger together, like sleeping puppies; hibernating like dormice or the hedgehog who lives the winter out under my raised wooden hut at Carbeth. But I’m sure this is not the case. In fact the colony gives every appearance of being deserted; wet through, there must be a drainage system inbuilt, just as there are ventilation ducts in the architecture. But to see the mushroom growing from one side is to doubt this. It may be Bolbitius vitellinus, it may not & seeing it, I’m reminded of the moss creeping once more onto the cold roofs of holiday & second home cottages now the fires remain unlit in ashy hearths. Wet again, the hound & I return, she to crunch her bone & sprawl across the floor (she’s the best part of five feet from nose to tail tip & uses a lot of space) & my glass fills as I listen to rain hard on the window & peel yellowed birch leaves from my boots.