13 11 07

Is a stag an event? There’s no wind, droplets of water on every aspen, birch & oak, as well as at the tip of each stalk of hard rush. Ambling across the bay west from Kentra, two hours ahead of low tide, pausing only to scratch, the dark necked stag owns it all. I move up the hill to cut him off & sit quietly where he’ll come ashore. To see things, it’s easier to be still than to lumber behind. I sit for maybe twenty minutes until the damp seeps in. Experience says he’s scented me & moved off below or above. There’s no further sight of him.

In the afternoon I walk round the headlands on the bay’s sands & there’s his slotted hoofprints leading in to an inlet east of where I was sitting in the morning. It’s among the poised & ponderous heron prints, each foot just about the span of my hand. The ridges & wrinkles of the bay are crisscrossed by worm casts & the meanderings of small whelk trails & the musings of other shellfish creeping. Just as the outlines of heron, stag & fish prints are softening in the moisture retained in the sand’s striations, so are the lower slopes of watercut hills of rock around the bay blurring into cloud; the peak of Ben Resipole rising into sun. The stag’s away.