23 11 07

At sunrise, together with a hind limned against a lightening sky, I watch as the bay becomes gold across its newborn sand. The news bulletin told me of Palestinians waking to the bulldozing of precious & ancient olive trees uprooted to make way for the concrete wall. The sun gilding sand is heart stopping, an organ played on by the blood of hind & human.

The hind moves on delicate black hooves over rock & heather, downhill, elegantly scratching her ear with her right rear leg; maybe, now in calf, she’s in as contemplative a mood as myself. I move up hill in a sky rapidly silvering then greying as the sun rises above the bay, above Ben Resipole’s hip & above rain clouds moving in from the Atlantic. The birches & the moss below are full of the flit & dart of chaffinches. The males echo the day, with their blue-grey crowns & rosy breasts, with the upcoming generation, or so I take it to be, slightly less coloured, but they’ll grow into it. The female is altogether olive brown. A grey crow, one of a pair in an alder, is wiping his beak on a branch, with a knife-sharpening motion, to take off traces of breakfast.

Under alder & birch & oak alike, the skeletal remains of bracken keel & reveal the green vividness of sphagnums & the herringbone pattern & green corduroy of shield ferns, (Polystichum aculeatum is my stab in the darkness of my own uncertainty). In the oaks grow polypody – Polypodium interjectum, their green multiple tongues dripping & refreshingly free of cant.

Dusk comes a little earlier each night, bringing greater safety, but greater hunger to the deer. The Glen Tarbert stags are down from the tops; three of them that I see have almost identical broken left antlers. They’re young & their rivalries are over, leaving only those cracked anti-trophies of male hormone flow, subsided as tide in the inlets. At Camas a’ Choirce, a solitary fossicking badger trots & snuffles between pounding rain squalls, light on her feet, her belly low-slung & her body-mass-index enough to frighten humans. Mostly nocturnal, she (I have no way of telling the sex of this animal) will spend more time sleeping in the longer colder nights, but have no food shortages just yet; the woods an autumn larder of roots, worms, carrion & mushrooms. At Kentra, young hind calves trot ahead of me, bemused by my torchlight in the pre-moon dark.

Clarity arrives with the full moon. Although there are clouds, the light is brilliant, lighting the white of sheep up on Gobsheallach hillside with a shining matched only by the luminescence of lichen rings on the rocks I finger as personal touchstones as I pass. Scale is confused in such clarity where I find it hard to ascribe anything but equal value to what is in front of my eyes wherever my glance falls – a lunar illumination scaled to fit human perception.