Reading about the fox

It’s too wet and windy for a walk – Storm Atiya is on its way – so I’m reading up on foxes. The Hidden World of the Fox by Adele Brand is not, as the blurb on the cover says, a lyrical love letter to the fox, but it is full of facts about foxes. How small they are (sometimes weighing in at less than a domestic cat); how keen their hearing is (yesterday’s fox had his head down because he was listening for earthworms); and how well they fit into whichever of the many and varied landscapes they inhabit.

One such ecosystem, notes Brand,  is Białowieża, a tract of near primeval forest in Poland. White booted eagles fly overhead, and if you are lucky (I wasn't!) you may see elk and bison. Fallen tree-trunks, supposedly dead,  are alive with mosses and thronged with woodpeckers, squirrels and invertebrates. The colour green is all around you. Oak, hornbeam, beech, lichens, sphagnum, and grasses; each tree, each plant, has its own particular aura of green. Białowieża thrums with life. If I describe the forest as magical I mean that in the two or three hours I spent there I felt more alive than I have done anywhere else on earth. My senses were sharpened, my skin became alert to the texture of the air around me.

In Białowieża foxes feed on wild boar carrion, the boar brought down by wolves and scavenged by their smaller relatives. English foxes too are scavengers, but it's unlikely that they would feed on wild boar; their teeth are not strong enough to deliver a killer bite, and there are no wolves to do it for them. So, our wild boar are safe, and free to roam - a reason, perhaps, to bring back the wolf?

Fox

Hoar frost hangs in the air. A robin greets me. A clatter of woodpigeons flies too close for comfort. Two crows, their black plumage bigged up against the cold air, fight over a chunk of bread. 

In the field next to the farm a fox, the fog dulling down his russet coat, meanders slowly across the grass. Head down, tail down, he is rootling for earthworms. Foxes eat a lot of worms. Rain, such as we had last night, brings them to the surface, but now the ground is almost frozen and it will be a while before he can unearth his breakfast. I am glad to be well-wrapped up. I am glad to have made it out this early.

Following the sun

Where the canal broadens out, a large flock of Canada Geese float on the water. A heron, hunched on a low-hanging alder branch, turns his back on them. Cock robins, pert and handsome, stake out their territories in the hawthorn hedge. They count me out along the towpath, and count me back in again – I might be up to no good. Stealing crab apples, perhaps, or gathering in holly for a Christmas wreath.

As I turn for home the geese take off, in groups of twenty or more, yapping and barking. They are following the last of the day’s sunlight, heading for the mill lodge hidden behind the hill.

Bracken

The rain has stopped, but the ground is still sodden. I walk through puddles to the canal, and by the time I reach the towpath my boots and the hems of my trousers are splattered with mud. The grasses beside the track across the field are flattened and yellow, the taller clumps dull ochre. And yet the hills are green, a green made even greener by the redness of dead bracken. The painter John Constable knew how to use red to strengthen the colour green; as a child I’d searched his pictures for the red - a scarlet cap or waistcoat, or an ornamental saddle to bring out the green of stream and meadow.

Today the redness of the bracken is astonishing; it defies analogy. Not amethyst, not chestnut, not madder, but all of these and all at once, a rich deep drowning of the hills in garnet. And the redness is doubled, each bracken frond reflected in the ebony surface of the canal. It is quite simply breath-taking.

Illness

For several weeks I've been ill, really seriously ill – I've had sepsis and pneumonia and there were hours when my life hung by a thread. It’s going to take me long time to get better. 

Since coming out of hospital at the end of September I’ve had a second bout of infection, a fifth course of antibiotics. 

My body is exhausted, but so too is my mind. Walking has been beyond me. Blogging has been beyond me.

I've been told it will take me a long time to recover, but no-one is saying how long. Suddenly, I'm old. 

Noise pollution

A mile along the towpath I encounter the noise that has been keeping me awake at night. One of the battleship grey industrial sheds that stand between my house and the canal has sprouted a trio of stainless steel silos which emit a low hum, as of an out-sized extractor fan. It's not a loud noise, but I'm sensitive to low frequency vibration and the hum has been disturbing me. Maybe it will bother me less now I know what it is. But if it does this to me, with my not-so-acute human hearing, what does it do to the wildlife?

Poem: January fog

January fog

There’s a tree on the other side of the road,

but I can’t see it.  I'm inside-out,

a coat whose sleeves have turned awkward.

I want to be the right way round.

I want to see the tree.

Snow

A slight dusting of snow on Blackstone Edge, visible only because I looked for it. 

New Year's Day

Today, New Year's day, the towpath is a social space. The world and its dog is out for a walk. I am embarrassed to be dogless, and compensate by politely greeting every pooch I encounter. The dogs are unimpressed. My doglessness is noted. 

Fox

As I walked past the small field beside Carriage Drive, I had the feeling I was being watched. It’s a feeling I’ve come to trust: If I think I’m being watched, I am. Who, or what, was watching me?

An animal was crouched in the middle of the field. A cat perhaps. No. It was a fox. Very pale in colour, as though it had been sprinkled with silver dust.  Its ears and tail were too big for its body, and yet, as foxes go, this was a large animal.  I gasped with pleasure, and the fox took off across the field – a fox can run at 30 miles an hour – and leapt over the perimeter ditch, its magnificent tail streaming behind it like a comet.

I stood at the field end.

Deeper in was a fox.

Suddenly I felt myself feared.

It was not a good feeling.

Echo

Echo

The air still, but elastic,

Throwing back

The quick dactyls

Of a dog-bark

Poem - Arthritis

Arthritis

My bones are without sap.

The pain strips me of all leaf.

I must make the pain beautiful,

like an old Caledonian pine,

twisted by years of wind and rain,

and now misshapen, but still tree.

Tree, I am tree.

I must remember that. 

A gap of three months

Three months without posting. That means I've been in pain for three months. It's been a bad year. It's not often I can't cope, but this year I haven't coped.  And meanwhile, the landscape has gone on without me. As it should.