In a long dry spell

Spring moles and badger bones

Cumbria, like all of northern Britain, is a place of ever-changing weather. The Atlantic blesses us with its fickle moods, surprises us by the hour. But this spring the ocean turned its back to us. For many weeks the ground dried out in a run of endless easterlies. As the land waited for rain so that the year could begin, we wandered the tracks and paths catching snatches of a unknown song, phrases from an ancient story. We needed to find a way into this unfamiliar landscape …

Smell her. It was an hour ago and in darkness that the fox pissed this luxury silk scent, wicked to the touch. The breathless dawn air has hung it on the line for you alone, a virgin veil of scurrilous sexy stink. Walk through it only once. Once in all eternity. Do not think of turning back. You will not find it again. Feel only the way your throat barks baleful of its own accord. Look hastily around to be sure that nobody sees the hair on the backs of your soft rufous hands.

The ground is crackle-dry. Walk slowly. Pad softly. Stop at random intervals and become a rock, a rotten stump, a fresh-fallen carcass. Go nowhere. The way the air has been of late, listless and nostalgic. Clinging on to smells, fingering them like old photographs in the way that you do when looking is no longer enough. As if touching the image can bring it back, that sunny morning when everything was well, when anything was possible.

The bones of Birkett Common

The land is long-suffering. With sunup each morning she sends a frog out from the wet reek of its sanctuary to divine the body-language of the sky. Today, again, her messenger crawls lanky-legged back to moisture and reports that the blue remains miserly, hoarding its wealth offshore. The dew’s lips are parched and cracked. She can barely lick them wet.

Now is the time of bones. They poke out of the ground in recompense for spring’s postponement. Strange flowers. The round of a deer’s hip-bone ball is as strokable as a cat’s head. A canine skull, no bigger than your hand, skewers you on the thorn of the moment. The face is as familiar as a glance in the mirror.

A fox, young forever

Up on the hillside the desiccated skin of Birkett Common is splitting. The ribcage wreckage of a limestone dinosaur is bleaching in the sun.

The land is patient. While she waits for rain there is always the housekeeping. Dry days are best for changing the linen. At the badgers’ sett the old sow’s bones have finally been taken out with the bedding and the tailings of a new tunnel. The great matriarch and her stories had been buried these last twenty years, in the side chamber where she died. Such is the badger’s way. Their dead are not for the ravens. Her offspring slept next door all that time, cosied up with her memory like warm buns in a basket. Letting the slow work of grief and forgetting percolate. They can let her bones go now.

The soil is a sea of possibility. In spring, young moles tickle the tunnels of their birth one last time and set sail for the new world. Rivers and rocks and roads stand in their way. Many founder and sink upwards to drown under the pitiless sky. They wash up at my feet, their paddle hands just too much like my own. I carry them over the tarmac, slow-march solemn, and bury them in their promised land.

Is the land not generous, taking care of our dead when we can no longer bear to carry them? She washes them clean. She launders their clothes so that they can be worn again. And when she sees that the time is right, she gives us back the stories of those we loved, white and shimmering like cotton-grass in the breeze.

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