The juniper tree and a vole’s soul

Up on Birkett Common, a short climb above our house, there is one last old juniper tree. Junipers are dioecious. There are male trees, who produce pollen from a profusion of yellowy orange flowers. There are female trees who produce juniper berries, slow to ripen. The deep blue of their maturity is more than a year in the making. The last tree on the common is a male. I sit with him often. We don’t say much. The usual courtesies, conveyed without words. He knows fine well that I want to hear his story. But we are not yet well enough acquainted. So, together we stare in silence, pointedly, intently, across at Mallerstang Edge. As if waiting for an answer. Today, in the gentlest southerly, barely a breeze, a zephyr of warm air lifted from the dust at the base of the tree’s outcrop home and ruffled his branches, brushed past the little ripe flowers. Gathering pace, joined by warmth from gulleys and gills, the column of rising air was adorned by circling buzzards, mewling their spring lovers’ joy. They climbed and climbed until the juniper tree and I lost sight of them, high above the fell-tops. ’There is your story’, the old tree winked. ‘Catch it if you can.’

The vole can hear the oration of bats and the battle-cries of shrews. But is himself a humble man who bears no arms. Wide-whiskered and elderberry-eyed, the vole is god-fearing. He glimpses the wind-hover kestrel, as if she were painted on the vaulted ceiling of the broad chapel that is Mallerstang valley. He may be grateful for the ministrations of the she-hawk one day, when his eyes grow dim and his teeth are worn down.

This is to be his second summer. There will not be another. A vole who has come full circle to the day of their birth is on borrowed time. Already, and a full year behind him, there are young voles who ask him to tell the old stories, who seek the venerable wisdom of his four whole seasons. ‘What is winter?’ they ask. Is it a giant badger whose teeth grind our bones like chaff? Or is it like the smoke of a moorland fire, stinging our eyes and choking our breath? He ponders. A shiver emerges from a memory and rummages in his chest, clutching at his heart. How can he speak the terror? That all grass turns brown and withers, that water turns to rock, that the sun shrinks and shrivels in the sky. Better just to tell them that winter is a great white owl, soft and silent. For now, the month of May is not yet over. The long, joyous, perilous days of summer are ahead. So many of the young ones need never know the truth of winter on the high fells.

He sees the prance and strut of the young roe buck. He feels the pounding of hares’ feet, boxing their way to the throne. But is himself content, lacking the ambition to rule the world. Only, he feels now and then the little itch behind his ears. The little itch that will not be scratched. The tickle of mystery. That biting mite which afflicts a vole of a certain age.

Just once before in his whole life, by folly and accident, has he crossed open ground. A horror, to a vole, like no other. He remembers the vertigo of that open sky as if he had been on a space-walk and his tether had come adrift, leaving him tumbling slowly forever in the glare of the sun. But the itch can no longer be tolerated. And there is no other way to reach the juniper tree, the hermit on his rock, the oldest living creature on Birkett Common. The highest authority of vole lore is surrounded by close-cropped sward on a bare bones ridge of bedrock.

There is a sharp pain in the vole’s heart when at last he reaches the safety of the juniper’s shadow. Too sharp to pass. He had run so hard, head down, through the blazing fire of his agoraphobia. Some little spring inside him has finally broken. His loan is being recalled.

The juniper tree sees that the vole’s ending is near and wants to speak. But it has been so long. And the stammer which gripped him as a seedling has not mellowed over the centuries. He can only sing with a rustling of his sharp green needles. His song is about the juniper berries which were formed on the day of the vole’s birth and are just at that moment on the turn to the deep rich blue of new life.

A year has passed. The bones now lie neat and white by the old tree’s roots. Flesh has long since passed down into rainwater pools deep in the rock, upwards into sap and outwards into juniper flowers. As I sit with the tree and listen to the buzzards’ cry, a vole, on a stream of rising air laden with pollen, begins his long ascension towards the sacred tang and tart of juniper berry. Somewhere far below him, on the limestone pavements of Westmorland, a female juniper is waiting.

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I don’t suppose that anyone will notice, not with all the wonderful hustle and bustle of the changing seasons. But just in case - Elvers by Moonlight will skip half a beat now and be back on the 11th of June.

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