The winter's tail

Riverwitch #14

‘Riverwitch’ is a collaborative project with my wife Sharon Blackie, writing on her Substack The Art of Enchantment. It’s the re-understanding of a prose duet we wrote for each other back in 2014, both grieving and celebrating our dislocation from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides to Donegal in north-west Ireland. It offers a story-within-a-story as, ten years on, we try to make sense of the ways in which places claim us, mark us – and then, when it’s time, cast us loose. We have been taking turns every Wednesday to revisit one of the original posts and add new reflections and insights. This is my final Riverwitch entry. Sharon will add her concluding post next Wednesday.

The previous post in this series was Sharon’s ‘Possessed by the land’, which she posted last week. Read it here. You can also find more of the background to this project here.

April 2015

There are only two seasons out here on the prow of this great vessel, full steam ahead, north-west-bound into the Atlantic. This ship is called Donegal, the jutting jaw of Ireland, soaking up the ocean’s hooks and jabs. Here, there is summer and there is winter. They are well acquainted, these two rivals. Spring is a game they play with one another. Autumn is their rank and rapturous lovemaking.

Donegal heads out to sea

March and April have been fighting it out. After a fortnight or more of rising temperatures the snow snuck back to the high ground and, briefly, to the low. The land is littered with false starts and desperation. Nests which were begun have been abandoned to the damp. A solitary bat, without the energy reserves to wait any longer, was active at dusk yesterday – putting it all on black, double or quits. I hope against hope that there were insects on the wing higher up amongst the trees. There were none down with me.

Perhaps it is our winters which define us after all. Not our summers and our high days, as we are tempted to believe. The season of cold days, of failed days and the repeated rebuttal of hopes. The weeks of holding on and the grace of our endurance.

Time tempers us in these moments, like the buds which are ever greening but not breaking open. No, not today. Nor the next day, nor the next. Days stretching out beyond the limits of our vision.

Only the herons have the measure of these days. I watch them through binoculars each morning from a vantage across the valley. The earliest of all the birds here to breed, most have already hatched chicks. Eight nests, maybe nine, in the precarious tops of a tight Sitka spruce plantation. Their castle on the bog. Improbable work for an implausible bird. Any strong wind blows them misery. The nestlings fall out of bed and cannot be recovered.

Away at the fishing grounds on the estuary, herons stand like grey beggars on a busy street. The rush-hour crowds of a white-capped westerly gale jostle past them, parting and rejoining. The birds are unmoved. Their cantilevered stillness unnerves the wind. It cannot look them in the eye.

Ripples and din scatter the light, chop stirs the silt. Foam flies and pieces of bladder-wrack, dismantled by the waves, flurry past. From these unpromising ingredients the patience of a heron reconstructs, atom by atom, butterfish, flounder, eel.

I imagine that they must be in some sort of trance, a reverie of creation. I dream enviously of their focus and their attending. But then I remember their hearts, the ticking clocks tapping anxiously on their breastbones, counting down the little time left for the chicks who are growing hungry and cold. A bird’s heart beats fearsomely fast.

Now the long uphill flight home, heavy with fish. An into-wind agony of rollover and gust. Hanging about on street corners, doing deals on gateposts, the crows are waiting for them.

The slow metronome of a heron’s wingbeat does not waver. It cannot waver. They must see this through.

Before dawn this morning the tables finally turned. April rallied. In a breathless calm and a dripping thaw, the adults who are not still incubating can stand on their flimsy tree-top perches without swaying and are scorched silent by the joy of it. The newly hatched put on their best ugly, raise their heads and peer at the world. I stow my binoculars and try again to look out beyond the limits of my vision.

In their best ugly

November 2024

In her house up on the hill above Gort an Choirce, an old woman once told me a version of the story of the brindled cow. She allowed me to visit her once a week to listen to her intensely local Irish Gaelic and, when her poor ears could stand my squawking, to work a little on mine. It was, of course, far more important that I listen. And what could be finer than listening to an old woman tell a story.

In most tellings of The Brindled Cow, An Bhó Riabhach, the old cow comes across rather badly. In the final days of March she boasts that the winter has again failed to kill her, old though she is. March is angry and asks to borrow three days from April – three days in which the weather will unexpectedly revert to Winter. April agrees and the three resulting extra days of foul weather overcome the brindled cow and she dies.

That is not quite how the old woman in Gort an Choirce told the story. She told me that the brindled cow was so exhausted as March drew to a close that she knew she would not survive. So she asked April for a loan of three days of clement weather – an advance, so to speak. To tide her over. April agreed and the brindled cow enjoyed three beautiful days of mild weather. She stood on a rounded hummock and gazed out at the sea. There were flowers on the gorse. But the debt had to be repaid. As do all debts. In the first week of April there was sleet and ice, scudding in off the Atlantic. After three days they found the brindled cow dead.

I don’t know if that was an established local variation of the story or the woman’s own personal twist. I would never dream of asking her. Herons and people tell their stories. What we make of them is up to us.

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