Trace Elements

Animals somehow know that they need to eat a certain herb, lick a particular rock or ingest a small amount of a specific type of soil. Even with plenty of calories and an apparently healthy diet they intuit that some tiny strand of the intricate mesh of their body is too tight or too slack. Perhaps they need a trace of selenium, a stain of cobalt. An animal foraging outside its normal setting, somehow distracted, not exactly ill but not quite well either – this may be an individual trying, unbeknown even to itself, to make good such a lack.

In a cooling early evening this July gone I closed the draft of a poetry translation I had been struggling with for far too long, put on boots and left the house. It had been a busy day for the collie dogs so their protests about being left behind were just a formality. I marched off down the lane and came to the bridge. I have tried to cross a bridge without looking into the river but never succeeded. Last winter’s trout fry were incautiously working hard in open water in order to become next winter’s parr. Older trout were playing shadows beneath the medieval stone arch.

I wasn’t really going anywhere. So I went just somewhere. I sniffed around at the place where the previous week I had seen a weasel working the base of a crumbling drystone wall. The weasel had been breathtaking. I can only be sure that I have seen a weasel four times in the sixty years of my life. The first two times were just glimpses of a ginger cat’s tail, removed from the cat and re-animated with a life of its own. So totally different from a stoat in its movement, the weasel passes through space as a wave moves across the ocean. The third time I was looking out of a window and felt the shame of a voyeur as the weasel stopped momentarily to inspect some anomaly in its world. It must have been a truly miraculous curiosity to bring a weasel to stillness, even for a second. But I could see nothing when I went outside to check. The recent fourth encounter had provided sufficient weasel for a lifetime. We made eye contact. I know this was rash. The surge of so much weasel might have turned me instantly to dust, to be blown away on the breeze. Luckily I blinked and the world, now concealing any hint of weasel, hesitantly began to rotate again.

Snuffling around the scene of my transmogrification a week after the event reveals no clues, no souvenirs. It was, and now it is not, like an interrupted dream you want to return to but cannot find. I press on up the facing side of the valley. As I rise to the steep, open fell the farm buildings and fields shrink into a scale-modeller’s pride and joy, complete with railway line and castle ruins. What detail this hobbyist has added. A little dog, a man mowing a lawn, a child bringing in the washing at the end of a drying day.    

The valley and its clanking buckets fade as I pass into the dead ground beneath the ridge’s jagged crown. The fractured limestone crags above me are barely hanging onto the sky, fingers cramped. They must surely lose their grip soon and fall. I scurry over their scree skirts and keep looking. The silence pounds like distant artillery. The pool is a surprise. I had no idea that I was searching for it. It rests in a small flat-bottomed bowl, close up to the cliff and unguessable from the valley below. It is close to circular and about six feet in diameter. Not a pond, by any stretch. But summer permanent. A rare thing up high on the limestone which is so miserly with its water, hoarding it down in the depths, filling its coffers in a storm until they can take no more and burst out into rivulets and cascades which then dry again as fast as they rose.

This tiny pool, then, is the cyclops eye of the Mallerstang ridgeline. It sees the Meadow Pipit’s careful deception as it returns to its nest. It counts the kestrel’s tail feathers, old and new, as its moult progresses. It watches the sheep’s bones bleach. I cover the last twenty yards crawling on my belly, though whether this is in stealth or in obeisance I couldn’t really say.

The edge of the pool is well defined as if the last piece of a green jigsaw on a dark tabletop has yet to be placed. Prone, it is possible to peer discreetly over the miniscule peat-cliff edge into the foot-deep abyss below. Shadows undercut the banks and the water is filled with aquatic plants in various stages of living and disintegration. Water Boatmen skitter. The meniscus and the bottom of the pond play ping-pong with a small diving-beetle in lieu of a ball. There are lines and curves and textures mixed in with the vegetation that don’t quite make sense. But slowly, as the heat continues to fade from the sunlight, these odds and ends organise themselves into newts. Over the next hour eight or more individuals reassemble themselves and start to go about their lives in the evening cool. A newt’s life does not appear to be a hurried affair. They swim a few inches and contemplate their next move almost indefinitely. They surreptitiously visit one another’s place in the weed and sometimes receive a welcome, sometimes not. Nobody seems to take offence. Occasionally they simply levitate and remain at some odd angle in mid-air, their miniscule feet engaged with a tilted horizon which has no recollection of gravity.     

Thus the buoyant, buoying note of newt, without which the world is incomplete, passed through me and on out across the fell into the everywhere beyond. A trace of them remains.

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