Our friend Helen (the person who encouraged me to write a first speculative Guardian diary 39 years ago) suddenly announced: “I see a stoat.” It would be the year’s first. I was anxious not to miss a glimpse, which is as much as you usually enjoy, because stoats move like eels and evaporate like smoke.
Not this one. A limestone wall through ancient sheep pasture seemed to have a magnetic hold over its movements. He rippled across the capstones like water, until he transferred attention to a feeding flock of tits that gathered, chattering with alarm at a possible predator.
The stoat then did something I’ve never seen before. He fired himself into an old elder and clambered midway up the tree. Next he scampered through the lower branches, converting the linear maths of so many outstretched limbs to a series of ellipses and spheres. Round and round he corkscrewed, at times apparently upside down and so quickly you could not possibly trace the manoeuvres, but gravity barely seemed to be involved and the liquid flow of his body more resembled flight than fleetness of foot.
There was one extraordinary moment when he appeared to need an intermission from all the ecstasy. He dropped to the wall, found a mossy niche in which to slot himself and rolled over with lemony breast uppermost, head and neck draped downwards so that he could see the human observers, but upside down. In this extravagant posture, like any lounge lizard on his divan, he wriggled his back, perhaps to mark scent or satisfy an itch. Those eternal 10 seconds of inaction were quite enough.
Off he skipped, back into the tree, through the branches, down to earth, along the length of the wall, far over the field until we could see him on a bent-back ash trunk: a distant dancing silhouette. Surely that was it? But back he rushed, peeping from elevated points along the wall, like a chatelain on his ramparts, where he came face to face with Helen (now trying to record the moment). A second to assess whether she was prey or predator and off he tricked, as light as seed floss, black-tipped tail upright, flickering as he departed.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
