This is a searching time. Blackbirds examine the ivy berries like jewel thieves. Thrushes poke through the mown grass of the Gaskell recreation ground with all the attention of the forensics team brought in to investigate the Spar robbery last month. The birds are twitchy, fossicking close to the hedge lines in case of attacks by sparrowhawks. Rooks are watchful and jackdaws group-speak up and down from the trees where blue tits, long-tailed tits and great tits work the branches as if picking tiny locks. A nuthatch chisels into a hazelnut to crack its secret.
After the snow, after the gales, after Storm Whatshername emerged from a murmuration of thrashing wings to press her lips to the window and blow through the glass like a kazoo, the woods are in disarray. A few big trees have bought it, but mostly it’s the damsons around the old squat lines, blackthorn along lanes and hazel in derelict coppice that cracked and twisted in the winds.
Unless someone gets a saw out, paths through woods will be redrawn. Scrambling from a barricade of fallen boughs, I spy a more open way I had not taken for years. I am led on by the sneak and dip of an almost path that joins a thin hoof-line of fallow deer close to a quarry lip.
Something blue catches my eye sticking out of a hazel trunk. It’s the plastic flights of an arrow, a stick with a foot-long meat skewer taped to it. Against the tree leans a bow made from an ash branch strung with nylon cord. This is a lethal weapon.
I follow the deer-path up a mound of quarry spoil like a tumulus and at its peak is a venerable crab apple, the sun shining through its gauntness on to golden windfalls. I have been foraging, too. I found a colander full of leaves, and in the root holes made by fallen trees a fossil shell and a scapula cut with a blade and incised with teeth marks. With these things in this place found by happenstance, I make a space for whatever is searching.
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