Along the dune-path, sloes and haws hung from thorn thickets, late flowers grew in profusion: bladder campion, herb robert, guelder rose, colonies of evening primrose, michaelmas daisies, clotted blooms of faded meadowsweet, rustling dry spikes of ladies’ tresses. By stepping stones marking the change of spring-fed stream to saltwater rhyne, a kingfisher burst from the reeds, whirred low above the water, its flash of orange and azure in brilliant contrast to mud banks between which a little egret, infinitely graceful of form, stalked on yellow feet and stabbed down with dark dagger beak. Skeins of geese calling plangently wheeled high overhead before gliding down to net-pools upriver of perilous Cardigan Bar: Canada geese and Greenland whitefronts come from the cold north to overwinter here, and run the gauntlet of “sportsmen”, their blued barrels loaded with deadly ejaculate, against whom the Welsh government affords this declining and lovely waterfowl scant protection.
Small fishing boats that had spent the day pulling pots in the lee of Cardigan Island bobbed through the surf and were running for home on the flood, keeping close to the northern shore before heeling round to shelter behind the mole. Tennyson’s “Such a tide as moving seems asleep” had whispered across the sands. The whole wide estuary, sunset and evening star reflecting, shimmered like creased satin. Sweet rattle of a curlew rose from the shoreline, pitched up to descant against distant roar of bay-rimming white waves. Dowdily adolescent cygnets congregated in little groups, whistled strangely to each other, dawdled far in the wake of their pristine parents. More geese took flight. Brutal echo of a single shot rang out upstream. Some father, maybe, initiating a son into murderous mysteries of his craft (I doubt many mothers pass this on to their daughters)?
Why, I wondered, must the brutish kill creatures that others love? Is Franciscan mercy no more than “the lost traveller’s dream under the hill” of Blake’s last poem? The halcyon mood lost, in a brown study I turned for home.
