Sara Crowe's Blog, page 3

This old apple tree

The oldest apple tree in England is 212 years old or thereabouts. I don’t know how old this one is but older than me at any rate and maybe 100 or 200. For all I know, it could be older than the official oldest apple tree.

Moss furs its boughs. It bears the scars of storms, amputations, woodworm. Grass grows in its hollows. Its bark is grey and cracked and scaly, like the skin of an ancient dragon. But in Spring it was a frothy mess of blossom and now it stands in the cool green shade of its own leaves, its dragon bark flecked with sunlight. Later, there’ll be apples, sour cookers.

We hung bird-feeders from the rods of new growth that sprout from it. From dawn till dusk, birds flit among its branches: tree sparrows, great tits, blue tits, greenfinches, goldfinches, dunnocks, long-tailed tits, blackbirds, robins, sometimes a Great Spotted Woodpecker.

Below, the grass grows long. There’s cow parsley and sticky weed.

A few days ago, I noticed trackways where something big was coming through the hedge and trampling its grass. So I left the Trailcam out, on its little tripod at the foot of the tree. And it captured footage of:

A badger

and a fox cub, rooting for peanuts that fell from a bird-feeder yesterday

The Hunter and the Bird-woman

A short story by me.

Deep in a forest in a faraway land there lived a woman. But this woman was not like other women, for she slept on a platform at the top of the tallest tree and at night she wrapped herself in great black wings that grew from her shoulder blades.

Every morning when the rim of the sun set fire to the edge of the world, the woman stood and shook dew from her feathers. She watched the mist rise through the trees. She opened her wings, lifted and dropped them, slowly at first, as if testing her strength against the air. Then she flexed her knees and launched, soaring higher with each powerful beat of her wings until at last she glided on the high thermals.

She was not like other women and this forest was not like other forests. Its trees were huge and ancient. Among them lived creatures and beings that men dared speak of only when they were safely indoors: great bears and wolves, mighty stags, forest folk with skin like bark or eyes like an owl’s, shapeshifters, nightbirds as pale as moonlight.

Humans had no place in this forest and so they coveted it and hated it. They spoke greedily about the value of its timber and of the magnificent beasts that lived there, beasts that they might have hunted for their meat or trapped and skinned for their pelts.

But they were afraid. The bird-woman patrolled the forest’s boundary by day and at night its fierce beasts roamed.

One day a hunter arrived at a nearby village. Lean and fearless, he’d heard tell of the forest’s riches and of the terrors that kept men at bay. That evening, he sat at a table in the tavern and bought ale for all around him, to loosen their tongues.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘why is it that you eke out your livings on this thin soil when less than half a morning’s walk from here there’s so much fine timber, and beasts whose furs are worth a king’s ransom, and acorns a-plenty to fatten up your skinny swine? If I were you, I wouldn’t work myself into the grave while such riches lay untouched so close by.’

The villagers laughed at his question and thought him a prize fool. They told him about wolves the size of oxen, of beautiful maids with dripping hair who lured men to watery deaths in deep forest pools, of shadow beings that would tear out men’s eyes and claw their faces to the bone. They told him about the bird-woman who patrolled the forest from the sky so she could warn its creatures whenever men approached.

The hunter listened carefully to all of this for though he was greedy, he was not a fool, and though he was bold, he was not reckless.

That night, he made his plan. A man alone, he thought, might slip unnoticed into the forest in daytime while the fiercest beasts slept, if only the bird-woman did not sound the alarm.

A single arrow, shot straight through her heart, should do the trick.

He took his time. He bought goats at the market and paid the elders to let him graze them on common land close to the forest. He dressed up like a goatherd and every morning for a week he took his small flock to pasture at the forest’s edge. Each time, he took with him a handcart, with his traps inside hidden under sackcloth.

High above the forest, the bird-woman drifted like a buzzard on the breeze. Soon she became used to the new goatherd’s daily visits and paid him no more heed than she did the other folk who grazed their animals on the common land.

On the seventh day, the hunter hid his bow and a quiverful of arrows under his cloak. He took the goats to pasture as usual. Then he waited until the bird-woman neared the edge of the forest.

His arrow flew straight and true to its mark, for he was a fine bowman. He watched the bird-woman stumble on the air, watched her wings fold, watched her tumble down until she vanished among the treetops.

The hunter smiled. A bird-woman, he thought, was just like any other bird in the end.

He took his traps from the handcart. Carrying two in each hand, he loped into the forest. Among the silent trees, he searched for wolf trails, bear trails. When he found them, he set his traps, vicious jaws of sprung steel. He shook armfuls of dead leaves over them to hide them. Tomorrow, he thought, he would return to kill and skin whatever his traps caught.

He was clever.

But not clever enough.

For the bird-woman was not like other birds and this forest was not like other forests. As the bird-woman fell from the sky with the hunter’s arrow through her, the trees beneath her meshed their boughs together to break her fall. She pulled the arrow from her own chest and sealed the wound with sticky sap. Then up she flew again, up and up and up, her wings a spreading shadow that blotted out the sun.

Far below on the forest floor, the hunter froze in the sudden blackout. Behind him, he heard the heavy tread of paws, snap of twig, a rough breath. He fled, sightless in the thick dark, crashing into low branches, tripping over roots. Thorn and bramble snagged his clothes. Then powerful jaws snapped shut around his ankle and he screamed, held fast by one of his own traps.

High above, the bird-woman folded her wings. For a moment she hung there, a still silhouette against the burning eye of the sun.

Then she plunged, like a falcon in a stoop, straight at the hunter.

What I listen to while I write

The beautiful, elemental yolks of Berit Margrethe Oskal

A drowned forest

Under the waves lies a drowned forest. At the end of the last Ice Age, this forest stretched all the way to mainland Europe. Birch and beech, oak and alder where now the North Sea bucks in the winter winds. Once it was the haunt of wild boar, wolves, bears. Then the seas rose.

The drowned forest is only visible at extreme low tides, a tangle of roots, stumps honed to spikes and blades by the wash of saltwater and sand. Chunks of petrified wood wash up on the shore. Some are small enough to fit in my hand. Others are slabs of dark peaty brown, Swiss cheesed with holes.

It’s haunting, this forest that now lies under the sea. It’s a reminder of the shifting sands of time, of the fluid and ephemeral realities that suck out the ground beneath us. Things change in huge and dramatic ways, often so slowly that we don’t notice.

So we stand at the water’s edge, and our imaginations raise the trees to their full heights once more. A forest. The leaf canopy full of the wind’s ocean roar. Ghostly paths through the understorey. Owl call, raven call, the eerie howl of a distant wolf.

Here we are, on the edge of all this.

We walk slowly back across the beach. And here, in this treeless place where there was once a forest, I find a solitary beech leaf on the sand.

You must not go to the wood at night

The fence sags

 

The gate keeps nothing out and nothing in

 

A bone tree, a fence of spikes, a shack

 

And you wait, at the edge of the place where the fox sleeps

Strandline

Sometimes we find starfish, mermaid’s purses, papery clusters of whelk egg cases, dried out dogfish like twisted lengths of snakeskin. But mostly it’s a strandline of seashells, smashed, sea-smoothed, sea-scoured.

 

 

 

 

Snapshots

2 years ago we set off in a van. We were on the road for 18 months. Here are a few snapshots I took along the way.

Click to view slideshow.

A sea fog

Kate Bush at the Hammersmith Apollo

Not a review, just love.

Once upon a time there was a girl in a house at the very edge of nowhere. One day this girl walked into a room and something, someone on the TV stopped her in her tracks.

Kate Bush.

And so, in the flicker of an eyelid, there I was, enthralled, enchanted. Tick-tock, the years fly past. On Tuesday I went with Joanna, with Nick, with Amber, to see Kate Bush perform live.

Song and story – and what a storyteller she is. And magic. Yes. Hallucinatory, a long glorious dream of such intensity we’re still shattered two days on

There was a full moon, so huge you felt like you could just reach out and and… or drift through the thin air into zero gravity, ghost the silver.

A woman drowning in a flinty ocean, under a skyful of stars. Find her, find her.

Fish skulls, seahorses with manes of spines, down in the deep. The air swimmy as water.

The sun rises, the sun sets.

A wooden boy, a puppet with no strings, looking for a way in, or a way out, a boy who wants to know what’s behind the door.

A painter, echoing the sky on his canvas.

It’s raining. All my colours are running.

And the birds. Let’s talk about the birds.

Pigeons, blue tits, starlings, woodpeckers, siskins, wild geese, crows.

Gazing towards unseen horizons. The lift and fall of wings.

A silver forest.

Behind the screen, a raggedy shaman dances, becomes shadow, becomes bird.

 

You’re here in my head

Like the sun coming out

Ooh, I just know that something good is going to happen

And I don’t know when

But just saying it could even make it happen.

And out we go, into the huge night.

Into the strange dark.

But the sun’s coming out. Yeah, the sun’s coming out.

 

 

 

Watching the wild

The first time we came here, the estate agent opened the door to one of the dilapidated outbuildings and inside there was a fox, frightened, pacing. We backed away quickly and left it to its own devices.

There’s so much wildlife here. We see hares, roe deer and rabbits every day. Our bird feeders are visited by robins, chaffinches, blue tits, great tits, long tailed tits, greenfinches, a bullfinch, sparrows. Last night I took my dog outside and a barn owl drifted above us like a ghost. There are little owls and tawny owls here too.

Nights here can be noisy – shrieks and chitterings, yelps, grunts, screeches, eerie fluting calls, childlike screams. Sneak outside and it all goes quiet. No one there? The dry grass rattles, something hurrying away into the deeper dark.

So I bought an infrared trail camera. Every evening for a month I’ve set it up and every morning I trot out to it excitedly and bring it indoors to upload its captures to my laptop. Mostly I’m disappointed – footage triggered by the wind moving the long grass, or rain, or perhaps some creature that raced through so fast that it outran the pause between the trigger and the filming. The faint outline of a fox. A mouse kangarooing across the grass. A large, inquisitive rat.

I’ve tried positioning the camera in different places. And this morning, at long last, there was footage of one of our nighttime visitors – a badger.

It’s at the bottom of the frame, grainy, a bit blurry, a far cry from Springwatch footage. But I don’t care. I’m thrilled.

NB – The video keeps going into ‘processing’ mode for some reason, so I’ve posted a still below it.