Autumn Read online

  Changing tack, we try to emulate the fox, stepping off the path and on to the saturated wetland. We jump towards clumps of taller grass, hoping their roots will be strong enough to hold us. But with each clumsy leap the dark water sponges out of the ground and over the tops of our boots. We are getting nowhere fast.

  Retracing our steps we hit the path and decide to strike out for home and dinner. From behind us in the darkening copse, comes an explosion of noise – the helicoptering whir of wings and a hoarse alarm call. Two hen pheasants break cover, but the noise continues.

  The fox, too, has dinner on his mind.

  Matt Gaw, 2016

  Lapwings

  They were everywhere. No. Just God or smoke

  is that. They were the backdrop to the road,

  my parents’ home, the heavy winter fields

  from which they flashed and kindled and uprode

  the air in dozens. I ignored them all.

  ‘What are they?’ ‘Oh – peewits –’ Then a hare flowed,

  bounded the furrows. Marriage. Child. I roamed

  round other farms. I only knew them gone

  when, out of a sad winter, one returned.

  I heard the high mocked cry ‘Pee – wit’, so long

  cut dead. I watched it buckle from vast air

  to lure hawks from its chicks. That time had gone.

  Gravely, the parents bobbed their strip of stubble.

  How had I let this green and purple pass?

  Fringed, plumed heads (full name, the crested plover)

  fluttered. So crowned cranes stalk Kenyan grass.

  Then their one child, their anxious care, came running,

  squeaked along each furrow, dauntless, daft.

  Did I once know the story of their lives,

  do they migrate from Spain? or coasts’ cold run?

  And I forgot their massive arcs of wing.

  When their raw cries swept over, my head spun

  With all the brilliance of their black and white

  As though you cracked the dark and found the sun.

  Alison Brackenbury, 2013

  The valley was ablaze with the colour of brilliant decay as the cycle of winter began with a fresh palette. Crows blown like black handkerchiefs from a funeral feast into the tangled treetops exchanged shrill chatter there, a running commentary on all that was happening around them. Everything was in vibrant flux. All was decay.

  The best of the heather had already been clipped and picked for the making of besoms. The longest branches and thickest clusters had been cut to size and bundled around a stouter pole – always willow – by those solitary bodgers and gamekeepers’ wives who had gained the landowner’s permission, and who sang the same song as they worked at home with blade and cord, always sung to a melody that followed a descending glissando of notes:

  Buy broom buzzems,

  Buy them when they’re new,

  Fine heather bred uns,

  Better never grew.

  The heather’s flowers too had been taken and set to boil in pots or hung to dry in clusters from mullions and over inglenooks, their mauve colourings turning darker with the darkening of shortened days bookended by nights that birthed new mythologies from old fears.

  The heather of the Calder Valley was burned at the behest of the few. Men unseen. Landowners who rarely walked the land they owned, let alone lived on. These were men from the cities, who spent their days away paving turnpikes and building mills. Sinking canals and striking deals. Buying and selling. Traders. Sons of the empire. Men for whom too much was never enough.

  Their estate work was done by land managers and it was these who took the heather plant and used its gruit for brewing the ale that filled their master’s bow-roofed cellars, while others used the barren moorland spaces for housing hives for their honey-making. Sheep and deer grazed up there and grouse nested in it too, but mainly the heather was used for the dying of the wools.

  The slow smoke drifted down to settle on the houses of those weavers and land workers who lived in the hamlets and farmsteads that sat below the moor line. The scent of it was the latest subtle signal to mark autumn’s tightening grip on the land.

  The incoming season meant death and soon the trees were to become bone-like, and their leaves would gather in drifts down in the lanes, and the animals were already gorging themselves before winter inevitably announced itself in a famine of everything but frost and fire and flickering candles below the patch-blackened shapes of moorland that saw shouting men with their brooms and beaters and handkerchiefs tied tight around their faces from late September.

  Come April the pitch-coloured rectangles of burnt heather shadows would be dotted with the white fingers of new shoots peeping through, though as this summer past withered and died, slowly curling in on itself into crisp husks and falling skeletons, the very thought of next spring’s re-birth seemed one beyond realisation for most in the valley, an impossibility, a wild, fanciful vision of the deluded.

  Benjamin Myers, extract from The Gallows Pole, publishing 2017

  The Stag

  While the rain fell on the November woodland shoulder of Exmoor

  While the traffic jam along the road honked and shouted

  Because the farmers were parking wherever they could

  And scrambling to the bank-top to stare through the tree-fringe

  Which was leafless,

  The stag ran through the private forest.

  While the rain drummed on the roofs of the parked cars

  And the kids inside cried and daubed their chocolate and fought

  And mothers and aunts and grandmothers

  Were a tangle of undoing sandwiches and screwed-round gossiping heads

  Steaming up the windows,

  The stag loped through his favourite valley.

  While the blue horseman down in the boggy meadow

  Sodden nearly black, on sodden horses,

  Spaced as at a military parade,

  Moved a few paces to the right and a few to the left and felt rather foolish

  Looking at the brown impassable river,

  The stag came over the last hill of Exmoor.

  While everybody high-kneed it to the bank top all along the road

  Where steady men in oilskins were stationed with binoculars,

  And the horsemen by the river galloping anxiously this way and that

  And the cry of hounds came tumbling invisibly with their echoes down through the draggle of trees,

  Swinging across the wall of dark woodland,

  The stag dropped in to strange country.

  And turned at the river

  Hearing the hound-pack smash the undergrowth, hearing the bell-

  note

  Of the voice carried all others,

  Then while the limbs all cried different directions to his lungs, which

  only wanted to rest,

  The blue horsemen on the bank opposite

  Pulled aside the camouflage of their terrible planet.

  And the stag doubled back weeping and looking for home up a valley and down a valley

  While the strange trees struck him and the brambles lashed him,

  And the strange earth came galloping after him carrying the lolltongued hounds to fling all over him

  And his heart became just a club beating his ribs and his own hooves shouted with hounds’ voices,

  And the crowd on the road got back into their cars

  Wet-through and disappeared.

  Ted Hughes, 1976

  Frost crackles underfoot as I walk through the meadow of Gilfach Farm. It’s not early, but it feels as if the trees and mountains are still asleep. Above me, the sky is pierced by the echoing call of circling buzzard.

  More gentle is the sound of the river as it slips beneath the bridge, bubbling over the stones. I’ve spotted a dipper here before, standing proud in the middle of the water, ready for dinner. But it’s the fish I’m here for today. I’ve heard that it’s poss
ible to see leaping salmon, a spectacle of nature that I’ve witnessed on screen but not in person. I’m full of anticipation, but caution myself not to get too excited in case nothing happens.

  Strolling through the meadow, I think back to summer here: butterflies dancing between flowers, and the song of migrant birds filling the woods. How different it feels in autumn. It’s cold too, and I shiver despite my layers. The river becomes louder as I walk along, and I know I’m approaching the waterfall.

  I take my place on the wooden platform by the cascading water, nodding in greeting to my fellow watchers.

  To see a salmon, patience is needed. I spend over an hour on the platform. Despite the cold, it’s a soothing experience. It is easy to become hypnotised when watching the water. Every splash seems different, but it’s all part of the same rhythm that I find myself getting drawn into. My eyes feel as if they are glazing over, mesmerised by the flow.

  Suddenly a flash of brown among the white foam, impossibly swimming upstream against the water. A salmon! My heart is in my mouth, then sinks as the salmon fails on this jump and falls back downstream into the swirling pool below. It isn’t long before it tries again, and inside I’m cheering it on, willing it to complete the leap and get over this hurdle. It surely must. It has leapt over so many other hurdles in its journey to this point, surely it can manage a few more to get beyond the waterfall. Again it fails.

  But I believe in this fish; it can make the jump. It has battled against the oceans, avoided capture by prey and by humans, found its way back to the river of its birth and swum this far up already; it will surely get up this waterfall with ease.

  Eventually, with an enormous leap, it succeeds. Clearing the foaming water, its whole body flies through the air into the next pool. There is now one less jump needed before the top of the waterfall is reached, and then it will be home to breed. I almost cheer out loud. I don’t, though, as there are other people about and I don’t want to seem too mad.

  I have seen plenty of leaping salmon since that first one, but each time the thrill is as great as I watch them battle the water in order to create new life further upstream.

  Megan Shersby, 2016

  Fieldfares, when they arrive early and in great abundance in autumn, foreshew hard winter, which has probably set in, in the regions from which they have come. They usually come in November.

  Thomas Furly Forster, The Pocket Encyclopaedia of Natural Phenomena, published 1827

  November

  The landscape sleeps in mist from morn till noon;

  And, if the sun looks through, ’tis with a face

  Beamless and pale and round, as if the moon,

  When done the journey of her nightly race,

  Had found him sleeping, and supplied his place.

  For days the shepherds in the fields may be,

  Nor mark a patch of sky – blindfold they trace,

  The plains, that seem without a bush or tree,

  Whistling aloud by guess, to flocks they cannot see.

  The timid hare seems half its fears to lose,

  Crouching and sleeping ’neath its grassy lair,

  And scarcely startles, tho’ the shepherd goes

  Close by its home, and dogs are barking there;

  The wild colt only turns around to stare

  At passer by, then knaps his hide again;

  And moody crows beside the road, forbear

  To fly, tho’ pelted by the passing swain;

  Thus day seems turn’d to night, and tries to wake in vain.

  The owlet leaves her hiding-place at noon,

  And flaps her grey wings in the doubling light;

  The hoarse jay screams to see her out so soon,

  And small birds chirp and startle with affright;

  Much doth it scare the superstitious wight,

  Who dreams of sorry luck, and sore dismay;

  While cow-boys think the day a dream of night,

  And oft grow fearful on their lonely way,

  Fancying that ghosts may wake, and leave their graves by day.

  Yet but awhile the slumbering weather flings

  Its murky prison round – then winds wake loud;

  With sudden stir the startled forest sings

  Winter’s returning song – cloud races cloud,

  And the horizon throws away its shroud,

  Sweeping a stretching circle from the eye;

  Storms upon storms in quick succession crowd,

  And o’er the sameness of the purple sky

  Heaven paints, with hurried hand, wild hues of every dye.

  At length it comes among the forest oaks,

  With sobbing ebbs, and uproar gathering high;

  The scared, hoarse raven on its cradle croaks,

  And stockdove-flocks in hurried terrors fly,

  While the blue hawk hangs o’er them in the sky. –

  The hedger hastens from the storm begun,

  To seek a shelter that may keep him dry;

  And foresters low bent, the wind to shun,

  Scarce hear amid the strife the poacher’s muttering gun.

  The ploughman hears its humming rage begin,

  And hies for shelter from his naked toil;

  Buttoning his doublet closer to his chin,

  He bends and scampers o’er the elting soil,

  While clouds above him in wild fury boil,

  And winds drive heavily the beating rain;

  He turns his back to catch his breath awhile,

  Then ekes his speed and faces it again,

  To seek the shepherd’s hut beside the rushy plain.

  The boy, that scareth from the spiry wheat

  The melancholy crow – in hurry weaves,

  Beneath an ivied tree, his sheltering seat,

  Of rushy flags and sedges tied in sheaves,

  Or from the field a shock of stubble thieves.

  There he doth dithering sit, and entertain

  His eyes with marking the storm-driven leaves;

  Oft spying nests where he spring eggs had ta’en,

  And wishing in his heart ’twas summer-time again.

  Thus wears the month along, in checker’d moods,

  Sunshine and shadows, tempests loud, and calms;

  One hour dies silent o’er the sleepy woods,

  The next wakes loud with unexpected storms;

  A dreary nakedness the field deforms –

  Yet many a rural sound, and rural sight,

  Lives in the village still about the farms,

  Where toil’s rude uproar hums from morn till night

  Noises, in which the ears of Industry delight.

  At length the stir of rural labour’s still,

  And Industry her care awhile foregoes;

  When Winter comes in earnest to fulfil

  His yearly task, at bleak November’s close,

  And stops the plough, and hides the field in snows;

  When frost locks up the stream in chill delay,

  And mellows on the hedge the jetty sloes,

  For little birds – then Toil hath time for play,

  And nought but threshers’ flails awake the dreary day.

  John Clare, 1827

  On one of the highest chalk hills in England, within the ramparts of an Iron Age hill fort and miles from any water, there is a strange autumnal gathering of birds. They arrive each November and stay till March. They are not there by day and come in after dark, pitching in among the sheep and the brown hares, among the whitened grasses and the speared sentries of brown thistle. Here, in the dead of night, it is possible to spot dozens of snipe, golden plover, woodcock and, astonishingly, ruff.

  Undisturbed scrubby fields of tussocky grass are a rarity in the farmed landscape. They represent small islands; isolated sanctuaries. Encircled by massive earthworks, this domed 974 ft (297 m) almost-mountain must seem as a beacon to hard-pressed birds.

  Full dark. As we walk out on to the hill, there is a frisson of excitement as we he
ar the melancholy whistle of golden plover and the piping of snipe: the waders are here.

  We have seen more than forty snipe, tucked along the parallel wheel ruts of the old cart track. Around them, feeding and more widely scattered, are as many woodcock. We’ve also seen jack snipe here. You’d think they would be sitting ducks to creeping foxes, yet many pairs of eyes, a shrill whistle and a nervous disposition stand them in good stead.

  They come to roost and feed on this bleakest, most exposed place. As our eyes adjust to the night, the ramparts, ditch and drop are as a solid silhouette above the tenuous lights of the distant town. The stars wheel and turn above. I can hear redwings calling seeip as they go over. The chill in the air deepens and grows damp as the temperature reaches the dew point and it begins to freeze.

  Golden plover run along, calling sweetly to each other – but most of them are out on the big arable fields in larger flocks. The snipe are alert and adept at keeping completely still until you are right on top of them, when they explode from the earth with a screechy scaarp. Their camouflage of brown, cream and tawny-gold streaked feathers mimics a fold of tussocky grass perfectly. Often, we only know they’re there when the big lamp glints off an eye. (And then, sometimes, a camouflaged body does not form and we find we’re looking intently at a bead of dew on the grass.)

  The woodcock are less easily spooked. I manage to creep up on one, my friend keeping the lamp indirectly on it, so that the bird remains on the shallow edge of the pool of light. I get about as close as it’s possible to get to a woodcock in the grass until I am kneeling beside it. It continues to feed, pushing its incomprehensibly long bill into the ground as if it were a ponderous sewing-machine needle. It leaves little stitch holes in its wake.

  I can see astonishing detail in its cryptic, complex dead-leaf-and-grass plumage, as well as the bump of the sensitive, worm-seeking tip to its bill. Its bright, watchful eye is set far back in its head for 360° vision. My eyes water and sting with the effort of not blinking, but I cannot take them off the bird. It bobs rhythmically as it walks – almost crawls – along, waddling slightly. It is a piece of turf come alive, a jigsaw piece of grass that gets up to walk alongside me and the lamp trembling in my friend’s hand. The woodcock is a creature absolutely inseparable from its environment.