Autumn Read online

  I pick him up, and carry him to the house. Tomorrow I won’t be building anything. I will be burying an otter next to the remains of his last supper.

  Jon Dunn, 2016

  October

  The green elm with the one great bough of gold

  Lets leaves into the grass slip, one by one, –

  The short hill grass, the mushrooms small milk-white,

  Harebell and scabious and tormentil,

  That blackberry and gorse, in dew and sun,

  Bow down to; and the wind travels too light

  To shake the fallen birch leaves from the fern;

  The gossamers wander at their own will.

  At heavier steps than birds’ the squirrels scold.

  The rich scene has grown fresh again and new

  As Spring and to the touch is not more cool

  Than it is warm to the gaze; and now I might

  As happy be as earth is beautiful,

  Were I some other or with earth could turn

  In alternation of violet and rose,

  Harebell and snowdrop, at their season due,

  And gorse that has no time not to be gay.

  But if this be not happiness, – who knows?

  Some day I shall think this a happy day,

  And this mood by the name of melancholy

  Shall no more blackened and obscured be.

  Edward Thomas, 1917

  By the bus stop, near the bridge, at the back of the industrial estate, along the garden fence . . . the seasonal memo is everywhere. Friends get called. While juveniles reclaim last year’s hexagonal jam jars from neighbours, adults rustle up boots, bags, and boxes. Because when starlings murmur, conkers fall, geese flock, deer rut, trees blush and fungi emerge . . . humans go blackberrying.

  For the bramble, it’s already been a busy morning. It has been sung from by a robin, whiskered by an acrobating mouse and plundered by a mistle thrush who, knocking ripe berries to the ground, activated a sweet-toothed vole. And now it has an appointment with another forager; except that this one, from the sound of it, is travelling in a herd.

  Leaving the main path, we head down a tiny track, catching up about bike rides, beaches and BBQs and who hasn’t got round to sorting out school uniforms. Our cubs, scurrying ahead, yelp with anticipation. They’re old enough now to know the way, because they came here last year, and the year before, and the year before that, and their internal map is bright with indelible landmarks. Here you fell in the mud. There we met the fox. By the stream, we sat in the lap of that massive oak, mum, mum, mum, mum, remember?

  The bramble isn’t in favour of large mammals as they have a habit of eating young plants. Birds are preferable, a point the bramble makes clear by spacing out its thorns so that small feathery guests have easy access, and big hairy gate-crashers don’t. Compared to birds and small mammals, larger ones, with their slow moving stand-and-eat habits, are useless at – to put it delicately – ‘distribution’.

  Someone tells a story about his grandmother and her ancient hooked stick. She kept it in the shed and only ever got it out to go blackberrying. Oh, how they loved the ritual! How she, stiff-hipped, would part the brambles with the stick and send him further into the thicket to collect the fruit she could no longer reach. How she would rinse the berries in the tin bath, while he designed this year’s labels.

  A gut’s a gut, whoever it belongs to, but the bramble hands out its flavour-favours judiciously, dangling its bribes in a drip-drip of staggered ripening. Keep ’em hungry, keep ’em keen. An over-fed bird is, after all, a useless messenger, when it comes to spreading the bramble gospel. The remnants of the blossom still cling like down around the base of a small, green berry, a hard knobbly dome. You can hardly call it a blackberry at all; more like an after-flower; a fruit-to-be; a bramble-idea. Next to it hang other berries in various hues: clumps of mottled pink, scarlet, burgundy. Their colour is their cunning. Not this, it means. Not me. Not yet. Seek elsewhere.

  Murmur and wow. All around, brambles sparkle with baubles. Our pack spreads out in an optimal foraging pattern, obeying the bramble’s code. Eyes register (but don’t see) the greens, hands brush past the reds and reach as commanded for the plumpest, blackest, juiciest treasure. Let the picking begin!

  The bramble has already got the job started. While its green and red berries remain bound tight to its stems, the bramble has obligingly loosened the ripe ones. It throws fruit!

  Sometimes we fumble the catch and the blackberries fall. Mostly, though, it takes just a gentle flick of the finger to beckon the berries into palms. Look, that one, and the next one, and those over there, the seduction of the prizes stronger than the punishment of the thorns. Tiptoeing and turning, we dance to the tune of the bramble. Silence falls, along with breathing and pulse rates. Never mind antioxidants, vitamins and fibre; here is health, and the eating hasn’t even started (except for one of our young, tucked in a sunny corner, berry-ink on her lips). Time slows down, speeds up. Bramble Zen.

  The bramble draws blood. But its crop is decimated: we apes have been thorough. Tomorrow’s birds will have to fly further for their breakfast. The small mammals’ tummies will rumble, and the badger, hedgehog and fox won’t linger here tonight.

  Tamsin Constable, 2016

  Gossamer, as it is called, being the fine web of certain species of spiders, floating in the air in abundance, and lodging on the trees, or the rigging of ships, and on other objects, affords a sign of fine settled weather in autumn, as does the much covering of the ground and herbage by the woof of the spiders in general.

  In crossing the Channel from Calais to Dover, I have observed that the captains of the vessels have sometimes forboded fine settled weather from the settling on the masts and rigging, of certain sort of web, which we take to be the woof of some spider, though we have observed it to alight on the ships when some way out at sea.

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

  As a child I often dreamed of living in a treehouse built in the branches of an ancient oak. I would press my ear against the oak tree, willing to hear its message to me, certain, as children often are, that there was a message to be heard. As I’ve grown, the most magical thing about the woodland has become the thing that you have to focus a little more closely to notice: the creation of the trees I so love.

  For grey squirrels and woodland birds, autumn is a busy season: a time for fattening up and preparing for the coming quiet; and for creating stores that will allow them to survive when food is scarce. Acorns, and other nuts and seeds, are a vital food source for these creatures. And that’s how a simple, yet special relationship has developed between them and the trees in their woodland habitat.

  A common sight is a squirrel, ignorant to all else, busying itself with burying acorns in seemingly random spots, ready to unearth later. Sit patiently at the foot of a tree, and you will be rewarded by the glimpse of a fluffy tail as the squirrel scampers down to search for bounty.

  Intent on the task at hand, it rummages through piles of golden leaves until it finds what it’s looking for. After an inspection, the acorn is carried away to what has been deemed a suitable place, and in less than a minute it’s efficiently buried. And then the process starts over again, countless times. It can quickly become hypnotic if you sit and watch.

  But it isn’t random, this process. The squirrel isn’t simply choosing an acorn and burying it. It is systematically examining and scrutinising its prize. It’s evaluating the benefit of burying each nut, deciding whether to store it for later or enjoy it now. High value nuts, those that will provide more nutrition and are less likely to perish, are the most likely to be buried as they will survive longer, ensuring much needed provisions for this and other squirrels to unearth in the coming winter.

  Due to their excellent memory and sense of smell, squirrels track down much of their hoard later on. However, there are inevitably caches that get missed. And that is the simple beauty of t
he system. Squirrels, and other distributors such as jays, are vital to trees because, in order to successfully take root and thrive, the seeds or nuts need to be distributed farther from their parent tree than is possible for them to fall. If they take root too close, they will be blocked from the sun by their parent’s foliage. Not only that, those high value nuts, the ones specifically chosen to be buried, are more likely to set root, because of their quality.

  That first act of burying a treat is the first step towards the life of a new tree. There’s an almost beautiful art to this. A symbiotic relationship that ensures both tree and squirrel survive to the next generation. At first glance, autumn appears to be the season of harvest, signalling the end of that year’s new life. But when you look more closely you can see it’s actually the opposite. It’s the beginning of a new cycle. Let’s imagine in the next hundred years those tiny acorns standing proud and strong in their woodland, with a little girl pressing her ear to them, hoping to hear a secret.

  Leanne Manchester, 2016

  Oh God. What am I doing here? I’m sitting on a white plastic picnic chair under the shade of a marquee roof. Ten feet behind me Mabel resembles a shadow cast on water; her wings are crossed as tight as swords and her eyes bloom huge with horror. I know how she feels. Too many people, I think, fidgeting on my seat. Too many people.

  ‘So, Helen,’ Stuart had said. ‘The landowner’s asked us to bring some hawks along for Apple Day at the farm.’

  ‘Apple Day?’

  Stuart told me that it was a tiny country fair, a celebration of rural history, farming and local food. ‘We’re not flying, just weathering the hawks in a marquee so members of the public can see them. I’ll take my tiercel. Greg’s bringing his barbary. Alan’s coming up with some eagles. Can you bring Mabel?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘No problem.’ I could do this. I’d worked in a falconry centre, for God’s sake. All I did for months was show people hawks. But as the day grew closer I started to fret. How will Mabel cope? Two months ago she was a bombproof, crowd-proof goshawk. But goshawks aren’t like other hawks: they need constant carriage to stay tame. Now we’re living in the empty suburbs we’ve not seen people for weeks. She’s forgotten how not to be scared of people. And so have I. My teeth are clenched so tight in the face of the crowds I feel pain blossoming up my jaw.

  After twenty minutes Mabel raises one foot. It looks ridiculous. She is not relaxed enough to fluff out her feathers; she still resembles a wet and particoloured seal. But she makes this small concession to calmness, and she stands there like a man with one hand resting on the gearstick. She looks pathetically small next to the birds beside her. To her left is a golden eagle, a hulking great thing with chest-feathers like armoured scales and taloned feet the size of human hands. To her right is a male martial eagle, an antelope-killing black and white monster with piercing white eyes. It is enormous, bigger than most of the dogs walking past the mesh fence in front of the marquee, and it watches them go by with its black chrysanthemum-petalled crest raised in idle speculation of murder.

  Stuart has brought his tiercel peregrine. Greg has brought his barbary falcon, a tiny jewelled dusty-blue and copper falcon with thin golden toes. While it preens he sits cross-legged, chatting with members of the public, his red cashmere jumper holed wildly at the elbow. Alan the eagle-man is drinking tea from a plastic cup, resting an arm on the tall perch of a saker falcon, which looks up at him with a mild and playful eye.

  I can’t sit still. I go for a walk round the fair. It is not very big, but it is full of surprising things. Smoke from an oil-drum barbecue curling through drying chestnut leaves. Beneath the tree an ancient wooden cider press pouring apple juice into cups. The crushed apples fall into mounds of oxidising pulp beside it and the man working the mechanism is shouting something to the craggy plantsman on the next stand with stripling trees for sale. I find a cake stand, a face-painting stand, a stand of vivaria full of snakes, spiders and stick insects the size of your hand. A stall of orange pumpkins by an ice-cream van. A boy kneeling by a hutch staring at a rabbit under a paper sign that says MY NAME IS FLOPSEY. ‘Hello, Flopsey,’ he says, bringing his hand up to the wire. I walk into a white marquee, and inside, in dim green shade, find trestle-tables displaying hundreds of apple varieties. Some are the size of a hen’s egg; some are giant, sprawling cookers you’d need two hands to hold. Each variety sits in a labelled wooden compartment. I walk slowly among the apples, glorying in their little differences. Soft orange, streaked with tiger-spots of pink. Charles Ross. Berkshire pre 1890. Dual use. A little one with bark-like blush markings over a pale green ground. Coronation. Sussex 1902. Dessert. Miniature green boulders, the side in shadow deep rose. Chivers Delight. Cambridgeshire 1920. Dessert. Huge apple, deep yellow with hyperspace-spotting of rich red. Peasgood’s Nonsuch. Lincolnshire 1853. Dual use.

  The apples cheer me. The stalls have too. I decide the fair is a wonderful thing. I wander back to my chair, and as Mabel relaxes, so do I. I wolf down a burger, gossip with my falconer friends. Stories are told, jokes are made, old grievances aired, the qualities and abilities and flights of various hawks discussed in minute detail. It strikes me suddenly how much British falconry has changed since the days of Blaine and White. Back then it was the secretive, aristocratic sport of officers and gentlemen. In Germany, falconry had fed into the terrible dreams of an invented Ayran past. Yet here we are now in all our variousness. A carpenter ex-biker, a zookeeper ex-soldier, two other zookeepers, an electrician and an erstwhile historian. Four men, two women, two eagles, three falcons and a goshawk. I swig from a bottle of cider and this company is suddenly all I’d ever wished for.

  Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk, 2014

  Evidence (Long-eared Owls)

  Each winter, they shrink to a rumour.

  For years, only a low moan

  that might have been wind blowing

  across the chimney pots,

  or a creak and whine

  that could have been the rusting gate,

  swinging wide just this side of sleep.

  But once, half a mile from home

  and surprised by the silent swoop

  of night, we flushed a flurry

  of autumn colour in the lane

  and were almost brushed by a breath

  of wings, that hardened and darkened

  amid the hawthorn thicket, became

  a branch tipped by embers

  burning up the light’s last slivers.

  Freed from earth’s embrace, with every star

  a crucible to kindle from,

  so might our eyes fire.

  So might we flame on.

  Matt Merritt, 2011

  A rich tint of russet deepened on the forest top, and seemed to sink day by day deeper into the foliage like a stain; riper and riper it grew, as an apple colours. Broad acres these of the last crop, the crop of leaves; a thousand thousand quarters, the broad earth will be their barn. A warm red lies on the hill-side above the woods, as if the red dawn stayed there through the day; it is the heath and heather seeds; and higher still, a pale yellow fills the larches. The whole of the great hill glows with colour under the short hours of the October sun; and overhead, where the pine-cones hang, the sky is of the deepest azure. The conflagration of the woods burning luminously crowds into those short hours a brilliance the slow summer does not know.

  The frosts and mists and battering rains that follow in quick succession after the equinox, the chill winds that creep about the fields, have ceased a little while, and there is a pleasant sound in the fir trees. Everything is not gone yet. In the lanes that lead down to the ‘shaws’ in the dells, the ‘gills’, as these wooded depths are called, buckler ferns, green, fresh, and elegantly fashioned, remain under the shelter of the hazel-lined banks. From the tops of the ash wands, where the linnets so lately sang, coming up from the stubble, the darkened leaves have been blown, and their much-divided branches stand bare like outstretched fingers. Black-spott
ed sycamore leaves are down, but the moss grows thick and deeply green; and the trumpets of the lichen seem to be larger, now they are moist, than when they were dry under the summer heat. Here is herb Robert in flower – its leaves are scarlet; a leaf of St. John’s-wort, too, has become scarlet; the bramble leaves are many shades of crimson; one plant of tormentil has turned yellow. Furze bushes, grown taller since the spring, bear a second bloom, but not perhaps so golden as the first. It is the true furze, and not the lesser gorse; it is covered with half-opened buds; and it is clear, if the short hours of sun would but lengthen, the whole gorse hedge would become aglow again. Our trees, too, that roll up their buds so tightly, like a dragoon’s cloak, would open them again at Christmas; and the sticky horse-chestnut would send forth its long ears of leaves for New Year’s Day. They would all come out in leaf again if we had but a little more sun; they are quite ready for a second summer.

  Brown lie the acorns, yellow where they were fixed in their cups; two of these cups seem almost as large as the great acorns from abroad. A red dead-nettle, a mauve thistle, white and pink bramble flowers, a white strawberry, a little yellow tormentil, a broad yellow dandelion, narrow hawkweeds, and blue scabious, are all in flower in the lane. Others are scattered on the mounds and in the meads adjoining, where may be collected some heath still in bloom, prunella, hypericum, white yarrow, some heads of red clover, some beautiful buttercups, three bits of blue veronica, wild chamomile, tall yellowwood, pink centaury, succory, dock cress, daisies, fleabane, knapweed, and delicate blue harebells. Two York roses flower on the hedge: altogether, twenty-six flowers, a large bouquet for October 19, gathered, too, in a hilly country.