by Rob Cowen
Proximity’s the thing, I’m sure. The sort that you feel when you look into a living eye as it fixes upon yours. Old memories are stirred, and not just from the human side. In that second or less, the deer took in my details too. A flash of remembering, that fear flickering down its flank. Until very recently the idea that memory could be passed on genetically in animals would have got you laughed out of any laboratory. Scientific consensus was adamant the slate was always wiped clean from one generation to the next. Yet recent studies in the field of epigenetics have revealed compelling evidence to the contrary. By training mice to fear a particular smell – cherry blossom, of all things – researchers at the Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, have shown that the experiences of one parent influences the structure and function of the nervous system of subsequent generations, meaning that the same stimuli can elicit the same emotional response in animals that have no reason to possess it. If it proves true across the mammal kingdom that environment, experience and traumatic events are sufficiently powerful to take root in DNA and be passed on, who can tell what a deer might recall in the moment it sees a human shape lying in a hollow below. Who really knows what might be inherited and transferred?
Seeing one deer is never enough. That’s what becomes apparent as I crouch in the hollow, looking west and east along the river, willing the shotguns to flush another. A branch snaps and I turn towards it, craving the sensation again. It’s not about blood or killing; it is a yearning for closeness, the visceral flood of animal without and within.
When Mesolithic hunter-gatherers stalked here roe deer colossally outnumbered humans, but by 1800 they had almost been driven to extinction in Britain. Now they are common again in urban and rural areas. Edge-lands, overgrown and largely people-free, provide perfect corridors between terrains and plenty of rough cover to hide, feed and breed in. Two months ago it was as though a pair of does was waiting for me twenty metres or so east of the holloway. An early morning mist cloaked the field. Their heads barely broke its surface. At first they seemed like giant rabbits, ears twitching and turning as they ate. Then a motorbike accelerating hard on a road triggered their flight reflexes and they bounded off in silence, disintegrating through the stubby spikes of hawthorn hedge, like leaf-smoke. Thrilling enough, but it’s different when you could have reached out and touched a living deer, when you might have stroked, or stabbed, the flank flexing in front of you. That kind of physical intimacy doesn’t feature in our daily lives any more. It must have started to fade as the shift towards settlement and farming took hold, before being denied completely as hunting forests like Knaresborough became the fiercely guarded demesnes of royalty. For most of us today the only connection is through the filter of a screen. The watcher has replaced the hunter. Watching was always a vital part of hunting, of course – following slots imprinted in the ground; noting movement, behaviour, location, weaknesses – but now it is the entirety of our engagement. Wildlife documentaries do astounding things in bringing us closer to species we would never otherwise learn about, taking us on voyages to the deepest parts of the ocean or stretches of remote jungle, revealing sights inconceivable to our ancestors. Even so, they are only ever a passive process, cerebral and reserved; there is a far more complex, complicated and profound wonder to seeing wild animals close-up and in the flesh. Interestingly, though, for all the separation that’s occurred, the connection still refuses to leave our systems. The affinity is there in the nature-craving TV schedules, in our fashions, even in the brand names of our cars. Science and technology – fields that at certain points in history almost defined themselves by their distance from, and mastery over, nature – are returning to the source for inspiration. Biomimicry – the study of nature’s designs, organisms and ecosystems to solve human problems – is a fascinating and expanding business. I’ve read of car companies using the scales on butterfly wings as a model for solar panels, and American running-shoe brands creating soles that replicate the traction functions of a mountain goat’s hoof. In this emerging area deer are proving their worth to humankind again. Scientists at the University of York are working on replicating the structure of antler as a basis for incredibly tough, resilient materials. They found that on the verge of the rut, just before bucks or stags duel, their antlers dry out. Instead of becoming brittle and breakable as you might imagine, this process actually makes antler two and a half times stronger than wet bone. York was a Mesolithic site itself, probably chosen for its position at the confluence of the Ouse and the Foss rivers. Over the same earth where edges of worked flint once cut deer skin and flesh, scalpels are being drawn and microscopes zooming in, still in the interests of sustaining our species. Or, at the very least, making life more durable.
And as I’m sitting here waiting, another thought hits me. Last week my brother dropped off a boot-load of stuff at our house: hand-me-downs from his kids for when the baby comes. The rich haul included a whole box of books and if I think about it now, every one of them had a different animal or bird on the cover: hare, snake, elephant, lion, panda, penguin, whale, bear, fox, owl, swan, mouse, deer – even the mythical creature on the front of the dog-eared copy of The Gruffalo is a composite of wild creatures. Surely it’s not a coincidence that the names, shapes and characteristics of wild animals are among the first things we teach our children, or that these are the books they love and lap up most readily. It must go deeper than just exotic colours or shapes on a page. I will do the same with our baby, no doubt, and as soon as it’s old enough, I’ll bring it down here to the edge-land. We’re still conditioning and teaching a process of watching from earliest days; there is still an undeniable affiliation. I wonder if it’s because in contrast to our vastly altered existences and increasingly unsure world, wild animals remain relatively unchanged, even if we have changed their environment beyond recognition. The deer that jumped over me was a single animal but it was also a link in a chain, an assertion of place, history and time. My shock and excitement weren’t because it was alien; it was the opposite – a half-remembered thing, known, forgotten and recalled. A ghost in the woods and in the genes. What that adds up to I’m not sure, but seeing it felt like closing a distance, scratching an itch from somewhere back down the line.
The light is changing now, drifting from its height into a watery green. The guns have ceased their shooting and the woodpigeons are cooing away, consoling each other. Blackbirds are tuning up. I can hear a moorhen on the river, under the far bank of emerald larch. Time to go, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to put my life back to normal. I’m not ready to lose this sensation, to leave the spot where a window was flung open and a world revealed. So I sit back in the hollow. A watcher, waiting.
ONE DAY
(To all those who can hear),
We share our merits with all beings.
Buddhist Water Ceremony
A shimmering horizon, the sky baby blue, and this triangle of edge-land has never looked brighter or richer. The lane and holloway grow wild with cleavers, nettle, purple vetch, knee-tickling grasses and the white lace finery of cow parsley and wild carrot; the meadow is flush with daisies, the gold of buttercup and yellow dandelion. Last night, quick, chaotic storms stirred the murmuring, sleeping town, but by morning they are no more remembered than an uneasy dream. The wet air steams with early sun, kindling the fragrance of the whipped-cream hawthorn blossom dolloped over the many tangled crowns, boughs, hedges and shrubs. It was known as ‘May flower’ once – sometimes shortened further to ‘May’ – the only tree to be named after a month, but no one calls it that any more. Not around here, anyway. Opening, ripening, the aroma of the cup-shaped blooms is stifling. Part-honey, part-human musk, it fills the air, the nose, the head, hazing everything with what people used to describe as a ‘carnal scent’ – the smell of sex. It carries too, drifting into the windows of cars gridlocked on Skipton Road, swirling into suburban kitchens and through the vents of passing commuter carriages, wafting down, deep down, into the insect-buzzing tre
es of the wood.
Beneath this intoxicating air, gods stir in the river, making for the shallows. Mayflies. Crawling over the algae-rimed stones, the nymphs of Ephemera danica are six-armed Vasudhārās whose tusky protuberances look like ornate headdresses in the sun-percolated water. After two years submerged and feasting on dead matter, hundreds, thousands, millions of these thirty millimetre bodhisattvas are emerging from silty burrows, slowly being urged to rise by the bubbles of gas accumulating under their exoskeletons. There is nothing to be done. No turnaround can occur. To survive they must channel their energy now into propelling up into the flow and through the rubbery tension of the water’s surface. Those that resist, exhausting their strength by clinging on or stubbornly diving back down for the safety of the sediment, will never experience the higher realms.
One nymph lets go, a female. It releases and drifts tail-high and backwards before turning its cylindrical, segmented shape towards the sun, long trident tail fanning and bucking it through the water like a tiny dolphin. More follow, ribbons darting and twirling up to the light. Trout have been waiting and thrust from channels in sorties to snatch at the exposed nymphs, but with every swirl of their tails they drive more upwards. The larvae begin to punch through the film, climbing into the hot, moist daylight with an almost human look – like someone hauling themselves out of a hole in a frozen lake. This action breaks open their see-through exoskeletons, their chucks, and they emerge unfurling upright grey-green wings, forming the silhouettes of graceful star-class sailboats. Their mouthparts have ceased to function now; their death is predetermined and irreversible, governed by the energy reserves built up as a nymph. With bodies the cream of hawthorn blossom, they float on the water changed, new creatures, subimago. These are the ‘duns’ waiting to fly.
At 11:02 a.m. Lauren Jackson finishes the early shift, pushes open the double warehouse doors and unclips her name badge. The air is hot as a hairdryer and smells of tacky tarmac and the heated vegetable contents of the red Biffa bins docked like container ships behind Sainsbury’s. She sits on the pavement and rolls a cigarette, looking down the road. Despite her manager’s complaints about staff smoking where customers might see them, this is where she comes on breaks and for a post-work smoke. It is a short street with a simple arrangement of low Victorian terraces running down either side, but across its end is a chain-link fence where every vestige of town drops away as though sheared. A dip in the land to the west conceals the sloping maze of houses, allotments, roads and sheltered accommodation, so it appears that the road launches straight into distant fields, hill and sky. A landscape of old England; a Gainsborough behind glass. It gives the feeling of extraordinary freedom, as if you could escape into it at any time, even if you never make that leap.
Lauren looks out at it for a while and then pops a compact. Curling stray L’Oreal Hot Chilli Red hairs behind her ears, she breathes smoke away from the mirror and fixes it over her stunning, rough, brown eyes.
‘Fit. That’s what you are.’
Joe is walking along the low wall behind her with his shirt off, shoulders already pinking in the sun. Happy, handsome Joe; good-looking, full of life. He grins and Lauren smiles back.
‘And you’re late.’
‘Had to get these, didn’t I?’ He swings a white plastic bag sagging with cans. ‘And it took me ages to buy your present.’
From his pocket he fishes out a pack of Marlboro Gold and throws it to her.
‘Fags. Wow.’
‘It’s inside.’
But she knows this and has already flipped the top. The edge of a little self-sealing transparent bag has been folded to fit among the remaining cigarettes. The smell of the bud is overpowering: burnt popcorn, oil, herbs. Fox. She breathes it in.
Joe crouches behind her and slips his arms under her breasts. ‘Happy Birthday, babe.’
There is a rendezvous planned with mates twenty minutes later at Lauren’s dad’s house, but it needs to be quick. Friday is his drinking day, much as he might pretend it isn’t. He still goes out in his paint-splattered overalls as though off to work, but when he returns for lunch (12:30ish) he’s rarely less than three pints in. And that’s just the warm-up. There’s no violence in him any more, not like when Lauren’s mum first left, but he’s deathly quiet and morose and, in his daughter’s eyes, it’s just as unbearable. She hates it – the giving up, the defeat and the lifelessness. So in her little bedroom she quickly peels off the black trousers and purple polo shirt uniform and wriggles into good underwear, leggings and a skinny vest, checking the window for his van driving oh-that-teensy-bit-too-slowly up the road. Only one card by her mirror this year, To My Little Girl, with ‘Lolo! 18!’ added shakily in her dad’s hand. Soon as she opened it (no need to tear, the envelope seal was still wet), she recognised the crap cartoon font from the display racks in the newsagent’s next door. Probably been sitting there for eighteen years.
At the kitchen table downstairs Joe skins up a joint then lifts the back-door catch when three raps sound on the window. Lauren rushes in and sweeps her hand across the table, brushing the baccy and stray Rizlas into the bin. Then they’re all out of there, out into the heat of the street, the rattle of Water Board jackhammers, the overgrown dandelions in the yard and concrete dust blown up by passing lorries. There are four of them: Joe and a mate from college; Lauren and her best friend Immy, both wearing their sunglasses like Alice bands.
‘Where are we going anyway?’ Immy asks, pulling hers down, checking her look in a car window, but Lauren is already gone, threading through the traffic.
There are mayflies everywhere, leaving the slipstream and turning slowly in the eddies in groups of twos and threes. Miniature regattas. More duns drift off with the current under the viaduct and over the heads of the waiting trout facing upstream in the weak-tea water, swimming lazily to keep stationary. Each fish knows the flow of the river and where the channels provide the greatest riches of subimago. Each fish barely shifts a fin, holding its position in the flow, still as a kestrel over a cornfield. Then a tilt, flick, and the blop sound as it breaks the water’s skin and takes another. Fish gorge themselves until something in the drooping willow and alder boughs, the gold air and the hot, heaped-up grass of the river’s edges lures the duns into attempting flight. The mayfly is unique in the animal kingdom as the only creature with two adult winged stages. As it is still sexually immature, the only purpose of the first stage is escape. Suddenly, stretching and beating their wings, the duns begin to leap and lift, careering clumsily into the shelter of vegetation.
A grey wagtail waits and watches on a semi-submerged stone. Breast a bright cadmium yellow, body tapering into the fine point of its long, folded wings and tail, it looks like a horsehair paintbrush halfway through a Van Gogh sun. Flying in a short circle, the bird plucks a few of the airborne forms, then, beak bristling, rests with its tail bouncing like it’s counting their numbers. But the weight of duns emerging is too much to monitor; they float up to the bank-side leaves, stems and trailing blades of green. Each lands weightlessly, basking, ripening in the warm threads of sunlight, spiny forelegs bent, wings straight and three tails extended like whiskers. Their final stage is already beginning. Even in apparent stillness, the mayfly never ceases to move; it is always folding in, pushing out, reforming, like the walls of the ever-expanding universe, or the edge of a town.
Lauren is the only one who knows where they’re going so she leads, but even if she didn’t, she’d probably still be at the front. Working their way down the hot, empty tarmac runways of royal-sounding streets – Albert Road, King Edward’s Drive – they come to a back alley hemmed in by the high fences and lines of locked garage doors, where dumped rubbish bags have been split and strewn by foxes. She lights the joint with a sharp inhale and holds it. A few more steps down the runway and Take Off. The slow release of excitement in the stomach, the skyward lift and simultaneous sinking inward of the mind, the sudden malleability of tedium and boredom, the potential for it all t
o become something different, something beautiful and mysterious.
The alley leads into a tatty car park pitted with collapsed asphalt. It is a sump for the houses around it, surrounded by sow thistle, dock, nettle and brambles. Everything is jewelled with litter – a bright pink prawn-cocktail crisp packet, sheets of soggy paper, plastic bottle caps, a rusty shopping trolley coiled with the green heart leaves of bindweed. Joe’s mate Nathan, dressed in a black Lonsdale T-shirt, high-tops and jogging bottoms, drops an empty cider can and kicks it ahead of him. They follow its rattle along the track towards a metal railway bridge scrawled with a bulbous graffito and a solitary lamppost dressed in a tutu of barbed wire. Running alongside is a galvanised steel palisade fence, the top of its metal points split and peeled like bananas to heighten the treachery of its cutting edges. Beyond it lie the last few houses of red northern brick and a rectangle of yellow: an enclosed patch of waste ground wild with ragwort and dandelion flowers. A collapsed sofa slouches at its centre, its exposed, fat-like cushion foam colonised by invertebrates. Leaving it all behind, Lauren registers the shift towards a place beyond restrictions, out of the way of town, out of the way of people. A lightness somewhere between her eyes.
