Once, when it got really cold – the snow heaped high against the hedges and the fields littered with weak, emaciated arctic thrushes – I snapped with whatever the equivalent of the red mist is when you’re just too frozen to deal. I filled the range as full as I could, eventually cramming lumps of coal in with my hands, opened up all the air vents as wide as they’d go and went back to work. A part of me knew this was not wise, and it was not. When I got home from work the house was full of smoke from the wallpaper burning away around the flue. But the Rayburn was our friend. It heated our water to Venusian temperatures, and saved us when the electricity went out, which it did from time to time, and we cooked chickens in it, often our own, young, poorly plucked, gristly cockerels bristling with filoplumes, which we chewed stoically by candlelight.
The office had a couple of hulking grey PCs and an internet connection so attenuated it took three days to download a sound file. The work we did there was fascinating and sobering. The recent collapse of the Soviet Union had opened up the breeding range of saker falcons to organised trapping and smuggling gangs, and falcon populations were in free fall. We ran field teams across their range to monitor their decline, ran sustainability education programmes, and sought to undercut the traditional market for wild-caught falconry birds in the Gulf States by sending out hundreds of home-bred falcons every autumn. I travelled out with them. I remember sitting in the night-illuminated cockpit of a 747 with a pilot who handed me a pink rose while explaining to me that aircraft greet each other in the darkness by flashing their lights. He let me throw the switches to do this, my heart lifting thousands of feet at the distant, impossible reply. Abu Dhabi itself was pale and dusty and in the midst of its mutation from coastal desert town to sci-fi high-rise metropolis, and my rooms on the Corniche looked out over one of the oldest buildings in town, the low concrete bulk of the 1972 British Embassy.
I treasure the times I spent in the UAE talking hawks and heritage with Emirati falconers. But the opportunity to spend time in the Gulf States wasn’t what kept me at the farm. The birds did. They kept all of us there. As racehorse trainers know, young people will put up with almost anything to work with the objects of their passion. Every year we’d hand-rear a few falcons and raise them in the office. I’d find fledglings fast asleep on my keyboard, squeaking irritably and sending feather dust into the air when I gently nudged them awake and asked them to move so I could type. Sometimes I’d roll scrunched-up paper balls to them across the laminate floor and they’d run, stumpily, unsteadily, wings half-open, grabbing at their rolling targets with feet that weren’t yet entirely coordinated, chittering with high excitement. Their presence made the office a much better place. But the breeding season was brutal for the bird staff. They slept in shifts to feed hatchlings through the night, and as the weeks went by became so exhausted they’d fall asleep in the middle of eating lunch, heads on folded arms, or pass out on the sofa and drool silently into the cushions. All spring they lived on pints of instant coffee and junk food and their lives were spent mincing frozen quail, changing paper towels, checking brooder temperatures, filling small falcon mouths begging for food again and again and again.
I learned a lot on the farm. Raptor biology, falcon breeding, for sure. But also how to work in a tight crew and love it; how to enjoy watching Premiership football matches on pub televisions, including the precise nature of the offside rule. I learned that counting sheep is harder than it appears, and that some sheep really are better looking than others. That the wet grass at the bottom of the field opposite the house was where the snipe were, and in deep winter, woodcock sifted down into the valley woods, their backs patterned like thumbprints and bracken fronds. I knew I’d leave the farm one day, but for a long time it was as vague and unexamined a notion as that of getting married or having children. What brought that intimation into focus was not my growing sense of dissatisfaction with this life, but the dreadful incident with the ostrich.
For there were ostriches. The wet valleys of West Wales were an unlikely place to find them, but the boss and his wife had repurposed a portion of their grazing land as an ostrich farm. It was the time of the Great British Ostrich Bubble, when ostrich steaks were heralded as the health food of the future and fertilised eggs were selling for £100 each. Soon this breeders’ market would saturate and prices collapse along with most of the farms. Disaster was already in the air: I shiver at the memory of the Welsh ostrich farmers’ social event we attended one night, where tables of former sheep farmers chewed sadly at ostrich steaks and took heart pills while a man in a lounge suit played show tunes on a Casio organ.
Ostriches are unlike falcons in that they’re genuinely dangerous, so the high wire fence surrounding their fields had a gap at the bottom that you could roll through if they chased you. I had as little to do with the ostriches as possible, but occasionally I was asked to check the fences along their field boundaries – I blush to admit that I used to pretend I was walking the electrified dinosaur containments in Jurassic Park to make the job more interesting – and I was in the company of the boss’s wife one morning doing just this when it happened. We saw a lump on the ground further up the hill that resolved, as we grew closer, into a female ostrich lying in a circle of trampled, blood-soaked mud. The poor bird had stuck a foot through the wire sometime the previous night, panicked, and had broken her leg trying to get free. She was still alive, somehow keeping her head off the ground though most of her neck lay flat in the dirt. The compound tibiotarsal fracture was so obscene, a chaos of torn red muscle and splintered white bone, that I went straight into full-on emergency mode. I searched my pockets and pulled out a miniature penknife branded with the logo of a local photographic shop. I unfolded it, picked up a big rock, hit the ostrich over the head to render it unconscious, then knelt down and cut its throat to put it out of its misery. Keychain novelty penknives are not sharp. It took a while. You do such things when there’s no other thing that can be done. I got up, watching the bird’s one good leg kick until it stilled, the blankness of sheer necessity receding then to leave a wash of simple, overwhelming sadness in its wake. This was so senseless. This bird shouldn’t have been able to break her leg. She shouldn’t have suffered like this all night. She shouldn’t have been here at all. I watched my hands wipe streaks of bloody mud down the front of my jeans, then looked up and saw the stricken face of my boss’s wife. I had forgotten she was there.
Oh, I thought.
The chain of command had fallen away. A bright, fierce sense of personal agency flared up, newborn of the grimmest necessity. My head pulled from the sand. We walked back in silence. I never felt the same about the farm after that morning; always a part of my heart flickered and beat and thrummed with the need to escape, a bird trapped in a locked barn. I handed in my notice a few months later. The date of my departure may have been hastened by my boss telling me he wanted to enroll me on a secretarial course at the local college, but what finally made me leave were the cattle on the hill.
It was a blank summer evening. Everyone else had gone drinking in town. I hadn’t wanted to go but I didn’t want to sit at home either, so I set off for a walk in the woods at the back of the farmhouse. I was bored with my life. I was so bored I didn’t know I was bored. I needed to do something. Then I saw the herd of bullocks on the lee side of a slope in the far distance. They had been left alone so long they were now almost entirely wild, and that was when the plan gripped me. I made some mental calculations. The valley was dark. The shoulders of the hill were bright with rays of low sun. The wind was in my face. There wasn’t so much cover that I couldn’t do it. Was I going to do it? I was.
I slipped deeper into the birch thicket and began stealthing my way towards them. A little later I grabbed some bracken fronds, tore and twisted them until they came free and tucked them into my T-shirt so my head was half-obscured, my hands gritty with fern juice, and then I took a handful of mud and rouged my face with it. I went full-on Captain Willard from Apocalypse Now.
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It was an epic stalk. Cover, concealment, camouflage. No sudden movements, everything slowed into certainty. When I was within three hundred yards of my target, I got on my hands and knees and crawled. When I was even closer, I got on my belly. I spent a lot of time utterly motionless, because keeping still for long periods was a crucial part of the manoeuvre. I had expected this stalk to be absorbing. I did not expect it to be a truly mind-altering experience. Every time I stopped moving the world dipped and swung and held itself in suspension around me. I felt myself then loosely scattered, hardly a singular being, just a thing of leaves and dirt and stones. I suppose I was incredibly uncomfortable, though I didn’t feel it, because later I found there was blood down one arm from a laceration, cause unknown, and my right knee hurt for weeks. But I persevered. I got right up to the herd. I got almost into the herd. They were sitting amid the thistly grass, flipping their tails on to the dried mud of their flanks, chewing the cud, flicking their ears. There was the rich smell of cow – I had crawled through God knows how many cowpats en route – and I was close enough to see flies and eyelashes.
And then I did it. I leaped up from the ground, waving my arms, and yelled. Under a low Welsh sky, to a herd of surprised cattle, I was a home-made ghillie-suited, dancing, mud-smeared monstrous apparition out of nowhere. The herd scrambled to its feet, lowing in entirely understandable terror, and stampeded. The earth trembled under their serried hooves. It was perfect. I yelled and yelled at the beasts as they flung themselves pell-mell hell-for-leather up and over the hill until they were all gone, and I knew the entire time that this was, hand to God, the most satisfying thing I had ever done in my whole life, and I limped back to the farm, with my mouth hurting from grinning, buzzing with thistle-prickles and adrenalin, and got myself in the bath, and lay there soaking away the mud, and as the adrenalin subsided, I realised I had absolutely no idea why I had done it.
Over the years I’ve told a few people that once I covered myself in mud and leaves and stalked a herd of cows on a hill. It makes me sound a little unbalanced, but then balance has never been my forte, and I had certainly been feeling the insulating blankness that accompanies certain forms of long-term depression. I almost never tell the story about the ostrich. A friend once told me it made me sound like a psychopath. ‘No,’ I countered, stung, ‘the point of the story is the opposite: it shows how none of us are used to seeing death any more, let alone having to . . . Well, that’s not really the point, the point is that no matter who we are, we can all do things that we don’t think we can do, really hard things, if we have to.’
Their eyebrows rose. ‘Like kill an ostrich with a rock and a novelty penknife?’
I tried to explain that when all options have narrowed to must, there comes a point where you can’t even think about alternatives. ‘Yeah,’ they said slowly, ‘but that just makes you sound even worse.’
It’s true that most of us these days haven’t ever killed an animal much larger than a fly, though humans kill more animals today than ever before – sixty-five billion chickens each year, for example. And it’s also true that all of us have the capacity to do things we think unimaginable until the moment they are not. But that’s not the point of the story either.
The point is that I would never have fled the farm without the ostrich and the cattle.
On my travels I’ve talked to many strangers about grief, and birds, and love, and death. And many have been generous enough to share with me a meaningful encounter they have had with an animal. With ravens or owls or hawks or bears; herons or cats, foxes, even butterflies. Each encounter has heralded a subtle but tectonic shift in the way the person related to the world, and so often they have involved animals appearing at a time of great hardship for the witnesser, and in places they should not be. A woman told me that after the death of a beloved parent in a city hospital she heard a lone wild goose frantically calling for the rest of its flock in the small courtyard outside before it took off and disappeared over the urban roofline. A man told of a magpie that flew down to the coffin in the midst of a funeral, where it sat for a long while staring directly at the mourners. A veteran helicopter pilot denied their flight licence began to be visited daily by a wild black hawk.
For the longest time I assumed these meaningful encounters were examples of confirmation bias. That when some thing deeply affecting has happened, you’ll find yourself searching for meaning in the things around you, and it’s then you’ll see animals that had always been there but you had never before noticed. But the more stories I heard, the more I began to feel restless with that explanation, and knew I should think more carefully about what animals can mean. I’m sure that the barn owl that turned its face to stare at a grieving son was merely momentarily surprised before flying on. But even so there was more to that exchange than an animal and a person looking at each other.
We have corralled the meanings of animals so tightly these days, have shuttled them into separate epistemologies that are not supposed to touch. You can consider the Eurasian wolf as a social canid, or see it as an archetype with deep spiritual significance, but scientists aren’t supposed to speak of magic, and New Agers tend not to bother with sustained research into animal physiology or behaviour. Of course we need science to comprehend the complexity of the moving world, and to help decide how best to conserve what there is still left. But there is always more. Perhaps one aspect of the sixteenth century is worthy of thinking about: the last great flowering of a form of emblematic natural history in which we could think of animals as more than mere creatures, each living species at the centre of a rich fabric of associations linking everything that was known about it with everything it meant to humans: matters allegorical, scriptural, proverbial, personal.
The ostrich and the cattle were living animals with their own life-worlds and deserving of their own stories. But they were also emblems to me, signs read by my subconscious mind to hasten me out of the quotidian incomprehension fostered by dismal circumstances. They were encounters with animals that resolved themselves into personal truths. And the nature of those truths were particular. They weren’t hard-won through therapeutic dialogue. Nor were they revelations of divine intent. They were the kind of truths most akin, I think, to those offered by Tarot cards.
Like the I Ching, Tarot has a very peculiar sociocultural position. I’ve met many eminent people – scientists, writers, lawyers – who regularly turn to it, but they tend to keep this quiet because reading the cards is too woo woo to discuss in polite company. I’ve used Tarot too. Not often, but sufficient to know how little use the cards are in divining the future – and to see how unerringly the cards reflect my deepest states of being, emotions I’d not let myself feel at the time. I have no idea of the mechanism through which this could be possible, but even so I find myself inclined to trust that the Tarot can speak to us in ways to which we should pay the most careful attention.
Encounters with creatures are always with a real creature. But they are also built out of all the stories and associations we’ve learned about them throughout our lives. They are always already emblematic. And while we should honour their lived reality, and trust the science, I wonder if we might also be readier to accept what animals’ emblematic selves are trying to tell us.
Sometimes the answers are simple. I understood what the ostrich had taught me almost instantly. But what the cows meant took me years. I was overtaking an animal transport truck on a motorway one afternoon when I glimpsed the wet pink nose of a cow pushed through its side. I felt pity, guilt, responsibility, sadness. I thought about the remorselessness of the system in which this creature had been caught up. And then I thought of the day I stalked the steers on the hill and it resolved into perfect clarity. For I had seen myself as one of those steers, one of a feral and uncared-for herd enjoying life in the middle of nowhere, not thinking about what would happen in the future, and not much worried about it, but knowing deep down that one day I was headed for the abattoir. There would be no es
caping the deep sea for the shore. And my stalking and shouting was not mindless. It had been an inchoate attempt to knock them out of their contented composure. It had been a warning to make them run the hell out of there, because the valley we were all in was dark and deep and could have no good end.
The Numinous Ordinary
The 1960s radio in my childhood home had a mahogany wood case, milled metal dials and a glass face printed with bands and frequencies. To find stations you moved the indicator through a gamut of squeals and static by turning a dial, which always felt a little as if I were a burglar unlocking a safe: click, click, hair-fine attention, feedback between the printed whorls of my fingertips and the slow beat of the sound-sensing hairs deep in my ears making me just a shorting arc between them, so that it was easy to feel that the voices were waiting for me alone to find them. LUXEMBOURG, BREMEN, STRASSBURG, it said on the screen in fat capitals, budapest. bbc light. Polkas, waltzes, voices in unknown languages. That radio made Europe into an idea for me, and I loved it. But as I grew older my fascination with the 1960s radio ebbed and died and I spent far less time playing with it. It ended up on my bedroom bookcase tuned almost perpetually to BBC Radio 4.
But then, on occasional evenings in the early 1980s, I began noticing the strangest thing. Whatever the radio was playing – the news, perhaps, a discussion programme, a mystery drama – a melody would drift in behind the voices, fugitive as ash. Usually it was only barely discernible before burying itself again beneath the programme. But sometimes the music would come clear. Ten bell-like notes, rich with mystery, so plangent and eerie that I took to turning on the radio just in case they appeared. Decades later, after spending some time on radio enthusiast message boards on the internet, I worked out that in my small English bedroom I had been hearing the interval tuning signal of the All-Union Soviet station Radio Mayak. Mayak: Russian for lighthouse, beacon. The melody was from the famous Russian song ‘Moscow Nights’. ‘Речка движется и не движется,’ runs the lyric. River moving and not moving. And ever since those days, certain unpredictable things will remind me of that ten-note melody – a photograph of thousands of bird skins laid out in open museum drawers, the dusty smear of the Milky Way, the details of spatter-coated samples in scanning electron micrographs, or the thin trails of summer meteor showers. I thought of it again yesterday while lounging on the sofa watching Raiders of the Lost Ark, hearing the amoral archaeologist René Belloq explain to Indiana Jones the nature of the Ark of the Covenant. ‘It’s a transmitter,’ he says. ‘It’s a radio for speaking to God.’ Somehow, the interval signal melody that slipped into the evenings of my everyday teenage life has become to me the music of the divine.
Vesper Flights Page 23
