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Authors: Simon Barnes
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foothold. She was wearing a skirt that swept the ground, but then she always did: she whisked it back to the thighs to climb in. She looked lovely ; I said nothing, nor did she. We were just there for a walk in the moonlight. I had no hopes, no plans. It was perhaps one in the morning.
There was always a delicious wickedness about walking in Ashton Court in these forbidden times of darkness. I remember the big sward, our two moon-shadows marching before us: the trees standing huge, but miraculously drained of all colour, as is the strange way of moonlight. Perhaps we held hands: but if so, it was only because of the beauties of the place.
And something happened. Something very beautiful and very mysterious. We walked into a herd of deer. We could see them, not well, in the moonlight: dark shapes picked out by the easily visible pallor beneath their tails.This is the caudal patch, I can now tell you, and I now know that its purpose is to flash a warning about danger – they turn their backs on the source of danger, raise their tails, expose their white bums and leg it – should it be the moment to run away. But miraculously, it wasn’t. Perhaps it should have been. But we stayed quiet and still: so did they: us incredulous, them nervous. Their enormous size, their colossal numbers: we seemed in some strange way to be in danger ourselves. We were, though not from the deer. I’m certain we held hands then. Do I imagine the click of the antlers? Have I superimposed such observations , from many subsequent African experiences of great proximity to wildlife, over what happened that night? Certainly I remember the way they looked at us: over their shoulders, solemn-eyed, big-eared. I remember hinds and stags together, though that may not be right. The main impression was of numbers: of huge and shadowed forms: of a profound and utterly different way of living and seeing and understanding the world. It was like an alien landing: creatures that seemed far from us: yet creatures we had some kind of important link with. They seemed wholly real, unnaturally so: yet also they seemed like a fiction, as if we had imagined them, somehow summoned them up by the power of a shared fantasy, as if we had, indeed, got ourselves back to the garden. Very softly, we crept away. Their power was all on us now: the power of place, the power of the wild world. We seemed scarcelyhuman: never more human.
At the top of a long rise, we stopped to rest, looking out over the perfect sculpted land that fell away. We found that we were in the fork of an immense fallen tree: cosy, hidden between the splayed thighs of its commodious branches, in the great woody crotch of the tumbled giantess. So we kissed. How could we not? We did more, not for pleasure but out of a sense of duty to this wild spot, to the wild creatures we had encountered. The power of the place, the power of the wild world had called us. We were beyond the reach of the tame world now.
8. Water vole
Arvicola terrestris
T here is a terrible danger when you make a transition from one element to another. If you get it wrong, you get the bends. If you make the transition in the wrong way, or too fast, or with too much confidence, you can find yourself in trouble. And it looked to me the most terrible step anybody could be asked to take: to move into grown-up life.
Was it harder to make that step, back in those days? To suppose that life was harder for us than it is for subsequent generations is, after all, the inalienable right of every mature human. I don’t suppose it really was, but all the same, the fact is that we were not simply making a simple change from feckless studenthood to the inevitable horrors of earning a living. Today’s feckless students are all wellaware that real life is ultimately unavoidable. But we really believed that we would be able to fly by those nets. When we joined the grown-up world, we had to accept something that none of us thought could ever happen. We had
There was always a delicious wickedness about walking in Ashton Court in these forbidden times of darkness. I remember the big sward, our two moon-shadows marching before us: the trees standing huge, but miraculously drained of all colour, as is the strange way of moonlight. Perhaps we held hands: but if so, it was only because of the beauties of the place.
And something happened. Something very beautiful and very mysterious. We walked into a herd of deer. We could see them, not well, in the moonlight: dark shapes picked out by the easily visible pallor beneath their tails.This is the caudal patch, I can now tell you, and I now know that its purpose is to flash a warning about danger – they turn their backs on the source of danger, raise their tails, expose their white bums and leg it – should it be the moment to run away. But miraculously, it wasn’t. Perhaps it should have been. But we stayed quiet and still: so did they: us incredulous, them nervous. Their enormous size, their colossal numbers: we seemed in some strange way to be in danger ourselves. We were, though not from the deer. I’m certain we held hands then. Do I imagine the click of the antlers? Have I superimposed such observations , from many subsequent African experiences of great proximity to wildlife, over what happened that night? Certainly I remember the way they looked at us: over their shoulders, solemn-eyed, big-eared. I remember hinds and stags together, though that may not be right. The main impression was of numbers: of huge and shadowed forms: of a profound and utterly different way of living and seeing and understanding the world. It was like an alien landing: creatures that seemed far from us: yet creatures we had some kind of important link with. They seemed wholly real, unnaturally so: yet also they seemed like a fiction, as if we had imagined them, somehow summoned them up by the power of a shared fantasy, as if we had, indeed, got ourselves back to the garden. Very softly, we crept away. Their power was all on us now: the power of place, the power of the wild world. We seemed scarcelyhuman: never more human.
At the top of a long rise, we stopped to rest, looking out over the perfect sculpted land that fell away. We found that we were in the fork of an immense fallen tree: cosy, hidden between the splayed thighs of its commodious branches, in the great woody crotch of the tumbled giantess. So we kissed. How could we not? We did more, not for pleasure but out of a sense of duty to this wild spot, to the wild creatures we had encountered. The power of the place, the power of the wild world had called us. We were beyond the reach of the tame world now.
8. Water vole
Arvicola terrestris
T here is a terrible danger when you make a transition from one element to another. If you get it wrong, you get the bends. If you make the transition in the wrong way, or too fast, or with too much confidence, you can find yourself in trouble. And it looked to me the most terrible step anybody could be asked to take: to move into grown-up life.
Was it harder to make that step, back in those days? To suppose that life was harder for us than it is for subsequent generations is, after all, the inalienable right of every mature human. I don’t suppose it really was, but all the same, the fact is that we were not simply making a simple change from feckless studenthood to the inevitable horrors of earning a living. Today’s feckless students are all wellaware that real life is ultimately unavoidable. But we really believed that we would be able to fly by those nets. When we joined the grown-up world, we had to accept something that none of us thought could ever happen. We had
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