John Lister-Kaye

At the Water's Edge


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      First published in Great Britain in 2010 by

      Canongate Books Ltd,

      14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

      This digital edition first published in 2010

      by Canongate Books

      Copyright © John Lister-Kaye, 2010

      The moral right of the author has been asserted

      ‘Crow’ and ‘An Otter’ by Ted Hughes. From Collected Poems © The Estate

       of Ted Hughes and reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

      Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their

       permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for

       any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections

       that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

       British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available

      on request from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 84767 890 4

      Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,

      Grangemouth, Stirlingshire

      www.meetatthegate.com

      for

       Magnus Magnusson

       in gratitude

      ‘Wealth dies, kinsmen die, a man himself must likewise die. But one thing I know which never dies – world-fame, if justly earned.’

      – Odin, in ‘Hávamál’ (‘Words of the High One’), from the Sæmundar Edda (Old Icelandic mythological poems)

      ‘Every once in a while we all need to get out, to give ourselves up to a favourite wild landscape, to explore and experience and to wonder. We should do this in every season and all weathers, by day and by night. We should touch and smell and listen. We should absorb moonlight on water, feel the wind in our hair, and discover the other creatures with which we share the world. We should be forcing ourselves to reconnect with wild nature and our origins. We need to do this before it’s too late.’

      Dr Jeff Watson, scientist and conservationist,

       1952–2007

      Contents

       Preface

       The Lie of the Land

       Spring at Last

       Dreams in a Jar

       King of the Castle

       Dawn

       Energy and the Big Deal

       Wild

       The Claim

       Summer’s Green Stain

       Pine Martens

       An Explosion of Flowers

       The Autumn Stalk

       Iceland and the Whoopers

       The Goshawk

       Pop Goes the Weasel

       Winter

       Postscript

       References, Further Reading and Biblioraphy

       Thanks and Acknowledgements

      Preface

      January 9th The frost’s sunlit sparkle that opened our year was quickly banished by a shroud of grey. The nights have been raw and the days burdened with icy drizzle. For a week we have shivered in the damp of winter chill. I have left my desk and my fireside only reluctantly, briefly venturing out for my Jack Russell terriers, Ruff and Tumble, and always without conviction. Even they have been happy to scuttle back indoors. But today is different. At last a troubled sun has shouldered through, with bright lances of green striping the river fields, drawing me to my study window. Mist hangs over the river but the sun’s courage is calling me out. It’s not quite ten o’clock.

      I left the dogs curled in their kitchen basket, pulled on my old jacket, my boots, hat and gloves, grabbed my binoculars and stick and set out on the circular walk I have done more times than I can count. I turned up the Avenue between the tall trunks of ancient limes and horse chestnuts, kicking the drifts of leaves across the path just for the reassuring swishing sound they make.

      My walk takes me gently uphill, northwards with the sun at my back towards high, rocky crags and then turning to face the lurching clouds of the Atlantic west by following the Avenue’s parallel lines of lofty trees, precisely planted by Victorian landscape gardeners. Now, more than a century later, in the reassuring way that nature always does in the end, the trees have broken free. The old drive they lined where carriage wheels once crunched on raked gravel is long disused, lost beneath a blanket of leaf mould, and their stretching, moss-sleeved arms have mingled overhead, forming a tunnel of bosky shade. Only the rigid spacing of the trunks reveals their hand.

      In the lower branches of one of the limes a spider’s web caught my eye. It arched from twig to twig in a mist of fine lace. It was strikingly beautiful, so much so that I stopped to look more closely at the intricacy of the design. It was studded with beads of dew. The weak, low-angled sunlight gleamed from tiny prisms, incidentally distilled from the night’s cold air, an unnecessary adornment tipped in for good measure. The spider herself was invisible. She had withdrawn to a bark crevice, where she waited, with one foreleg fingering the pulse of a silken cord to alert her when her trap was sprung. I couldn’t resist jiggling the web with a straw, imitating a moth struggling in its tacky mesh. She was fooled, but only for a second. She rushed out to rope her victim round and deliver the poisoned bite to paralyse her prey. Halfway to my straw she realised her mistake, stopped, seemed to think for a second and then returned to her lair. I smiled. That spider was smart. I knew I couldn’t fool her twice.

      That net was a killing machine – I knew that well enough – but that’s not all I saw, nor what I chose to write in my journal. What had stopped me was the beauty of the morning caught in the dewy eye of her device. I was witness to its delicacy, its symmetry and its inspirational cartwheel design. It was