The Years

Pheasant - photograph by Jo Sinclair

I have a mental photo album of my favourite place going back thirty-five years. I don't recall details, like the smell of peat or pond water or mammal, and I remember what mood I was in or what was happening in my life only once or twice. The atmosphere that comes to mind is fascination and calm.

In the glade behind the pond -  a noise like a bird, alarmed, urgent, turns out to be a weasel. It has prey in its mouth. No, not prey - its own baby. The weasel is frantic and determined, moving its kits.

Two months after we've made the ice creak with our skates til nightfall it's frogspawn time. I go in search but all I find are the massacred remains of hundreds of toads.

I see piles of grass snakes entwined on sun-warmed patches of cold soil.

Emerald grass and hazy blue forget-me-nots grow on the bank of an upended tree. On the other side, where the roots are, there's a fox curled up asleep but I scare it and it plunges clumsily into the water and swims to the base of an alder tree where it clings uncertainly. There's a balloon by the fox bed with a return address label. I return it with a note about the fox. A young boy's family sends me a small prize.

One June I notice toadlets the size of my smallest fingernail, everywhere. They swarm beneath my feet and along the trunks of fallen trees.

For years after the 1987 gale kingfishers become woodland birds, nesting in an uprooted tree. They chase past me in their courtship games, beaming electric blue between dark alders and the bright green of spring.

A roe deer has staggered to the edge of the pond with a bullet in it. Its dead body is big, impressive,  perfect.

Every winter tiny, squeaking siskin silhouettes lace the tops of the alder trees.

A huntsman with a gun and a smile and a raised eyebrow tells me he shoots migrant woodcock when they arrive during the first full-moon in November. The birds catapult from under my feet so fast I hear them before I see them.

A doe rabbit chases and boxes a stoat with her long, strong feet.

A huge wingspan takes off in front of me; buzzards move in for the first time. The sound of Welsh mountains mewls high in the blue East Anglian sky.

Generations of badgers eat elderberries, dig latrines, pass elderberries, plant elderberries. Jelly ear fungus grows on the elderberry branches.

Hobby falcon silhouettes boomerang back from Africa.

A colony of exotic mandarin ducks checks out potential nest holes in the trees.

I'm sitting on a fallen poplar tree. A mink runs straight at me, spots me and leaps off with a scream.