Song Thrush, Firebox.
Away from everything, there is a profound quiet in these short, grey-white days that feels reflective and inward. The sun levers open the lid of a tin-coloured sky at dawn and dusk, to peer up at the underbelly of grey cloud before closing its eye.
A fox has been using the field shelter to lie up in. When I go out in the morning with the hay, I swing the lamp in the hope of seeing him – but just his strong scent lingers. I find chewed pheasant wings and a breastbone licked clean on the muck heap two evenings running. One of my Nan’s famous retorts comes back with a smile: ‘a fox can’t smell its own stink!’ This must be the warmest place to lie, if a smelly one. He passes the farmyard at a trot, barking three times as he goes, causing a covey of red-legged partridge to explode into flight as he passes and I hear, quite clearly, the harsh keer-rick of our native grey partridge among them. I drop my pitchfork with a clatter in my excitement to see them and they whirr away in an arc, over the barn roof and back to the wood’s edge. The fox continues on, calling every hundred metres or so for a vixen. I can map his progress through the almost-dark – round the corner of the wood, across the park and onto the stubble. Pheasants cough up their indignation as he goes, and late-settling blackbirds pink, pink their alarm and fury.
The fire sulks in the woodburner and will not go. It has unreasonable nights like this without explanation. The wood is dry, seasoned ash we have cut ourselves and is covered in black ‘cramp balls’ or King Alfred’s cakes – a fungi that is a natural firelighter. All is quiet, velvet, atmospheric dark density in the firebox. It demands reverence and has the rustle of folds of jackdaw wings about it; a sooty, withholding, a coveting of unexpended energy. Each time I approach with a lit match, it huffs it out. The newspaper faggots will not light. There isn’t much wind, but it went last night on one match in seemingly identical weather. I open the front door to provide a draw: nothing. I wonder if there is a ghost in the chimney. Hours later the wind bellows a call down the stove pipe and it explodes into life as we go to bed.
In the morning a song thrush is singing repeated half-phrases, sentence by sentence as if learning his lines – loudly, exotically from the oak top. Its spotted cream breast visibly trembles with effort, bill thrown wide, a purl of condensation rising like a question mark on the air. Cyclists stop in the lane to marvel: what could that loud, loud bird be? It vibrates the ear drums. It samples a car alarm; some notes of a green woodpecker’s laugh.
I feel a direct link with all those souls down the centuries that have lived and passed through this place, and all places in England, who have heard this astonishing proclamation from a tiny, bird voicebox on the greyest, shortest days and felt such joy, such relief, such reassurance and confirmation that life will begin again.
The robins take up the mantle and shift their soft, melancholy minor-key song up a notch, to sing the same song, but louder, in a jollier major-key.
And suddenly, singing the snowdrops and the winter aconites up and out, we have ourselves a dawn chorus.
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