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thickness. They gather and crack, knock, creak, groan in communion. One second their bone beats are echoing far away, the next they are shockingly loud and right behind me, as rhythmical as falling footsteps. Walking alone in the dark, I suddenly fancy I’m being followed by a long-dead cattle drover leading his longhorns to market, a weather-cracked face under a rough hat, teeth clamped around a clay pipe. When I summon the nerve to look, he is gone; his white eyes are just holes in a holly hedge.
    I find the fox beneath a pine. Actually, if I didn’t know better I’d say he sprang out of the tree, one of three Scots pines that grow where the wood joins the meadow. In man’s hierarchies of timber, pine is a commoner. It is the cheap stuff, the material sliced down and split for flat-pack furniture; the very name maligned as the fragrance of toilet cleaner and taxis. Compared to mahogany or walnut, the alluring cedar or the majestic oak, pine is plantation fodder, plentiful and useful but with no class. This centuries-old tree begs to differ. With its resplendent poise and beauty, it is the very essence of wildness and craggy moor, a poster boy from the ancient Caledonian Forest. Winter fiddles with colour filters dragging down tones, desaturating until the landscape takes on the drab hues of a 1940s cine film. In contrast, this tree’s bright trunk glows copper, rising over a tangle of bramble to bend gracefully at the top where it is persuaded eastwards by the prevailing wind. Its lowest branches are snapped short, spiky, bristling, without bloom and with little more than a haze of ochre, but higher up the thick branches that meet its circular core are sculpted arms. Just like a waiter carrying a tray, each fawn limb holds up a nest of needles that range from silver-green to a jade green-blue. A wind stirs them into life so that the whole canopy suddenly resembles an animal rising, the mist of needles shoaling and shimmering in the way fur ripples over muscle. As the gusts build, these coalesce and then separate, kaleidoscoping the darkening steel sky behind and creating a swirling vortex of green, silver and rust. It is magnetic. A passing magpie, caught by a blast of wind under its wing, is consumed by the whirlpool and disappears into its depths. At that moment the fox is birthed below, into the meadow. At first indistinct from the reddish trunk, he trots down to the frosted grass, eyes screwed tight, blinking in the last light. When he turns back, I follow him as far as I can. True to his mythical function, the fox is escorting me into this land.
    Out there my hands freeze and thaw as notes are made obsessively, messily. Rain, when it falls, blots the ink. I record where I see the fox, where he moves and what he shows me. New spidery lines are required and scribbled over my ordered maps. The rough courses of his runs are bumpily drawn, approximated, often while walking. And he is a he, I’m sure of it. Although differences between the sexes are fairly indistinguishable at a distance, there are certain telltale signs when you get close enough, with size being the obvious one. I estimate he is about seventy centimetres in length, a figure I arrived at by measuring the space between two twigs on a fallen pine that he crossed near the weir. Halfway along he turned and looked straight in my direction. I had time to memorise his face, its broad head and long, narrow snout. He looked thinner. Haggard. Only those baleful eyes remained a roaring furnace of defiance.
    Another day I find a blackbird limping on the ground with its eyes shut. It lacks the strength to take to higher branches and hops feebly away from me along the old railway into wiry caves of bramble, as if seeking refuge from the very air. Another scolds me and hurls past, diving beak-first into a moss-grown elder thicket. There are no melodies past the last line of gardens on Bilton Lane. Birds camp by feeders like refugees around cooking