The weather held for the harvest moon. As the sun set, a huge, bulbous, blood-red balloon rose on the opposite horizon, smearing the low cloud carmine. By the time of the next full moon, the hunter’s moon, everything had begun to change. The season of fog and wind. There were two distinct fogs here: a rising fog and a falling fog. The first of these would settle above the river on a clear cold night, and would bring me those bright mornings of such breathtaking beauty that as I looked out over the rolling ocean of foam beneath me I would think: forget everything else, it was worth coming here for this alone. In a falling fog, the clouds would drop over the mountains and envelop me. All would be still and grey and washed-out, but when the clouds were on the move, this fog could have its magic too. As I walked on the hill, cut off from everything, with bands and belts of denser cloud drifting in procession through the canopy of the pine woods, the landscape looked primal and mysterious. A dark beauty rather than the brilliant beauty of the rising fog.
The first frost came. When I went to get water for washing one morning there was the first thin disc of ice floating on the surface beneath the lid of the water-butt; when I tapped it with the edge of my jug it snapped crisply in two, like a poppadom. That first frost always felt like a turning point; there would be no going back now. It brought the winter flocks. A huge flock of siskins, over a hundred of them, was working the line of alders that trailed down the hill, following the shallow gulley of the seasonal stream that originated from the overflow to my well. All summer long the siskins lived deep in the plantations and I would seldom see them, but in winter they emerged en masse from the conifers, were joined by birds from the north, and lived almost wholly on the alder seeds. When at the tail end of winter their food supply finally ran dry, they would turn to my bird table to see them through. There were goldfinches too, a tinkling flock of fifty or so, that fluttered from thistle-head to thistle-head, and a flock of at least twenty yellowhammers. One year the yellowhammers spent the entire winter within sight of my cottage. If I could not see them out in my front fields, I would wander up the track and look up the hill to see them in the back field. They were like my mascots for the winter. At night they would roost in the fruit tree in the garden behind my bird table. I would wake early on a dull, misty morning, everything grey and blurred and indistinct, and look out the slotted window of my living room to see them, bright yellow flags dotted all over the tree. A string of yellow bunting that almost glowed through the drizzle and the mist, like Christmas-tree lights.
At the very top of an alder on the edge of Penlan Wood was perched a small bird of prey. A male sparrowhawk, I thought at first, but its posture was too upright, and it was in too prominent a position. Perhaps a kestrel; I had watched a pair of kestrels earlier that day on the hillside by the ravens’ nest, hovering above the collapsing bracken, working systematically and in tandem, each leapfrogging over the other to methodically cover the entire ridge line. As I approached the edge of Penlan Wood to try to get a closer view, the bird flushed. I should have been able to tell if it was a falcon in flight, but it turned and raced out of sight over the trees. Sometimes they are gone before you can be sure what they are. But this time the bird returned and settled at the top of a spruce, and now I was nearer I had enough information to be certain: it was a female merlin. It is not very often you get given a second shot at an identification. The moors, where she had come from, would be lifeless now; the pipits and larks and wheatears would all be gone. The merlin would spend her winter in the lowlands or most likely on the coast, and she would be just passing through here.
I saw her again the following day. I was visiting my postbox, and there she was, high above the hillside over the woods, harassing a buzzard determinedly. She looked so tiny way up there, and the comparison between her slender curved wings and the buzzard’s square solidity made her look more like a swallow mobbing a sparrowhawk. She was relentless in her pursuit of the buzzard, and though she had only arrived on the hill the day before it was as though she was taking ownership. She stayed on the hillside all month; I kept thinking she had left and then I would see her dashing by again. The next year there was no sign of her, or any other merlins, but eventually the time came again for one to stop over for a while on its way from the moors. It became a feature of my autumns: I would keep an eye out for the merlins, in hope if not in expectation.
October, and the trees were in full fall. The larch woods were gilded, the beech woods bronzed, and as for the oak woods, well, each and every tree seemed to be a harlequin of every possible autumn hue. Only the ashes would disappoint, their greenery just fading a little before starting to fall. And as soon as the time had come for the ashes to start shedding their leaves, the jackdaw ash on the rocks behind the cottage would give up its struggle; one day it would be in full leaf, the next I would look and it would be totally bare. It would always be the first. All the others would take weeks to surrender to the inevitable and become leafless save for the bunches of keys at their tips, which the woodpigeons would come and unpick, swinging from the slender twigs with surprising dexterity.
The winds came, and blew in gust after gust of redwings, huge numbers of them but in discrete flocks of twenty or thirty travelling at impossible speed with the winds hard behind them. They came all day long, newly blown in from Scandinavia, and gathered down in the valley. On a bright, sunny afternoon, I followed the flocks down the hillside. Through the old oaks at the bottom of my front fields I paused and sat on the remains of a long-abandoned tractor that gave me a fine view over the patchwork quilt of the woodland canopy below me lit up by the sun. Deep in the drifts of leaf litter beneath the trees, a cornucopia of toadstools and mushrooms would be fighting their way through the mulch. Decay has its own fecundity. There was the white barkless skeleton of a solitary tree in the field by me, and in it were perched a pair of kites. There was a third kite too, flying over the stand of oaks I had come through. The perched birds flew up, and the three birds all made passes at each other, swoops and circles just above the trees at only twenty or thirty feet above me, before settling again. They seemed not to mind me being there watching them, and their repeated sallies didn’t appear to serve any purpose; they were simply out enjoying the sun and the wind like I was.
A goshawk was flying over the streamside woods, following the path of the stream uphill and straight into the thrust of the wind. He would soar for a while, then veer upwards until he stalled. For a while he would hang suspended, motionless, his broad wings outspread as if in crucifixion. Then the wind would take him, and he would be blown backwards. It was like he was daring himself; at the last possible moment, just as it seemed he would be dashed into the trees, he would flip himself around, make a tight circle, and go back to soaring over the dingle. As he passed over the mottled woods, redwings would dash out of the cover of the trees below and race up to him. As soon as they reached him they would drop immediately back down to safety. There must have been thousands of the newly arrived redwings sheltering in the canopy, and this pattern followed the hawk’s progress all along the length of the valley woods. It was like a Mexican wave of rising and falling birds rippling across the treetops, and the goshawk was surfing that wave in fine style.
The winds turned storm force. I lay awake that night listening to the howling outside. There was a whole language of wind out there; the gusts seemed to be coming from different directions at once, each with its own voice. I could hear the clattering of the roof tiles and wondered how many I would have to replace. With luck they would hit the ground without shattering; I had no spares left and was already having to use tiles with their corners chipped off. If the ash on the rocks behind the cottage was ever going to come down and take my roof with it, it would have been on that night.