Eventually I lapsed into a fitful sleep, and when I woke the next day the storm had blown itself out. I went outside to check on the damage, and several of the ash trees in front of the cottage had lost large boughs, but the jackdaw ash was undamaged. Perhaps because it was the only one that had lost all its leaves already, the wind had just blown straight through it as if it had not been there. In the fields both above and below me trees had fallen, but, quite noticeably, it was not the hollow trees that had been overpowered but the sturdier-looking solid ones. There seemed no order to it; some had fallen north, some south, some to face uphill and some down. Their falling had wrenched great root plates out of the ground, ten or fifteen feet across, and where the roots at the bottom of these were still embedded in the ground the trees would not necessarily die; they would now grow horizontally instead of vertically. In the woods the trees that had fallen were much more likely to have snapped right off; surrounded by competition, they would have had to grow faster to reach for the light, and would be slender for their height. The biggest victim was a massive oak on the bank of the stream. As if the wind had blown directly down from above and crushed it, its trunk had shattered downwards rather than crossways, and it had fallen in every direction at once, like a chocolate orange.
That afternoon I walked up to the summit cairn of my mountain, and looked out to the north. Though it had been eerily still further down, it was still bright and gusty and bracing up here. On the hillside facing me across the valley to the north, almost an entire small plantation had been clear-felled by the winds, and from here it looked like a tangle of matchsticks. It had blown out from the centre, and all that remained was a fringe of sturdier trees all around its periphery: the outline of a wood.
Two autumns in a row, hares came and bred in the overgrown field in front of the cottage, around my well. Hares were not at all common here; they didn’t like the closely cropped improved grassland of the hill farms, and although hares are active in the daytime and therefore easier to see than most mammals, sometimes weeks would go by without my seeing a single one. They are tough creatures that live out in the open in all seasons, all weathers. They don’t rely on burrows or nests for shelter and protection but on their ability to outrun predators. And they are fast: if they lived in town they could easily break the speed limit. As a child I would see them in large numbers when I walked on the marshes. In spring I would make a point of going to look for them so I could watch them boxing: the traditional spectacle of the mad March hares. At that time their fights were thought to be between the males, known as jacks, competing for the attention of the females, known as jills; now it is believed that it is actually the females, to our eyes indistinguishable from the males, fighting off the premature or unwanted attentions of the males. But here the jack was in no danger of getting his crown broken. The problem for the females here was not fighting off unwanted suitors but finding a mate, any mate, in the first place.
Hares can breed at any time of the year, and the young leverets have to be as hardy as the adults, for they are left in a form, a hollow in the grass that offers no more protection than the bare scrape of the nest of a wader. Their defence from predators is to stay very, very still until they have no alternative but to run. The fields of sheep-grazing didn’t offer enough cover for them, but the field around my well was becoming visibly more and more overgrown year on year, as bracken spread from the edge of Penlan Wood, along with banks of sedge where the field was boggy, and nettles and thistles in the drier ground around the rocky remains of Penlan Farm. Sheep still passed through, but the field was growing steadily more marginal and unappetizing for them, and steadily more attractive for wildlife. I had no idea how many leverets were in the field, for they were all hidden in separate spots, for safety’s sake, but for a whole month of each of those two successive autumns it seemed as though whenever I walked down to my well, little hares would explode from every stand of nettles, every clump of sedge.
They didn’t all make it. One year, on the twenty-foot slab of exposed rock beside my fruit tree, where the mosses and liverworts grew, I found the bloody stump of a young hare’s hind leg. Dropped there by a buzzard, I supposed, or perhaps by a hawk. I was fairly sure it had been carried there rather than killed there, as there was no sign of plucked fur, or any other remains. Just that one solitary paw. The next year, I found a skinned leveret on the track in front of the cottage. The skin was inside out, with the fur facing inwards like the wool on a sheepskin coat. The head had been eaten, but all four paws were snapped off and still attached. It was a neat job, the work of a badger, I thought, rather than a fox. Badgers didn’t often approach this close to the cottage — only once had I gone out at night and surprised one at my fence — but this drama had taken place right outside my window, in the deep darkness while I slept, and I had not been disturbed.
One late-autumn day I opened the back door to fetch some water, and there was a young hare sat on my back step. Save for the twitching of its nose, it froze in position as if I had surprised it as it was about to knock. It was already the size of a full-grown rabbit, and its black-tipped ears were longer than any rabbit’s would ever be. I stood there and waited for it to flush. After a while I began to doubt that it would, and squatted down to its level for a closer look, eye to eye. It stared back at me apparently unconcerned, chewing silently, with bulging eyes that were such a rich golden colour they were almost orange, with black depths like the keyhole of a door to another world. I tried to imagine what might be going on in its mind, whether it might be ill or injured, and considered what might happen if I tried to pick it up. It seemed like a risky survival strategy, to trust in your camouflage when you are sitting on a doorstep, and I wondered if its sibling had done the same when it had been caught out by a badger on my track. As I touched the little hare, it burst into life and raced away at incredible speed, turning on a pin at the corner of the cottage. I dashed after it and was in time to see it clear my drystone wall, fence and alclass="underline" a perfect arc of perhaps twenty feet. The next day the young hares had gone from my front field, scattered. They were close to adulthood now, ready to begin their wanderings, and I wouldn’t see a single hare again until Christmas.
That was my fourth autumn at the cottage, and I felt that I had the measure of life there. All my systems were in place for the months of austerity to come. My woodshed was well stocked with drying logs; what had needed harvesting from the garden vegetable patches was stored away in the pantry; I had my thirty jars of jam, my selection of pickled and dried wild mushrooms. But there are some things you cannot prepare for. There was another storm coming: my own personal fall. I became ill. Of course I had been ill at the cottage before with colds and fevers — though admittedly not as frequently as when I was surrounded by people and more exposed to infection — and I would just keep myself warm and weather it out. This was something else altogether: a whole range of symptoms that I struggled to make any sense of, or even, to begin with, to recognize as signs of illness.
At night I found myself lying awake for hours, tossing and turning restlessly, or staring up into the dark, waiting until I could begin to make out the cracks in the ceiling and could justify to myself that it was now daytime and I could reasonably get up. I no longer slept for more than an hour or two each night, and, though I might feel physically exhausted in the daytime as a result, I never felt tired enough to sleep then. Instead, I felt jittery and on edge; I twitched and fiddled and fidgeted and couldn’t sit still for a minute. I became aware of a constant nervous tremor, like a vibration that ran right through me, to the bone. And I became almost fearful, of nothing. It felt as though there was a dark shadow that kept falling over me from somewhere behind me, from something just out of view.