‘We’ll try up Bracks first,’ he says as
they pull out of the yard, dawn breaking across the frosted earth, the sky wide
streaks of pink and violet, like a child gone crazy with the crayons. He leans over slightly to see past his
daughter and across the mere.
‘Magga saw a whole family down there a few
mornings ago, down near Hundred Foot,’ he says, sweeping his arm out in front
of her. He looks over at
her, her long hair obscuring her face, and wonders if she’s bored. It was easier when she was a child,
running around the farm in her red wellies, sitting on his lap in the tractor,
pointing out the cows, the trees, the birds, pointing at everything. The glee of it she felt. He felt.
He let his eyes return to the fields, the
familiar. A map of crops and
hedgerows he could draw with his eyes shut. Black fen peat that will soon turn
emerald and gold as winter recedes. He
lives this land, he’s made of it, every bone, every ache. He scans the horizon, searching, every
so often slowing down where
he’d seen some recently.
‘Look, rabbits!’ she shouts.
He smiles as they watch two rabbits bounce
along the grass verge, before disappearing into the ditch in a flurry of
white. He takes a
left off the main road and down a dirt drove.
‘There!’ he says, breaking hard and
pointing to his right. ‘Do you see them?’
‘No, where?’
‘Three of them! Do you see, look, you see the gate in
the far corner of that field, look a bit to the left, the other side of the
ditch.’
‘Oh yeah! I see them! I see
two, bit I don’t…’
‘The other one’s just gone behind those
brambles, look you can see his head, hang on I’ll get us closer.’
They bump across the field, and he stops
as near as he dares.
‘Look Dad, they are looking right at us,’
she whispers, eyes fixed ahead.
They sit and watch in silence. The doe bends her head, pulling at the
long grass, then raises it and starts to lick the fawn’s back. The younger deer nuzzles against its
mother. The stag emerges
and takes a few steps towards their vehicle, the stops, statuesque, looming
large against the endless flat of the land.
After a while, the stag turns and leads
his family away. Long thin
legs slow and graceful, the follow the ditch in single file before disappearing
into a thicket.
‘I can’t believe how close we got!’ she
says, grinning, turning towards him.
‘We’ll have a look at Hundred Foot before
home, we might see some more,’ he says, switching the engine back to life.
Much later, long after she has returned to London,
he thinks about that morning they shared with the deer, and he feels like
something has shifted. That
something lost had been, for a moment restored. Though he could never have explained
this to his wife or daughter, or even to himself.
"A wonderfully evocative picture,
drawn by Linda, of the yearning of a parent to keep their child from
disappearing into adulthood. Lovely phrases like 'a map of crows' and 'the
frosted earth'."
Amita Murray
