Sheep December 9th o2
It’s cold tonight for the first time, face- biting, frost cold. I get the feeling the sheep are glad of it. I took them a second bucket of nuts as it started to get dark and they crowded round, but calmly. They seemed bouyant not sagging and dejected the way they are when it’s relentlesly wet. I rubbed Kenny’s nose and he pushed back gently. This is what their mountain ancestors evolved for, serious cold and hard ground. When I feed them in the morning there will be frost on their backs, demonstrating the efficiency of wool as an insulator, and their breath will billow hot into the air and round my legs. I love to feed them on frosty mornings. I’d forgotten about that. The black ewe that has been limping is walking on that hind foot so perhaps this cold is killing the bugs that give them foot rot too.
I went to put the chooks to bed and found they didn’t need putting, they’d gone. They like to save energy and be in from the cold on nights like this. I noticed the Dutch hen and cockerel hadn’t eaten the scraps of lamb fat I gave the rest. Don’t know what it is they do eat, they seem to exist on nothing. Then I walked up the hill. I was looking at the ashes at the edge of the plantation and at Flint being silly and dancing sideays like she does when she’s over excited, she too likes cold and dry, not wet, when I caught a glimpse of one of Pete and Evelyns horses swinging across the field agaisnt the sunset, just a blink and it was gone behind the hedge. That outline – somehow like a girl with long hair tossing – made me notice the sky behind. peach and watered tangerine round the whole of its wesetrn rim seeping into dove blue mist over the earth making the junction between solid and gas indistinct. The difference was tiny just half a shade like two things next to each other on a paint colour card, ‘pale horizon’ and palest horizon. Funny how the sky always seems arched like the inside of a glazed bowl on winter dusks. It seems finite, close and comfortable like a ceiling instead of what it is, the edge of space into which all the heat and energy of life is inexorably escaping as entropy triumphs in the end. It arched tonight over my head, almost a Springtime blue, the colour of thrushes eggs and then down to the east behind the Christmas tree plantation where it was the colour of spiders webs. The moon was a little curve, more than the first crescent, like a small breast catching the light. I walked to the hill top and down the steep lane to Fairoak. In the ten minutes before lighting up time all thats human fades, it gets lost in the ridges of hills, the grey blue shadows of valleys, the fuzz of trunks and twigs and branches. Looking towrads Tiverton I could see nothing but the line of the hills going from Bucks Bog and the set aside fields that I lust after owning, down to that flat bit of lane before the Lowman road, and the hills beyond the town, and beyond those, far and insubstantial as tissue, the top of Dartmoor.
The lights began to come on then, yellow squares and dots in the blue grey of the valleys and faded green of the hills, the human ness came back at once and I lost that sense that anything wild and big could be hiding the other side of the hedge, or even that the hedge itself could shake itslef alive like a giant pangolin, and go stalking off towards the Moor.
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