We’ve been trading in small things, these past few months. Our walks are simple narratives, the length of the canal towpath and the way through the woods, short on spectacle, lacking in plot twists.
Fish break the canal surface to grab for gnats and caddisflies among the floating catkins. Feral greylags lounge in big family gangs on the apron of lawn behind the church. There is a honeybee colony in a hole in one of the big beech trees. We see a stock dove, its beady eye and open expression at once kindly and a little furtive. We roll over old logs in the woods: we find flat-backed millipedes, click-beetle larvae (the potato grower’s dreaded “wireworms”), ground beetles; once we find a toad, thumb-sized, baize-green and the texture of old brick. Steely riffs of song demarcate goldfinch territories.
Today, walking the canal at mid-morning, we see what for us amounts to a star turn, a celebrity exclusive. Across the canal, in the long grass beneath a terrace of elder and willow: a fox and three adolescent cubs. I haven’t seen or heard foxes here before (I admit I’m not enough of a countryman to know whether I’ve smelled them).
They’re bold, unbothered. The cubs chase and roll and wrestle. They’ll have been out of their earth for perhaps two months. One stops and stares right at us, unblinking across the water. I have known domestic cats to be more wary. “Fox,” I say to my daughter. She has foxes on her nappies, on her socks, on her wallpaper, in her books. “Hox,” she says.
Later we walk beneath a cloud of feeding swifts and I tell her they’re saying “wheeeee” as they bomb through the muggy air. The path that runs past a host of wild garlic still smells of garlic even though the plants have died away. We play with tacky straggles of goosegrass. There is robin-song, wren, chiffchaff, blackbird, song thrush. A crow dive-bombs us (I’m not sure what we did to annoy it, but it’s annoyed).
In the woods, it begins to rain. But for a soft, white-noise susurration on the waxy beech-leaf canopy high above, we wouldn’t even know.
