Nothing. The hawk rouses again and begins to preen her covert feathers. The running deer and the running hare. Legacies of trade and invasion, farming, hunting, settlement. Hares were introduced, it is thought, by the Romans. Fallow deer certainly were. Pheasants, too, brought in their burnished hordes from Asia Minor. The partridges possessing this ground were originally from France, and the ones I see here were hatched in game-farm forced-air incubators. The squirrel on the sweet chestnut? North America. Rabbits? Medieval introductions. Felt, meat, fur, feather, from all corners. But possessing the ground, all the same.
We set off, again, homeward this time. But now the rain in the air is harder, and the rabbits are so close to their holes that Mabel’s not able to get a foot to them before they disappear. After one hair’s-breadth miss in a rocky quarryhole by a bank of wild rose stems, I call her back and feed her up. She is tired. Beads of water spot her head and tiny eyelash feathers. We stroll back to the car park. I’m tired too, and glad to see people walking towards us. I’ve met them before: a retired couple from my mother’s village, walking their white-muzzled terrier on a long lead. They’re all wrapped up with scarves and snap-fastened country jackets and their shoulders are set a little against the cold and wet. I meet them here quite often. I’ve always been delighted to see them. I don’t know their names, and they don’t know mine, though they know my hawk’s called Mabel. I wave, and they stop and wave back.
‘Hello’, I say.
‘Hello! How’s the hawk?’ they ask.
‘She’s good,’ I say happily. ‘But tired. She’s been flying all over the place. It’s beautiful out here today. I saw the deer!’ I went on, glad to have someone to tell. ‘A big herd of them, dark-coated, down in the bottom of the valley.’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘The deer. Special, aren’t they, those ones. Rare. We see them quite often.’ He is smiling; we’re all enjoying our shared secrets of a place. She’s nodding too. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ she says. ‘We counted them once, didn’t we?’
He nods. ‘There’re usually between twenty-five and thirty.’
‘Thirty exactly!’ I say.
‘They’re a lovely sight.’
I agree. She tucks her scarf more tightly around her as a squall begins. Her husband nods vigorously, rain darkening his shoulders. ‘A herd of deer,’ he says, beaming, then his expression folds into something I don’t recognise.
‘Doesn’t it gives you hope?’ he says suddenly.
‘Hope?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Isn’t it a relief that there’re things still like that, a real bit of Old England still left, despite all these immigrants coming in?’
I don’t know what to say. His words hang and all the awkwardness is silence. The leaves rattle in the hazel stems. And I nod a goodbye, sad as hell, and my hawk and I trudge home through the rain.
It is a miserable walk. I should have said something. But embarrassment had stopped my tongue. Stomping along, I start pulling on the thread of darkness they’d handed me. I think of the chalk-cult countryside and all its myths of blood-belonging, and that hateful bronze falcon, of G?ring’s plans to exclude Jews from German forests. I think of the Finnish goshawks that made the Brecklands home, and of my grandfather, born on the Western Isles, who spoke nothing but Gaelic until he was ten. And the Lithuanian builder I’d met collecting mushrooms in a wood who asked me, bewildered, why no one he’d met in England knew which were edible, and which were not. I think of all the complicated histories that landscapes have, and how easy it is to wipe them away, put easier, safer histories in their place.
They are only safe for us. The fields where I fly Mabel back in Cambridge are farmed organically, and they are teeming with life. These are not. The big animals are here, it is true: the deer, the foxes, the rabbits; the fields look the same, and the trees, too, but look more carefully and this land is empty. There are few plants other than crops, and few bees, or butterflies, for the soil is dressed and sprayed with chemicals that kill. Ten years ago there were turtle doves on this land. Thirty years ago there were corn buntings and enormous flocks of lapwings. Seventy years ago there were red-backed shrikes, wrynecks and snipe. Two hundred years ago, ravens and black grouse. All of them are gone.