Gods of the Morning Read Online Free

the end of the month. For the moment the rooks had upped and gone, leaving only a vapid sky and an unavailing silence behind them. I wouldn’t expect them back permanently until February, but if they happened to be passing in their unruly troops, they’d occasionally drop in for a few hours and clog the trees with their quarrelsome bustling, like school-kids claiming their spaces well before the bell goes. But in today’s soft rain they were absent, and the oaks and sycamores solemnly dripped in an uncluttered, graveyard silence. When I stood completely still, a transcendental moment with only the pluming of my breath to reveal my presence, the silence bent to a lower urgency than a rowdy rook could comprehend. Beneath my feet, all around me, busy, industrious life was at work.
    I have often noticed that life beneath the rookery is fuller, richer and more diverse than similar habitats nearby. Logically, when you consider the rainfall of nitrogen-rich droppings from on high during at least five months of each year for well over a hundred years, coupled with the annually layered carbohydrate of mouldering leaves from the sycamores and oaks, it is hardly surprising that the soil is rich. Here, beneath the trees, despite the shade, the naturalising daffodils I have planted are always finer, taller, grander and a richer gold than elsewhere.
    Off to my left, with quick, jerking thrusts, a blackbird was cashing in, flicking rusty leaves, as if turning the pages of an ancient tome in a rushed search for wisdom. A restless robin fluttered from the wooden fence to the ground andback again, always pert, chinking its little metallic assertions, always checking out where my footsteps might have delivered up a worm, a bug or a centipede. And somewhere invisible, somewhere under the wind-blown waves of leaf litter, a shrew was blindly burrowing in its own private, nose-quivering, bristle-trembling quest.
    Everything alive knows that winter is coming. Everything needs to hurry, to feed, to lay down fat, to burrow down, to bore deep into the sanctuary of timber or soil, to crawl under stones, into hollow logs or mud, to build nests, to take in bedding, to batten down. Need and haste: those are the two bywords for this moment in the year. They are the apothegm by which so much survival hangs. The bell for last orders has sounded loud and clear. Even the moon seems to know it, as it rounds to its chilly apogee, trailing mercurial pallor across the lawn and freezing the shaggy world with an icing that crackles like fire beneath my morning feet. By the time the stifling snows and vicious frosts arrive, for many it will be too late. Nature takes no prisoners; it renders no quarter to the unprepared.
    The red squirrels were busy building a new drey. I was watching one yesterday, scurrying (its Latin name is Sciurus ). It was pruning fresh larch and pine fronds and bearing them along in its teeth, fronds sometimes fully its own length, then weaving them together with the practised eye of a gypsy wife making baskets, pushing, bending, pulling, intent, labouring away with paws and teeth, totally oblivious to, or more likely just ignoring, my silent presence a few yards from the foot of the tree. Time-served though they may be,my field skills cannot boast the fooling of a squirrel on high. It knew I was there, all right, but I was no threat to that tail-flicking, nose-twitching, bright-eyed red, busy about its urgent affairs. Only one thing burdened its mind: winter.
    Earlier in the day I had watched two of these enchanting native squirrels at the nut box I had put out for them. (We have no pox-carrying greys in the northern Highlands yet – they haven’t crossed Loch Ness – and I pray that we may have the resolve to keep them out.) They were busy feeding, laying down fat, but also carrying off the hazelnuts in their teeth and burying them with rapid, jerky forepaws, scrubbling out the shallow cache pit, carefully dropping the