Gods of the Morning Read Online Free Page A

nut and filling it in again, even scattering a few leaves over the top, all in a matter of a few seconds. Then back to the box for more. What makes me chuckle at this important caching of winter supplies is the ritual furtiveness of the process: the casting-around to see who else might be watching, with the shifty look of a shop-lifter about to pocket something, the nipping off to a quiet corner, the frantic digging, then more furtive glances while sitting upright on its tail for a better view, and scuttling back for another nut.
    And the question I am so often asked: can they remember where they have buried the food? The evidence seems to be that they can – at least some of the caches. It would be a dangerous waste of energy and food if they couldn’t. But undoubtedly some nuts survive to germinate and grow a hazel tree and the squirrels must be saluted for fulfilling that important, if accidental, ecological role. I am glad I saw them building that drey and I noticed that, whether by chanceor design (surely design), it was built on the sheltered side of the trunk, away from the prevailing wind. Squirrels don’t hibernate, so I find it a comforting thought that when the bitter winds slice through in the long December nights they will be in there, tucked up in their long fluffy tails, curled as tightly as a barrister’s wig.
    This moment in the year is also marked by the very sensible migration indoors of wood mice, Apodemus sylvaticus . Voles and shrews are fascinating, but wood mice are classy. Hamster-golden with huge ears and big glossy eyes as black as polished ebony, underbellies as white as the rose of York, and their extravagantly long tail (they used to be called long-tailed field mice) pursues them, never touching the ground, flowing with all the elegance and style of Elizabethan calligraphy. They skip across the ground with the grace of a gazelle, barely seeming to touch the surface, and they can climb and leap like a trapeze artist. I’m entranced by their speed. I have always admired them and, unlike Lucy when she’s in hyper-efficient housekeeper mode, I am overcome by a downward somersault of the spirit when called upon to trap them. The notion of poison has always been abhorrent to me – out of the question.
    There are times when I have had to set my natural-history instincts aside and give in to lobbying from household and family. After all is said and done, they are mice – beautiful mice – but with all the mouse potential for causing trouble. If they do become a nuisance and I am harried into taking action, I use Longworth live traps and transport the captivesa few miles up the glen before releasing them, wishing them well and apologising as they go.
    At first I made the mistake of thinking that releasing them in the garden was good enough until one day I caught one with the tip missing from his tail. The very next day he was back in the trap in my daughter Hermione’s bedroom. I was pretty sure it was the same mouse so I took him much further away, about three hundred yards. Two days later he was back in the trap. To be certain I now marked his back with a touch of nail varnish between the shoulder blades where I reckoned he couldn’t groom it away. I took him to the village a quarter of a mile to the east and furtively released him into someone else’s garden. This time it took a week, but back he came, straight into the trap, proudly showing off his tell-tale smudge of oyster-shell pink. I was left scratching my head, pondering the mysteries of animal behaviour. Just how does a mouse, two inches high and six inches long, find its way over a quarter of a mile of what, presumably, must have been entirely strange and hostile territory? Is it scent? (We know that a male moth can detect a female’s pheromones up to a mile away.) Or is it some electro-magnetic homing compass we don’t properly understand? It seems entirely logical that any foraging