The River Arun
The sky seems huge, an endless sheet of towering grey clouds, their tops cleaved off by the jet stream. Rain falls in sheets, and I stand on a carpet of sodden pendunculate oak leaves under trees that career from side to side like the masts of some storm-bound fleet on the open ocean. Water runs from everywhere, is everywhere, is everything.
I wait for the peregrine, but she doesn't come. Nothing flies in this maelstrom. I imagine her driven mad by hunger, unable to hunt. I scan the banks for kills, but there is nothing. I count the moorhen in the garden of Quell Farm, but there are no more and no less than yesterday. I scan the brooks where pochard, wigeon and a solitary great black-backed gull mix with huge numbers of mallard. Creatures everywhere hunch up against the wind driven rains.
Nothing flies and nothing moves. A sudden urge to leave is over-powering and not even the the brightening of the sky and the promise of watching the short eared owls hunting hungrily across the inundated water meadows can keep me here.
I beat a melancholy retreat.
The sky seems huge, an endless sheet of towering grey clouds, their tops cleaved off by the jet stream. Rain falls in sheets, and I stand on a carpet of sodden pendunculate oak leaves under trees that career from side to side like the masts of some storm-bound fleet on the open ocean. Water runs from everywhere, is everywhere, is everything.
I wait for the peregrine, but she doesn't come. Nothing flies in this maelstrom. I imagine her driven mad by hunger, unable to hunt. I scan the banks for kills, but there is nothing. I count the moorhen in the garden of Quell Farm, but there are no more and no less than yesterday. I scan the brooks where pochard, wigeon and a solitary great black-backed gull mix with huge numbers of mallard. Creatures everywhere hunch up against the wind driven rains.
Nothing flies and nothing moves. A sudden urge to leave is over-powering and not even the the brightening of the sky and the promise of watching the short eared owls hunting hungrily across the inundated water meadows can keep me here.
I beat a melancholy retreat.
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