Speakeasy is a fortnightly showcase of the creative writing talent at Flinders University.
Years ago my friend and I rode our horses over the ancient rolling landscape of the Dorset hills. We galloped across open grassy ridges and moved around the ramparts and ditches of Iron Age hill forts and burial mounds, watched by buzzards riding high on the thermals. But it was when we entered the dappled half-light of the woodland trails we watched for the phantoms of the forest. Roe deer. We curbed our chatter and slowed the horses. At first we saw only the wood. Then, on the periphery of our vision, they materialised, perhaps two or three, between the trees. They watched our passing, silent and still, their twitching, straining nostrils and jaws halted mid-chew the only clues to their vitality. We rode by, looking covertly from under the peaks of our crash hats, our shallow open-mouthed breathing hidden by the dull clop of the horses’ hooves on the soft earth. In late spring, before the canopy had dimmed the light, the forest floor was awash with bluebells and the deer waded in this shallow ocean amid the jetty piles of the young trees.
***
Wild deer are, surely, the most ethereal of creatures. They appear, wraithlike, in forest or field, there and not there in an instant, able to melt silently back into their world. I rarely saw them while on foot. Sometimes, while walking, I came across a depression close up to the hedge where the long grass or crop had been flattened, a few blades just springing back. Bending and pressing my palm onto the place, I felt the warmth rapidly dissipating into the cooler air, and I knew that a deer had lain there a heartbeat ago, but I neither saw nor heard any sign of its leaving. I encountered them many times while on horseback. The horse was kindred to the deer, trusted, known, the strange shape upon its back ignored or overlooked. I suddenly found myself gazing at them where I was certain there had been none the moment before. On horseback my mount and I merged, and the deer, watchful, but unafraid, did not know me for what I was. Let my humanness escape in any tiny fashion, with a cough or a movement, and they took flight, vanishing into the forest, leaving nothing but a sad, empty space of disappointment and loss.
The deer know that we are separate, different, other, and keep apart and aloof from us. They have, as all wild things do, a lightness of being which humanity has lost somewhere in the distant past. They share this earth with us, but in a different dimension.
***
One hot evening we stood knee deep in a gin-clear ocean watching the setting sun. The still, heavy air had ironed out the wrinkles and the surface of the sea was a bolt of turquoise silk. In the near distance a disturbance rippled the glassy surface, and a grey fin zig-zagged slowly toward us, the sun flashing off the glistening skin as it moved silently back and forth. We held our breath as it came nearer. Finally, the dolphin stopped swimming and lay floating very close, its blowhole just breaking the surface. It blew, once, twice, and we smelled its fishy breath. As we studied its glossy grey body, streaked here and there with white scars and nicks, it rolled onto its side and studied us in return. Endless seconds passed. I met its gaze, and in those moments felt the separation of ages and an overwhelming longing that left me desolate. I feel it still. Breath caught in my throat and tears pricked, but, just as I thought to reach out, muscles rippled under the slick skin and it was gone. The water swirled briefly around our knees and then settled to a glassy calm once again. I stood in the water and searched, with aching heart, for a breaking fin, until the sun disappeared over the horizon and I could see no more.
***
Our species has a deep yearning for connection, and to return to the knowing of those that we call wild. Their knowledge remains in us only as a fleeting race memory that eludes us the moment we reach for it. Even the ancients knew the thread had been broken and sought to reconnect through the appeasement of gods in animal guise. Their memories were still strong, but even as they danced impotently around their fires, and painted their pictures in flickering light on the cave walls, they knew there could be no return. The rift was too wide, and we had journeyed too far and for too long. We look into the eyes of our closest relatives and see ourselves as we once were, and regret. Humanity lives with a deep subconscious sadness for what has been lost. We visit wild places and peer through windows into their dimension and hold our breath at the sight of a dolphin, or a deer. Strive to enter and they are gone, leaving us bereft.
***
The daylight stretches well into evening during an English summer. Even in early May there was still plenty of daylight left, but the overhanging trees cast a gloom over the narrow, winding lane. The headlights hardly made an impression on the half-light and I drove very slowly through the soft green tunnel made by the high hedges and undergrowth. The lights picked out a movement in the hedge and on impulse I stopped, and turned them off, along with the engine. I rolled down the window and allowed the sweet smell of damp forest to fill the car. I waited. Presently the hedge rustled again, and out into the open space of the road stepped a deer. She took a few more paces and then paused. Her large ears twitched this way and that, while her nose sampled the air. She turned her face towards the car and I was tempted to duck down, but I kept still and she looked right through me. Then she coughed, just once. There was another small movement in the hedge and a tiny, spotted fawn stepped out and delicately trotted up to its mother. The doe bent her neck and they touched noses briefly, before moving off and disappearing into the bushes on the other side of the road. I quietly got out of the car and moved to look over the hedge. The grassy field beyond was empty. Mother and child had melted back into their dimension and I was left wondering if I had even seen them at all.
***
It is a puzzle as to how and when this separation, this otherness, came to be. For aeons our existence was inseparable from that which surrounded us. Our lives were intertwined with every minute or mighty living thing, and together we made the soil beneath our feet and the air around us, which in turn enabled our existence. An eternal circle. Perhaps it was a single event, a tearing apart, or maybe a gradual stretching then parting of bonds. Maybe when we started to make and use tools instead of our bare hands, or when we started to clothe ourselves, or when we began to live in caves, or when we captured fire, or when we began to walk upright, or when we came down from the trees and evolved the opposable thumb. At some point there was a transition, a turning point, from which there was no going back. We now think of the natural world as something outside and apart from ourselves even though we were spawned, and nurtured by it.
***
Winter in England can be devastating for small birds. Neither insects, nor seeds nor even water is available when temperatures drop and earth turns to stone. The leaden sky and thick snow cover gave the day a deadening silence that even the wind could not break. I stood with my arm extended, some chopped bacon rind and fat on my upturned palm. It was bone-chilling cold. The sharp air stung my eyes and my breath formed a cloud in front of my face that blew back and briefly fogged my glasses. Too cold to stand still any longer, I sighed and moved to throw the fat onto the bird table. Then, with a soft, almost inaudible flutter, a small weightless creature alighted on my fingertips. I was entranced. The tiny, exquisite scrap of blue and yellow, perched for no more than a second, cocked its eye towards the fat, grabbed a piece, and flew away. I watched the pale dimpled impressions of its claws on my fingertips grow back to pink, and felt a deep and satisfying gratitude that this tiny creature from a world I can hardly comprehend had briefly shared existence in mine.
***
We strive to preserve those that dwell in the other dimension, but in so doing, the more apart we become. We have assumed, with monumental hubris, stewardship, even ownership, of this tiny speck in the cosmos. We call it Earth, or Gaia, or Mother as if it was ours to name. It has never been ours. We make but temporary footprints here. Other beings before us, surely, had more claim, but even they have passed. Every living thing, every microbe, every green speck in a drop of water, every worm or whale, everything that slithers, slides, walks, swims, or flies, every hairy, feathered or scaly thing, every rock or grain of sand, every breath of wind or fire, every movement of the ground under our feet or the oceans that surround us, collectively ensures each other’s existence. We no more own them than they us.
***
I floated face down in the cool water, sculled slowly with my hands and let the weak current of the incoming tide push me gently along. I scanned the rippled sandy floor for life and found a small toadfish bumbling about near the bottom. It swam in erratic circles, its pouting lips and large eyes giving it a permanent expression of surprised confusion. I smiled, lifted my head for a breath, and then returned my face to the water. The toadfish had gone. I looked about and was startled by a large black shadow near the bottom, off to one side. Its huge triangular wings undulated slowly as it cruised just above the sand. I saw the notch in the left wing and recognised the stingray as a familiar resident. He paused and I saw his eye roll as he looked at me. I kept very still. He resumed his cruise and I sculled to keep pace with him. Finally, after a minute or two, he tired of my presence and with a mighty wave of metre-wide wings swam off into the gloom of the deep where he knew I could not follow. I duck-dived under and let myself sink so I could watch him go. I mouthed a goodbye as his dark shadow merged eventually into the blue-green backdrop of the seagrass.
***
Our species is the result of a magnificent, unique throw of cosmic dice, maybe never to be repeated. By chance alone we came to be and learned and grew, until for the first time in eternity we came to a point where we could look back into the past and forward into the future, and perhaps understand. We are both cursed and blessed by the ability to look into the mirror of time and see what we have become, and feel regret at what we have left behind. If we look harder still, we would see that the more we separate ourselves from the beings which we call wild, and with which we share this moment in space and time, the more we seal our own future, for nothing in nature stands alone.
Sue Double describes herself as a little old lady with grey hair and a tattoo, who is doing a science degree. If that isn’t weird enough, she also swims a lot, walks, plays the recorder and guitar, reads (about science), draws and paints, and writes a bit, but not all at once.
