And so I emerge with Pavlovian rigidity to the sound of a bell, weary and fumbling like a punch-drunk boxer, from a slumber that has been anticipating this moment. It is long before dawn. Shuffling, stooped against the cold air and peering out from the smallest apertures my face will allow, I grope through the darkness for warm clothes and wrestle them over my body. Autumn is here and there’s nowhere to hide.
But it’s not just the stone heart of the house that I have to face. My unfaithful companion is eager for the only hour of the day that is entirely her own and the primitive secrets which lay in the fields beyond the village. Bracing myself as the back door opens; jacket collar up, cap on tight, shoulders hunched, I shake off the first real chill of the day with a shiver. Only the first though. Somehow the still air creeps through my clothes and beneath my skin to freeze me from the inside. I will probably curse soon, under my breath, as I usually do.
The dog, by contrast, is oblivious to everything except the scents that rise as invisible mists in early autumn, and linger, zigzagged by the wind, across the fields. And whilst her eagerness is not contagious her jaunty pace gradually displaces the cold from my bones and it is only now, as the tension in my muscles subsides and I stand up straight, that I am reminded autumn is my favourite time of the year. Earthy and earthly, simple and wholesome; it is colourful and beautiful.
Yet for all its colour, autumn is a prelude to death. Indeed it is the very progress of death in life. Not the sudden, spiky demise that a car crash can bring but the gentle withering of mortality moving towards its natural end. Trees relent and give up their wares to stand naked in the freezing wind; beasts in hedgerow and woodland prepare for a sleep from which many will not wake; and the land, or much of it, lies with its brown flesh exposed to the cruelty of the frost and snow to come.
All along the dog pays no mind to such whimsy and instead, transfixed, hunts a brown hare across plough and stubble, nose to the ground and unheeding of my sorry pleas to return. Sorry because the spectacle transfixes me also. Soon I will lose sight of her for what will seem like an age and in that time will fear she has run the animal towards a road or met an unsympathetic gamekeeper lurking just beyond my view. But I am too delighted in the chase to stop her now. I know she will be back, when she’s ready, and the hare will live to run another day, but it’s a drama in which we are all willingly participants every time we pass this way.
Dawn breaks behind us and villagers gradually extract themselves from the warmth of their nocturnal retreat. Kitchen lights flicker into life encroaching on the solitude that mark out our early morning walks. We return to a very different place we left behind.
Back in my kitchen the heat seems at first stifling and then pleasant. The dog pants loudly, her tongue hanging limply from her mouth like a dead weight. The hour is up now but there’s no regret or sense of tragedy, just anticipation of the food I am about to give her. I roughly pat her head and continue my morning routine as if hypnotised. Tea is the next weapon in the fight against weariness. Strong tea made in a pot with leaves, not bags. The first sip on a cold morning is a moment to savour. Life begins and ends with tea.
You make it sound like a pleasure to walk the dog in the dark and cold Nick (which it always is in retrospect), now where’s Sam’s lead.
You’re right Neil, writing it in front of the fire on an evening, you tend to be a bit more romantic than when you are actually dragging youself up at 5.30am and cursing for buying a dog! Human nature I guess.
Cool site. Keep up the fantastic work!