Filaments

The willows have decked the area around Minerva.

Last night, I dreamed of a crow who was being savaged by a creature, some cross between dog and mink, though in the dream I called it Weasel. The creature held the struggling crow in its jaws and had already, perhaps, eaten the bird’s feet.

This horrible image comes from Dave Goulson's A Sting in the Tale, in which he recounts his failures with animals. He had a pair of quails in an aviary and one bitter night they lost their toes to frost bite. It is a terrible story.

Anyway, in the dream, I kicked out and the Weasel disappeared and I held an injured crow, with some revulsion for the footless legs and battered feathers. I put him in a box, with food and water and left. This is what Goulson did with the quail, but he realised they would not recover and killed them. With an axe. Ghoulish.

In the dream, time had passed in an instant and I returned to see that the crow was desperately trying to escape the cage in which I had placed him for healing. He did not want that. I opened the door and he burst out, dull black and partially footless. At once he had grabbed something in his beak. I thought it was a garter snake and he would eat. But it was a cat toy. The crow had come out to play, unperturbed by stumpy legs and torn wings.

Minerva suggested that life is a game of wounded players.

It was a beautiful day and the trees on this part of the Reserve look a little better than Kairos. Here is Chronos - on the right. To the left is the ash whose branch spreads over his crown.

On the way back to the car I saw something trotting up the track. I thought it was a fox cub. Ears too long for a cat. Then it turned sideways and I thought, rabbit. But no, it was a juvenile hare. The hare went as if to go into the hedge, then turned and cantered toward me down the track. It stopped, then came on at a gentle lope before turning unhurriedly into the field and disappearing in tall grass, leaving just the ripple of its passing.