Gods of the Morning Read Online Free PDF Page A

Highland woods does not have the very destructive and invasive house mouse, Mus domesticus , originally an alien species from Asia, trans-located all round the world by man, and the progenitor of all pet and laboratory mice, which can carry unpleasant diseases such as leptospirosis, typhus and meningitis – even bubonic plague. They are present in the Highlands, but mainly restricted to the grain-growing areas of the east coast and to towns and cities such as Inverness. Happily, they don’t venture up the glens. House mice will gnaw through just about anything: lead and copper pipes, electrical cables, plastic, woodwork, plaster, skirting-boards and structural joists, even limestone.
    Our wood mice, alas, are not entirely blameless: they delight in shredding polystyrene pipe insulation, and if they elect to nest in a wardrobe of stored clothes their actions can be very distressing. By comparison with house mice, though, the damage they do is slight. They are very clean living and are not known to transmit disease. When I find their nests in the woods, exquisitely crafted balls of grass, moss and leaves, often lined with sheep’s wool, there is virtually no smell.
    Years ago I brought some reindeer skins back from an expedition to Lapland. I thought they would make cosybedside rugs for our growing family, but I was wrong. Reindeer fur has a fine woolly undercoat but the outer fur consists of longer, hollow, air-filled hairs for efficient insulation in an Arctic climate. These hairs are brittle. The regular passage of children’s little feet broke the outer fur into a constant fall-out of shards, which stuck to everything, itched in their socks, clogged the vacuum-cleaner and drove their mother to drink. The pelts were banished to a cupboard in the cellar, securely contained (we thought) in sealed polythene bags.
    The wood mice said, ‘Thank you very much.’ It took them no time at all to find the bags, nibble in and rearrange the rolled-up skins to their liking. Several months later, one of the field centre’s education officers needed a piece of reindeer fur to demonstrate the efficiency of natural fur insulation to some visiting school-children. I opened one of the bags and was astonished to find that large patches of the pelt had been shaved clean down to the leather and the removed fur, both woolly and brittle, had been skilfully woven into an orb-shaped nest the size of a cantaloupe melon. On pulling it gently apart I found that the hairs had been systematically sorted and separated: the long hairs for the structure of the ball and the softer wool for the inner lining. The inside of the nest issued the essence of fertility, like leaf mould, making me think of wood anemones and unfurling ferns in spring – none of that uric rodent reek I remember from keeping pet mice as a boy. I was sorry I had disturbed it and put it back carefully, glad that they had found a use for the reindeer skins and happier to have them living in the cellarthan in my wardrobe. It would be hard to imagine a warmer, cosier or more secure winter refuge from which to produce a family.
    *  *  *
    As I walked back to the house from the rookery, the unmistakable yelping chorus of geese floated to me on the damp air. I stood still and squinted into a sky of dulled metal. They were high, just below the ruffled cloud base at around three thousand feet; it took me a moment to locate them. There they were, in an uneven V-formation, shifting and flickering in a large wavering skein of tiny silhouettes, like flies on a high ceiling. I shivered. Not a shiver of cold – I was well wrapped – but a shiver of deep, transcendental unity. No sound in the world, not even the rough old music of the rooks, etches more deeply into my soul than the near-hysterical ‘wink-winking’ of pink-footed geese all crying together high overhead. It is a sound like none other. Sad, evocative, stirring and, for me,