Gods of the Morning Read Online Free PDF

quintessentially wild, it arouses in me a yearning that seems to tug at the leash of our long separation from the natural world.
    Their arrival in the early autumn sets a special seal on the turning year, repeated again with their departure, back to their Arctic breeding grounds in the spring when the last few rise, with rattling pinions, and wheel away into the north. Autumn or spring, I never tire of their unrestrained dissonance, which surrounds us during the winter months when tens of thousands of grey geese gather on the BeaulyFirth. Scarcely a day goes by without a skein or two passing over, or when we go east to the Black Isle, the moist coastal fields are always cluttered with their corn-gleaning and grass-plucking flocks.
    It seems that naturalists (and perhaps not just naturalists) need these sounds to help us locate our passions, to ground us in the beliefs we hold about the natural world and to link us with our origins. My old friend Brian Jackman, the celebrated wildlife journalist, who has enjoyed a forty-year love affair with East Africa, tells me it is the night roaring of lions as he lies awake in his tent on the Masai Mara that does it for him. For Lennart Arvidsson, the half-Lapp-half-Finnish doyen of the Arctic forests, who first showed me wild lynx tracks in the Sarek snows, it is the long-drawn howls of timber wolves, rising and falling on a moonlit night. Dame Jane Goodall insists it is still, after nearly half a century since they catapulted her to world fame, the hoots and pants of a troop of chimpanzees deep in the forest that sets her blood tingling. Television wildlife cameraman John Aitchison recounts that, for all his globetrotting, it is the calls of waders – greenshank, curlew and redshank especially – on the Scottish salt marshes of his Argyllshire home in the crisp air of a morning in early spring that raises the hairs on his neck. And Roy Dennis, my ornithologist (and a brilliant all-round naturalist) colleague and friend of more than forty years, once told me that the combined fluting calls of tens of thousands of common cranes assembling on the wetland steppe of Hortobágy-Halastó in Hungary was a moment of pure transfiguration for him.
    My geese and the shiver pass together. It is autumn, late autumn, and winter is no longer imperceptibly snapping at our heels. Its clawing fingers have finally gripped. I know there will be a piercing frost tonight. I pray that the rooks still gleaning manna from the barley fields are well prepared; bad luck for the hungry barn and tawny owls – I know that at least some of the wood mice have moved indoors. Like the robins and the blackbirds, the shrews have no choice: they have to keep going whatever the season, bound to the treadmill of twitching out from the dark confines of the leaf litter their own body weight of invertebrates every day.
    The squirrels are well stocked up and these last, straggling goose arrivals will have joined the vast flocks that are gorging on the late spillings from combine harvesters on the stubbles of the Black Isle. A final few ash leaves gyrate silently to the yellow carpet of their own design. The crinkly oak leaves hang stubbornly on, only reluctantly releasing when winds scour through. And the silky-haired beech leaves will rattle like crisps until the spring when the new growth will finally force them off.
    As I return to the house I see wood smoke pluming from a chimney. Lucy has lit the sitting-room fire, a sight that brings an inner glow and a smile to my tingling face. As the darkness closes in I shall repair to my old armchair with a book. The Jack Russells will yawn and sigh as they stretch themselves across the hearth rug at my feet. Winter brings blessings of its own.

3
    So Great a Cloud of Witnesses
    Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses . . . let us run with patience the race that is set before us.
    Hebrews 12:1
    Those few last geese to arrive from