Deep dark. Deeper than black, but not black. Red, and green, in a way. But so dark. Darker than any place I’ve lived. Nothing to corrupt it. Song of the stream behind the wall. Reka, my lodger, was out at work. Fumbling in my bag, I thought I had lost my key again, and would have to break in through the back window like last week, but the reason I could not find my key in my bag was because I was already holding my key. I have been walking until late on these long summer nights, making sure I have covered every footpath and small lane near the house. I usually get the timing wrong, and night is totally down when I arrive home. Bats are flitting about on top of the hill, gobbling up the day’s less fortunate moths. At the bottom of the valley, young owls shout their complaints to the last rechargeable glow of the sun as it sinks behind the moor. A powerful, sinewy, medium-sized dog hurtled towards me down one particularly quiet lane – one of those that don’t really lead anywhere and have a verdant central reservation of weeds – and I wondered when the dog’s owner would appear, breathlessly bringing up the rear and calling the dog back, and just as I realised the dog was a hare, not a dog, the hare also appeared to realise I was a human, not a shadow or a ghost, both of which would probably seem more likely on this lane at this time of the evening, and made a sudden, impressive reroute, ninety degrees to its right, as if responding to some internal satnav, not losing a fraction of pace or finesse in the process.

When you walk a lot in the countryside, you get a crystallised realisation that most animals are united by one factor: their conditioning, over the course of thousands of years of hard, regrettable evidence, to be shit scared of humans.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is dead birds. Insects too, and rodents. Actually, dead things in general, in the wild. I mean, obviously we see quite a few of them, while we’re out on walks, and even sometimes in our garden, but think how many are dying all the time, and just what a small percentage it is of those we do see. I mean, I know living wild things will swiftly move in to eat the dead wild things, and decomposition can happen very quickly, especially in summer, but there’s still something to be learned from this, and it’s probably that dead things often do their dying in secret places, known only to them.