Knowing Answers

I can’t see the green figs growing larger or the lighter fruits getting away before they can be dried. These questions I am asked and I know the answers.

I can’t see the end in sight or the light at the end, I am not in a tunnel. I am in a flask of light, shaped to sit upon the hip when out stalking answers on the cold and sleet driven moors. The answers can sense me coming a mile off, they prick up their receptors and tense their muscular logic. If I move now, they will be off like a shot, bounding away, each bound higher than the last, towards the safety of the mists. I have crawled upwind for sixty-nine years to get to this vantage point. Peeping out between the gorse and heather with my long lens, the waterproof tweed dripping down my neck.

Let’s rewild the mountains and vales, so that the wild answers may slide amongst the unparallel saplings and be encountered, unexplained, in a clearing by a well.

Then I would cease my crawling and simply wander through the woods, discussing an inconsequence. Picnic and flask safe, and hunting pen loaded full of ink.

In the clearing I would look the wild answer, unblinking, in the eyes, to make it calm and talk gentle words to sooth its heart and allay its fears. Slowly reaching out a handful of tender stems to its soft nose. I think it’s got improbably long eye lashes, which, were I prone to anthropomorphising, I would have to marry.

But I would not harm the creature, nor wish holes in its perfect side above the heart. I would not have it lie, discoloured, like a discarded dish cloth, amongst the oblivious grasses by the roadside, like unwanted roadkill. Nor strap a part on my car or wall to boast some kind of prowess, with the rest dismembered in my laptop.

I would not cautiously slide some unbreakable straps about its neck, which would tighten, before it realised what I was doing. If I did, it might suddenly rear up and injure itself trying to escape. I would not pin holiday snaps of the answers upon a large wall, with coloured pins and strings connecting them like malfunctioning spiders. I would not drink too much alcohol and stare fixedly at this display until I fell asleep. I would never put them in a glass case with the ubiquitous dust, mounted on a custom-made plinth and described in bowdlerised terminology on a tiny card, in black ink scrawl with catalogue numbers, for which the legend is lost.

Instead, I would make a quick sketch of its silhouette in my mind and make plaster casts of its cloven prints in the soft mosses, for the children. I would record on film the steam clouds of each breath and describe in lyric prose the quality of its coat, its gentle demeanour and the angle of its cheek whilst listening to the sounds in the branches.

In captivity, behind the wire, their ears droop downwards, and their fur looks patchy and unbrushed, their delicate horns turn to twigs and their form becomes blurred and unsure. Eventually they fade like a bleached photograph, dropped by accident upon the pavement.

If someone I know asks me if I have found the answer, I shall reply that I saw the answer once upon the thin jungle paths. The impression was painted behind my eyelids, before it melted in the shadows. I heard the answer singing in the shower while I was downstairs in the kitchen kneading the bread to rise. I felt the answer follow me home from the fish and chip shop, scenting the vinegar and newspaper. But that does not mean that I have the answer, there is no knowing a wild creature, let it run.