Hare’s Breath
Towering screes of glacial rock in shades from taupe to plum flank the pewter sheen of Wastwater. Crowning the head of England’s deepest lake lie the great gables, barrows, pikes and fells that command this hallowed place. A trickle of sunlight inches slowly down the head of the narrow valley, like a lover tracing from nape to rump the impossibly beautiful contour of his sweetheart’s back. A Midas touch of first light dispelling night. Waking the day with a kiss.
The scent of camomile hangs sweet in the air as I make my way along the still sleeping lakeside of the southern shore. Above me, a dapple of cloud makes its unhurried way across the undulant horizon. The lane blushes with Rosebay Willowherb in swathes of deepest pink. All around lichen laced walls and time worn ways thread hillside to valley, past to present, kith to kin. Following these boundary lines back, I think to myself, I have a stone umbilical that links me to the two boys who lie still snuggled in the warmth of the cottage I left just two hours ago. There, in the prescient darkness before dawn, the soft thrum of sparrows wings in the eaves gave me leave to rise and head up the winding road towards the lake.
At a footpath sign to the little hamlet of Nether Wasdale, I leave the lakeside and head west towards the sunlit slopes through a patch of woodland. Beech and birch yield to elder, holy and rowan as the path emerges into a mosaic of fields, each one patterned with clumps of sun-dried grass and edged with harebells, scabious and knapweed.
That’s when I see her.
Stock still, nose twitching. She already knows I’m here. Burnished eyes wide open, the dark tips of her long ears are pinned up and back, as she takes in the unfamiliar presence of the creature who has strayed into her morning. Wishing with all my heart for the hare to stay, I too stop in my tracks.
For one extraordinary moment we look at each other. The world around us vanishes. I feel her taking me in to the soft tissue of her awareness. She can hear me breathing. Through her exquisitely sensitive nostrils the scent of my skin mingles with the hare’s breath, rests on her tongue, before breezing its way deep into her lungs, through the chambers of her heart and into the very life blood of her.
In the split second before her strong back legs kick out and she hares off, I feel profoundly seen.
