Gods of the Morning

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John Lister-Kaye. Gods of the Morning

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GODS OF THE MORNING

‘I love this book. It quickens the heart with hope and wrests real beauty from keen observations of the natural world. If only we could all be as attentive to the life around us as John Lister-Kaye. No one writes more movingly, or with such transporting poetic skill, about encounters with wild creatures. Its pages course with sympathy, humility, and wisdom’

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The red squirrels were busy building a new drey. I was watching one yesterday, scurrying (its Latin name is Sciurus). It was pruning fresh larch and pine fronds and bearing them along in its teeth, fronds sometimes fully its own length, then weaving them together with the practised eye of a gypsy wife making baskets, pushing, bending, pulling, intent, labouring away with paws and teeth, totally oblivious to, or more likely just ignoring, my silent presence a few yards from the foot of the tree. Time-served though they may be, my field skills cannot boast the fooling of a squirrel on high. It knew I was there, all right, but I was no threat to that tail-flicking, nose-twitching, bright-eyed red, busy about its urgent affairs. Only one thing burdened its mind: winter.

Earlier in the day I had watched two of these enchanting native squirrels at the nut box I had put out for them. (We have no pox-carrying greys in the northern Highlands yet – they haven’t crossed Loch Ness – and I pray that we may have the resolve to keep them out.) They were busy feeding, laying down fat, but also carrying off the hazelnuts in their teeth and burying them with rapid, jerky forepaws, scrubbling out the shallow cache pit, carefully dropping the nut and filling it in again, even scattering a few leaves over the top, all in a matter of a few seconds. Then back to the box for more. What makes me chuckle at this important caching of winter supplies is the ritual furtiveness of the process: the casting-around to see who else might be watching, with the shifty look of a shop-lifter about to pocket something, the nipping off to a quiet corner, the frantic digging, then more furtive glances while sitting upright on its tail for a better view, and scuttling back for another nut.

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