Chris Packham

The woodland charts the year for Chris and Scratchy

Through the clag that pulls on the foot, the drag of briar and the shove of cold, through the dun, the black copper and the long shadows, through the tired gate and the trough of sour rot, the sunken tread of tractor and tracks trodden deep by deer and dog, through the wind-slapped cheek and the chilly tear, I can feel the distance, coming, near.

A nuthatch pipes up, up there in the up, in the blindness, the thin cage of warty twigs that makes the crown grey like a ghost head, shot through with veins in chaos, all bleeding up from the big, bold body, the trunk, holding up their gravity, thick and old and boastful. That was alive, that tree remembers us; maybe the bird too peered down on our path, watched us three stretching out the distance, tramping-wet, counting-down, slowly.

This wood is a clock, a calendar, a diary. It counts our time, charts our year and carries our story. On any day I can read the light and dark, see the patterns, the brightened boughs, the f laming ferns, the lichen spots that map the sun’s passage and its probing through this complex tangle.

And on the following day, the star arcs a different course and all my pictures change in time and space; that strip of shade that highlights a spangled flag of beech falls in a different shape and the leaves ignite slightly later and not quite so brilliantly.

And whilst the clock is crudely constant, the calendar can only ever evolve. It changes as life comes and goes, sprouts and falls, rises and dies. The lookscape, the precise sound, the actual smell, is never quite the same day to day, week to week or year to year, because everything here is in transit.

But as the seasons rotate through this woodland’s restless fabric, there are clear annual repeats that mark moments in that circle – not days or dates, but the moods made by them, written in the colours, spelled by the sounds, told by the tastes.

So this morning I feel early December in my shiver, in the drier chill and in the transparency between the timber. From our path I see shafts that have been hidden since April, peek at their naked limbs, coy and uncluttered now the curtains are all torn down.

Through their embarrassment the road now roars, scraping the air, smothering the seep of redwings and the clap of pigeons and the whispers of all the little things too tiny to shout above that noise. I can almost smell Christmas, not mulled wine or mince pies, but a sweet richness in the sticky dirt. And reluctantly I acknowledge that I know this mud, this sky, this symphony. I’ve seen this collage before: it’s been coming through the year, creeping up, patiently stalking towards an inevitable convergence. Time has hunted us and as much as we’ve tried to kill it, it is about to strike.

Soon now: the trees are telling me it will be soon now. They have led us through the start of the story, stooped over us, reliving its punctuations, hovered as we’ve reconstructed the chain of events, cast us the leaves that we’ve written our tale upon.

Of course, we could have taken other routes, refused our geography’s history, but their reach is long and in winter hiding here is hard.

So next week, we will weave through the coppice stools and skirt around the floods where the stock doves sip and the buzzard bathes, over the bank where the oily muck makes rainbows in rusty puddles, down the aisle where muntjac flag their tails, piggybouncing to the thickets.

We will climb over the two- eyed oak, trip through its tangled wreath of honeysuckle, all f laked and pale, push through the conifers to the ponds, launch the mallards and listen to their panic and to the rain, because it will be raining then, because it was raining then and that then will be again.

I don’t know yet what we will say. I’ll take some sausages for him, I’ll wait for him to sniff and wee, and we’ll walk that walk that a year ago was the last with our sweetest friend.

We will hurt but still love this wood, our clock, our calendar, the diary of our little lives, until we reach the end.

THE STAR ARCS A DIFFERENT COURSE AND MY PICTURES CHANGE IN TIME AND SPACE.”