Pale light with the quality of pearl bathes the land in the early morning. It is only two hours after midnight, but this is the tundra. This is the land where the sun will rule for almost a full day and only give the night a grudging hour or two while the height of the summer passes. How flat the landscape is ! Stretching to a weary horizon the earth can nowhere summon up the energy to rise more than a bare meter or so above the plain. Behind us is the sea and coming across these flatlands to meet it is the longest river in the world. After all this distance it isn’t making much effort. Large meanders are often cut into oxbow lakes. Still pools sit in silence as evidence that the river once passed that way. Meres, tarns and divided estuary channels add to a liquid mellow confusion where there is only a little more land than slowly moving or stationary silver mirror waters. It is as though, at the last the river cannot find the resolution to finally commit itself to the sea, or perhaps it cannot even find the object of its journey.
Where there is solid ground, there is life in profusion. It is unambitious life but ostentatious and assured for all that. Lichens and mosses thrive to carpet every available rock surface as it is exposed. They are so luxuriant and so thick that the ground seems hardly natural - slightly surreal. Rival species are lurid light and dark greens, velvet reds and livid yellows and oranges. Their texture is soft and deep to cushion the walking foot, but there are no large animals to tread them down. Only small scampering white rodents feed on the fat arctic fish. But there are the insects. Royal purple moths with two centimetre wing spans flutter no more than a meter or so above the ground in an involved dance with tiny black butterflies. Occasionally you can glimpse a less common intricately patterned and finely feathered red and cream species flitting more purposefully in low hops across the pools.
A short distance inland, and just away from the main body of channels is the most prominent area of raised land, about three meters above the surface of the waters and forming a dry little plateau safe even from the excesses of spring meltwater. A tiny stone croft house has been built at one end and there are signs of attempts to cultivate the stony ground outside. We can see that the building has not been there more than one lifetime, even though rain and wind have long since weathered the rough edges. If it had been, the slow growing but patient mosses would have reclaimed the stones from which they were so rudely evicted. It is a crude structure but an adequate shelter.
Outside is a simple wooden sled such as might be used to drag heavy loads across this terrain in winter or summer. In an outhouse, little more than a knee high stack of rocks abutting one short wall, there is a store of logs brought from goodness knows where. At the opposite end of the plateau is a cairn. It is not possible to bury the dead in this land. They must lie above ground. A simple wooden cross of two cut branches provides some memorial and you might be able to read the faded carving chipped on the largest stone.
‘Joanna Sandford R.I.P’
Hung around the cross by a loop of twine is a corn doll. In yellow and brown gone dull with age it depicts a country woman in full skirts, twisted stiff by the craftsman who made it many years ago.
Look through the open door. An old man lies on a pallet close to the ground. The remains of his last meal are left in one corner on a thin cut of wood that serves as a plate. Fish and moss supply him with all the dietary essentials but occasionally he manages to catch one of the white rodents. Although only tiny animals, they add some variety to his meals. They smell awful. Yesterday he was lucky enough to catch one drinking at a pool. It seemed mesmerised by its reflection as he killed it; a circumstance he has noticed before. An outsider might consider the hunter unlucky, given the revolting stench he must now endure.
The man does not seem to notice. He is asleep, even though the light of a new day gains all the time. When it is summer in the tundra sleep must be sought outside the decent hours of darkness. But the man is restless, gnarled and woody. His wizened body will not stay still. He turns over at intervals on the painful ground, muttering incoherently to himself. He is dreaming. This is his dream.
It is late evening and dark - really dark with the blackness of an honest temperate night. The sky is scattered with a myriad glowing stars which twinkle in the heavy air. A warm breeze kisses the skin. It blows across ripe August corn fields and towards the road where the man strides. He has his arm about a comely dark haired woman who matches him step for step. He whispers something in her ear and Joanna laughs, low and soft. Ahead of them the moon shines like a beacon; their guide in the pursuit. There is nothing more serene or lovely than that August moon. Bountiful and cool, it smiles on the waving warm corn fields, puts the dark hedgerows to bed and paints the road in a light blue water-colour wash. Magnified by harvest, its face looks benignly down on the lovers.
This is indeed another world and another time. Soon the pursuit will be over and it looks as though Marcus and Joanna will gain the high honour. It is certainly not every young couple who last out the seven days, and to do so is a most propitious sign. Then the marriage ceremonies will begin.
Marcus has often thought it is a strange custom, this business of mock flight and chase, which every couple to be married must go through. He knows that it is one practised by all the villages of the fertile circle, and ever since he was old enough to run with the rest he has taken part in the chasing pack, at the summer feast. The pair who will be man and wife may be given shelter in any of the other villages and no one outside their native hamlet may help the pursuers, but if they are caught by one of their friends, relations or neighbours during the week, the individual who touches them receives a high seat at the wedding and the couple are brought back early. Now for the only time in their lives, Marcus and Joanna are on the other side. They are fleeing in partnership to escape that touch. Suddenly he sees why. It is a way to test the strength of a relationship before irrevocable vows are made, and a successful evasion is a symbol which he desperately wants to attain. Together they are striving to catch that which perhaps cannot be caught. Together they are running away from those things which they ultimately cannot escape.
Dream on old man, dream on. Dream about the scrambling and the struggling and the strategy. Dream of open moors with yellow gorse and closed leafy lanes with red campion; of bubbling brooks and friendly faces. Dream of summer storms and electric tension in the touch of your hand with that of your young companion. Dream of small towns and taverns where you rested. Dream of the innkeeper at the Wheatsheaf, watching a dark country cross-roads, who shyly gave Joanna that corn doll as a good luck charm. But most of all, dream of how you got here.
You had come to an unfamiliar region of the fertile circle, a long way from home. Maybe it was outside the circle even. It must have been the very last evening when you needed to hide. Tomorrow you would start to return in triumph. This was a desolate place, a desert of a moor, but you had found a hollow where bracken and low insects lived which seemed the perfect shelter for the night. But in the gloaming you saw a light. Rising up you were both drawn like innocent moths to the flame. A standing circle of white limestone crouched like old men in conference only a few hundred yards from where you had rested. Strangely, you had failed to notice it before. How heady the air was that night! It felt like the shock before a lightning bolt, but the sky was clear. Around the stones a blue light played. St. Elmo’s fire had you both spellbound. As if it was a dream you walked to the centre of the circle. You kissed. It changed. Now you are here.
Wake up old man! There is work to be done and no one here but you to do it.
