Recently I had to leave my lemon-of-a-car at the local town garage as the disc brakes were grinding alarmingly. There being half an hour`s worth of light left, I walked home along the back road.
The moon, already well risen and floating above Cadon Bank, was almost gibbous, and its yellow glow hovered above and between the high tree tops as I walked east. To my right the forest hills, to my left, fields stretching out to the Tweed, the greying single-track road the borderland. I saw and named the birch wood, the cluster of ash trees, the long, clean-limbed beech wood, the tightly packed and musty spruce plantation.
I hoped to catch a glimpse of a badger. My first and only sighting had been a few years ago, on my first long, exploratory run, far along the logging roads, high in the hills. Somewhere around Plora Craig I`d startled one, about 15 feet away and I gather there is a Set in the hills of which this creature must have been a member.
But this day I saw no animals, just old trees in the ancient Plora woodland: mature trees standing amongst their dead and transforming parents, saplings shooting upwards in the moonshadow.
As I walked, the beginnings of the Great Bear emerged through the darkening sky, and I decided that a bright red point wasn`t Mars, being too far north and unmoving.
Finally, approaching our wooden hamlet, a soft owl hooted to my right and, walking up to the " forest gateway" and home, the moon rose above it all.
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