Back Road

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.

The Bird

My particular bird and its tribe have been almost my only contact in recent forest runs (for going on two months). 
This, the Elibank part of the forest, is the vast tree swathe nearest our house. We, and a few neighbours, sit either side of the logging road. Together we form a kind of north facing gateway. Follow this track south and soon you disappear into the woods, into the sounds of the Bold Burn, the smell of resin.

 Two minutes on and the road forks up left, then sweeps round to face and then run  parallel with the Tweed. And from here, right up to the Head (the path travelling in long curves from left to right over 5 kilometres) the only other creatures I`ve seen have been the small gangs of little, dipping birds.
They seemed at first sighting to be nondescript sparrows (black against the white sky). In time their song and colour and movements have revealed themselves to me. I tend on these solitary runs to "converse" with objects and creatures: "What are you ?" might apply to a caravan, tree or bird (it seems). These wee birds are a mossy yellow, small-headed and they flit ahead, settling in the trees beyond me until I draw level again provoking them to head off again and again. I think  they are called Chiff Chaffs, but it could be that I`ve met a charm of Goldfinches (such is my ignorance). In time, I hope, as I pore over maps, words, descriptions, I`ll be able to "name" this other world on my doorstep.

Actually...a siskin