Gostalking!

I take it all back. I sneered at Forest Enterprise’s Goshawk Trail. I thought it was ridiculous. As if you put a sign on the seafront saying Orca Trail. Or Ghost trail in a haunted house. Good luck, mate.

Guess what? This morning I saw goshawks on the bloody goshawk trail! I knew I would, too, because I was doing all sorts of unconsciously superstitious things that I knew were already part of a day in which I saw goshawks. Rather as if time was spooled backwards: so there I was, eating a gorse flower, pinching it from the tip of a prickly branch, because something about the petroleum taste of dissolving yellow petals was part of the day that I saw goshawks. Seeing tiny flutes of pine seed wings falling to the forest floor on the day I saw goshawks. Picking up an owl pellet and pulling a vole skull free from the compacted hair, rolling the tiny jaw between finger and thumb and then dropping it again, because that’s part of the day when I saw goshawks.

Have you ever seen a deer coming out from cover? A roe deer, a whitetail deer, all the same. They step, stop, and stay motionless, nose to the air, looking and smelling. A twitch might run down their flanks. And then, reassured, they’ll ankle their way out of the brush to graze.

Looking for goshawks is like that — only, it's only the bit just before they relax. It’s not that I walk around with my nose in the air, smelling, of course, and I don’t stand still. But there’s something about walking around like this that’s a bit like standing on a precipice: something is ordering you how and where to step without you knowing much about it. On the Goshawk Trail I feel tense when I'm walking or standing in sunlight: I find myself unconsciously edging towards broken light and shadow, or slipping into the narrow, cold shadows along the wide breaks between pine stands. I flinch if I hear a jay calling, or a crow’s rolling, angry alarum. Both of these things could mean either warning, human! or warning! goshawk! which I found quite amusing on a morning when I was trying to find one but not the other. Or was I? Hehe. Of course everything’s significant, all metaphysically glamorous, when you’re stalking like this.

I remember reading — can't remember where; can anyone help? — something I think written by Donald Campbell, whose death on camera is right up there with Dallas motorcade for spectacular media horror. He said, I lost control of a car for six seconds, and thought I was going to die. In that six seconds I thought a lot of things. Afterwards, I wrote them all down. It took about fifty pages. I was amazed.

Yes I know gostalking is not losing control of a car at three hundred miles an hour. But it bears some relation to it in the way that the quality of time is altered. And you think differently. Thoughts get compact. Sharp. They're not contemplative, not chewing the top of a pen, deep sigh, reverie by the fire thoughts. They're short sentences about things. You can still think abstractly. But abstract thoughts out gostalking are compacted things, which you can unravel later. Like packets of data compressed for sending. Meanwhile, the old ghostly intuitions that have tied sinew and soul together for millennia are doing their thing, making you feel uncomfortable in bright sunlight, uneasy on the wrong side of a ridge, somehow required to walk over the back of this bleached rise of grasses to get to something on the other side: which turns out to be a pond, as if you always knew it was there.

The pond was behind a wicker fence. There were toads beeping in the shallows. Mallards loafing and hoovering up toadspawn. And a whole chocolate box assortment of small birds drinking; blue and pink chaffinches, black and orange bramblings. Nice pond. And interesting, too, because it was sunk in the middle of what were still obviously sand dunes. Dunes covered in thick tussocks of xerophytic dried grass many, many miles from the sea.

Parts of this strange area have periglacial dunes. Heaths with patterned ground. It’s very odd indeed, here, and you come across things you don’t expect in lowland England. Tracts of reindeer moss, for example, tiny stars and florets and inklings of an ancient flora growing on exhausted land. Crisp underfoot in summer. It’s like a patch of the arctic fallen into the world in the wrong place.

Bony shoulders and sharp black blades of flint extrude from the reindeer moss fields. I've got a whole windowsill of flints from here: some are sharp, translucent shards like tiny knives; others are knobbly organic forms that resemble fertility figures. You can find flint weapons and tailings around here, too. This place has long been famous for flint. The neolithic flint mines near here at Grimes Graves exported flint all over the south of England. And in the seventeenth century, flints for gunflints were a major concern here. Oh, and rabbits. That's why Thetford Warren and Wangford Warren are so called. The rabbits got a little out of control, and grazed the short sward here to almost nothing. When unusually strong southwesterly winds started blowing in 1688, rabbits and weather together created a long-forgotten disaster, the Great Sand Blow. With the thin crust of vegetation atop the sandy soil broken, the wind raised the ground to the sky. To the villagers of Brandon and Santon Downham, it must have looked as if a yellow thundercloud had fallen to earth. The wind shifted tonnes and tonnes of the land to different places. A long, creeping dune appeared, moving to circle Brandon to the south, it engulfed Santon Downham, choking the river. When the winds died, the great blow had left a desert of dunes between Brandon and Barton Mills. It was atrociously bad travel: soft, dune sand, scorching in summer, and infested with highwaymen at night. Our very own arabia deserta.

I was standing in these dunes. Most are now afforested with Corsican and Scots pine, and the highwaymen, we hope, long gone. But the place still feels dangerous, you know, and strangely damaged. I was looking at a little sprig of berberis growing out of the turf, with its oxblood leaves like buffed pigskin. Looked up.

And then I saw my goshawks. There they were. It was eight thirty exactly. A pair, soaring above the canopy in the rapidly warming air. There was a flat, warm hand of sun on the back of my neck, but I smelt ice in my nose, seeing those goshawks soaring. I smelt ice and bracken stems and pine resin. Goshawk cocktail.

They were on the soar. They are a complicated grey colour. Not slate grey, nor pigeon grey. But a kind of raincloud grey, and although they were distant, I could see the big powderpuff of white undertail feathers, fanned out, with the thick, blunt tail behind it, and that superb bend and curve of the secondaries of a soaring goshawk that makes them utterly unlike sparrowhawks. And they were being mobbed by crows, and they just didn’t care, like, whatever. A crow barrelled down on the tiercel and he sort of raised one wing to let the crow past. Crow was not stupid, and didn't dip below the hawk for long.

These goshawks weren’t displaying: there was none of the skydiving. But they were loving the space between each other, and carving it into all sorts of beautiful concentric chords and distances. A couple of flaps, and the tiercel would be above the female, and then he’d drift north of her, and then slip down, fast, like a knife-cut, a smooth calligraphic scrawl underneath her, and she’d dip a wing, and then they’d soar up again.

They were above a stand of pines, right there. And then they were gone. One minute my pair of goshawks were describing lines from physics textbooks in the sky, and then nothing at all. I don't remember looking down, or away. Perhaps I blinked. Perhaps it was as simple as that. And in that tiny black gap which the brain disguises they'd dived into the wood. Yes, that must have happened. The corner of the wood there, by the phone mast. Guess where? Right by my car! Right by the sign saying Goshawk Trail.

Forest Enterprise, I take it all back.