Part three; Rain - The Doe

The darkening of the woodland always portrays one of two fates, the coming of night and wild beasts or the coming of rain and wild weather. 
Its taken bravely by the adventurer, who looking to the desire for shelter and warmth, makes the decision to ignore it and walks deeper into the dark.

It initiates the instability of the pupil and the widening of the nostrils, as the avid beast lying hidden in our DNA surveys the landscape and prepares to survive. 

The landscape has taken on a gloomy mood, wet and drooping heavily under the weight of the water. Darker, thicker and more intense colours blunt the spectrum and the scent of the air, compressed lightly under the mass of a low, dense cloud, becomes richer and more delicious, sweetened by the aerosols of plants and petrichor.

If anything could be darker than the earth right now it is only the sky…

It’s a wet May, the rain water fills the woods as if it were an empty vessel. The wind heels through the trees and scurries between the heads of the flowers, like children returning to their playgrounds. Laughing. 
Within a few hours the river bubbles up to the extremities of its banks and the roads bordering Southleigh Woods bare a resemblance to volumes of dark brown watercolour, marking the outlines of fragmented greenery. 
Every surface under the cloud is rippling, so that no reflection is left understood and must be released instead to interpretation. 

A Blue Mint Beetle clings to the underside of a bluebell, looking out to the woodland through the convex of a raindrop, hanging from the precipice of the magenta petal. The aspect of the world is consequently correct, thanks to the nature of refraction and the beetles upside down position against the surface. 

Its iridescent blue back is the only thing retaining some brightness through the storm. Until a larger, coagulated drop of water dives suddenly from the apex of an alder leaf, shatters on the head of the flower and dislodges the insect - that hurtles down into the undergrowth, from where it’s back continues to wink faintly up at the canopy.

As the rain begins to subside it does so in frames; two hundred rain drops become a hundred and in a few moments and a watery sun comes out to shine.

From the base of the Alder tree, a shape begins to unravel itself. The silhouette of its long, graceful back had been broken up by the showering rain, but as visibility is regained it’s hiding place is revealed. 
Two long ears spring up from under her shoulder accompanied by two large, black eyes; holding within them the only reflection left undistorted by the rain.

A westerly wind brings her news of movements through woodland and she sniffs them deeply, contemplating the familiar and the new. Her friends and her rivals, her mother, potential partners and her own descendants.
The fine hairs surrounding her nostrils have acquired an almost microscopic dew, which she licks away before stretching her neck to sniff a drooping bluebell, beneath which the beetle is still hiding. 

The Doe, who stands to shake herself and drink the beading water on the fur of her back, moves like a shadow. Her thin bronzed legs that look as though they should not be able to carry one, carrying two.

From being almost invisible she is now barely camouflaged, striking burnt-gold against the rich greens of the ferns, flowers and saplings, her wealth enhanced by her visible enjoyment of a warming sun on her swollen hide. 

She moves away from the river onto a beaten, muddy path and makes her way south towards the trough of the bracken valley. Leaving nothing behind her but her tracks and the warmth of the place where she had been resting. 

She’ll be gentle and hidden for the rest of the summer now, and we could understand that despite how much we would love the chance to appreciate what she’s about to do. Capture it and share that moment with a million people. Because we know that England’s wildlife is just as surprising as any other belonging to a stranger climate. Worth protecting and talking about. 

What’s more is that it is beautiful. Frequently beautiful in a way that only England knows, especially in the rain and the moments that follow when the sun comes out.