Common Ground by Rob Cowen Read Free Book Online

resistance, tearing channels through the soft sandstone and carving out the river gorge ahead. The evidence is that humans reached here soon after the ground was released, conquering the rich, fertile earth as it burst with colonising seeds and spores after 100,000 years of incarceration. For so long there has been an unbroken line of eyes looking out across the gorge as I do now, seeing the skeleton tree canopies tinge with evening sun. The rift remains an open tear.
    If you plumbed deep enough, you’d find foxes bound up in every layer of this land. Remains have been discovered in Warwickshire’s seams of Wolstonian glacial sediments dating their presence here to between at least 135,000 and 330,000 years. Data reveals that when the great ice came again, some were driven south to more temperate climes – Iberia, Italy, southern France – others curled up in caves and dens and slowly turned to stone. But the margins were always in their blood. The species returned from exile as soon as the climate permitted, repossessing the fringes of the habitable. Their post-glacial remains have been found at several sites in Britain, evidence of a swift reclamation about the same time as humans. The crossing point for both of us was Doggerland, an earth bridge that once connected this country to Germany and continental Europe. Perhaps foxes were our guides then too and we followed them into this new realm. Certainly the flooding of Doggerland 3,500 years later isolated us both. We were trapped here together on the edge of the world.
    It’s been a few days since I saw him. The air doesn’t help. It is a clinging curtain of cold, wet wool, clouding sight. Disjointed noises of machines and trucks rattle from the roads. My breath blows thick as a sea fret. I hear muffled shouts and, inexplicably, sheep. Closer is the clatter and chatter of jackdaws. All around is the feeling of confluence, of things happening just outside my vision. We’re always told that time is linear, yet in this kind of atmosphere it feels more like a ball of string where points touch for the briefest moments and coexist in the same space. An overweight sheepdog sniffs at a gap in the undergrowth by the old railway siding before being pulled away. ‘Leave it. It’s dirty,’ shouts a man, yanking the lead. ‘Fox.’
    I think nothing of ducking down and following the hole through the bushes. A squashed Fanta bottle lies by a torn clump of hen pheasant’s feathers. An unusual dinner. Soft down is scattered everywhere, caught in cobwebs and brambles, but three or four beautiful, mottled, russet-brown wing feathers are still attached to a bony stump. Slightly curved inwards at the edges, it looks just like a little baseball glove.
    The crossing point is shrouded in fog, which forms an impenetrable wall behind the houses, deadening distance. It creates the illusion that the world is only a single street deep, a wood-backed Hollywood stage-set in an American desert. But from the viaduct, a different vista. The view stretches twenty miles in one direction, revealing open country in an astonishing collage. The nearest fields are a British military green, then come the smudged lines of grey-purple trees and hedge. Furthest is a blurry ochre where division between land and sky can only be discerned by the crimson glow of evening. It blushes the low cloud as though a great fire rages over the horizon.
    As the days pass I sense a thin, alarming energy rising within, like when you get a nosebleed and, head back, you swallow blood. All this time out here in the cold brings an extraordinary clarity; I have bursts of intense awareness where I can almost hear, see and feel too much. But still no sign of the fox. And no fresh kills either, or none that I can find. I wait nightly, though, camped down in the seams of undergrowth between the old railway and the meadow. As the hours fall away I feel no urge to return to the empty house.