Wheatears sat on the stones, then bobbed away across the open ground as I approached, their distinctive black and white tail pattern flashing their identity behind them. It was then that I saw it, the hare, going to ground behind the cairn pile. I walked around the pile slowly, attentive and ready to be surprised by its leaping. Where was it? The place where it went to ground came into view: the capstone over the cist lifted at 45˚ and held there by iron supports revealed a small oblong chamber in which a body had once been buried, arms and legs folded into the foetal position to fit this stone box – back to the crouch before birth. But there was no hare. And yet there was, leaping through a gap somewhere here.
I looked across at the standing stones in the near distance, at the gap in the alignment between them – the two that stood forward of the small circle beyond them – and saw, though it should have been too far to see, the cup marks carved into them. I didn’t move. The wheatears came back to settle on the stones. I leapt. The hare leapt. We leapt through the gap between the stones, across the wide, flat valley of stones beneath the mountains and above the sea loch. There was a cry of a bird. Not a wheatear. Like a redshank, an oystercatcher, a curlew – or some combination of these mournful cries. A keening as we leapt through the gap across the open ground and into the wood. It was darker here, the green canopy shading out the sunlight; the bracken high, the shadowed path beneath it winding through for a hare path as we ran. The valley, the stones tilting away from us as we ran on ….. and then stopped.
My senses were sharp. I sniffed at a far scent. I heard a far stalk of tall grass bent to the ground. I felt each vibration in the valley. As near as it was to my senses, it was somewhere else, in the world where I was not a hare. Here events happened differently. A leaf touched another as wind passed through the canopy. I felt it. I heard it happen so slowly that it seemed to last forever. Each rustle and turn of wind-touched foliage stretched out in slow-time. But against this the awareness, sharp and quick, of each event in the valley rushed past, clear and precise in rapid motion. Two streams of time ran on at the same even pace when perceived together. But each ran differently, fast and slow, though twisted around each other so hearing them as distinct events was to be aware of counterpoint at the core of the world-flow.
The hare sensed one, I sensed the other; together we brought them together. So it seems now, recalling the experience. But then, when it was happening, I couldn’t say. It was hare think. It was human think. Each was distinct, and I could sense both of them, but separate just as humans and hares are separate and cannot know each others’ thought.
Back in the valley, I stand staring at an empty cist, watched by the wheatears. There is no hare. But there, in another time, right here, a hare leapt. I was there.
awenydd.cymru 