There is an hour in the wood — somewhere between four and five in the morning, this far north and this early in the spring — that nobody seems to write about. It is not night and not dawn. The night-birds, mostly the tawny owl I had been listening to for hours, finish their work around four-fifteen. The day-birds, mostly thrushes and the first blackcap, do not begin until just past five. Between them is a stretch of about forty minutes in which the wood appears to be holding its breath.
I had walked up to the lower terrace below the Tisá Walls the previous evening, with a bivy bag and a notebook and a thermos of tea I knew I would not drink, mostly to see what this hour was like. I had been suspecting it of being interesting for some time. It turned out to be more interesting than I had any way of preparing for.
04:12 · The last owlThe owl that had been calling from somewhere above the terrace stopped at four-twelve. I noted the time because I had been counting the intervals between its calls and they had been growing, slowly, from about two minutes apart at midnight to nearly nine minutes apart in the small hours. The last call was on its own. There was no response, and then there were no more.
For about twenty seconds after the last owl-call, I could hear nothing at all. Then I could hear the sandstone. This is going to sound strange, but the sandstone of the Tisá Walls — about two hundred metres of vertical rock just above me — was making a small, low sound that I had not noticed before because the owl had been louder. It was the sound, I think, of the rock cooling. The stone had been warmer in the day. Now, at four in the morning, it was the same temperature as the cold air around it, and somewhere in the long process of giving up its day-heat it was making a sound. It was almost subsonic. You felt it more than heard it.
There is a quiet in the wood at four-thirty in the morning that is unlike any other quiet — it is not absence, exactly, but a kind of held attention.
The blue, and how it arrives.
The colour began to change at about four-twenty. Not the sky — the sky was still black with three stars in it — but the air. The air, in the spaces between the trees, started to be a particular blue that I had been told about but had never had the patience to see. It is not navy. It is not midnight. It is paler than either, with a green just barely under it, and it sits in the air the way a film of cold sits over a lake.
You cannot photograph this. People have tried. The camera reads it as black, or, if you push it, as a flat featureless grey. The eye is doing something the lens cannot. The eye, in a low-light scene with a particular range of cool colours, performs a small piece of generosity that I do not understand, and the air becomes a colour. It is, I think, the colour of the inside of a piece of beach glass.
From about four-thirty to about five, there was almost no sound. The rock had stopped cooling, or had stopped doing it loudly enough that I could feel it. The wind was not moving. There was no water nearby, which I had not chosen but which now seemed correct. Even the small movements of small things in the litter — the mice and the voles and whatever else lives in the cracks of a sandstone terrace — even those had stopped.
What is the wood doing in that half hour, exactly? I do not know. It is not asleep. It is, possibly, the only time in the twenty-four hours when it is fully still. The day-shift has not started. The night-shift is over. Everything that has been working has just put its tools down for a moment, and everything that is about to work is still finishing its tea.
The first thrush.
It came at five-oh-three. A single thrush, somewhere lower down on the slope, in the open ground between the terrace and the village. It sang for about thirty seconds and then stopped. Forty seconds later a second thrush, much further off, answered. Within four minutes there were seven of them and the wood was a different place.
The blue hour was over. I had been waiting for it, and now it was gone, and what had replaced it was something I knew well — the ordinary, beautiful, mostly birds-and-light dawn that the wood does every day of the year. I lay in the bivy for another twenty minutes anyway, just to mark the boundary between the two, and to thank whatever it is one thanks at a moment like that, and then I packed up and walked down.
I will sleep here again. Probably the night after a full moon, when the owl will be louder, and the rock will hold more heat from the day, and the blue hour will start a little later and last a little longer. I have been a long time learning that the wood has hours, and not all of them are the ones the clock knows about. This one is mine now. I will come back to it.