Coat with long sleeves

How dark is dark?

On this June night there are pinprick stars showing in the west; a tenuous moon skulks behind a grumbling, crawling cloud. There are no lights in the landscape. No lamps behind cottage shutters to give even a flicker of flame. No comforting trail to home. No harbinger of dawn in these early hours.

To eyes that have become accustomed to the deep blackness there are milky silhouettes of distant moors on the horizon and outlines of hedgerow thickets in nearby fields, but under woodland trees with their serried canopies of lush leaves there is barely any penetration, only occasional lonely, mottled moonbeams. If you concentrated and you were patient, you could discern your hand in front of you, follow its movement and just about count your fingers. Perhaps you couldn’t see around you, but you would be instinctively aware of the branches and the thorns and the brambles and the nettles closing in, their perilous presence pressed on you by a sort of ephemeral and elusive tension you can feel on your skin, and through your skin, that you could not properly describe to a stranger to these parts in words he would understand.

Deep countryside, indeed.

This night is still and warm and a brittle dryness in the air has coated the dead leaves of last year and has given them a satisfyingly delicate crispness that whispers when disturbed by paw or hoof or claw or shoe.

When there is no wind to warp the boughs of the trees there are sounds that reach your ears from far, far away and from under your foot in equal measure. Some miles distant on the other side of the valley a farm dog is barking at a shadow, a little closer a tawny owl is calling plaintively to its mate in a melancholy aria. A toad gurgles and throbs in a muddy ditch and a harried shrew runs for its life.

In this English woodland on this particular summer night there is a faint but distinct shuffling that to the experienced ear suggests the unsteady trudge of two adult human males. They are coming closer to a rocky clearing in the trees where the straining moonlight bathes the scrub with an insipid grey mask. They are trying to be silent, these men, but it’s not really working. Every step they take breaks another fragile stick or shifts around the desiccated leaves. The red deer that were grazing on young shoots just a moment before are long gone and there are countless pairs of eyes, all shapes, sizes and colours, fixated on the two shadows from the safety of the darkness. Everything in the wood knows they are coming. They’ve known since the first warning call. The foxes and the badgers and the rest. They have things under control.