21st-Century Yokel

of that pristine black rabbit disappear into the hedgerow, but I started making a bit more of an effort shortly after that. A few weeks later, I was heading through a kissing gate from a twisting path to a field when I heard a miniscule anguished squeak coming from the bushes behind me: something that, in my previous, less present-aware state, I might not have picked out of the light din in and around a wildflower meadow in midsummer. I slowed down and listened some more, and in under a minute, two furry animals, each not much bigger than one of my feet, locked together, spun onto the path behind me, at least one of them in extreme pain. One of these animals was a young rabbit and the other was a weasel. I’d watched rabbits suffer a few times in the jaws of my cats but this was another level of ruthless. Seeing the nameless dark burning in the weasel’s eyes and the shrieking rabbit in its jaws, I momentarily became the rabbit and the weasel became the headlights.

What happened next astonished me further still: a larger rabbit, bouncing out of the undergrowth and hurling itself at the weasel. There was something deeply, heartbreakingly powerless about the gesture, but it was just enough to break up the original ball of weasel and rabbit. As they separated, all three creatures noticed me for the first time in my static, mesmerised position, not more than eight feet away. The adult rabbit hopped into the bushes, its offspring flopped and writhed behind it, probably mortally injured, until both were out of sight. The weasel made a fast-forward creep in the other direction, pausing and getting on its hind legs for a second to peer at me in a way that suggested it blamed me for everything and was wondering, just for a moment, if nipping over and disabling my spinal cord in punishment was a viable option. I sat quietly on the grass, and five minutes later the weasel re-emerged, scuttling across the path like a cackling villain in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, confirming everything we know about the etymology of the word ‘weasel’. I heard nothing more. I wondered about looking for the young rabbit and putting it out of its misery. I decided not to, not just because such a prospect filled me with dread but because I had no place interfering in any part of this episode. I had been in a slightly fragile state of mind on the day of the weasel’s attack, and for the ensuing twenty-four hours I could not help returning repeatedly to the image of that mother rabbit flinging herself out of the bushes, doing everything in her power to save her offspring, even though what she had in her power was virtually nothing: the impossibly touching, doomed heroism of it. A small part of me wished I’d had my phone with me and filmed it but then I realised I didn’t wish that at all. The Internet just conned me into wishing it, because the Internet knows that humans like to share stuff, and that sharing stuff often comes from a kind place and carries the promise of bringing us all closer, so it gets us all addicted to the process, but leaves us ultimately emptier as a result, hovering in a state of non-presentness, getting nostalgic for stuff that happened barely any time ago that we didn’t even take the time to properly absorb when it did happen, skimming across everything, not quite fully experiencing any of it. But the Internet is also teeming with good intentions and seductive promises, and that is the problem.

Summer Solstice is a punctual visitor whose punctuality, though unvarying, always takes me by surprise. Midsummer’s Day does not really happen in the middle of summer of course, and if it did genuinely mark the midpoint of the warm part of the British year, that would feel desperately unfair, but its arrival always elicits a slight sense of injustice in me: a Hold on! We’ve only just got to the point where all the leaves are green! You can’t start heading in the other direction yet! protest. As I headed home from the site of the weasel attack, this protest rose inside me more acutely than ever. There were signs that the lush party of June in Devon had reached its crescendo: nature’s equivalent of that moment on a night out when you stay out, thinking things will get wilder, and they do, but in an insalubrious way that you regret. Blood-caked bird wings and gristle lay on the path ahead of me. My bare legs had been stung by the towering bully-boy nettles of full-throttle summer, thistles that didn’t have the guts to slag me off to my face. A local foraging expert named Brigit-Anna McNeill – more commonly known as just Anna – had told me recently that the stings were good for you. In which case, I was seven stings healthier than I had been at the beginning of the day.

A forager is much better than me at looking and listening as they walk through the countryside: they see beyond the wall of green that the rest of us see flanking us in midsummer and recognise individual species. My Scythe Fair companion Jay, who cooks a lot of foraged food, regularly walks the paths near my house sampling all manner of leaves and flowers like some kind of mystic ground-level giraffe. I wanted to gain the confidence to do the same so in midsummer 2015 I joined one of Anna’s foraging courses in the grounds of Sharpham House, on the hill above the spot where the river reaches the spectacular peak of its congenital indecisiveness. After only a few hours in a tucked-away corner of the UK’s Deep South West like this with a group of strangers, a strong sense of community sets in: a possibility in the air of being part of a new underground