Foxglove

Small growings of elder and hawthorn clung to the gaps scooped out below me, buttressed with bramble in the sheltered parts, then the land fell sheer in thin soil over chalk, where nothing could hold root except the more determined of the downland wild flowers. As the slope eased off more gently, small copses offered shelter for wildlife, and the fields at the bottom were richly grassed and dotted with grazing stock.

Bringing my gaze partway upwards again, I saw the back of a kestrel hovering below me, saw her swoop and touch the ground, and then rise up again, banking sideways to skim over the top and down into the next valley.

The dogs were restive, drinking the wind. Luckily the breeze was wrong to bring them the roebuck that eased out of cover well below us, with a very heavy doe behind him. She was carrying her pregnancy low, and would drop her young within the day, I thought.

The fields which she had probably had in mind for shelter were being cut for silage, the hum and roar of tractors carrying across to me on the wind, and she would in any case be better off to stay in the woodland.

Below her, I could see movement and russet against the green: fox. Fox in broad daylight, walking unhurriedly across the small level of land that paused the steeper parts of the slope, stopping to show himself in a patch of sunlight, an appealing patch that invited a fox to lie down and stretch out.

He rolled luxuriantly, then sat up to scratch. A fox at ease with the world and no thought of his own security. Looking back at the deer, I wondered if they had caught my scent on a gust, for they had their heads up and looked tense. The fox appeared to have curled up and gone to sleep in the sunny patch a hundred yards below them.

The roe doe fidgeted, looking this way and that, her ears flicking as she strove to find where I was, for the wind was too erratic to help her much with scent. The buck moved confidently across to the next patch of grazing, but she was having none of it, taking her cumbersome body back into the spinney she had just left.

Looking again at the fox, I could see him rise and stretch, and on the wind came the cackling of the magpies that had disturbed him. He walked away in a leisurely fashion, one magpie following right behind him with that heavy gait corvids show on the ground.

It was right on his brush, teasing, ready to take to the air if the fox whirled around. I saw the fox into cover, and when I looked back for the deer, they too had vanished.

The dogs had missed all this, but they had scented plenty of more pressing interest. We stood, they far more elegantly than I, and made our way across the rim to the next area of cover, where there were rabbits.

I gave them the word and they bounded ahead of me, all eager intent. At my feet was the honeyed scent of Lady's Bedstraw, above me the kestrel flew once again. What a beautiful part of England this is.

This appeared in the West Sussex Gazette June 4. To read it first, buy the West Sussex Gazette every week.