Naturans | Naturata

Part 2

Commit these words to memory but forget the place you found them.

Bridbydale is what they call it. You won't find it on a map – it was somehow disremembered between the Domesday Book and modern cartography – but even in my youth people spoke of the hidden village over the chalk hills, nooked, they'd say, in the crevice between two mountainous fingers of a Yorkshire giantess who'd fallen dead against the earth in another age.

Curious, I entered the dale that lay behind my own village in search of the mythic place. Sightless fog accompanied me for miles before the sun broke through by a fork in the Gypsey Race, revealing a mystical oasis in the vale of two hills and stopping me cold. Mouth agape, I labelled what I could see, a poor attempt at shaking off the fevered sense of unreality in this microclimate of Darwinian exception.

- Flora: Trees and ferns packing the hill slopes, creating a natural barrier that was anything but natural; almost oaks and alders, atypical ashes and pines, familiar-yet-not birches and horse chestnuts; knowledge of wars or kings or the BBC lost in the lush density.

- Fauna: Squirrels more magenta than red eating the odd acorns of the almost oaks; hedgehogs the size of labradors snuffling for as-yet-unidentified fallen fruits; herons, hundreds of them, dancing in courtship at the edge of the mere off the stream's right fork, kicking about shallow water like children in paddling pools, with wings a near-metallic rose gold glittering, legs stretching beyond nature's already ample measure, as though some other animal had clung onto them as they took flight.

- People: Unseen, but a small village visible off the stream's left fork, tidy houses and shopfronts strung like bunting down a single street.

Wetting my boots in the Gypsey Race toward the village, I spotted a magnificent oval rock in the shallow water and took it into my hands. Perhaps four inches tall, veined with scarlet and speckled by gold at the top end, the whole a gem-like magenta. So enraptured was I by this find that I did not hear the approach of a group of villagers who, seeing the prize in my hand, began to talk excitedly to one another and beckon further residents to hurry over.

It was no rock, they told me, but a dale heron egg, something (despite the annual flocks of mating birds) very rare to find, as the dale herons were known to be both great hiders of their shell-bound babies and fiercely protective of them. They drew me into the village, ascribing to me in that moment a reverential aura, saying how fate had chosen me and me alone to find this egg, an unspoken destiny before me to fulfil.

Without question, I accepted the role assigned, so young and easily swayed by their quasi-Messianic attentions. I was given the village's best cottage – the very one I reside in today – a holy of holies in which to cosset the egg in the warmth of an overhead heat lamp, as local pilgrims arrived each day in humble homage. Eventually the jewel-like shell began to crack, seam-by-seam, and small pieces began to fall away. Within the hour, the newborn bird broke free, naked and helpless, as church bells tolled in exaltation and the village celebrate an impromptu fete marking the birth.

As streams of magi ogling my Ardea (as I had named her) filed into the house over those next months, an unexpected paternalism seized me. I shared their affectionate coos over Ardea's downy cuteness and bugle eyeballs the size of gooseberries, but I had a desire to protect it which they could not conceive. I stunned them when I instigated a one visitor at a time policy; it was easier to watch them one-by-one in this way, to divine the meaning of their gazes, to assess their intentions.

Shed nestling tufts made way for the elegant feathers typical of dale herons, those sun-bloom spans that could give Ardea flight. Her eyes took on a molten gold. Fully extended, her height reached that of my own. All external milestones reinforced a pride I felt in her exquisite beauty, a filial ownership as it were, such that I began to forbid anyone from entering the house at all and beholding her so directly, so fearful was I that their veneration would turn to greedy objectives, to abduction. That hasty decision proved graver than I had supposed.