A walk in the Cool Air

Quentin Large.

The storm had left new piles of seaweed, sharp smelling in the frost, and a swept-clean beach. The usual plastic sea-borne man-made rubbish was half buried and the wind had sculpted the sand into razor-edged patterns like heavily weathered old wood with deeply exposed grain, cutting through layers of different textured, different coloured sand. There were no birds where I had joined the beach, nor prints of any - no prints of anything at all. The only sings of life were two seals sleeping on their backs in the swell, their noses pointed up to the sky and on the horizon the outer islands were sharply white and black bare rock, clear thirty miles away. Then from out over the sea, a flight of disturbed geese swung back inland and glided down towards the fields behind the machair.

There was no sign of life along the tide-line until I came to a thick rope which had a dense forest of bivalves, each attached to the rope by a long black leathery stalk. They were putting out what looked like miniature orange hands with waving finger-like feeding (?) parts, from the free ends, and then withdrawing them rapidly and closing their shells - so many at one that there was a rustling sound. It was this that had made me go over to look at what I had first taken for a much thicker, mussel-covered length of tree trunk. I didn't know whether they would still survive in the sea but they surely would not where they were, exposed by the tide to frosted air, so I dragged the rope with its great mass of struggling life back down to the water.

After that, other signs of life returned to the beach - birds near the north end, rabbit footprints, a cat's tracks all four paws in the one hole, so that it looked as though some onefooted thing had hopped far along the beach with two-foot hops. The most interesting thing I saw, though, was an otters's tracks heading up from the sea towards the dunes and along the dune contours, and then smaller prints of a second. There were several tracks of the same two otters, all radiating out from the one area of marram grass, so it seems as though there is at least one pair living on this beach. It's possible that the larger one is lame, as its rear right paw-print was always placed a little behind the others and that paw was the only one to have left a firm central pad-print - as though flatfooted - where all the other prints were virtually only toe-prints. Most were galloping tracks - a diagonal pattern of all four paw-prints just in contact with each other, then a two-foot gap, then the diagonal four, and so on.

Right at the north end of the beach, three Highland heifers chewed seaweed, contentedly knee deep in their breakfast.

A mile of beach, frosted white, shining under a blue sky, - but not empty.