Far from Madding Crowds

 

It’s ages since we walked the dam.

It is shrunken and shallow and the pelicans that lived there have hefted themselves heavily into the heavens and gone elsewhere.

But the green around it abounds with a soothing stillness.

I can hardly complain of Madding Crowds but we all need to get away from it all. Whatever the All is.

And so we do, with dogs and cold beers and a camera.

And we hear the gabbling call of a turaco, the hysterical shrieks of mongoose as they catch our scent and scream at their young to come home right away. Right Now, I said! The odd over inquisitive one peeps a small black-beady-eyed face out of a burrow and pops back down directly to report our progress to the others.

And the quiet; we hear the quiet. You know you’re listening to silence when you can pluck separate sounds from it. Because they don’t meld and blur as white noise.

 

And the big blue sky was shot with spangled light and the water shone like a mirror as the sun lowered itself gracefully behind distant purplebruised hills and the ants in the whistling thorns scurried for cover from my lens and the long grass blushed and shivered and nodded wooly heads at the tiniest whisper of wind and then the moon, full and fat and waxy, rose, hoisted on silver threads.

 And we went home and left the mongoose alone.