Autumn folded

"When the need for food comes, when you desire to eat,
eat forest mushrooms, . . ."
Charms against bears; the Kalevala


The day opens with a red squirrel undulating along the road in front of me. I'm off to the woods again still checking mushroom spots as I pass by, and after that to sit awhile in the bird hide, Vasikkahaan. As this is a wetland reserve, as everywhere, the needs of humans are the first to be taken into account, by making a building; though the hide - a tower really to reach above the reedbeds - has me admiring its solid no-nonsense construction.

The bone-headed yaffles - green woodpeckers - seem intent on bashing their brains out on not just the trees, but on the telephone poles leading to the couple of houses at the bay. They pay no attention to me. Like any of the bird-hide's visitors, I hope to see the altogether more shy black woodpecker which is also common here.

A jay scolds me as I pass under her: autumn's folded in her wings and she wants no intruders now.

What the woods reclaim the seasons reveal. I've walked extensively through these woods now for 20 days. How could I have failed to notice the skeleton of a small shed in the centre, collapsed on itself and being taken by mosses and lichens, sagging low, so that only the leaf fall of the covering maple is slowly lifting the woodland curtain on this wee puzzling view.

There's none of that damp moss and musty scent in the air that alerts to the presence of ceps. Though there's more fly agaric than I've ever seen anywhere, spilling over themselves at the feet of the old birches - the largest the size of dinner plates and together with the smaller making up a whole set, side plates, inverted teacups and saucers as well; ranging in colour from deep red to faded yellow that ceramicists would enjoy. But they are not edible. I'm wary of the word poisonous. So often it simply means that the old lore of how to use them has been lost. These were once ingested in animistic religion in these parts. While they do poison - extreme vomiting and diarrhea - they are seldom killers and (so it's said) grant visions of the seat of illness in a sick person and to locate lost cattle, lost people. There's more to it of course; I simply admire them. The world is odd enough for me anyway without inducing hallucinations.

Reaching, eventually, the bird tower, even though I'm pretty quiet in the woods, I disturb a napping buzzard who has time to cast me a look before silently moving off along the wood's edge. I can't restrain myself from laughing at a bird hiding from bird watchers in a bird hide. Though I'm sorry for waking the buzzard.

On my stroll back I'm accompanied by ever increasing numbers of cumulus clouds; east and west and north, wherever I look they're massing, pile on pile. They open the sky: maybe it's the rare glimpses of blue among them. A late cricket hops out of my way on the sandy path. There's the hot resinous smell of pine in the air and through that the breath of birches. There's flame now in the maples.

Another half crushed viper at the road's edge. I collect the emptied skin of another.

That the fox is there outside my quarters in the old farmhand's cottage is a fine red bracketing, together with the squirrel, of morning and evening in which nothing happens; literally.