Free At Hawthorn Time by Melissa Harrison

dog’s mercury, harebells, vetch. Otter spoor by the river.

    It wasn’t the first time Jack had woken up covered in birds. He gave a start and was surrounded by the whirr of pinions, the breeze from their wings fanning his face as a dozen or so birds exploded from his body up into the branches of the little wood in which he lay.
    For a moment he froze, willing them to return; but as his eyes adjusted to the low evening sun he saw that there was someone standing over him, their shadow reaching across his sleeping bag. He leaned up on one elbow, shading his eyes, his heart lurching in his chest. But only the trees’ long shadows lay black on the ground.
    The birds seemed to have melted away, too, like a dream that disappears before you can snatch at it. Corn buntings, he thought for some reason; not that you saw them in numbers any more – or ever would again, probably. He lay back down for a moment, unseeing eyes fixed somewhere beyond the branches. In the police cells they woke you every hour to check you weren’t dead.
    The wood he had camped in was young, having sprung up in the 1960s in the no-man’s-land between a power station and a golf course on Connorville’s scrappy outskirts. Myxomatosis had devastated the local rabbit population in ’53, ’54, and without their nibbling teeth far more saplings had survived their first few years than usual; on the golf course the greenkeeper kept them down, and the land around the cooling towers was managed, but in the area between the two a few hundred trees had quietly set down roots. Now the wood was almost established, though it had yet to be marked on maps or given a name. Jack liked it for its opportunism, and for the stray golf balls that dotted the ground. They worked on him like conkers, and he couldn’t help but pick them up and walk with them for a while.
    And there was something else, too: in places like this he felt invisible in a way that he rarely did in the proper countryside with its signposted walks and intelligible views. Places like this, in the shadow of a power station, were far from picturesque, and they were somehow wilder for it. Hardly anyone went there except for lovers and local children, who sensed that these ungovernable scraps of land were somehow outside the law. Jack had lost count of the tepee-like dens, stained mattresses and secret camps he had stumbled on in such places over the years. He always left them untouched.
    His own childhood was almost entirely lost to him now. It had lingered on in his memory for a little while like a contrail in a clear sky, growing fainter and fainter, until now, when he thought about the past, he thought less of his own and more of the line of men who had gone before him, a dim procession out of some dark history, their future uncertain.
    Nearly dusk. Jack sat up slowly, working the knots out of his neck and shoulders. Was he actually being looked for? Maybe, maybe not. He was supposed to be on a doorstep curfew, required to sleep every night at the hostel in London for the next two months. But he could no more survive in a city than a swallow could live underwater.
    He’d spent much of the day trying to find a lane marked by a line of oaks with double trunks that he’d heard about from a gypsy family he’d travelled with years back. They’d told him their forefathers buried children with an acorn in each hand, and that this lane marked a succession of stillbirths born to one woman many years before. Now he was in the area he’d wanted to see the twinned trees and pay his respects, but although he knew it was somewhere nearby he couldn’t find it. When he’d heard a distant siren he’d decided to slip away and find somewhere to rest for a few hours.
    Now he took a notebook out of his pack, unwound the rubber band that clasped a biro to it and tried to write down some of the things he’d seen that day in case they might make a ballad or a poem, but the rhythms wouldn’t come. Instead, he flicked