(image - mamalisa.com)
One of the things I love about living in the countryside is knowing that all around me are animals, in all shapes and sizes. Apart from garden birds I mean. It gives my day a real lift to come across a fox in the woods, or the couple of enormous hares I saw the other day.
I regularly see cranes in nearby fields and buzzards and birds of prey overhead. Rarer but not invisible are deer, including a stag with a healthy head of TV antennae that I saw one winter morning in the woods. I’ve also seen other deer grazing, and come across wild boar on several occasions, while out running and in the car.
Once we were driving to town with friends when three adult boar and a troop (herd?school?) of babies (boarettes?) crossed the busy road we were traveling on. We all cried out in distress as the last baby changed its mind about crossing the road and dashed back into the woods from where they had come from. I was later reassured by a friend who hunts regularly that the youngster would have followed his mum’s scent and found her without difficulty ( if my friend hadn’t shot him I imagine).
All of this gives me a feeling of peace, of being at one with mother nature, we’re all her children after all, etc.etc.
What it doesn’t explain is me screaming KILL IT, KILL IT at my husband while dashing to hide from the enormous great spider that just scuttled up the wall earlier this evening. I’m sorry, it was either him or me, it’s a dog eat dog world out there after all.
