The Morville Hours by Katherine Swift

Author:Katherine Swift
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781408821312
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

In the tunnel now, the apple trees are covered with thousands of tiny apples, no bigger than crabs. I have come with secateurs to thin them, so that the fruit will grow larger. But instead I am watching a dragonfly basking in the sun. Its transparent wings are fine as gossamer yet strong as steel, ribbed like a web of girders. I only see them on warm days: dragonflies are cold-blooded, grounded by cold weather; they need to absorb heat in order to fly. This places them back with the most primitive creatures on earth, millions of years old — back before the Ice Age, back before dinosaurs browsed, back when Shropshire was a tropical swamp and dragonflies with two-foot wingspans cruised the earth beneath colossal trees. Stealthily I creep closer to get a better look. It’s a hawker dragonfly, with a long slim blue-banded body, storing up energy in the four wings it stretches out horizontal to the sun’s rays. But it is far from asleep. From its perch it keeps watch for prey. Dragonflies are formidable hunters, quick and fierce. Their common names reflect that: hawkers, chasers, darters. Hawkers are the biggest, the most accomplished flyers; they roost in the trees at night and cruise the garden by daylight, in search of prey. Chasers are the ones with short muscular bodies. Darters are light and fast, returning with their prey again and again to the same perch. The damselflies are slimmer and slighter still, with narrower wings which they keep closed when they perch. Like hawks or sight hounds, dragonflies seek their prey almost entirely by sight. They have enormous compound eyes, making up almost a tenth of their body length, each eye with up to 30,000 facets, each facet producing its own image. The eyes meet on top of a dragonfly’s head, giving it almost 360° vision. I have a sudden startling image of myself splintered into thousands of parts, blue shirt, white face, dark hair, multiplied sixty-thousand-fold in the darkness of the dragonfly’s head, as in the control centre of some gigantic power station. Alarmed, half-queasy at the strangeness of it, I step back. And suddenly it’s off in a whirr of wings, shimmering metallic blue-green as it skims over the rose bushes like the helmeted bikers who zoom past the end of the garden every summer weekend.

(It’s a lovely road for biking, they say: long smooth curves, gently switchbacking up and down, the Clee on one side, Wenlock Edge on the other, all the way down Corve Dale. No traffic. I see them leaning into the Z-bends, sleek black and silver with a slick of red or blue, all steel and leather, part-man part-machine. I bought a motorbike too, but not for speed. I cruise the lanes and byways at hardly more than walking pace, sniffing the air, gazing over the hedgerows and into the fields, hardly disturbing the buzzard that flaps lazily away at my approach. My speed is 25–30 mph, max. The top speed, as it happens, of a dragonfly.

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