In Wester Ross, on the border with somewhere else - a lonely road `moved` and shimmered in the fading light.
They had clearly been massing for some time and now the moment was right and the exodus from the hillside and peat bog took on the look of the battle of Austerlitz as wave after wave surged forwards.... Squelch popped bladder hop...
Evolution had not prepared them for 165 70 R 14`s - let alone the 1,000kg, or even the lights as the road writhed behind and hopped in front to the insistent diesel drone superimposed on the slithering and crawling sound of a far greater work.
Always the eyes, the eyes...... golden irises, gilded and more impressive than any Human creation -pupil, dark and crafted in shape by an unseen anvil in the forge of evolution. Able to spot a centipede several yards away - but impassive and a mirror to the Moon and internal tidal pull - as mass, metal and halogen light past by, an angel of death in it`s transient way.
Transient... barely a blink of Earths, life time line.
Now the hills are dark at night - a larger, nearer, Moon casts shadows as golden irises move down over the hills, still following the beat - the internal tune of amphibian calling..
The Pied Piper leads, over the ancient battlefield, a road, now deep below, under 30 yards of peat .
There had been a distant, distant, call...the call of natures fortune now restored.
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He's done it again!
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Oilrag
what are those funny weeds you grow in your garden?
:-)
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They must have been caned toads
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Poetic as always, oilrag... is nature's profusion starting to run out? Is it our fault?
At night in Ceylon in the forties, I still remember the one-lane blacktop unreeling at 60 or 70 under our wheels covered at certain seasons with hopping frogs, crossing from one area of their social lives to another, thousand upon thousand of them for mile after mile. They looked white in the headlamp glare. Impossible to avoid. A bit slippery to drive on I suppose. To be hosed off the underside of the car later perhaps.
Can't say they put me in mind of the strangely ornate Buddhist and Hindu armies with weird, multi-bladed, tooth-edged weapons that had marched that land in the past though. I didn't know about them then. More interested in monkeys and village pariah dogs, reputedly rabid to a dog, that also sometimes left blood and fur on the Humber's grey girder of a front bumper...
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A very long time ago when first married, my wife had a Mk 1 Fiat Panda. She drove it as if it was a Golf GTi though.
Very early one summers morning she was taking me to the airport to catch an early flight. This involved a rural journey of some 30 miles or so. Alone on the empty road she bowled the little Fiat along with her usual aplomb. She is an excellent driver, as an aside.
We had reckoned without the number of rabbits that morning and quite accidently, over the course of the journey she must have squashed at least six of the poor creatures. This upset her a bit but obviously not enought to slow her down. We became morbidly used to the thunk of a bunny being flattened that morning.
Anyway, later that day I was in London and by way of a wheeze got a colleague to call her up and pretend to be from the RSPCA. He somberly explained that she had been observed deliberately murdering rabbits and did she realise it was the breeding season and now there would be parentless and starving baby rabbits and so on.....
Hooks, lines and sinkers come to mind...
Well after a day or two the "joke" was admitted to. By way of an end to the tale I had not realised until that point how much pain such a small person is capable of inflicting on a large one when properly motivated.....Especially given that the large person was dozing off in bed at the time chuckling about the success of their practical joke earlier in the week.....
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