A BARE HOLLOW Walking up the hollow, along the course
of the stream, I remembered that the last time I went that way I found a magpie's nest in a broken-topped fir, and a brood of hedge- sparrows in a little bush at the side of the track. It was spring then. Today the scene is different, for the bramble clumps are naked skeletons, and the alders by the water are Marooned in a spate that has carried the stream over its banks. Among the alders a Mulch of leaves and other debris gathers, and it is dangerous to walk on the lower side of the path where a pair of waterhens have left their tracks on the smooth, black mud. Up
on the side of the hill the magpie's nest is still there, but someone fired the gorse, and the little bush where the hedgesparrows were reared is now charred sticks buried in the grass. The hollow once swarmed with rabbits, but today its only life consists of one or two small birds, the waterhens in their secret over- hang of the bank, and the magpies, flirting their tails and looping over the bare trees.
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