Screeching alarm, silent attack

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/03/country-diary-alarm-wren-weasel-attack

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Bare, cropped hedges of hazel and hawthorn, riddled with glimmering light, bound fields that stretch up to green westerly ridges. I took a path descending from the ridgeway towards the river Unk. This insignificant stream concertinas its way down a valley too big for its volume, like a scrawny boy in a fat uncle’s hand-me-downs. Its quiet surrounding landscape is one of robust spurs and rounded hill flanks. On a mist-smudged day of the year’s ending all was still, not a breath of wind to stir the last lemony leaves on field maple, the last umber hangings of scattered sentinel oaks.

Something sulphurous caught at my throat as I reached the margin of Nut Wood – a pungent animal scent, neither stoat nor polecat but surely one of that family? In the same instant my ears were assailed by fingernails-on-a-blackboard screechings of an alarmed wren, which whirred to and fro, in and out of the underbrush, minutely and vociferously indignant. Why was it scolding? I stilled myself into the landscape and watched: focusing on the wren’s continuing commotion, absurdly loud for so small a creature; recalling how my grandfather would reward me with a farthing coin bearing Humphrey Paget’s alert, dumpy 1937 design of the bird whenever I spotted one in the hedges of the Manchester park at the bottom of his street.

As I remembered this, the wren’s protests reached a crescendo. Bounding out from under gorse bushes came a weasel – a slender, dancing presence in chestnut and white, vibrant, little over a foot long, dark eyes in its arrowhead skull searching for prey. It ignored the wren, scented around, loped over to where a small rabbit crouched immobile under a bank. In a savage flurry of motion it fastened on the back of the rabbit’s neck, and bit hard and deep, then disappeared as swiftly as it had come, leaving the unresistant rabbit paralysed, trembling: a hedgerow brutality, a survival necessity, savage but not tragic, miniaturised, only the wren’s alarm as elegy. I did not interfere.