Noises in the night

When I was thirteen, my dad took our family on a camping trip in the English countryside. It would’ve been a nice idea, except we already lived in the English countryside. It wasn’t so much a holiday, as our regular life, made slightly worse. We traded our house for two tents, our beds for sleeping bags, and our TV for a deck of cards that was missing its Queen of Spades.

The campsite was in the grounds of an old manor house, on the border between two counties. Dad was a birdwatcher, and he’d picked the campsite because the area was famous amongst birders for its red kites, harriers, and honey-buzzards.

I did not care about kites, harriers, or buzzards – honeyed or otherwise. What bothered me was the deer. The campsite was infested with them. We had plenty of roe deer and muntjac back home, so there was nothing novel or exciting to me about seeing deer, and the campsites sika weren’t enough to outweigh their muntjac problem.

Every evening, as the last rays of the August sun disappeared beneath the horizon, the squat little muntjac came shuffling out of the woods, hellbent on causing carnage. They rubbed their gaping scent glands against tree trunks and low hanging branches, and they pressed their faces into the undergrowth, snorting and gasping, like boar searching for truffles, snapping every stick and twig and loose chunk of tree bark in earshot. They mostly travelled alone, but when two male muntjac came across each other, they would bark like feral dogs, butt heads, and maul one another with their stubby antlers and tusks.

Somehow, the rest of my family managed to sleep through the muntjacs’ midnight matinee, but not me. I'd barely slept a wink since we’d arrived.

‘All I do is close my eyes and go to sleep,’ my little sister Lottie said, when I asked how she was sleeping through all the commotion. ‘And then, when I wake up, it’s morning. Have you tried closing your eyes and going to sleep?’

I wanted to punch her, but I knew Mum and Dad would tell me off, and I was terrified they might extend the holiday as punishment if I hurt Lottie. I could hear Dad chastising me, ‘That’s it, Fawna,’ he’d say, ‘we’re just going to have to stay here, until you two learn to get along.’

No matter how satisfying it would be to punch Lottie, it wasn’t worth even one more day of camping.

On the last night of the holiday, I was curled up inside my sleeping bag, reading by the light of Dad’s head torch, when I heard something different. It started with the familiar sound of four hooves, crunching through the undergrowth. I stopped reading to listen because the animal sounded heavy – heavier, even, than a roe buck – and that’s when I heard it. The creature outside was making a deep, rumbling noise in the back of its throat. It was a soft sound, much gentler than the harsh yelps and barks of the muntjac. And there was something warm and comforting about it, like the purring of a cat, or the nickering of a horse.

Wiggling my way up my sleeping bag, I popped my head out the top to see if Lottie had heard the noise, too. Unsurprisingly, she was fast asleep. I thought about waking her, but I didn’t want to waste time and miss seeing whatever was outside.

Bleary-eyed and confused, I unzipped the door to our tent, as quietly as I could, and stepped out into the campsite. I probably should have been scared, but I wasn’t. I had convinced myself that what I’d heard was a horse. It was the only animal I knew of in England large enough to sound that heavy. I didn’t know how a horse would have got into the woods, but I wanted to see it.

Lottie and I had been riding for almost as long as we’d been walking, and all of our family loved horses. Mum had even ridden with the hunt when she was younger, until Dad begged her to stop.

I glanced around the campsite, but I couldn’t see the horse anywhere. I couldn’t even see any deer.

A few hundred feet away there was another family, staying in a caravan. They had chained their border collie, Walker, to a stake in the ground. He was sat up, looking in my direction. For a moment, I thought he was going to start barking at me, but then I remembered the old boy was so ancient, he was almost completely deaf and blind. Just because he was looking at me, that didn’t mean he could see or hear me, and it certainly didn’t mean he had the moxie left to start barking. His family had probably called him Walker as an ironic joke, back when he’d been a puppy, charging around the farm; but now, walking was about all Walker could manage, and even that was a struggle.

‘It’s cruel,’ Mum said, when we’d first arrived. ‘They should put the old wretch out of his misery.’

Dad shook his head. ‘Nothing crueller than death. Even a miserable life is a life worth living. Let the poor bugger hang on for all he’s got. God knows I will, when my time comes.’

I hadn’t really given what they said much thought – being young, thoughts of death and mortality weren’t at the forefront of my mind – but Walker didn’t seem too disappointed to be alive.

As I looked around the campsite for the horse, I noticed a trail of destruction through the trees behind my parent’s tent. From the broken branches and crushed shrubs, it looked like a large animal had passed through that way.

Figuring it must have been the horse, I slipped my welly boots on and followed the trail into the woods. Had I been more awake, I would’ve got dressed and asked Mum to go with me. Instead, sleep-deprived and confused as I was, I set off after the horse in my pyjamas, with nothing but Dad’s head torch to guide the way.

Walking through the woods felt like wandering into a fairy tale. I didn’t have any breadcrumbs to scatter behind me, but I wasn’t worried about getting lost. I thought I could follow the trail of broken branches back to the campsite after I found the horse, and that would be fine.

Eventually, though, I reached a point in the woods where the trees changed. The dense green of the beech and oak trees made way for the branchless trunks of the silver birch. The change was so sudden, and the difference between the trees so stark, it felt like I’d walked into another world.

In the white light of Dad’s head torch, the silver birch looked deathly pale and thin, like they were the ghosts of forgotten trees that’d come long before.

With so few branches low down on the birch trees, there was no more trail to follow and no sign of the horse I’d been tracking. I thought about turning back, but the woods were quiet compared to the campsite, and I was tired.

Continuing, half-awake and half-asleep, I found a clearing a little way into the birch trees, where the moonlight fell through the break in the woodland canopy, onto the ground beneath an ancient English hornbeam. I made my way to the foot of the great tree, turned off the light on my head torch, and curled up against the moss-covered trunk that twisted and bulged and wound its way into the ground.

The air at the campsite had been warm, but the air in the clearing was cold. It didn’t feel like a summer’s night, anymore. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but a sudden gust of wind sent a chill running down my spine. 

The branches above my head creaked and groaned.

Run, they said.

‘Oh, great,’ I whispered back, wanting nothing more than to sleep, ‘now the trees are talking.’