I closed my laptop as I finished the last chapter. I had been hunched at my desk all morning; my body was telling me to get up and go for a run and I still had some time before going to pick the children up from school. It seems needless to say that I Love the crows and the lapwings on the hill. I Love the hill. Watching the sunsets and sunrises from the ancient barrow that tops it helps me to recognize and Love our Neolithic forebears who dug the barrow and watched the same transitions between day and night six millennia ago.

My usual run takes me up and over the hill and through the raised embankments of the ancient village that housed the people whose lives would be celebrated at the barrow four thousand years before Jesus or Mohammed were born. My legs then start to burn as I run back up the hill towards the barrow. On this day, as I reached the flat top of the hill and picked up my pace, a raven came and flew off my right shoulder, letting out a primal ‘craw’ as it joined me. We looked at each other as I ran along the crow- topped fence. The crows are used to me and so do not always fly off at my presence, but the raven was a surprise. Halfway along the fence, it let out another loud ‘craw’. Even louder this time as it swooped towards me, first clipping a crow with its wing, before brushing past me.

Looking down at the crow that the raven had led me to, I noticed some orange twine tangled around its feet and trapping it on the fence. The twine cut into its feet when it saw that I had stopped next to it and it tried to get away from me. It calmed down when I took my T- shirt off and carefully covered its head, but the twine was so tightly wound that it was cutting into the metallic flesh of its feet and would have broken its legs had I pulled it away. Momentarily dwelling on the problem, I remembered that I had previously noticed a rabbit burrow nearby.