They’ve suddenly got hens, the owners of the Landaround. Even with ear plugs in to drown the roar of aircon, I am waked as if my mother had just wheeched off my duvet, which she did. That voice is sharp enough to cut through steel and it, He, is right outside my door for some reason, hurtling his testosterone into an early dawn. I rise and yank the door open in my Notverymuch and there he struts, coloured up like a whole day on legs. He eyes me. I eye him. Jaunty he is, proud of his strut, reminding me of someone I once knew and who was not a fowl, or maybe he was, but with a different spelling. I watch the dawn sun rise just behind him as he stands his ground on my doorstep, flightlighting his feathers, lifting the rainbows as he fingers the air with his wings showing me orange and magenta and purple and butter.

Hallo, I say and he quirks and takes a squiff at my bare legs. No eye contact I notice, I say quietly because my neighbours are still in bed as I should be. He ignores that, his head performing moves that would snap mine. Finally he struts away, tail feathers sassy, but he doesn’t go far. Why….I can’t resist asking him this….aren’t you with your women? He just moves away, pecking in the dusty dirt, shrieking out now and then. Later, as we drive out for a morning walk, I see why he is alone. Across the sandy space there is a hurry of hens and a big Chanticleer as their owner/protector pecking about quite joco. It wonders me. What does a single cockerel do in such a situation?

We walk in the winelands, moving beneath blue mountains and through baboon lands. At times we bundu bash, although it isn’t the same as in the Real, where Bush/Bundu is dense and positively quivering with possible bites or stings, where my fear levels could stay me back in camp amd thus miss me every exciting thing, even bites and stings. These walks are wild, yes but in a very polite way, the sort of place that Englanders will walk through in frocks and flip-flops with loud voices and a certain entitlement. It is a gift to walk here any day, quietly, respectfully, noticing everything, seeing the baboons, hearing their wee ones shriek in play down by the river, to greet the workers, to notice the swell and fall of the river, hear it bubble and trip over stones older than anyone can map; to notice the growth of the second spring, the pulse of risepetals from just yesterday, to smell the wind and to hear her stories.

Evening still. Watching the sun dip, casting flames all around the blue hills, the tall grasses, our faces. And so, another day. Tomorrow could be anything but I absolutely do know that it will begin with a cockerel.