Country diary: even reduced to bare bones the bat's magic remains

Welburn, North Yorkshire With a tiny paintbrush and tweezers I salvage a skeleton: the tiny skull, the whisker-fine finger bonesI found it at the top of the field in July, after the barley harvest. A little body, wings folded and face scrunched. It was snagged on a scaffold of stubble like a miniature sky burial, overlooking a vista it must have known well until the previous night, when, somehow, all its knowing became nothing. Reflexively, I picked it up. In my hand, with its sky-tickling energ