After the disarming warmth of early April, a few cold nights serve as a reset, and when I go out to collect the milk there is still a chill in the shade and the celandines are tightly closed. The sun is falling full on one of the sheets of corrugated metal I lay out in spring as warming refugia for cold-blooded creatures.
I peek beneath to see the first sleepy slowworm of the year, a female, about half-grown. She lies motionless, and when I lift and hold her in my pocket, she is as cold as alabaster. I remember the first time I saw such a creature, collected in a crisp packet by a boy at my school. He said it was a lizard with no legs. I didn’t believe him.
After a few minutes of warming she starts to stir, like stone animating into flesh in my hand. The polished smoothness of her body brings to mind an amulet of jade or jet, or the lissoir stones used by prehistoric people to burnish animal hide. Unlike snakes, whose scales usually overlap like roof tiles, hers fit like tiny mosaic tesserae, so there is no nap, no snag. Additionally, each of her scales lies over a minuscule disc of dermal bone, reinforcing the tactile sensation of a living sculpture. Her gloss is such that she could slide from my hand like water, but instead she twines my fingers in an unhurried flow of clean cursive forms, flicking the short, rounded forks of her tongue to sample my skin as she goes.
Her names recall that we never knew quite what to make of her kind. The old English sla-wyrm meant “earthworm-serpent”, while the Latin Anguis fragilis, “fragile snake” hints at an ability, shared with several other lizards, to cast off the end of the tail in an emergency – a neat trick, but surely still traumatic. Potential predators here are many: corvids, cats, pheasants, hedgehogs and badgers, so I’m not surprised to see her tail is already truncated.
With luck though, like me, she might live another 30 years on this slow lane, slipping through soil and briar and thicket, winding silent glyphs that thwart attempts to define her form: ampersand becoming knot, becoming spiral, becoming clef, becoming wave, becoming infinity.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
