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The Nomination: David Knowles
“Every essay of David's is a love affair with his subject(s), he dissects every minute living and decaying detail, entwining knowledge and prose with the sensitivity only a profound perception of nature can achieve. I chose this paragraph for its humbling honesty and realisation of how human beings are only ever tolerated in the places we call wild.”
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The Excerpt – “Up the back on a calm moonless night”
"For all her delicacy the night is rarely alone. She has her favourites. The horseshoe bat has always been welcome at her court, face like a battered rose but witty and well-informed. The badger, bluff and dependable. The polecat with his clown’s make-up hiding stiletto teeth. She has the Great Bear and the Dog Star to carry her insignia. Though nobody understood what she saw in him, she once took a blunt-headed comet as a lover. The Tawny Owls are the offspring of the union. So we must be thankful for her occasional indiscretions.
She rarely bothers to open her eyes. Sight, the judge and jury of the daylight hours, is a trickster after sundown. For the night, it is her nose which fills the few gaps which hearing has left unpainted. By smell alone she can follow the stoat through his labyrinth, footfall by footfall, even though he went to ground an hour ago. The slightest breeze is a watercolour of leaf mould, rabbit piss, otter spraint. Hedgehog is spicy, eel smells of sex in the grass. The scent-shades of life and death and decay are rich and long since in harmony. Mine is the only smell which offends her, uninvited as I am, out here in the black velvet lands where I have no business, no grace, no senses worth the name.
She has her footmen trip me up and laugh when I fall. They steal my hat and place it high, unseeable on a hawthorn branch. For now I must accept that I am not fit for this place, not worthy of being in her presence. To one day go unnoticed and ignored is the high honour I hope for. I’ll study hard to reach it."
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best words, best order: david knowles