It’s Monday morning on the Moray mudflats of Findhorn Bay.
A new moon presides over a very low, spring tide.
The geese have already flown, in a great cacophony of morning discord, which I heard from the van, while watching the stovetop coffee maker gurgle and steam in the morning twilight, everyone else sleeping.
There is nobody around when I venture out, just me and the mud and the wading birds and the blue-grey sky and the suggestion of smoky mountains on an opaque horizon.
Rippled, puddled, grey-brown sand stretches out before me, revealing a landscape usually inaccessible and submerged. I’m tempted.
Curlew flies past, uttering its long bubbling trill.
Where the grass meets the edge I pause to ponder quicksand and imperilled cockle pickers before placing one foot over the threshold onto the wet ground.
It’s reassuringly firm, an inch of water here and there, but nothing to dissuade further footfall and as the first island is only three steps away I make landfall easily enough. Emboldened, I push on.
On the wing above, herring gull laughs at me stopping and starting in the mud, mocking my halting progress.
So I strike across a clew of worm casts, a bed of sandy mounds, put up by lugworms living in burrows beneath the wet sand.
Ahead of me, oystercatcher pokes about in the sand, prising open cockles and mussels with its strong, flattened bill.
Further on, the next small island sand bar seems to be a bird midden, the remains of an ongoing feast, strewn with piles of busted, hammered shells, the fleshy innards long since swallowed.
Keep going, I’m a long way out now.
Then something changes.
Stand still, look around, check behind.
Watchful, fearing the cut off, I go out of my mind and feel what’s under my feet, breathing softly, watching the water, unmoving for the longest time.
After a while, in the near distance, a movement, almost imperceptible, betrayed by a path of ripples on the surface, growing in size and strength, heading toward the sea. The tide has turned.
Time for me to turn too, I walk back.
