The path begins where the lane ends, just past the last streetlamp, where the tarmac gives way to packed earth and the hedgerow thickens into hawthorn and blackthorn and a little elder gone to berry. You step onto it and the sound changes. The village falls behind in a single soft diminishment, one television through a window, a gate latch somewhere, and then only the river, which is barely a sound at all, more a displacement of quiet. The water lies to your left, low between its banks, the colour of wet slate. A faint mist walks on it, knee-high, moving the way breath moves. You walk slowly. The path is dry underfoot and wide enough for two.
The moon is up but behind cloud, and the light it gives is even and without source, so that the willows along the far bank stand in no particular direction of shadow. They lean toward the water as willows do, their long withies trailing the surface, and where a withy touches it the river makes a slow ring and lets it go and makes another. You watch one tree for a while as you walk past, and then another. Farther down, a pollarded crack willow has grown back into a low crown of new shoots, each one straight and pale, a kind of sheaf standing on an old stump. Beyond it the bank bends and the water bends with it, and the path follows them both without hurry, the way a path does when it has been walked for a long time by people going nowhere particular.
A sound comes from the reeds on the near side, small and domestic, a moorhen shifting in its roost. You hear the reeds part and close. Then nothing. Then, a little later, the same sound repeated further along, or perhaps a different bird doing the same small work. The reeds here are tall and dry at the top and green lower down, and the wind that is not quite a wind moves through them with a dry, continuous whisper, the sort of sound that seems to be coming from every direction and none. Under it, if you listen, there is the river itself, not loud enough to be called running, more a low steady pressure against the bank, a sound like a held note played very softly on something made of wood. It goes on being that sound whether you are listening to it or not.
You pass a wooden footbridge that crosses a side channel, its handrail worn smooth and dark where generations have rested a palm going over. You let your fingers trail along it as you cross, and the wood is cool and slightly damp, faintly furred with the night. The planks give a low, hollow sound under your boots, three steps, four, and then the earth again. On the far side a bench sits set back from the path, its seat sagging at the middle where the wood has taken the shape of a hundred thousand sittings. You don't sit. You keep walking. A moth, late for the year, blunders up from the grass by the bench and loops once around your sleeve and is gone, and the place where it was is marked for a moment by a small stir of air against your wrist, and then that, too, thins into the general cool.
The air here smells of river, which is a smell made of several things at once: of water over flint, of the green rot of the weed that grows in the slow bends, of the cold clay of the bank where an otter or perhaps only the rain has scooped a small slide. There is woodsmoke in it as well, very faint, carried out over the fields from a chimney in the village, and under the woodsmoke the dry, mineral smell of autumn leaves that have lost their sugar and gone to paper. Somewhere a late apple has fallen in an orchard you cannot see, and although you cannot smell it from here, you know the smell and the knowledge of it arrives anyway, thin and sweet and slightly fermented, and walks with you for a few paces before going back to where it came from.
Downriver the heron is standing. You see it only as a darker vertical in a row of dark verticals, the reed stems and the one still shape among them that is not a reed. It is fishing, or waiting to fish, which in a heron is the same thing. You slow without meaning to and then walk on at the same pace, so as not to startle it, and it does not move as you pass, only watches the water with the kind of attention that does not need to be paid because it is already being kept. A little further on you look back, and the heron is in the same posture, and the reeds are in the same posture, and the mist is still walking on the water at knee height, and you turn forward again and keep going, and somewhere behind you the heron puts its head down or does not.
The cloud thins for a moment and the moon comes through, and the river takes the light the way old pewter takes it, flat and grey and slightly warmed. You can see further now. The far bank shows its detail: a stile, a leaning gatepost, the squared black shape of a cattle trough set back in the field. A few cows are lying down near it, their backs making long low humps in the grass, and one of them is chewing, the rhythm of the jaw visible only because the white patch on its face keeps moving against the darker ground. Farther still, the church tower of the next village sits on its low rise, and a single light burns in a farmhouse window on the hillside, the yellow of a lamp left on in a hallway for someone not yet home. The cloud closes again, slowly, and the details go back into their darker versions of themselves, and the river goes back to slate.
You come to a place where the path widens and an old brick sluice stands half-buried in the bank, its ironwork gone to a soft red rust, its wheel fixed long ago into one position. Water slides past it without noticing it. The brick is the colour brick becomes after a hundred and fifty winters by a river, a deep even russet with pale lichen in the joints, and moss along the top course where a little soil has gathered. A small fern has found a crack and grown out of it sideways. You stand by the sluice for a moment, one hand on the cold curve of the wheel, and then you walk on. The path carries you past a stand of alders, their trunks dark and upright, and then past a single ash that has shed most of its leaves into a loose ring around its own base, so that you walk through that ring without quite disturbing it.
The moorhen calls once, very close, a single soft note that is more a click than a call, and then settles. A fish rises somewhere out in the middle of the stream and the ring of its rising opens and travels to both banks and is lost. The willows continue to lean. The mist continues to walk. The path, being the path, continues as well, pale and even, between the reeds on one side and the hedge on the other, and the hedge is full of small rustlings that do not resolve into anything and do not need to. A blackbird shifts its feet in its roost. A vole moves along its run under the matted grass. You walk, and the walking itself becomes a kind of listening, and you don't count your steps, and you don't count the bends of the river, because there is no number at the end of either.
Ahead the path goes on, and further on, and further, losing itself gently in the dark between the trees where the moon does not quite reach. The mist thickens there, and the far bank softens, and the near bank softens, and the water between them takes on the colour of the air above it until you cannot tell exactly where one ends and the other begins. The heron is a long way behind you now, or perhaps has moved, or perhaps has not. The willows lean as they leaned. Somewhere the river keeps on under the mist, going at the pace it has always gone, and the path goes with it, and your steps grow quieter on the packed earth, and the sound of the reeds thins, and the light thins, and the cold on your hands thins, and the path keeps going, pale and even, into the dark between the trees, and the river beside it, slower now, slower still…