What's in a fern?

I was looking at a fern and now I'm falling beneath shifting remnants, white footprints on a blue sky, a trail of moments in the giddy swirl of a cloud. They're all part of a story from another time ready now to be matched in this breath with a goddess I once saw. I saw her on the side of the road to Inverness where you turn left to head for the Isle of Skye. I saw her face from a bus window after she'd hailed the driver. She was perfectly proportioned and naturally elegant in movement. Tall as me. Her chestnut hair was a prism of copper light as she stepped up into the passage between seats. I was quick to look down. A girl like that is besieged by stares. I had no right to throw yet another at her. She walked past me looking for an empty seat other than the one next to me. I knew there were many and that the air which softly pressed between us would be the last part of a tragically short experience of her presence. A tap on my shoulder made me look into the curious green eyes of a fox. I insisted she take the window seat so as to see her and countryside at the same time. Her skin is flawless white all the way down from above full eyebrows to the upper swells of her breasts and her face... No magic mirror could ever tell any queen she looked more beautiful. Snow White had stepped out of a fairy tale and was sitting next to me and yes; she's a goddess but she's also a fox.

I figured her for 20 years old. She was a 2nd year student at a London University, on holiday and working at the only lodge on North Uist. I was on a walk-about after a short but taxing contract in Edinburgh. That's how I earned my living then. I was a fox for hire to those for whom all else had failed. I was paid to mend broken promises. We saw each other with a curiosity focused on what may happen next. It's a game like chess but with an aim of adventure and we were not to be opponents. We were to be conspirators, agile partners balanced between two breaths on a stepping stone in a mountain stream. A breath at a time. The next may be another or the same but in a different place and it must be near. A footprint stays still on the ground but nothing else does when we step above its gravity. For a moment we step beyond it into another moment to balance briefly in that before the next. We can move in a swirl of moments, some breathless, which may lead anywhere we let them take us.

In a formal beginning she speaks an immaculate English accent. We breathe through moments and turn between them as her voice becomes edged by a Scottish lilt. At times later she slips into Gaelic of the Outer Hebrides, sometimes with an amusingly apologetic translation and there's a time when the words not needed have fallen away.

People I've known longest are often those I know least. It's easier to meet an awake fox in a stranger than it is to find one in an old friend. Perceptions atrophy as worn and faded patterns of moments in a time past at a place where innocense was then found and is now lost. She leans back against the window, her head against it to face me. I see a subtle stress of caution give way to a faint tension of anticipation. Some sounds are lost and others are found. Textures fade from the picture's edges becoming no more than charcoal lines of a scene in a bus on paper. Sound and motion transform into the whispering glide of a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. At centre stage is an exquisite woman reclined on a shifting horizon of the Cuillins and eyes with the wildness of a fox. We tell each other secrets only strangers may know. We speak without preconceptions or preconcieved opinions until words go but voices remain like notes of a flute in a song which is as much of wordless thought as it is of sound. Her eyes are concentric zones of deep sea green threaded with emerald and amethyst and in them I see supple arms of imagination poised to engage with mine. They reach and entwine in rhythms of a dance. She moves nimbly with me when I guide and leads when she notices what I don't. A momentum grows until I slip and fall to find her falling with me a smile peeking out at me showing me how to fly. She takes me across a bay to a pebbled shore on the isle of Raasay where the otters play and up over heather and higher still on a stairway of lochs reflecting a blue veined far away sky. We swoop down from the top of Dun Caan toward the crater's lake transformed into the dragons who must live there. We gracefully alight on a black beach frosted by diamonds. A delighted smile shapes her mouth to match the sparkle of her eyes. A Gaelic exclamation trips off her tongue and I need no translation. She pulls me back up into the air and across a bay to be swung by wild winds which howl in orbits around the ancient giant sentinal of stone. She calls it Storr. We glide through the skirts of Skye, the clustered pleats of veiled air with as many as three seasons between, and beyond them across an isolation of open sea until her island appears at a cold and misty edge of the world. It's fringed by scores of glistening lochs set in a lacework of heather and peat. We land softly and look into each other's eyes without speaking. It's an eternal moment beyond the measures of age and time. I step out of a bus and stand on a pavement in Portree waving goodbye as the goddess leaves for where we already have been. I stand here ten years later reminded that I can still see her now just as clearly within a wild fern.