In the dead of night over many months, a visitor entered our kitchen and wrote in the wee small hours over the doormat. What to read into its silvery doodles other than “I was here, here and here”? I never crept downstairs to interrupt and spoil its mystery; never saw it or worked out how it came and went.
Every night it came without fail, until one parched day of the droughty summer. Over the previous few nights, the kitchen trails of our slug or snail had grown thin, thready and shorter.
That evening, we walked over the lawn and the dead grass powdered underfoot. How could anything in need of moisture possibly survive? On the following morning and the ones after, there was nothing on the doormat. Stickiness needs sustenance, and it seemed this little gastropod’s life of slime was over.
Now, with the return of rain, it’s back and laying trails. Not those feeble semicolon and comma dribbles of late, but the full spaghetti. Not dead as thought, but roused from aestivation, that improbable process by which slugs and snails all but shut down and sit out adverse conditions.
And yet still I fret. What do these longer, more frequent periods of inactivity in these arid summers mean for their health, for their ability to breed, for the song thrushes that depend so heavily on molluscs to see them through the autumn? Is there dearth under darkness and what might be the wider ramifications?
Outside the kitchen door, a morning downpour has brought forth a small battalion of banded snails. A shower is not enough to draw them from the lavender and on to the path; it takes a full soaking to flush them out, and each grazing mollusc appears to be drowning in its own meniscus. Except that they push on, riding through the waves over the concrete meadow, in colours and patterns many and various. Some with shells of cooking-apple green, others rose pink. Others still in bands thick and thin.
I have a sneaking doubt that there are fewer than in the spring, but push it aside and trust to hopefulness.
• 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
