Every step is a giveaway.
The crack of twigs, the crunch of dry leaves, a squelch through the mud - we are undercover elephants in crusty, dusty walking boots that still carry the years-old muck of a Scottish isle - so long is it since last they were worn.
But so be it. And as my mind plays over and over 'We're going on a bear hunt, we're going to catch a big one, we're not scared!!'*, I think it has been too, too long since we last ploughed through long, wavy grass (swishy swashy!), thick oozy mud (squelch squerch!) and crumbly woodland (stumble trip, stumble trip!).
We are in the Foret De Soignes**, a tiny part of the 4,000 acres or so that sweep across south-eastern Brussels, the part which borders the parks and lakes of the Bois de la Cambre, the part that is a 20-minute walk from our flat. And the need to get out of landscaped ornamental park into the thick, dense woodland is overwhelming. To be where the wild things are!
We set off along a narrow mud path, trying to adjust the eyes; binoculars - more recently used to spot the moons of jupiter than spotting a bird - slung round the neck, and we look for a giveaway flash in the peripheral vision, listen for a telltale rustle.
On one side of the path it's as if the forest is playing a magic eye trick: almost identical, slim, tall silver birches, parallel to each other, long, lean and vertical - you can almost be convinced there is a shape you're missing among the tree trunks.
And on the other side a giant, a great, wide-girthed, trunk stretching up and up and up and I'm wondering have I just not seen trees close up for a while or are these really extraordinarily tall. They are the kind of trees you can't just pass by. You have to touch them, to draw your fingers across the bark and wonder what histories they could recount.
Everything is becoming green. Not a thick, dark canopy, but a flittering of millions of tissuepaper-thin leaves, barely emerged, fresh, uncontaminated. And as a stronger breeze gusts up the delicate unfurling leaves of the silver birches rustle, witter and chatter. There are bluebells..only a first few, giving parts of the woodland floor a gentle blue hue and here and there are sprawling clumps of bell-like flowers (campanulas?).
High above there is the harsh 'shkaaaaaak' of a jay - its wings a flash of white and azure - and everywhere there is the almost-synthesised sibilant 'tsirrup' of nuthatches. They are a grey-blue blur as they fly from tree to tree but, through binoculars, are stunningly beautiful creatures with their bold eyestripe, and deep orangey-pink buff bellies.
If you stop and listen it's easy to hear them at work.
Tap tap tap.......tap tap tap.
There's no confusing them with the rapid drilling of the greater spotted woodpecker we'd seen earlier.
This is more gentle, you really have to stand still to hear it.
Follow your ears, almost pin it down and then it is on the wing, and, as it lands on the next tree, you catch it at last.
It explores tree trunks in a jerky, fidgety gait, hopping with head up, then head down digging out invertebrates, nuts and seeds. It's a clever little thing - able to wedge tougher nuts into cracks in the bark to hammer them open.
And then, on a neighbouring trunk, a treecreeper, a tiny brown bird with exquisite delicate bow-curved beak, flitting, batlike, from trunk to trunk. Unlike the nuthatch which can go in both directions, it heads ever upwards.
There are red squirrels here. They aren't red. They are rusty. And it is a joy to see them unthreatened by their boistrous, bully grey counterparts.
They bound along the ground, flick, flick, flicking their tails, easily identifiable by their tufty ears, even high up, in silhouette, when you can't see their colour, and we watch one with a pine cone, hoping to see it stop and eat or bury it, but it moves too quickly - now you see it, now you don't through the tree trunks - and then it is gone.
There is a song thrush calling, its loud repetitive song unmistakeable, and there are many, many great tits and we can also hear chaffinches, wood pigeons, and, suddenly a melancholy 'peeeeeioooooo' I've not heard here yet - a call I first heard on the high crags and moors on the Isle of Mull many years ago...a buzzard.
We scan the trees and there it is, perched on high, all talons, beak, brown speckles and pale breast. It takes off again quickly, disappearing from view, but we hear it for some time afterwards and I think it is one of the most beautiful, most desolate calls.
It feels a healthy forest - the cracked, gaping crooked limbs and trunks of long-dead trees are left to lie where they fall, for the moss to blanket and for fungi and insects to consume, perfect habitats among which woodmice bound and chipmunks duck, dive and chatter.
Yes, chipmunks. Siberian ones***. This was a surprise. Bright eyed and bushy tailed (literally), we spotted them darting between fallen trunks, over stumps, pausing, observing before ducking into sandy burrows.
One in particular allowed us to get very close. Too close. As if it had forgotten its wildness.
Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that his great great great great grandfather was probably kept as a pet before making his bolt for freedom and starting a colony. They shouldn't be here. And on learning this I'm unsure what to make of their presence. What has had to make way for their arrival?
The rain falls lightly at first and the wind strengthens. Somewhere close by wood is creaking against wood, that eerie sound that suggests timbers shivering at sea or rusty hinges in haunted houses.
Then it comes all at once. No shelter here! Raindrops gather and congeal on high branches and fall in great plops down the back of the neck and, for the first time, what with the bending and scraping of wood, the insistent wind and the driving rain, there's a slight and sudden fear of taking the wrong path, of plunging in deeper. Too much reading of Wind in the Willows, perhaps.
We turn around and yomp back, retracing our steps and eventually come to the forest edge, then tarmac, then park, then home... thrilled to have found a great outdoors on our doorstep.
A fruitless bear hunt though Thomas.
If we'd been here 1,000 years ago or so we might just have been luckier..and found one hiding in a narrow gloomy cave. They were here then you know.
Now there's a thought...
* Credit and thanks to Michael Rosen (author) and Helen Oxenbury (illustrator): 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt'. For the memories of happy times reading a fabulous book. In your top 10, Thomas, definitely...and your mum still knows it by heart.
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonian_Forest
*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_chipmunk
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