At the Water's Edge. John Lister-Kaye
over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’ – later to be justified and permanently imbued in the founding principles of Christian society by the seminal thirteenth-century teachings of St Thomas Aquinas.
At a time when many of the great wildernesses of the New World were being opened up for the first time, Emerson and his colleagues leapt from the notion of taming the wild to harmonising with it in spirit and deed. The concept and philosophy of nature conservation as we know it owes much to these exuberant and assertive scripts. But they also perpetually question what it is all about. ‘To what end is nature?’ asks Emerson early in his famous essay, a question that presents itself to every naturalist over and over again. As science systematically strips back the scales from our eyes the questions loom larger, not smaller. ‘God knows why I’m here at all,’ a man I met working in the woods said enigmatically to me recently. A few days later I saw a teenager walking down the Inverness street with ‘Perhaps the Hokey-Cokey is what it’s all about’ boldly printed across the back of his sweatshirt.
Out there, just over the fence and up the steep field, on a high spot where, like clenched knuckles, grey boulders nudge through the grass, sits a solitary hooded crow, a blackguard of the crow clan known round here as a ‘hoodie’ – a term as far away from endearment as you can get, but one often spoken with the sort of respect afforded to Attila the Hun, or, in Highland Scottish parlance, the Wolf of Badenoch, the fourteenth-century warrior chief (Alexander Stewart, 1st Earl of Buchan) who sacked Elgin Cathedral and many other sites. The hoodie has a reputation. It also knows exactly why it’s here.
It is a handsome bird, strong and well balanced, with a black hood – as someone once said to me, ‘as black as Calvin’s bible’ – and a grey mantle as pale and soft as a cloud that threatens a shower. Everything else is black, crow-black: the sharp, powerful bill, the gimlet eye, the tough, springy legs and scaly feet, the long wings and tail – the satanic reputation. It is, of course, a race of the carrion crow, Corvus corone, one of the arch-rogues of the bird world, but the hoodie is awarded its own ensign – cornix, ‘of crows’. So he becomes the ultimate crow of all crows, the highly intelligent arch-knave of the corvid tribe, craftier than a raven and quicker to seize upon an opportunity; more cunning than his cousins the artful jackdaws, magpies and jays. Unlike the rowdy, gregarious rook, he is a loner, usually working alone or as one of a pair, furtive, sly and often seen to be malevolent with it. You can’t impugn a hoodie; he’s been there before you.
It is hoodies that will spot a sore on a sheep’s back and harry it, landing over and over again, savagely pecking so that the wound stays open, letting in flies to lay their eggs. Before anyone notices it the sheep is down, ‘struck with the fly’, as they say round here. Hill sheep often lie undiscovered for days. Maggots will do the rest. A suppurating carcase is a hoodie’s idea of nirvana.
It is the hoodie that will swoop down and chisel its stabbing bill into a clutch of four newly hatched curlew chicks, one by one, as they struggle to find cover among the heather, leaving them maimed and strewn across the moor like victims of a sniper, cheeping out the pathos of their own imminent destruction, moving on to the next one, and returning later to finish them off, while the yikkering cries of the frantic mother rend the air overhead.
This one bird on the rock looks innocent enough, sunning itself, occasionally preening. But it is neither innocent nor alone. Its partner is perched atop the lightning-scorched mast of a Scots pine, only just in my view some three hundred yards away to the left. Between them they can scan a whole hillside containing the spread hirsel of my neighbour Geordie McLean’s sheep. They are waiting. Opportunistic patience is the name of this game. They are waiting and watching the lambing field: waiting for events to unfold, for an afterbirth or a stillborn lamb, watching for the slightest chance to raid and plunder.
It is May and the wide pasture is dotted with ewes like a repeating emblem on a counterpane. Many are yet to produce. Little gangs of strong lambs cluster like schoolchildren in a playground. They rush off in a game of Tag, tearing along the fence, halting suddenly and rushing back again. Then they scamper off to a low mound – it’s Follow My Leader. The strongest lamb – at least a week old – gets there first and bags the high point; the others are jostling, pushing, competing. He holds his ground, bleating assertively – King of the Castle. The air vibrates with their high-pitched, stuttering din. The expectant ewes graze quietly, apparently unaware of four black, scanning, scouring eyes.
Competition: that’s what it’s all about. We’re all competing, all the time, although like Emerson we merrily choose to wrap it in fluff, sentimentalise it, rose-colour it, to conceal it in any way we can. We’re not good at facing up to unpalatable truths. But we are all competing for space, light, food, mates and power, each and every last one of us: archbishops, civil servants, vagabonds and vicars, knaves, princes and prostitutes, welders and trapeze artists, bus drivers and bakers – even naturalists. Any excuse will do. Even the colour of our drinking water would become a competition for authority if I rose to the challenge.
The great tits are frantically competing for caterpillars; competing against other bird species and other great tits. The caterpillars are competing with each other for the starch-filled cellulose they need to grow; they’re munching for all they’re worth, gripped by the fear that somebody else’s mandibles will get there first. The leaves are competing for light; far below, the roots are jostling with the root hairs of other plants for water and minerals, grabbing, grasping, gripping and hanging in there for all they are worth. The whole thing is one ghastly, urgently swirling, deadly serious game of King of the Castle.
Years ago I read in Sir Dudley Stamp’s thoughtful analysis of nature conservation in Britain that our post-industrial societal values were no longer determined by those of primary food producers – farmers and fishermen – and that since most of us no longer had to worry about where our food was coming from our attitude to nature was one step removed from reality. Back in 1969 Stamp was right, as was Emerson in 1836. Relieved of the worries of primary food producers who, throughout the Third World, still struggle for soils and against agricultural pests every day of their lives, we can waft through the woods musing loftily, ‘To what end is nature?’
A vehicle crunches slowly up the track and parks at the field gate. It is Geordie, now in his sixties, whose crofting family have kept sheep and cattle on this land for centuries. Tam, his black and white border collie, leaps from the back of the pick-up and clears the fence in a high, excited bound. Tam is a young dog and still has to be worked through. Enthusiasm for the task in hand is fine, but over-exuberance is counter-productive. Geordie calls him in with a wave of his long crummack and they move up the slope together with the dog at heel.
Those who give their lives to working with animals also gift themselves to the land. They know it and love it, and, over time, it adopts them and shapes them to its will so that they become a part of the landscape, blending with it in economy of movement and sureness of foot, hand and eye. The gentle philosophy of the hills and glens shapes their weather-sculpted faces, delivers broad smiles and a knowing nod in place of unnecessary words.
I watch man and dog walking quietly among the ewes. Tam drops to command, lying obediently while Geordie eases in and catches up a lamb with the looped handle of his crummack. He checks it out; the ewe grates loudly, a stammering ‘He-e-e-e-e-y!’ of disapproval. She stands her ground and faces him; crossly she stamps her neat little front hooves, first one and then the other. He gives her lamb back, placing it gently on the cropped turf. It runs to its mother and immediately suckles, tail a-shimmer like a ribbon in the breeze. Geordie is a primary food producer, although I don’t think he sees himself or his hill sheep as competing with anything much, except perhaps the weather.
Most of the competition was over long ago. With fire and axe men cleared this land from climax forest, using the timber and burning the brush, exposing the fertility of the forest soils to the sun and the rain. Grasses rushed in. With competition eliminated, those colonising plants had the light and the nutrients to themselves.