At the Water's Edge. John Lister-Kaye
thought it was good. They planted their meagre crops and tended their animals here for thousands of years, keeping the forest at bay and slowly but systematically removing the unwelcome competition from wildlife such as deer, wolves, wild boar and bears. They went to bed with their bellies full and slept soundly at night. There is no doubt who was winning their game of King of the Castle.
But competition never sleeps; it is built into the very spiral of the DNA double helix. Like love and hate it is built in, a part of us all. Just as tribal societies all over the world persistently fought among themselves for the land and its resources and the security and the options for living that came with it, so did the Highland clans. That pressure never lifts. Even now our new Scottish parliament is fingering the legal rights of those who own the land. At least in this glen we no longer kill each other.
Unconcerned about land rights or food production, and also with his belly full, Ralph Waldo Emerson could afford to wax lyrical about the woods:
I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.
In his darkest dreams it can never have occurred to Emerson that, by exactly the same process as Geordie’s patch of Highland hillside was shorn of its forest, his own Massachusetts woods would soon be almost entirely cleared. Nor that within the span of just two human lives – little more than one hundred and seventy years – the human population of the USA would be approaching 300 million and the world 6.45 billion, with such patches of wilderness (mostly deserts) that are left teetering on the very margins of ecological viability. Suddenly his question seems acutely relevant. To what end is nature now? And what if the Hokey-Kokey is what it’s all about?
Geordie returns to his Toyota pick-up. I watch it bump away down the track; Tam stands in the back, head out at the side, tongue lolling and ears flapping in the wind. He has done his rounds; for now the competition seems to have lapsed, the lambing is going well, the sheep are okay. I walk on.
If I’m honest, I don’t really like sheep. The Highland hills have suffered badly from overgrazing since the old cattle economy ended in the early nineteenth century and the Highlands’ agriculturalists rushed into sheep. Wool profits and hill sheep fortunes have waxed and waned like a tide for two hundred years, but they have never gone away. Throughout the twentieth century the crofting world of small-scale agriculture seems to have pivoted around the sheep as its principal source of revenue and employment. It has spawned a sheep culture of its own, which is immediately evident to any traveller through the crofting counties: bare hills and close-cropped sward, lambing pens, dry-stone fanks, wind-tanned faces, quad bikes, collies and wool sacks hanging from their summer gallows. Yet I have come to respect those who have given their lives to caring for their livestock; those who never complain about the long, unsociable hours, the foot-slogging toil, the driving rain and sleet or the summer midges; all those who fiercely defend crofting as a way of life, regardless of whether it makes economic sense or not. I feel an empathy for Geordie and his black-faced ewes – ‘blackies’ – and their leaping, gambolling, bleating progeny, scattered across the hill like currants in a bun.
The trail takes me up the burn and through the spruce plantation to within a few yards of the old pine where the hoodie is perched. He is alert and wise to human movements. He has watched Geordie come and go – they both have. Hoodies know the range of a shotgun, the shape of a rifle. They know they are hated and that they are also dependent upon man’s activities to raise their young. They could choose to live safely high in the mountains where contact with man would be minimal, but life up there would be tougher. Without the constant food supply provided by farming and crofting they would have to work harder, compete more, defend a larger range, and, like the great tits and the caterpillars, they would be far more vulnerable to the vagaries of climate and season. Their presence here is a calculated decision; a risk assessment perpetually grinds inside their black, angular skulls.
For a while this pastoral scene is idyllic. The birds sing; a buzzard wheels overhead, lazily spiralling higher and higher with the barometer. The sky is ribbed with the mackerel cirro-stratus of incipient high pressure. I see the hoodie’s head tilt sideways as it eyes the buzzard, assesses the threat and weighs up the competition. It cries out: three rasping calls as rough as scraping your exhaust pipe on a stone, as if to alert its partner still back there on the boulders overlooking the slope. All hawks are a threat, even to these finely tuned predatory villains.
I’m close to the loch now. The drinking water nonsense is still fizzing in my head. I wander closer, almost as if I have to check out the colour for myself. If I’m not careful that letter could spoil my day. I must think like Emerson, be aware of ‘the perpetual presence of the sublime’. It works. These eight acres of cloud-reflecting sky are as close to sublime as I’m likely to get today; I never tire of the surprise that greets me as I top the rise and see over the dam for the first time.
From the east the loch is sheltered by the woods. In these conditions the surface immaculately mirrors the world in which we live. It has sun and clouds and woods brimming to its shores. Birds trace through and the ospreys and herons draw wide arcs around its rim. Over the other side, near the marsh and where the water lilies are surging upwards from their long winter sleep, my friend and neighbour, Pat MacLellan, is fly fishing, although, like me, he comes for the escape not the catch. (‘Don’t know what it is, John, but those damn trout just seem to laugh at me.’) I see his rod and cast whip elegantly back and forward in double show. The green hull of his rowing boat is precisely replicated beneath him, and through my binoculars I can see his khaki baseball cap shimmering gently, a perfect upside-down image in the glowing water. We wave to each other and I turn away smiling. Pat always makes me smile.
As I walk away from the dam I see that the hoodie on the pine has gone. Something chills deep down inside my guts. I know it wasn’t me that put him off. We had eyed each other up, that hoodie and I, and passed on. I didn’t rattle him, nor, then, for all his reputation, did I have good cause to suspect him of any imminent foul intent. I leave Pat to the laughing fish he almost certainly won’t catch (although, astonishingly, he holds the loch record!), and head back down the trail to the field edge. Up with the binoculars to check out the other bird in the boulders: not there. Now I know they’re up to no good.
To gain a vantage point I have to head uphill again to a spur that overlooks the loch and the pasture. It is steep and I have to push hard against gravity for fully ten minutes. At the top I’m out of breath and can’t hold the binoculars still enough to scan the broad grass slopes in front of me. I rest. The land is quiet. Nothing seems to have changed. The hoodies have gone, just vanished. I’m suspicious, but, fears temporarily allayed, I perch on an old log while the pounding in my breast subsides.
On the very edge of hearing, a cry as thin as tissue peels away from the bright grass slope like a sliver of paint from a barn door. I am not even sure I heard it. In a broom bush beside me a willow warbler takes over, claiming the morning in a long cascade of descending notes. I love him but I wish he would shut up. I clap my hands and he’s off in a flicker of lemon tea. I hold my breath. The cry comes again, weaker, if that is possible, but higher pitched and so edged with pathos that I know my instincts were right.
I vault the fence and run out into the short grass. Two ewes start away from me, tails bouncing. Their strong lambs dash in behind them, heading away down the hill. In front of me, still a hundred yards out, is a small glacial terrace that runs across my vision in a low ridge concealing some dead ground. It seems to take an age to get there. As I top the rise I feel that low-slung clawing again in my abdomen. There is dirty work afoot and I am sure of it. But there is nothing: no lambs, no ewes, no hoodies, nothing – just a cropped green emptiness nestling in a Highland hollow on a May morning. I feel a little foolish.
As I turn to walk back down the slope the cry comes again. It is close, so close that I have failed to see its source almost beneath my feet. There, just a yard away, its outline blurred by a pale clump of last year’s grass, is a lamb. It is tiny, lying with its back to me, so weak that it can barely lift its head. I realise straight away