Ring of Bright Water. Gavin Maxwell
up with her ears back and slashing wickedly with her fore-hooves each time he stooped with an audible rush of wind through his great upswept pinions; if one hoof had struck home she would have brought him down disembowelled, but though she never touched more than a wingtip the eagle grew wary and finally sailed off down the glen, the sun gleaming whitely on the burnish of his mantle.
It is the helpless red-deer calves that are the staple food of the hill foxes in June, and the young lambs in April and May, but what they live on for the rest of the year now that the rabbits have gone and the blue mountain hares become so scarce, remains a mystery to me. Possibly they eat more seldom than we imagine, and certainly mice form a large part of their diet. Some years ago I went out with a stalker to kill hill foxes after lambing time. The foxes’ cairn was some two thousand feet up the hill, and we left at dawn, before the sun was up over hills that were still all snow at their summits, silhouetted against a sky that was apple-green with tenuous scarlet streamers. The cairn, a big tumble of granite boulders in a fissure of the hillside, was just below the snowline, and by the time we reached it the sun had lifted in a golden glare over the high tops. The terriers went into the cairn and we shot the vixen as she bolted, and the dogs killed and brought out the five cubs; but of the dog fox there was no sign at all. We found his footprints in a peat hag a few hundred yards below, going downhill, and he had not been galloping but quietly trotting, so we concluded that he had left the cairn some time before we had reached it and was probably unaware of anything amiss. We sat down under cover to wait for his return.
We waited all day. The spring breeze blew fresh in our faces from where the sea and the islands lay spread out far below us, and we could see the ring-net boats putting out for the first of the summer herring. All day there was very little movement on the hill; once a party of stags in early velvet crossed the lip of the corrie on our right, and once an eagle sailed by within a stone’s throw, to bank sharply and veer off with a harsh rasp of air between the quills as his searching eye found us. In the evening it became chilly, and when the sun was dipping over the Outer Hebrides and the snow-shadows had turned to a deep blue, we began to think of moving. We were starting to gather up our things when my eye caught a movement in the peat hags below us. The dog fox was trotting up hill to the cairn, quite unsuspicious, and carrying something in his jaws. The rifle killed him stone dead at fifty yards, and we went down to see what he had been carrying; it was a nest of pink new-born mice – all he had found to bring home in a long day’s hunting for his vixen and five cubs.
At first sight it is one of the enigmas of the country around Camusfeàrna, this great number of predators surviving with so little to prey upon; in the air the eagles, buzzards, falcons, ravens, hooded crows, and on the ground the wildcats, foxes, badgers and pine martens. There is no doubt that a surprising number of the animal species spend much time during the off season – when there are no young creatures to feed on – in my own hobby of beachcombing. In the soft sand around the tide-wrack I come constantly upon the footprints of wildcats, badgers and foxes. Sometimes they find oiled seabirds, sometimes the carcase of a sheep, fallen from one of the green cliff ledges that throughout the West Highlands form such well-baited and often fatal traps, or of a stag that has tottered down from the March snowdrifts to seek seaweed as the only uncovered food, or they may creep upon sleeping oyster-catchers and curlews as they wait in the dark for the turn of the tide. But whatever they find it is to the shore that the fanged creatures come at night, and at times, perhaps, they find little, for I have seen undigested sand-hoppers in the droppings of both wildcats and foxes.
The ravens and hooded crows, though they will peck out the eyes of a living lamb or deer calf if he is weak, are in fact offal feeders for the greater part of the time. The hoodies spend much of their time about the shore in the late summer and midwinter, opening mussels by carrying them up to house-height and dropping them to smash on the rocks, but at most other seasons of the year there are routine harvests for them to gather elsewhere. In the back-end of winter, when the ground is as yet unstirred by spring, the old stags that have wintered poorly grow feeble and die in the snowdrifts and the grey scavengers squawk and squabble over the carcases; a little later, when the first warmth comes, and the hinds interrupt their grazing to turn their heads and nibble irritably at their spines, the hoodies strut and pick around them, gobbling the fat warble-grubs that emerge from under the deer-hides and fall to the ground. When the lambing season comes they quarter the ground for the afterbirths, and from then on there are the eggs and young of every bird lesser than themselves.
Of my human neighbours, the MacKinnons, I have so far said little. Calum Murdo MacKinnon is always given both his Christian names, for there are so many Calum MacKinnons in the district that Calum alone would be ambiguous; there are so many Murdos as to make that name by itself ineffective too; and there are so many Murdo Calums, which is the true sequence of his names, that to retain his identity he has had to invert them. This was a common practice under the clan system, and is still the general rule in many parts of the West Highlands, where the clan names still inhabit their old territory. Sometimes he was abbreviated to ‘Calum the Road’ (in the same way I have known elsewhere a ‘John the Hearse’, a ‘Duncan the Lorry’, a ‘Ronald the Shooter’ and a ‘Ronald Donald the Dummy’ – the last not in any aspersion upon his human reality but because he was dumb). But the necessity for this strict taxonomy is a strange situation for one whose nearest neighbour other than myself is four miles distant.
Calum Murdo, then, is a small wiry man in middle age, who, when I first came to Camusfeàrna, had for long been the road-mender responsible for several miles of the single-track road on either side of Druimfiaclach. It might be expected that a Highlander living in this remarkable isolation would have few topics of conversation beyond the small routine of his own existence; one would not, for example, expect him to be able to quote the greater part of the Golden Treasury, to have read most of the classics, to have voluble and well-informed views on politics national and international, or to be a subscriber to the New Statesman. Yet these were the facts, and I fear it must have been a sad disappointment to Calum Murdo to find his new neighbour, of a supposedly higher educational level, to be on many subjects less well informed than himself. He would impart to me much fascinating and anecdotal information on a host of subjects, and would close every session with a rounded formula: ‘And now, Major, an educated man like yourself will be fair sick of listening to the haverings of an old prole.’ Over a period of ten years he has contributed much to my education.
With Calum Murdo’s wife Morag, a woman of fine-drawn iron beauty softened by humour, I found an immediate common ground in a love of living creatures. One reads and hears much at second hand of the spiritual descendants of St Francis and of St Cuthbert, those who experience an immediate intimate communication with bird and beast, and of whom wild things feel no fear, but I had never encountered one of them in the flesh until I met Morag, and I had become a little sceptical of their existence. What little success I myself have with animals is due, I think, solely to patience, experience, and a conscious effort to put myself in the animal’s position, but I do not think that any of these things have been necessary to Morag. She frankly finds more to like and to love in animals than in human beings, and they respond to her immediately as if she were one of themselves, with a trust and respect that few of us receive from our own kind. I am convinced that there exists between her and them some rapport that is not for the achievement, even by long perseverance, of the bulk of those humans who would wish it. It would not, perhaps, be difficult to find more understandable explanations for individual cases in which, with her, this rapport seems apparent, but it is the number of these cases, and the consistency with which the animals’ behaviour departs from its established pattern towards mankind, that convinces me of something not yet explainable in existing terms.
A single instance will be enough for illustration. Across the road from the MacKinnons’ door is a reedy hillside lochan some hundred yards long by fifty wide, and every winter the wild swans, the whoopers, would come to it as they were driven south by Arctic weather, to stay often for days and sometimes for weeks. Morag loved the swans, and from the green door of her house she would call a greeting to them several times a day, so that they came to know her voice, and never edged