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April in the Hills

THE Lady of the Spring, when she comes to the uplands, has something of an acidulous and virginal chastity in her mien. She is unlike the debonair goddess who scatters her lavish favours in May. In truth, April is little more than winter with stray gleams of summer to temper his acerbity. Yet in the austere skies and barren woods there is not a little charm—the charm of latent strength and unborn magnificence.

The waters have a cold look between the yellow banks and patches of brown heather. The snow on the hill-tops and the sparse remnants of drifts in the glens are perpetual tokens of the winter past. In the high corries you may find a glacier of snow with a yawning cavern at the top, through which you may see the black depths of darkness beneath. Those very white-rimmed hollows might bring an awful death to a man. If he slipped down one of the gaps there would be no more news of him in this world. Far below you can hear the trickle of the little runlets which issue forth to swell the burn of the glen. There you will find acres of burnt heather, whence the foot of the walker sends up a fine white dust; grey rocks still clammy with winter rains; and short, arid turf merging ultimately in the ranker lowland meadows.

Yet, even here we have at times a symphony of colour. The blue-grey streams swirling past the dry grasses, the sun-flecks on the rapids, the deep, steely black of the pools, make a fine picture. Pied wagtails and water-ouzels, like spirits of the place, so completely harmonise in colour that it is only by their darting flight that one can discern them. You may come, too, on a nook where the yellow moss is as fine as old court-velvet, a blot of summer colour on the grave scene. Icicles and snow, sun and blue water, yellow and green and grey—there you have the lights and shadows of the glens in April.

Snow falls in sharp, intermittent showers; but the common phase of weather is a dull, cold greyness of sky and air. The distances are clear and a trifle dismal; hills and trees are uniform and silent; the tops of the birches in the woods look like a pale vapour; the air is chilly, and the breeze shivers icily through the leafless trees. That line of Edgar's in his madness:

Through the sharp hawthorn blows the cold wind,

is for me eternally linked with the memories of an upland April.

But sometimes in a week of grey days there comes a golden one, when the clear spring sunlight makes the hills stand out cameo-wise; when the black pines are thrown into deeper shadow, all but the crests, which are golden or green or russet as the whimsical sunshine pleases. The patches of snow, which on a dull day give a wintry aspect to the landscape, have now a dazzling whiteness, as if the hills were really made of encrusted marble, which shone in places through the brown husk. The waters of the stream are never made golden by the sun as in summer, but are of a pale, silvery tint, which gives an eerie, witch-like look to the picture.

Nor have we any of the common associations of spring, like the singing of birds. A mavis or a blackbird may on occasion break into a few notes, and there is, for certain, an increasing twitter among the trees. But the clear song of the lark as yet is not; the linnet does not pipe; the many named finches are still silent. The curlews scream and wail, a plover quavers across the bent, and the wild-fowl croon by the shallows. You may find, too, the songless heron stalking majestically by the stream and preparing for the time of nesting; and the grouse—sorely tried by late family bereavements—with renewed hope sets about her thankless maternal task.

But if we dwell more or less in a shadowed valley and cohabit with solemn skies and windy heights, we may boast at least of one supreme beauty. There are few finer sights in the world, I take it, than a grey sunset. In the west the sombre pall is lightened from within, and the watcher waits expectantly, knowing that from that shell the phoenix of sunset is to arise. Nor is he disappointed. Slowly, by degrees, the veil lifts. Red and gold, dry and flagrant, burn within. A long shaft falls on the bare fields. The west unfolds like a rose. The grey mantle passes from the sky, and night, clear and star- lit, hovers over the earth.