Читать книгу At the Water's Edge - John Lister-Kaye - Страница 11

4

King of the Castle

Crow, feeling his brain slip,

Finds his every feather the fossil of a murder.

Who murdered all these?

These living dead, that root in his nerves and his blood

Till he is visibly black?

– Ted Hughes, ‘Crow’s Nerve Fails’

May 12th Regulation has polluted my whisky. The water we drink comes from the loch. The Victorians built a dam to increase its size and piped it to the house and the farm. Before that it came in buckets. Bronze Age children scooped it up in their hands. People have lived here and been drinking the water from this loch for the best part of five thousand years.

The water analysis man who arrives every year with his little sampling bottles tells me comfortingly we have some of the purest water in Europe. But now, suddenly, after all those millennia of drinking and living, it is apparently no good any more. The chemicals are fine: lovely iron and magnesium and other trace minerals shoring us all up; the electrical conductivity is spot on; the mild acidity renders it soft and quick to lather; the bacterial count is nil – not a coliform or an E. coli in sight; no unwanted salts or chlorine, not even a nasty nitrate, but the colour is wrong.

Somebody somewhere else, someone who has never been to the loch, nor perhaps even to the Highlands, has decided that our water looks wrong. Its hazens (whatever they may be – the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary fails to acknowledge them at all) are too high. The Chardonnay-tinted staining that comes with the clouds and the snow and the life-giving rain that gently bleed tiny, suspended particles of peat into the loch from the high moors, and which have graced my bath and my evening whisky for the thirty years I have lived here, is no longer acceptable to someone who doesn’t have to drink it or even see it. ‘You will be required to undertake remedial works,’ insists the letter I have just thrown down in despair. I have another remedy in mind.

It’s the second week of May and I’m escaping again. Some things are better ignored, treated with the contempt they deserve – survival is tough enough without creating problems that don’t exist. The kestrel still burns in my memory’s eye so I’m heading out to see what nature’s wild wheel can uncover today.

It is early. The sun is awake, but still cool, the west wind light. I don’t plan to linger. Sail-white clouds jostle in the marbled sunlight of the morning like club racers. There has been rain in the night and the infusion of leaf mould lifts headily from the scuffles of my boots. I breathe deeply. Last year’s horse chestnut leaves still clutter the path in russet rugs, swirled into low dunes by winter gales. Picking one up, I see that the flesh of the leaf has all but gone, leaving only a filigree of veins and stalk with shards of translucent tissue trapped in the corners like broken glass in a ruined church window.

May’s great trick is movement. It never stays still. No two days are the same, always pressing forward so that yesterday’s images are diffused, atomised in the breathless rush for food, space and light. The new leaf is bolder now; after months of open tracery, shade is arriving to sharpen edges and deepen creases in the land’s complexion. The great tits in the Avenue are silent. I pause to see what’s up.

The hen bird, less custard and more mustard than her mate, comes in with a looping caterpillar in her bill. So that’s it. Her white, speckled eggs – could be five, could be twice that or more in exceptional years – have hatched. I could easily take a look; the nest box has a hinged lid secured with a twist of wire, but it seems an unmerited intrusion at this delicate moment in their new lives, so I abandon the thought. She is in and out in a flash, a tiny buff and black torpedo exploding out of the hole with those white cheeks gleaming like a nun’s alb. She alights for a second on a twig, just long enough to pull focus. She’s as tight as a nut, sleek and pressed together like modelling clay. Did this really evolve from the amoeba by the gradual process of random change? Did Stanley Miller’s experiment running wild for a few million years cause methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapour to fuse and spark into this bright, hot, fizzing fistful of protein; this seeing, singing, dutiful, nest-proud mother of five to eleven would-be replicas, blind and naked and unspeakably ugly, trapped in the moss and down cup she has so lovingly woven?

It’s far too comfortable to live with assumptions. Although adult great tits eat a wide variety of insects, seeds and fruit, they feed their chicks almost exclusively on caterpillars. It is safe to say that without a steady supply of caterpillars they couldn’t raise their young. So all they have to do is lay their eggs fourteen incubation days before the caterpillar glut emerges and that’s them sorted – isn’t it? But how do they know when the caterpillar glut will be? It peaks at widely differing times, sometimes by up to three weeks from year to year, dependent upon the weather, but particularly the temperature in late April.

If it’s very frosty caterpillar eggs won’t hatch because buds won’t open, the leaves will be retarded and there won’t be anything for the caterpillars to eat. These hatchling tits have to be fed immediately. They will quickly weaken, chill and die if each chick doesn’t get a good feed in the first few hours. I do the crude sums in my head: let’s say nine chicks, each needing at least fifteen of these squiggly loopers a day, plus a couple of good fat ones of other species if possible – that’s a hundred and fifty-three caterpillars to be garnered in across the fourteen hours of daylight available to them, as well as food for the parents themselves to keep up their strength – call it one hundred and eighty. That’s ninety per adult bird: six and a half per hour if they don’t rest – a beak-ful back at the nest every thirteen minutes, including travelling and searching time. No wonder they’re not singing. And they have to keep it up for the full twenty days before the chicks fledge and another week after that before they can feed themselves. So how do they know just when to start laying eggs?

Is there some grand programme out here? Are we back at school, obediently plugged in to a timetable? Is there a Fat Controller in charge, keeping everyone up to speed, frantically barking out rules and regulations like the Water Authority? Or is it just chance; are we all a mess of pottage and protoplasm, tossed in together like the kestrel and the slow worm – some you win, some you lose – and you just keep praying that your number comes up? Hmmm. Maybe I should have stuck with the hazens. I walk on, wishing the sun would get to work.

‘Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous,’ wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1836 in his essay ‘Nature’.

. . . The simple perception of natural forms is a delight . . . To the body and mind . . . cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman . . . comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods and is a man again. In their eternal calm he finds himself.

Somewhere in the Massachusetts woods, the cradle of American literature, the transcendentalist writings of Emerson, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau were to change the English-speaking world’s perception of nature. They established a distinctive rhythm for this literature of meditative excursions. They mark a purposeful shift from the imperative Abrahamic diktat requiring the conquest of nature in Genesis – ‘. . . and have dominion 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. Pasture flourished and those long-forgotten men and women 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 that it is the twin of one of the stronger lambs that ran off with its mother as I vaulted the fence. Ewes with twins are often bad mothers, abandoning a weakling lamb if it can’t keep up, favouring the strong with milk so that the weakling gets steadily weaker. If the shepherd isn’t quick to catch up all three and pen them so that the weaker twin can get its required quota of colostrum and first milk, it is certain to fail. On his rounds this morning Geordie saw the strong lamb and missed this little fellow, already failing, and the hoodies knew it. That is why they were so patient, so fixed in their stances and their watch. As usual, they were ahead of the game.

I scoop up the frail body in one hand. It is as light as a rabbit, and flabby with hollowness. Its legs dangle uselessly. It makes no attempt to resist. Then I see its bloodied face. On one side there is a bare bony cup where an eye should have been, and on the other the shrivelled remains of an eye lurks in its crater like a burst balloon. Blinded and abandoned it was bleating out the last faint strains of its imminent doom.

Like I said, you can’t impugn a hoodie crow. Whatever foul trick you think it might be capable of, you are too late. It thought of it first and acted swiftly upon its surest, most devastatingly effective instincts. The birds had gone. They had done their fell work and cleared off to wait out the inevitable consequences. What they want is a carcase; their task was to immobilise it in such a way that food for their own young was guaranteed. There is nothing I can do but end the wretched animal’s misery.

‘. . . The simple perception of natural forms is a delight . . . in their eternal calm a man finds himself,’ wrote Emerson. Not today. This particular flash of natural forms brings little delight. I’m not a primary food producer but I do know and understand the rough old rules of nature. Sublime it may be, but this morning I will give transcendentalism a miss. It’s tough out here, and it always has been. I head back down the trail. The lambs are still playing King of the Castle.