Читать книгу At the Water's Edge - John Lister-Kaye - Страница 7

Preface

January 9th The frost’s sunlit sparkle that opened our year was quickly banished by a shroud of grey. The nights have been raw and the days burdened with icy drizzle. For a week we have shivered in the damp of winter chill. I have left my desk and my fireside only reluctantly, briefly venturing out for my Jack Russell terriers, Ruff and Tumble, and always without conviction. Even they have been happy to scuttle back indoors. But today is different. At last a troubled sun has shouldered through, with bright lances of green striping the river fields, drawing me to my study window. Mist hangs over the river but the sun’s courage is calling me out. It’s not quite ten o’clock.

I left the dogs curled in their kitchen basket, pulled on my old jacket, my boots, hat and gloves, grabbed my binoculars and stick and set out on the circular walk I have done more times than I can count. I turned up the Avenue between the tall trunks of ancient limes and horse chestnuts, kicking the drifts of leaves across the path just for the reassuring swishing sound they make.

My walk takes me gently uphill, northwards with the sun at my back towards high, rocky crags and then turning to face the lurching clouds of the Atlantic west by following the Avenue’s parallel lines of lofty trees, precisely planted by Victorian landscape gardeners. Now, more than a century later, in the reassuring way that nature always does in the end, the trees have broken free. The old drive they lined where carriage wheels once crunched on raked gravel is long disused, lost beneath a blanket of leaf mould, and their stretching, moss-sleeved arms have mingled overhead, forming a tunnel of bosky shade. Only the rigid spacing of the trunks reveals their hand.

In the lower branches of one of the limes a spider’s web caught my eye. It arched from twig to twig in a mist of fine lace. It was strikingly beautiful, so much so that I stopped to look more closely at the intricacy of the design. It was studded with beads of dew. The weak, low-angled sunlight gleamed from tiny prisms, incidentally distilled from the night’s cold air, an unnecessary adornment tipped in for good measure. The spider herself was invisible. She had withdrawn to a bark crevice, where she waited, with one foreleg fingering the pulse of a silken cord to alert her when her trap was sprung. I couldn’t resist jiggling the web with a straw, imitating a moth struggling in its tacky mesh. She was fooled, but only for a second. She rushed out to rope her victim round and deliver the poisoned bite to paralyse her prey. Halfway to my straw she realised her mistake, stopped, seemed to think for a second and then returned to her lair. I smiled. That spider was smart. I knew I couldn’t fool her twice.

That net was a killing machine – I knew that well enough – but that’s not all I saw, nor what I chose to write in my journal. What had stopped me was the beauty of the morning caught in the dewy eye of her device. I was witness to its delicacy, its symmetry and its inspirational cartwheel design. It was this beauty that possessed me and made me stand and stare. It possessed me not in a purely poetic sense, blinding me to everything else, but in the practical perfection of its own intricate existence. A spider’s web doesn’t need to be beautiful to work, but the presence of such radiance is a constantly recurring natural melody I have noted over and over again, almost always there, underscoring the drama of the moment.

Wherever I look in nature I find myself confronted by the paradox of sublime design and grim function, almost as though one is mocking the other – a deadly game, sometimes so violent and brutish that it takes my breath away – the stabbing bill of the heron, the peregrine’s dazzling stoop, the otter’s underwater grace in pursuit of a fish. And then the beauty floods back in as though some grander plan than evolution fits it all together with added value, that extra aesthetic ingredient, the work of some unnamed genius quite incapable of creating anything shoddy or brash. So I walk, and I watch, and listen, and slowly I learn.

Back at my desk I wrote this brief entry for the day’s walk. It’s a habit. I always try to write down what I have seen and perceived to be the truth, a journal of these secret and personal thoughts and undertakings. It’s not a diary, nor in any sense a scientific record – but I have noted down those things that have caught my attention and hauled me off, incidents and happenings that I have wanted to remember and revisit, and which have helped me engage with the land and the animals and plants that share this patch of upland delight with me, the place I have come to know as home, theirs and mine.

Flicking back through these pages and volumes, I find a perpetually repeating theme. It is the timeless paradox of beauty and the beast inextricably tangled with the impact of man. It is the indescribable and often inexplicable beauty of nature and the overarching sense of wonder it carries with it, always drawn into sharp contrast by her utterly ruthless laws and the terrible truth of mankind’s peaceless domination of his and their environment.

Slowly, as the decades have slid by, I have become intimate with my circular walk in a way few of us can hope to achieve in the hurly-burly of modern life. I never cease to be grateful that my work has permitted this level of involvement with the natural world. It doesn’t matter what day or what season it is, my walk is an addiction and an escape. I’m taking off towards a loch – my loch encircled by wild and sensuous woods. I don’t mean my as in my car or my coat, or as decreed by a deed in some lawyer’s dusty safe, but mine in the sense that no one can ever steal or deny; a private, unassailable mine, the mine of hopes and dreams.

On a good day if I walk briskly I can do the whole circuit – up the burn, round the loch, across the bog, through the woods and back to the house again – in under an hour. But those days are only good from the perspective of wind in my hair and a spring in my step; good for heart and lungs. They usually mean my mind is somewhere else, transported, clogged with trivia and unable properly to take in where I am and what else is with me – walking for walking’s sake. Later, they become the bad days. When I sit to write my journal I can find nothing to say.

Other days are quite different. I only get to the end of the Avenue or to the bridge over the burn, or perhaps halfway round the loch before I realise I have run out of time and must turn back. I have sauntered and dawdled. The walking has been hijacked by some insect or bird I have seen or heard, by a strange footprint or maybe a rustle in the grass, something that freezes me to the spot – something that has caused me to fade into the undergrowth where I can transmogrify into the observer, not the observed. Too often shortage of time has meant I’ve had to tear myself away, only to regret it later. These are the days that fill my journal, that return to me again and again, resurfacing from my deep subconscious, where they lodged like pleasure-charged pockets of narcotic, days that have sent me back down the path with fresh images to hoard away, new riddles to crack.

I have lived here, on this little glen-side patch of the northern central Highlands of Scotland, for thirty years, man and boy, for I was a hot-headed and incautious youth when first I bought these few acres of rough land and made them my home and my work. It was an impulsive move, but one I have never regretted. I fell in love with the place then and that primal attraction has never waned, although, as in a good marriage, we have grown comfortable together as I have come to know and understand its ways.

All good farmers get to know the dynamics of their land: the wet and the dry ground, where the sun or the winds scorch thin earth, the hollows where frost lies all day and how the invisible drainage runs. They will know where the cattle stand with their backs to the driving rain and where the sheep hunker down against a dry-stone wall; where the rushes constantly invade the grass and where every summer the stinging nettles and creeping thistles reappear however many times they are weeded out. So it is with a naturalist, although perhaps the cast of dramatis personae is longer and the plot a little more complicated, demanding both a predilection for nosiness and a well-developed capacity for dawdling.

I walk when the mood takes me. In summer it is sometimes absurdly early in the morning when the first birdsong tugs me from my bed, sometimes at lunchtime to take a welcome leg-stretch from sitting at a desk and sometimes a break from the dull routines of more dreary work, and occasionally as a closing thought in the long, elastic and emotion-tingling dusk Highlanders have dubbed ‘the gloaming’. There are no rules. It is just an unplanned convenient amble and a way of keeping in touch with what lives and moves around me.

The path takes me across field edges, along an old farm track and, most importantly, beside the burn. This spills from the loch and runs down the fringe of the woods to the fields. Its friendly gossip brings a smile to my cheeks and its moods come and go with the clouds; the burn always has something to say. Long ago its flow powered a sawmill and the cobbled lade is still present for part of its course. I am lucky that my trail passes through so many different habitats, something that has happened more by chance than design as the route has established itself over the years, although a desire to feed my own curiosity has undoubtedly revealed its hand.

I have scant equipment. An old felt hat and a once-waterproof jacket, stout shoes and a long stick called a crummack to lean on (from the Gaelic cromag, a shepherd’s crook, but with a wide curve for hooking a sheep by the neck, not the tight, conventional crosier shape for catching a leg), and, of course, my faithful Swarovski binoculars. Good binoculars are to a field naturalist as a set of spanners is to a mechanic, a stethoscope to a doctor. They must be clear, sharp and an effortlessly natural extension to the eyes and the hand. They are a vital, silent route to where you want to be. Bad binoculars are a distraction, an affront to the watcher and the watched, a hindrance that should be tossed away; better without any at all.

I have worn the same old khaki jacket for years, now tatty and torn, but soft and friendly and, above all, silent. Jackets that rustle are made and worn by people who think human, not wild. There was a time when I would have worn only tweed, but wonderful though tweed still is, its weight when wet and the length of time needed to dry it have pushed it aside in favour of modern convenience fabrics. My aim is to blend, not stand out; to be accepted, not to alarm.

I believe in routine and familiarity, those two. Nothing that lives on this land can fail to be aware of my scent and my regular and hopefully benign presence. Those are the keys I rely on to open nature’s doors, to help me slough off some of the universal plume of dread that sheds from all humans like bad smoke. In winter I sometimes wear workman’s leather gloves – cold is an unnecessary distraction and, besides, I cannot write with frozen fingers. In summer, if the midges on the moorland are intolerable, in my pocket I carry a veil to wear over my face; Highland midges can be irksome to the point of despair. On my belt I have a knife, and always, always, always my notebook and two pens in my pocket.

I go alone. Wildness favours the solitary. Company is good, but there are other times and better places for human companionship. And that’s it; anything else is superfluous clutter that will detract, not enhance. And expectations? No, none of those. There is a trump card in the expectation game that nature loves to play.

This, then, is a sharing of thoughts and images rekindled from my journal, drawn from the rock and the wind, the snow and the rain, the trees and the birdsong and the blush of wild flowers that have welcomed every spring. Turning its pages and dipping in, I realise it has taken me over thirty years to cover little more than a mile.

John Lister-Kaye

House of Aigas