The Nature of Winter

by Jim Crumley

  I never reached White Craig. Instead, and without any conscious decision, I drifted west of north from the heart of the plateau to its highest point at Darlees Rig. Then the very last steps to the summit burst the world apart, and there, far in the north-west, were the Highland mountains arrayed in a gently curving arc, a frieze of miniaturised mountain shapes, all acutely sculpted angles, snow brilliance and deep blue shadows; and with Ben Ledi for its centrepiece. I snapped back into the here and now of the situation. It felt like a summons.

  I consulted my fifty-year-old map, confirmed a compass bearing, raised a farewell hand to the men whose finished lives had lured me here. Then I dropped down from that airy place to the West Water and kept its murmuring company until it met the path back to Dunsyre. All the way home, I tried to reconvene something of that day with the single swan and the old, old footsteps, and what flowed from it, but found it tantalisingly elusive. Late in the evening, with my preferred winter whisky in my hand, I sat down with that old book and renewed acquaintance with the nameless wanderer of The Mountain of Light.

  Chapter Four

  The Well-Being of Mountain People is my Purpose

  (from The Mountain of Light)

  Many men were restless in those difficult days between the wars. Many a tramp and wanderer forsook downcast town and city lives and took to the lonely roads of the Scottish Highlands. Nature’s quietude among the mountains was the certainty they craved through that least certain of times.

  It was a hospitable land then, unsuspicious of travellers and their motives, ignorant of tourism. Simple truths held sway. A solitary wanderer could travel, eat, sleep, albeit primitively, for next to nothing. Next to nothing was what most of them had, but they judged that richer than the nothing they had left behind. Such a wanderer might pay his dues with a story, a song, gossip gleaned on the road. These might buy him a bite, a bed, a pair of old boots with an untrodden mile or two left in them.

  Often, that mysterious grapevine that whispers among Highland places would travel before him, announcing his arrival at the next village or township or farm. But there was one wanderer who captivated the grapevine as much as he taxed its powers.

  He was tall and larch-straight. White hair fell to his broad shoulders or bannered out behind him when he faced the wind – “like a white wing,” said an old one who nodded courteously to him on a north coast cliff path. His body was agile and lean, length of his stride as full as a stag’s. But his face looked older than his body, for it had weathered under the stings of many winds. His long sealskin coat was grey and looked like a robe. His speech bounced strangely on wide vowels and hard gutturals, a voice that sprang on the craning ear of the grapevine with the rhythms and music you might have heard in the Shetland of a century before, an antiquated lilt. A few coastal villagers, old hauled-out mariners who once went whaling in northern oceans, swore it was Iceland they heard in his voice; others said no, it was Faroe, or Norway, or Spitsbergen. They agreed at least about the hemisphere, and that his eyes were the eerie ice-green of glaciers.

  Then, there were his stories.

  Such stories! And with these he would spellbind uneasy hosts wherever he paused. Stories of northern places imprisoned by mountains in a way no Highland places are. They told of poets in mountain places. Often they told of swans (fearful glances among a few old Highlanders at that, for it was the troubled lot of the aged and wise to see through the swan stories), swans that wove their flights through the lives of mortals and interwove with their very existences, mortal becoming swan, swan becoming mortal.

  In one village after another, people shook their head at these stories, but the grapevine was enthralled despite itself, and the wanderer was asked for them again and again wherever he paused on his journey south, always south.

  The swan stories troubled them for reasons they were slow to acknowledge. Indeed, they may not have been able to articulate them at all, for the reasons were rooted deep and distant, inherited from earlier eras than theirs, eras when a swan was held to be the guardian of a human’s mortal soul, that when man, woman or child died, their souls flew on immortally, within swans.

  It was also held that swan could become mortal, that changelings – poor enslaved creatures – walked the land between flightings. So you never turned away nor gave offence to the swan-folk. You could never be sure, and there was no way of knowing.

  To add to the unease some felt, the wanderer seemed to arrive in the landscape unpredictably, eluding the instincts of the grapevine, confounding its best guesses, troubling that fine line that skirts the frayed edge of folklore and unchancy eye-witness. So half-submerged instincts stirred strangely.

  Sometimes the wanderer would use the old ways through the hills that people had trodden for as long as there had been people. But at other times he would pass through a landscape unseen and then some would say he had travelled by night and some would say he flew, and both were hallmarks of the swan-folk.

  From Strathy Point on Scotland’s northmost mainland shore to Strathyre in Perthshire near the southmost beginning and end of the mountains, his travels held to their relentless southerly course. That too was curious, for it suggested he had the purpose of destination, whereas the wandering was destination enough for most of the Highlands’ wayfarers.

  They still say in Strathyre that it was an old hill shepherd, who had travelled the world’s mountains himself and fetched up on that Highland Edge to while away his last years . . . that it was he who determined the ultimate course of events which befell the wanderer. But all up and down the route of his travels through Scotland, the old ones who saw him said his destination was predetermined and beyond his control. That he was driven. And that too was the way things were for the swan-folk, or so the old handed-down stories told it.

  There is some persuasive evidence that the shepherd passed the time of day with him on a hill shoulder west of the village a bit. The wanderer, it seems, had taken to the high ground again, stag-striding out along that south-bound shoulder, shunning the easier going along Loch Lubnaigside. If you had heard the story of that portentous meeting told by the Strathyre folk for a generation or two after the event, you would gather that the shepherd had a good ear for the grapevine, and might have greeted the wanderer thus:

  “So, still south, is it?”

  “Still south,” the wanderer smiled.

  “Well, if you’re holding south all day, and you’re as thirled to the mountains as I think you are, there is only one left after this wee hill shoulder.”

  He pointed to where a singular cone stood slightly aloof from all that landscape, the first and last mountain of the Highlands.

  “What is its name, this signposting mountain?” the wanderer asked.

  “Ben Ledi.”

  “Ledi? A strange name for a southern mountain. What does it mean?”

  “It’s obscure now. Some swear it means the Mountain of God, others the Mountain of Light.”

  “And what do you say? You must know it as well as anyone. God or Light?”

  “I say it’s much the same thing. All we can ask of our Gods is that they shed a little light on the road ahead.”

  The wanderer smiled again, and added, “Indeed. Or the road behind?”

  “That can be useful too. Frankly, a good light is more use to me than any God I ever heard of.”

  The wanderer, you may be sure, had a thoughtful ear for the conversation of the local people he met along the way, hearing them as eagerly as they heard his stories. He saw in them, it would seem, some kind of last hope for the mountain realm, a hope of guardianship. He had told the Strathyre folk (and doubtless many others on his way south):

  “The well-being of mountain people is my purpose on the road. That and the well-being of the mountain.”

  That afterthought had baffled as many as it intrigued. The shepherd, though, had heard it the night before in the village inn, heard the note of kinship it struck in him, and he saw now the quickening of this wanderer’s interest.
He said:

  “Mine is a seeing job. A good light breaks up the contours into watchable fragments. The hidden ledges are revealed where a beast might stand or fall, or an eagle might nest or a fox lie up. Mostly there is good light in these mountains. A God, forever peering down through the clouds, is in no position to assist, for all that I ask one often enough.”

  “And what do you do,” asked the wanderer, “if your seeing reveals a nesting eagle or a lying-up fox?”

  “I watch, of course. I watch how they see. They – the eagle and the fox in that order – are the best at the seeing job in the mountains. It may be, of course, that they do not see as far back as swans.”

  “Shepherd,” said the wanderer, “it has been good to talk to you. You are an extraordinary shepherd for a land such as this. What is your name?”

  The shepherd nodded formally:

  “John Muir, at your service.”

  “I have heard of a John Muir who was a shepherd and poet of the mountains, although I hardly expected to meet him here.”

  “As I hardly expected to find a swan-pilgrim. The swan things have been submerged even longer than the wolf. People are unsure, now that you have let the light of swanflight into their eyes. The old ones know the stories. The young ones scoff. They will take some convincing. But I think I see what is at work within you. Wherever your journey leads, I hope there is a Light or a God – whatever pleases you – to illuminate the next good mile and the next. And a strong white wing when you need uplifting.”

  The glacier-green eyes of the wanderer turned to the one mountain shape which still lay to the south.

  “The Mountain of Light. There can surely be no better place to let it end.”

  The mountain commands all that land. It stands above the throat of a pass, the first and last thoroughfare of the Highlands. It marks a watershed of landscapes. Near its summit lies a small watersheet, Lochan Nan Corp, which is the Lochan of the Corpse. A child’s body was found there amid a smothering of swan feathers. It was said that he had been claimed by the swan-folk, and that in many guises (but mostly as a single whooper swan – the Icelandic race that winters in Scotland) he still returned to the lochan during the quiet hours of dusk and dawn when he might linger secure from human gaze, and mourning that which was lost.

  The wanderer came late in the afternoon to the lochan, a solitary figure on the back of the mountain. He stood there for an hour and only his coat and his hair moved in the wind. He looked as rooted as a tree. His silence matched his stillness. Then he climbed to the last mountain summit and there he thanked his own light-shedding God, for he believed at that moment he had been delivered from a great torment.

  He had only ever known mountain lands, locked in the places of the northlands of the Earth where the ice was still as much of an element as rock and wind and water and fire. Now he saw a broad river valley, its harvested fields a chequer of pale gold in lowering sunlight. A long wall of low, flat-topped hills held the valley to the south, and where the valley opened to the east he saw where fields and river yielded to the supremacy of single mighty rock. There the sun stoked pale fires in the surmounting walls of a great castle.

  That rock drew him. His was an eye long accustomed to reading landscapes, so that he could penetrate the inscapes which are the unseen skeletal structures and foundations within and beneath all landscapes. Just as a good architect might gaze on a great building and marvel at the unseen genius of its construction as well as the beauty of the façade, so he could comprehend the hand of nature as architect in the midst of its great works.

  So he appraised the far-off rock and its flat-bottomed river valley thus:

  “First the volcano spat and roared and cloaked itself in heaps of its own spoil, then it cooled. Then it shed its useless loosening outer layers and reinvented itself, cold and alone, the naked rock.

  “Next the ice, the great ice that carved the valley but baulked at the cold rock, gripped it but could not overwhelm it.

  “Next the sea. These two, ice and sea, shaped the waist of this land. The ice melted, the sea flowed and flowed until it acknowledged an unyielding mountain chain, these mountains where I stand, a protecting arm about the waist.

  “The sea relented. As it withdrew eastwards again, it also deferred to that one cold rock. The rock remains, the volcano’s souvenir, hewn and coughed up out of the valley’s oldest darkness. The ice was too new and no match for it. But neither was the sea, and that is more remarkable, for it is rare in an island landscape for a rock to wear down the sea.

  “So the sea parted, swam round the rock, fell back and back. Now, instead of the ice, instead of the sea, a great river flows, a water snake, deep and dark and coiled. Its strength is fed by the benevolence of these mountains, and they are its kin, for they too were once the ice’s tortured prisoners, worn and wearied down to the nub.

  “Men came.

  “Where the sea had fallen back and back they found the valley, fertile and sheltered by mountainside and hillside. They would marvel at the one cold rock, at its command of the country in all directions, at its prospects to the mountains, at the great river below it (their safe passage to and from the sea whence they had come). Was there a sounder place in all the land to fortify and settle? There was none. So they claimed the rock for their own, built a wooden fortress there, then a succession of bigger and better wooden fortresses, then a great stone castle that still stands, then a walled town that spilled downhill from the plinth to a bridge over the river, a causeway beyond the bridge across the sodden valley to the foothills, the mountains beyond.”

  So that was the rock the wanderer set eyes on from the summit of the Mountain of Light, twenty miles distant. The rock had long since been named – Stirling. But once it was called Strivelin, which some say is the Place of Strifes, after all the warrings of nature the rock had endured. It would prove a prophetic name as well as a historic one, for in the agonising birth throes, life throes and death throes of Scotland as an independent nation, the rock watched a parade ground of battlefields assemble and disassemble in its shadow, licking its myriad wounds. If you held the rock and its castle, you held the key to the kingdom, or so men thought once, but the key to their Scotland was never so simple as that, and it has long since rusted in the unfathomable lock of the Union, all but immovable it seemed, more elusive than ever, although who knew what winds of change might blow in from the sea, down from the mountains?

  The wanderer saw and sensed a change in the land. It was as the shepherd Muir had told him. There was no mountain beyond this one, and he sensed that the values and priorities common to all mountain lands would also be absent in the valley. In their place, what?

  Perhaps it was then he saw a white ripple go through the far fields and knew it for a skein of whooper swans, for the Icelandic whoopers fall from the mountain skies and linger in the valley winter-long. The birds’ presence surely reassured him, so that when he went down at last, down to the valley the people called the Carse, he would go eagerly. And from that Carse the Place of Strifes beckoned peacefully enough. There, he reasoned, the Highland grapevine would have lost its thread, for the place stood alone in its own realm, neither Highland nor Lowland, and walled in only by the low hills to the south, the mountains to the north and west. Whatever else, it would be a place with its own story.

  An old crone’s words were in his ears as he climbed down and felt the floor of the Carse flatten under his feet, words from a distant time, a distant mountain land:

  “Absorb all that the mountains can give you, but then stand for a winter beyond the furthest edge of the mountains. Cross that bridge of landscapes. See the mountains with the eyes of those who live beyond.”

  * * *

  Re-reading that chapter from The Mountain of Light now, re-introducing myself to this strange wanderer-poet of a character I invented about fifteen years ago, I don’t have very far to look for his origins. The northlands of the Earth, the tribe of wild swans, and the poetry of the land are thre
e of the most enduring elements of my fascination for nature. Although I was born and brought up in Dundee (and I have never stopped thinking of it as home), I have evolved over the years into an uneasy townsman. Throughout my nature-writing years, I have worked from a base either in Stirling itself or in the mountain realms of Glen Dochart and Balquhidder in Stirling’s north-west hinterland. I have adopted and grown into that Highland Edge territory with Ben Ledi at its heart and embracing the Carse of Stirling to its south and the mountains immediately to its north, east and west, all their lochs and rivers and forests. A kind of intimacy springs from the constant reworking of known circumstances, and because I have done it for so long now (almost thirty years), I have a sense of the rhythms to which nature moves across the landscape. It is unsurprising then, that, I should reach for that landscape for my first novel of the land, and centre it on the travels of a wandering, solace-seeking swan-poet who thinks he might find what he is looking for in a rock-founded settlement just beyond the mountains.

  The view across the Carse to that arc of mountains is Stirling’s great gift to a nature writer. One December morning, I was walking below the castle by the 17th-century King’s Knot, strangely sculpted earthworks which delineate the form of a garden created in 1627–9 for Charles I within what was then a royal hunting park. The castle on its sheer rock towers above the King’s Knot, and from that ancient garden’s raised and terraced centrepiece – and on the right kind of day – the frontier mountains of the Highlands appear at their most alluring. But at first glance, that December morning was the wrong kind of day. A kink of the jetstream that generated midnight gales and thudding rain squalls at 3a.m. had subsided into hefty winds and a frayed and torn-open sky. The mountains were shut in by massed clouds. Yet even on such days when the mountains are lost to the citizens’ gaze, their absence reaches across the intervening miles with a measure of sustenance. Far in the west (where Ben Lomond’s wide sprawl of mountain shoulders had been smothered in a smouldering bruise-shaded shroud), strange shafts of rain-and-snow clouds appeared to fan outwards and upwards across the sky from a kind of low, crab-shaped hub, like the aurora borealis in reverse. That hub was suddenly galvanised by a burst of low sunlight from over my left shoulder, and a ragged patch of rainbow jived there for all of two minutes, a hypnotic dance.