The Nature of Winter

by Jim Crumley

  On a parallel course to the vanished flock, but to my west rather than my east, a single raven approached, muttering to itself. It also flew through the treetops in its path without stopping. But almost at once, a second raven I had neither seen nor heard appeared, flying much higher. Its flightpath was so aligned that it appeared in the glasses against the out-of-focus bulk of Ben Ledi, so that as it flew I was conscious of the snow-patched, ridiculously skullcapped mountain massed immensely behind it, thus creating the illusion of an emissary despatched by the mountain. Perhaps Noah was up there, his ark perched on the summit inside the cloud, searching in vain not for dry land but for a semblance of winter.

  This second raven perched in the top of a pine, also at my eye level from the top of the tower, and began calling vigorously, stretching his entire body, neck and head forward with each call, straining for volume and projection it seemed. There was a gap a second long between the mandibles opening to call and the sound reaching my ears, so that it looked like one of those television moments when sound and mouth are troublingly out of synch. Not for the first time in my life, or even in this first month of winter, I wished I was more fluent in the language of ravens.

  * * *

  My day often begins with a half-hour walk to get newspapers and coffee. I count bird species while I walk. My record, for what it’s worth (which is nothing at all), is twenty-four. I am not, instinctively, a bird-counter. Nor do I keep records of numbers or dates. The interest as far as the morning walk is concerned stems from the small variations that occur within the familiar roll call. My antennae twitch at a snatch of an unfamiliar voice. On one of the very few frosty and misty journeys that December, there was hardly anything moving at all. Then one two-syllable call fell to earth and made my day. It was pitched somewhere between the woody voice of a clarinet and a muted flugelhorn, and it was high and somewhere over my right shoulder. I occasionally wonder if anyone watches me from behind net curtains at moments like this. I stopped dead, spun round, looked up, and eventually found a line-astern flight of five whooper swans, a family group of two adults and three of this year’s cygnets, heading west. They came directly overhead, and about 200 feet up. I stayed still and staring until they had vanished over rooftops.

  No day which starts that way can ever feel anything other than blessed. My debt to the wild swans of the north of the world is one that I can never adequately articulate, and as for repaying it, I wouldn’t know how to begin. As it was, the brief incursion of the swans on my early morning acted on my mood like a fork of lightning out of a clear sky. Even the adults had looked grey in flight, for there was no sun and the mist dulled the sky, but I was dazzled by them. I felt as if they had sought me out, which is a preposterous notion once time has passed and you think back to it, but it always feels that way whenever my path crosses that of any one of the tribes of nature with which I feel a particular affinity. With swans, the pitch of that affinity is unique in my life, and I walked on with a headful of swans.

  In particular, there was an old winter by a small hill lochan in the south of Skye, and another family of five whooper swans. I had heard them from some distance away, knew from former visits that they were on the lochan even before I could see it, so I approached with every nuance of stealth that I knew. I reached the nearest shore crawling with my chin in the peat, and just in time to see the cob rise up on the water and stand there, ankle deep. He had found a submerged rock, a favourite preening perch for swans everywhere. So he began to preen with only his feet and an inch or two of leg in the water. It was a less fluid routine than a mute swan, and I wondered whether the whooper’s characteristically straighter neck is also a less flexible preening aid.

  The pen was on the water and heading in his general direction but with her head deep in the feathers of her back and folded wings, preening as she swam. In that compacted pose she drifted directly in front of him. Sooner or later in any protracted preening routine, an adult swan stretches head and neck high, appears to “stand” on its tail, opens its wingspan to its full extent and beats its wings forcefully so that they sound like drying sheets in a big wind. At the precise moment when she reached him, he unfurled himself into that heroic pose. He was a particularly well-built cob, and when he opened his wings it was like the prelude to a vast embrace. For perhaps two seconds, the coiled form of his mate was canopied and quite dwarfed by the one wing beneath which she swam so obliviously, so furled beneath such a stupendous unfurling. Then she drifted on past him, reassembled herself into a swan shape, and swam off towards her brood at the far end of the lochan. He was simply a standing swan again, busy with his breast feathers.

  The light began to drowse. I have much cause to be grateful to an instinct that urges me to linger through the last hour of half-light when there is little to see but the shifting mood of wildness as the laws of daylight peter out and the laws of darkness gather. I was still watching the swans when I became vaguely aware of a gentle splashing at my back where the lochan shore curved away from my limited field of vision. When it persisted and the swans started to react with stiffening necks and muttered calls and a slow advance a dozen yards across the lochan then a concerted discretionary halt, I eased my position as slowly as I could to look back over my left shoulder. Five red deer hinds and three calves had walked into the shallows fifty yards away, as unaware of me as I had been of them. I simply lay dead still, memorising everything.

  They waded and drank and muttered. Red deer can be surprisingly vocal at close quarters and when the wind is in your favour. The swans, as far across the lochan in the other direction, paddled and fed and muttered. The deer voices were gruff, croaky, percussive. The swan voices were mellow, soft brass. Both sets of voices were couched in the speech of communication rather than concern. I wondered what Sibelius would have made of the hour.

  Chapter Six

  Whale Watch (1): The Narwhal in the Sky

  A strange day dawned, a day autumn had stolen back from winter. En route for Glen Finglas, the Woodland Trust Scotland reserve and Ben Ledi’s next door neighbour to the west, pausing on Loch Venachar’s shore . . . there, at noon, the day was warm, and so still that a hint of surrealism crept into the sunlit surface of the loch and the reflections of land and sky. There was no obvious join, no demarcation between reality and reflection, cloud and water seamlessly united, the western shore which includes Ben Venue was both suspended and afloat in sky and water simultaneously, neither the real land nor its reflection noticeably brighter or darker than the other, an equinox of the mind’s eye. Was this autumn’s revenge for winter gatecrashing autumn that day in the Pentland Hills? Do the seasons deal with each other that way? Is there a conversation, a negotiation, a deal, or just an uninvited raid, facilitated by one more foible of the jetstream?

  The Glen Finglas oakwood was deep dark brown, mysteriously suntanned. All the leaves had turned, but they still clung to the trees in huge quantities. By early December 2015, four of those storms the Met Office likes to refer to by their Christian names (Abigail to Desmond) had already bludgeoned the trees bare and left quite a few of them prostrate on the forest floors of the land. But by early December 2016, the back end of the year had been utterly stormless. The result was an atmosphere within the oakwood of other-worldly tranquillity, as if the natural order of things had been suspended, as if time itself had been outwitted. The oakleaves had passed through all the phases of photosynthesis demanded of them by nature except the final one. Once the leaves stop producing chlorophyll, its green signature is replaced by a yellow one (carotenoid) or a red one (anthocyanin) or both, and when these fade, decomposed carbohydrates and oxidised tannins turn the leaves brown. Then the autumn gales invade the woods and the leaves are blown off. But there had been no wind, even by December, and the leaves still clung, but lifelessly; brown shrouds in a brown mortuary.

  Sunlight was the saving grace of the place that day, for it lit and shadowed all that brown-ness. When a female buzzard and I surprised each other (she had h
er back to me and the sun, using it to spotlight fugitive prey by positioning herself on an oak limb so that the light came over her shoulder), she parted with the tree in such a way that it was as if a fragment of the oakwood cloak had been prised away from the whole and unwillingly cast adrift. For she flew so knowingly through that web of trunk and twig and branch and limb, and she bore in her plumage – and especially in the fluctuating revelations of upper and lower wings – every single shade of the winter oak; she was as much of the wood as every living tree and every fallen tree. The sense that my arrival in the wood had wounded some ancient peace lingered with me until I climbed up beyond the highest oaks and out into the more open-handed generosity of the embryonic birch wood above, then the broad expanses of mountainside with their splashes of tall, slender pines against the skyline.

  These are survivors from the commercial forestry that predated Woodland Trust Scotland’s benevolent rescue operation. The dense spruce was felled, birch and pine enclaves had somehow found a niche and with no room to fill out they survived by putting all their energies into growing tall. They may not look much, but they are seed-bearers and they beget more of their kin, and that is the object of the exercise.

  I paused – as I always do – at the bench dedicated to the memory of one William Butler. I know nothing about him, but I refer to him as Yeats, for obvious reasons. Sometimes I speak Yeats to him, such as He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven or this one-verse poem entitled The Coming of Wisdom with Time, which strikes me as a fitting epitaph for a woodland memorial:

  Though leaves are many, the root is one;

  Through all the lying days of my youth

  I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;

  Now I may wither into the truth.

  The bench faces the sun with a wide view of the loch far below, and beyond that the distant wooded slopes of Achray Forest. These, along with Glen Finglas and other woodlands all the way west to Loch Lomond, comprise the Great Trossachs Forest, a 21st-century conservation endeavour of great promise. I like to sit and write there. On that December day of unseasonal warmth and calm I listened to far-carrying sounds: a dog bark at a distant farm, the woodwind sigh of bullfinches, and the one that made me wish I could spin my head through 180 degrees like an owl – the high-pitched, incongruous yet unmistakable terrier yap of a golden eagle. I found it in the glasses eventually, much higher than I had thought it should be and almost directly overhead. It was the fourth time I had seen an eagle from that seat in two years; one more reason why William Butler’s thoughtfully-placed memorial endears itself to me, likewise his family who thought fit to put it there.

  I watched the eagle climb out of sight (it simply became too tiny), but the arrival of the sound of its voice in my ear, fallen to earth like a discarded feather, had only been possible because of the stillness of the day, the clarity of the air, and the fact that whenever I am alone in wild places, I am increasingly intrigued by that idea I have mentioned before of listening to the land. It is the simplest of ideas and one of the oldest; it is the basis of a relationship with landscape common to many of the native peoples of the northern hemisphere.

  You make a space in the day. You think only about listening. You give it time. Those are the essentials. Slowly, you can begin to reach beyond the surface sounds and detect the presence of something beyond them, something deeper. Then your eyes begin to assist the process of listening.

  So, there was a moment within that hour of profound calm when every shallow curve and every deeper breast-shaped curve in the contours of the wooded hillside below became a kind of breathing, the breathing of the land itself, and there is at least the sense of something other: the speech that flows between land and forest and water emerged as a conversation on which I could eavesdrop. The American nature writer Barry Lopez hinted at something similar when he wrote of a conversation he had with an old Eskimo woman about a visual equivalent of that “something other” in his book Arctic Dreams (Scribner’s, 1986), then interpreted it thus:

  To put it another way, occasionally one sees something fleeting in the land, a moment when line, colour and movement intensify and something sacred is revealed, leading one to believe that there is another realm of reality corresponding to the physical one but different . . .

  George Garson would have nodded his head agreeably at that. I subscribe to it wholeheartedly.

  I felt embraced by the moment. I had become a fragment of the land. It is the highest and most elusive ideal I can strive for as a nature writer, a condition which feels as if I can respond to the land with animal sensitivity. I have proved to myself over and over again that nature’s most elusive qualities and secrets come within reach when you can let them come to you. Stillness is the key to all of it. Can you be still enough for long enough to become a part of the landscape in nature’s eyes? Almost always, some mundane intrusion from the world beyond its force-field ends it. This time, it was the crescendo throb of a helicopter. But briefly, I lingered in that other realm of reality corresponding to the physical one but different. And long after the helicopter had come and gone and its engine notes absorbed back into the world of uncountable engine notes, the eagle voice came back to me and I was able to recreate its potency, its other-world-ness, its wildness; it is, if you have ears to hear it, the very speech of nature, the language of the world as defined by nature.

  I turned my attention back to the hillside below. I love the pines at this time of year, when every other tree is either brown or bare or both. They appear to glow, as if they are lit from within. That particular winter circumstance of dead calm (wrong expression – living calm), the air rinsed clean, the land lit by the afternoon sun low in the south-west . . . all that conspired to show off the finery of pines while every other tree on the hillside was smoored. At its most exhibitionistic, the phenomenon alighted on a small heathery knoll where two pines have flourished spectacularly in the dozen years of their liberation from that old spruce stranglehold. One is twice the height of the other, but the other has twice the spread. The trunk of the taller tree forked about six feet off the ground, in order to send two perfectly parallel limbs shooting skywards, so that now it brandishes its double crown forty feet above its roots. I have seen many pine trees I would call handsome, but I have never seen another one with quite this elegance. And here was a day designed by this showiest of winter moods to show it off as I and that high-flying eagle (which will know it for a landmark, as I do myself, and must surely have perched there) had never seen it before.

  In the late afternoon, with the sun half in and half out of that realm of shadows beyond the hills in the south-west, I felt the air stir and knew it at once for the breath of winter. Then the air went immediately cold. One hour hence, it would be deep dusk and deep winter cold, the day’s illusion done. It would prove to be the first of many illusions in which this particularly skittish winter would indulge itself. Global warming’s southwards seepage down through the northern hemisphere from the Arctic is making mockeries of the very nature of winter itself. But for now, I watched a thin, creeping, purplish band of cloud begin to wrap itself across the half-sunk sun. Its progress across the sky held an indefinably ominous air and made for hypnotic watching. When I eventually turned my back on it, I was just in time to see my shadow fade into the hillside. At once, the cold rushed in around my neck. Then, there was that sacred thing again, a force of such quietness that I was compelled to linger and listen to its symphonic purity. My stillness felt like a kind of command. No nature writer worth the name is deaf or disobedient to nature’s commands. It could have been moments or minutes or half an hour.

  It ended in uncontrollable, spell-breaking shivers. The unmistakable rasp of a dog fox snapped up out of the woods below me, a harsh discordancy, but one more pointed utterance in nature’s vocabulary. I turned away downhill to consider all that I had just heard.

  * * *

  Sometimes I think I believe in omens. If that sounds half-hearted, that’s because it is, because a
belief in omens is a tough creed to commit to, because by the very unchancy nature of their appearance, they invite doubt, scorn, disbelief. What, for example, am I supposed to make of a whale that was about to appear in the sky?

  I had just shared that landscape’s brief era of quietude with eagle and fox, vivid embellishments to the day’s tapestry of nature’s moods from lochside to oakwood to open hill. I was already thrilled by a kind of lingering unease before that eerie cloud ushered the sun from the sky, and I watched the western sky as I dropped back down the hillside. It was then that a new cloud shape materialised above Ben Venue, the mountain which dominates the very heart of the Trossachs, and this one stopped me dead. It was the shape of a narwhal, complete with long, slender, tapering tusk, jutting out dead straight from its head. I stared and stared and stared. If I concede that the moment was attended by a sense of omen, I should also acknowledge that I was clueless about what kind of message it might be trying to impart. It is a long, long way from the landlocked Trossachs of the Scottish Highlands’ most southerly mountains to the Arctic Ocean domain of the narwhal.