by Jim Crumley
The newcomers around the skylines above Loch Lubnaig are the sea eagles. They are not nesting here yet, although I am as sure as I can be that it is a question of time. But they turn up with increasing frequency, mostly wandering young birds, and some of these will be crossing the country between the relatively new sea eagle reintroduction site on the Tay estuary and the well-established golden and sea eagle populations on Mull, following a loosely defined two-way coast-to-coast highway, a phenomenon I explored in a book called The Eagle’s Way (Saraband, 2014). Everything I have seen since then reinforces my conviction that not only is the “highway” in regular use in both directions, and involving the young of both species of eagles, but I am also convinced now that this is the resumption of very old behaviour, made possible once again because the east coast reintroduction of sea eagles recreated the circumstances which facilitated it. Here in the hills surrounding the loch, their vast silhouettes grace my sky, mostly alone, sometimes companionably travelling with young golden eagles, sometimes being aggressively moved on by nesting golden eagles.
Even at this distance, you can tell the eagle species apart. The sea eagle with its wings held wide has the look more of a vulture than an eagle. It is also the only thing in our sky that makes a golden eagle look small. I have seen a male golden eagle and a female sea eagle square up to each other, and although David and Goliath comparisons are uncalled for, the golden eagle looked positively compact, the sea eagle something of an ungainly monstrosity. Surprising as it may have looked at first glance, the odds were stacked against the sea eagle from the outset. Firstly, the golden eagle had the added impetus of defending its territory and there is no greater stimulus in nature. Secondly, the golden eagle is the finest flier in the sky. The sea eagle was out-thought and out-manoeuvred, and several times during a confrontation which lasted for three or four minutes it had clearly no idea where the golden eagle was, and where its next assault was coming from.
Yet where they live and breed close together and in significant numbers, as on Mull and Skye for example, they appear to function as complementary tribes, for the sea eagle is well accustomed to frequent and to hunt the low-lying ground where people live and work, while the golden eagle mostly shuns humanity and its works. I think we are not too far away from the time when the sea eagle will be restored to much of its historic landscape, and for sure the hills around Loch Lubnaig will come to know it well.
I wandered back down the lochside, thinking not about eagles (for a long scrutiny of the skyline had revealed none) but rather how that thick early frost had scarcely made it through the morning before this most un-winter-like winter dismissed it. By the time I was back at my car, I was carrying my winter jacket, for I had dressed for a cold day, and by any standards of a Scottish winter solstice, the temperature had risen to something uncomfortably warm.
* * *
A bustling thrust of the jetstream introduced the day of the midwinter solstice at 3a.m. with a shuddering gale and thudding rain. Seven hours later, ill-slept, I walked out near Stirling Castle. Without doubt, it was snowing in the mountains, but the weather forecast was as fragmentary and chaotic as ever. A burst of low sunlight from somewhere behind my left shoulder thrust a torn, jiving fragment of rainbow in among the snow clouds. The light show was captivating while it lasted, and tomorrow there would be an hour or two of clear skies, and the mountains would soar in wintry splendour, and then it would rain and rain and the snow would vanish, the rivers swell and churn, the fields below the foothills would gather large and small pools of floodwater, and the geese and the swans would flock there because there is nothing they like better than feeding on grass through shallow water. For now, there was the rainbow again, and again and again, for it flashed on and off over half an hour like a landlocked lighthouse with ideas above its station and a tendency to jazzy improvisation.
Something eerily similar drifted through the following afternoon when I was walking up in the Sma’ Glen, not far from Aberfeldy in Perthshire. The sun materialised in the late afternoon this time, and it was as low and pale and round and watchable as a full moon, and draped in hanging silken veils of translucent snow cloud, which shifted restlessly against the light. It was the flimsiest, frailest phenomenon I have ever seen in a Highland sky. These clouds had been at work in the glen all day, edged along from time to time by a light and chilled northerly air. Eventually the sun held sway over them for a midday hour so that the newly whitened mountains bared their shoulders and then their summits, and these shone a fetching shade of bridal white. But then the veils regathered, and layer on layer they dimmed and shaded and shackled the sun. As the afternoon edged towards the earliest of dusks, the sun appeared to recede further and further back among the fusing densities of more and more layers of cloud with their freighting of light snow, until at last it was nothing but the light at the end of a cloud tunnel, illuminating nothing at all.
NATURE WRITER
Clouds in a river pool,
yesterday’s snow on the bank,
the fall of an otter’s paw
memorialised there
at least until the thaw.
Every reflected river hue
- dull green, off-white, off-black,
patched sky-blue snared
between upended trees – all these
gather in the drake goosander’s breast.
Raven, high and flying west,
staccato whoops slung at intervals
between the milestones
of its purpose.
And who’s this whose
masking stillness slips only
to reach for that cup
of cooling flask tea
on its saucer of snow,
or to inch the pencil
that pauses at intervals
slung between the milestones
of his purpose?
Chapter Eight
Wolf Moon
Sometimes, when I have wolves on my mind, I go to Beinn a’ Chrulaiste. By the standards of its nearest neighbours it is an unprepossessing mountain (it lives across the Glencoe road from Meall a’ Bhùiridh and Buachaille Etive Mòr, and it rubs shoulders with the Aonach Eagach on one side and Rannoch Moor on the other). It even has an unprepossessing name – crulaist means “rocky hill”, so Beinn a’ Chrulaiste means “rocky hill mountain”. The old namers of that landscape that fringes Rannoch Moor didn’t burn the midnight oil of their creative imagination to come up with that one, did they? There again, perhaps there was a time when the mountain was just called An Crulaist because it had a particularly rocky profile when viewed from where the namers lived, then some academic twat with a degree in pedantry went on a Highland jaunt, paused a night in the Kings House Hotel, and decided to affix the prefix which was already built into the name; and once it was written down on a map, no one could be bothered to change it back, for the local folk didn’t need the map and went on calling it An Crulaist, and the mountaineers who did need the map called it what it said on the map without much caring what it meant. But despite its name, Beinn a’ Chrulaiste has rare qualities. I am predisposed to any mountain that assists the idea of an imaginative understanding of how the landscape works, and for that matter, the idea of wolf reintroduction into Highland Scotland, which is why, sometimes, when I have wolves on my mind, I go to Beinn a’ Chrulaiste.
Mostly, when I do have wolves on my mind, it is midwinter. Winter is the wolf time. In countries where they still run free and where they are still permitted to make the rules which govern all nature there, winter is the season when wolves are at their most imperious. When all their prey species are weakened by winter, and especially the deer, wolves grow stronger. It can never get too cold for wolves; they are too well designed, too well insulated. On firm, dry ground, a healthy deer will always outrun a wolf, but in snow the deer struggle and the wolves are tireless. Snowy winters are when wolves effect decisive measures to adjust the balance between the deer herds and the well-being of the land. So they are not sim
ply supreme hunters, they are also eco-warriors. One of the comparatively few human beings on Earth to grasp the true significance of that was an American ecologist, Paul L. Errington. In a book called Of Predation and Life (Iowa State University Press, 1967), published five years after his death, he wrote:
In my opinion, native predators belong in our natural outdoor scenes, not so much because they have a monetary value . . . as because they are a manifestation of life’s wholeness . . . Predation is part of the equation of life.
Errington also wrote:
Of all the native biological constituents of a northern wilderness scene, I should say that the wolves present the greatest test of human wisdom and good intentions.
He was an enlightened thinker on the subject of wilderness, but then he had studied at the University of Wisconsin with none other than Aldo Leopold, who became his mentor and friend, and with whom he enjoyed a close working relationship. And Leopold had numbered John Muir among his friends, so there would have been conversations in the University of Wisconsin at which I would love to have been a fly on the wall.
And it was Leopold who wrote in A Sand County Almanac:
. . . I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death . . . Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise . . . I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer . . .
In a Scottish context, this kind of thinking does not go down well, even today, with the manipulators of those two great oxymorons of our landscape, the deer forest and the grouse moor. The idea that “predators are a manifestation of life’s wholeness” is not one that would sit lightly on the shoulders of most Highland estate land managers, far less that “predation is part of the equation of life”. Unless of course the predation is done by human beings with shotguns who are paying dearly for the privilege, and who have no feeling for where they are and no sense of responsibility for the well-being of land and landscape, nor of nature and deer, nor of the native people; and to whom the idea of deferring to the wolf as top predator is an abhorrence. The economics of sporting estates are an affront to the land itself and to the deer. I love red deer, love to watch them thunder over a bealach from a high mountain perch, love to find them placidly browsing a sunlit woodland corner (they are woodland beasts at heart), love to come close and listen to their conversations. But I despise what passes for Scottish land use policy has done to them. We have been accustomed for far too long to the reckless proliferation of deer, to pruning-sheared mountains and to the absence of wolves. We have lost the capacity, the inclination and the willingness to consult our mountains, to listen to our land.
Beinn a’ Chrulaiste is unquestionably a mountain that lives in mortal fear of its deer, a mountain that makes its own eloquent case for the return of the wolf. The first time I climbed it was also the moment I began to piece together the case for reintroducing wolves into a majestic Scottish Highland heartland with Rannoch Moor as its centrepiece. I was attracted to Beinn a’ Chrulaiste first because of its heroic stance in the north-west corner of the Moor, and diagonally opposed to another heroic mountain in the south-east corner – Schiehallion. The first time I advanced the argument in print was twenty years now, in a book called Gulfs of Blue Air (Mainstream, 1997). That book was my own contribution to the age-old Scottish literary tradition of the Highland Journey. It included a crossing of Rannoch Moor:
I had crossed the Moor once before, at the end of an old March, when it was still hard and still and steely and ice-grey and dark, dark brown. I have wandered out into it in every season from Kingshouse for a mile or two at a time, just sensing the difference. I have stared out at it from Beinn Dorain, Schiehallion, and the Buachaille’s near neighbour, Beinn a’ Chrulaiste, the last an occasion when it contrived its own sunrise weather, fashioned it into a thunderous storm and hurled that monster of its own making at mighty Clach Lethad of the Black Mount, resuming (as I saw it, high and dry on my off-to-one-side mountain) ancient glacial hostilities. If you ever fall to wondering about the ice-bound forces which made the shape of the Highlands as we know them, then scratch your head over this: Rannoch Moor was once a high white plateau, like the Icelandic ice cap or northern Greenland. When things began to move, and the dragging weight of the ice began to fashion mountains, Rannoch Moor fell through its own roof and lay there, a reservoir of ice, and the glaciers of the embryonic Black Mount fed off it. I have stood on an Icelandic glacier (it is no great claim to fame, any number of tourists have done it), and although any number of films and glossy books can prepare you for the spectacle if not the scale of the spectacle, nothing had prepared me for the fact that it spoke. It groaned and growled and muttered and spat out lumps of itself. It sounded like the indecipherable musings of a parliament of plotting architects: should we have another lake here, another mountain? Or a mountain range? If we lay our moraines through that valley, will trees follow? It was a millionth part – a billionth for all I know – of an awareness of what went on here when Rannoch Moor invented itself and began to leak glaciers of its own – Glen Orchy, Glen Etive, Glencoe, and east to Loch Rannoch, even northwards where Loch Ericht lies. My mind is not up to the task of imagining what that re-invention of landscapes must have looked like, but I have heard a few syllables of the language of the architects.
Over the years I refined and elaborated on my wolf reintroduction argument, in Brother Nature (Whittles, 2003), most noticeably in The Last Wolf (Birlinn, 2010), and most recently in my beaver book, Nature’s Architect (Saraband, 2015). The plan is this: a new wilderness national park extending from the Black Wood of Rannoch and Rannoch Moor to the Black Mount, Glen Orchy and Inishail, and west to the shore of Loch Etive. The national park should mean what it says – a park owned by the nation, rather than the unwieldy conglomerations of often reluctant landowners that characterise Scotland’s existing national parks. Its overwhelming priorities would be to serve the needs of nature. Its every native habitat would be enhanced, extended, restored; Rannoch Moor would return to the lightly wooded mosaic it once was. The first wolf reintroduction would be into the Black Wood and the Moor of Rannoch, and because the new national park would march with the Cairngorms National Park in the north-east and Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park to the south-west, the wolves would be well served with room to expand in both directions. I think that initially at least, Scotland could accommodate three or four packs, and if numbers increased beyond that, some controlling measures could be considered. It is a model that seems to work well in Norway, where wolves re-introduced themselves by walking over the border from Sweden. In the absence of a land border with Sweden or anywhere else for that matter, we, the people, have to make the first move. We have nothing to fear. On the contrary, when the wolf’s wholly benevolent presence is revealed to us, an ancient darkness locked deep within our psyche will be banished. For the wolf is a catalyst, an enabler, a provider of unlimited opportunity for nature in all its guises, all its tribes. Like aconites and snowdrops thrusting through frozen ground to burst into flower, wolves invigorate the land with new light, new colour, a new flowering.
All the obstacles are in our minds. We misunderstand the nature of the wolf. That ancient darkness from which the old stories emanated and elaborated their distortions (a devourer of babies, a despoiler of the battlefield dead) is the product of nothing more than a very old storytelling tradition. The real wild wolf is to be found elsewhere. And despite all that biologists now know about the wolf in many countries, despite all the literature and all the television documentaries, despite the Yellowstone reintroduction making positive headlines for wolves around the world, there are still far too many of us who believe, or think we believe, that the only goo
d wolf is a dead wolf, or better still, an extinct wolf.
Even the myths are stubborn. There was a strange story in some British newspapers on January 12th, 2017, concerning the full moon that night. It said that the first full moon of the year is known as the wolf moon. I had never heard of a wolf moon, so with years of dismantling wolf myths under my belt I was immediately suspicious. The story explained that it was so named because in the deep snow of midwinter, wolf packs got hungry and came in around the villages of Native American tribes, scavenging for food. The implication, at least, was that the food walked around on two legs.
So far, so much bollocks. But why, I wondered, would British newspapers run such a story? Where had it come from? I sniffed around. I have a background of newspaper journalism, and although I quit my last staff job almost thirty years ago to write my books, sometimes it still serves me well. It turned out that the 2017 edition of an American journal called the Farmers’ Almanac was its 200th, and so it had issued press releases and posted blogs in celebration. And because one of the ingredients was the wolf – and I can see no other explanation – it found its way into some very unlikely outlets, which you could be forgiven for thinking are normally furth of the fiefdom of the Farmers’ Almanac. It said that native tribes among America’s northern and eastern states used to name each full moon (which is true), and the first of the year was the wolf moon (which, it turned out, isn’t). The Almanac elaborated on the reason why the first moon of the year was called the wolf moon: