The Nature of Winter

by Jim Crumley

  So might it then have been a woodland like this one, but on Skye rather than Mull, that determined the outcome of an epic fight between the Ulster hero Cuchullin and the Skye warrior-goddess Skiach, for it was known even then (and whenever “then” may have been) that hazelnuts possessed a magic that conferred knowledge on those who ate them? One of many versions of the legend has it that when Cuchullin heard that Skiach was operating a school for heroes in the Cuillin of Skye, he crossed the sea in three strides to land at Talisker Bay, for he was already a true hero and he was intent on wiping out the opposition. Skiach enrolled him in her school and he proceeded to defeat every pupil in hand-to-hand combat. This impressed Skiach enough to permit him to fight her daughter, whom he also defeated. This in turn infuriated Skiach to the extent that she deigned to descend from the mountains to fight Cuchullin herself. They fought inconclusively for days, until finally Skiach’s daughter persuaded them to pause long enough to eat a deer roast that had been stuffed with hazelnuts. The two combatants reckoned privately that the hazel wisdom would give them the knowledge to defeat the other. Instead, it gave them the knowledge to realise that neither could overcome the other, so they made peace instead. They also made this pact: that if either should ever need the assistance of the other, it would be given unconditionally “though the sky fall and crush us”. Cuchullin returned to Ulster. Skiach called the mountains after him – Cuillin.

  It is more than just a wood you enter when you step into the edgy embrace of an Atlantic hazel wood, more than just food you acquire when you eat the nuts of an Atlantic hazel, and it was ever thus. The legend imitates nature, imitates the pact the hazel wood made with the ocean, that both might thrive and accommodate each other.

  The thing is, it works. At the end of a winter in which the dominant characteristic was a climate in chaos, a chaos contrived by our confrontation with nature, the moral of the story was never more obvious. We are Cuchullin and Skiach before they ate the hazelnuts; if we are to pull back from an abyss of unknown depths and disasters, we have to stop the fight. It can be done, a way can be found, we can be the hazel wood to nature’s ocean.

  Nature tells us that every day. But first, we need to take heed. We need to listen.

  Acknowledgements

  I see from the Acknowledgements in this book’s predecessor, The Nature of Autumn, that “I edge closer to poets and artists with the passage of time”. It seems the process only deepens.

  I doff my cap to William Butler Yeats again in these pages.

  And my late great friend George Garson is here again too, and he was both artist and poet. It is probably time that I stopped trying to grapple with the nature of the debt that I owe him, and just be grateful that our paths crossed and that as a result my life was – and continues to be – immeasurably enriched.

  For a Scottish nature writer working primarily in Scotland, the process has occasionally immersed me in the works of others furth of Scotland, some of them considerably furth. Shingi Itoh may not be a name on the lips of many readers and writers of nature books, but his book, The White Egret, is a masterclass in the art of nature photography. I have known and loved it for thirty years and finally I have the opportunity to pay it due tribute, now that little egrets have begun to creep into the fiefdom where I ply my trade.

  I have long been grateful to the painter Charles Tunnicliffe for his thoughtful reading of the plumage of swans, and although it was doubtless intended in the first place as a kind of memo to himself, it is an object lesson for me in how the seeing eye of the artist is one of the most prized assets a nature writer can add to his toolbox.

  And a couple of generations down the line, a young Fife-based painter (and incidentally a singularly entertaining blogger) called Leo Du Feu is one to watch. We’ve worked together at book festivals, and in the context of this book we went whale-watching on the Forth. He has that virtue that George Garson used to extol: “Control, but relaxed control, mind.”

  Other writers, of course, continue to cast their spell, and none is more enduring and more important to the kind of nature writer I have become than Seton Gordon. He is one of my orginal sources. And it was Gavin Maxwell who first made me aware of the possibilities of writing about the land for a living.

  Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (written in 1940s Wisconsin) remains unopposed in my mind as the very pinnacle of the art of nature writing. My Alaskan friend Nancy Lord is one of Leopold’s heirs, a powerful writer who is also increasingly involved in teaching the troubling science of climatology. And Roger Payne, an American whale biologist, wrote in Among Whales the finest work on the subject I know.

  Thank you all, the living and the no longer living, for the benevolent influences of your work on this Scottish nature writer.

  Finally, the most heartfelt vote of thanks of all is for my publisher Sara Hunt of Saraband, her editor Craig Hillsley, and my literary agent Jenny Brown. They are a kind of dream team for my kind of writer.