by Jim Crumley
The only view in any direction was down. I was alone on the summit. I ate a late lunch, enjoying the solitude, the hill-quiet, the sun’s hazy warmth. Highland Scotland does not throw up too many such days on its mountaintops in high summer. I had been still for the better part of an hour. I felt no urge to move. I could have gone down to the bealach between Ben Vorlich and Stuc a’Chroin and scrambled up the buttress to that other mountain summit standing upright in its own blue shadow over there above the paler blue void (I thought of Norman MacCaig’s line ‘gulfs of blue air’), but why bother? – the view wouldn’t improve. The buttress in that light looked like something temporary designed to transform the mountain’s appearance, the way a busby transforms the guardsman beneath. I had climbed it often enough to know its subtleties, to know where to push right whenever conditions were tricky, but it’s not technically difficult climbing. Technically difficult climbing has never been among the reasons why I like mountains. No, the day would not be improved by climbing Stuc a’Chroin. But it might improve if I sat still. As Norman MacCaig put it (in the same verse of the same poem, ‘High Up on Suilven’):
There are more reasons for hills
Than being steep and reaching only high.
There is a theory of mine at work here. It is that whenever I have reached a vantage point of any description in wild country without disturbing anything on the way, and if I have been more or less still and more or less silent for quite a while, then that time spent being still and silent is an investment that gathers interest as it lengthens, because I have succeeded in becoming a fragment of the landscape, and it is in that guise that nature is most inclined to come to me, to see what I’m up to. If you have the capacity for stillness that is willing to sacrifice most things for the reward of having nature come to you (I do – I take no credit it for it, but it is in me, perhaps a throwback inheritance from God knows what ancient member of the tribe), then sooner or later a mountaintop, for example, is likely to grow generous with its secrets.
Sit.
Be still.
Attune.
Let time pass.
Live for this moment alone in the very now where you find yourself, and if the mountain lays bare one of its secrets, be ready.
A noise over my left shoulder.
Damn.
I don’t want noises. Mountaintop noises usually mean other people. I don’t want other people, not here, not now. The noise again, a small scuffle, a throaty croak like a frog, but not a frog, not at 3,000 feet in July.
Of course! I know that croak.
I turned my head left, inch by inch, until the croaking one came into view, a cock ptarmigan, ten yards away, walking towards me. I neither saw nor heard the flight or the landing. How far did he walk to get here?
He advanced, turned left, walked towards the edge, stopped a foot away from where the mountain ended and the gulf of blue air began, and still ten yards away from me.
Then he sat.
Now I could watch him without straining over my shoulder. I saw him close his eyes briefly, a long, slow, sunlit blink. He had become what I hope for myself in this situation, a fragment of the landscape. He was a small rock. I usually aim to be a small boulder. I remembered Margiad Evans, an English nature writer, as I so often do in circumstances like these.
All good, true and loving earth writing must be done first out of doors, either spontaneously in the brain or roughly and livingly with the hand, then afterwards, as swiftly translated to permanent wording as may be. Translated to permanence – ah, is there, can there be permanence . . . The only chance is swiftness and intensity of feeling. Or else, as fallen snow obliterates all movement and knowledge, time lightens the impression and the precious secrets discovered are hidden moment by moment in the day of ever fresh discoveries . . . There is no substitute, even in divine inspiration, for the touch of the moment, the touch of the daylight on the dream.
I took the sentiment to heart years ago as a kind of gospel. It taught me, among other things, to pack a notebook and pencil and sharpener (pencil doesn’t blot in the rain) in the top of my rucksack so that whenever I stop it comes out first and is ready. So I tried to write him down there and then while he sat and blinked his slow, sunlit blink, reminding myself of advice handed down by an American teacher of writing, Donald M. Murray – ‘Never be embarrassed by crap first drafts.’
His red eyebrow is odd and overdone, and a startling shade at this distance, a piece of scarlet fuzzy felt left over from a nursery child’s bird. The rest of him is mottle – interlocking fragments and shades of gold, brown, tawny, tan, grey, black on his widespread tail, white under his chin, patched on his flank like quartz, and on his folded wings . . . the wolf shades. Only a creature dedicated to stillness goes to so much trouble to transform its plumage four times a year. No creature is more of the mountain than a ptarmigan.
Ten minutes, punctuated by the slow, sunlit blinks. Is that how a ptarmigan sleeps?
He stirs himself, stretches out first one bright-white wing then the other, walks to the edge, steps off, boards the gulf of blue air, as fluent in the shapes of the mountain’s airspace as in the shades of the stony ground; vanishes round a buttress.
Did he even know I was there?
I read it back: ‘ . . . the wolf shades . . . ’
The ptarmigan’s genius, like the wolf’s, is to remain unseen until it declares itself, the ptarmigan to outwit its predators, the wolf to outwit its prey. Many, many times, in the north of the world, a wolf walks the high, stony places like this one where ptarmigan nest. The sitting bird can fly, of course, if she sees or hears the wolf coming, but that betrays the nest. She knows the wolf’s way, because their tribes have evolved together for uncounted millennia. She knows the wolf knows she is there, or at least she knows she cannot rely on the wolf failing to notice her rock-stillness for what it is. But she knows too that the wolf often declines easy prey if that prey opts for stillness. It’s as true for her as it is for the deer, the elk, the caribou, the moose, the buffalo . . . the big beasts all across the northern hemisphere that will sustain the whole wolf pack for days. The one with the courage to stand and face the wolf usually lives to tell the tale. It’s almost as if stillness baffles the wolf, as if it’s not in nature’s script. The wolf likes its prey on the move.
So I wonder about that ptarmigan whose high-mountain terrain I shared for a few minutes, now that we are both natives of a wolf-less land; that ptarmigan that walked to within a few yards of me then sat and drowsed for ten minutes, my presence either unrecognised for what it was or undetected. And what I wonder is this: has the absence of the wolf these last 200-or-so years blunted the land-wariness of a creature like this whose principal predator now in a wolf-less landscape is the golden eagle? Out-of-control hillwalkers’ dogs and the occasional forays of the hill fox up onto the high ground doubtless take a small toll (and neither of these have scruples about stillness), but the presence of the wolf is as a sharpening tool for the vigilance of all its prey species and all its fellow travellers. Does its long absence from its old territories, therefore, blunt that old vigilance? Do the prey species un-evolve to something less than their full potential?
Far down the mountain I saw white movement. In that light, even at a distance of over a mile, the tiny whiteness was a vivid intrusion on the natural order of the day. No ptarmigan would have sat beside such a shade. I put the binoculars on it, and it proved to be a white teeshirt with someone inside it, one of a small group of less conspicuous hillwalkers who had just turned uphill from Glen Ample into Coire Fuadaraich. Every eye on the mountain would see that shirt.
In all the time that I had been sitting high on the mountain I had not lifted the binoculars until that moment. I had not, for example, scoured the bealach or the corries on either side of it for signs of life – Coire Fuadaraich to the north-west, the Dubh Chorein to the south-east. I had been content with lunch, with the warm mountain stillness, with the random nature of my thoughts, with writing do
wn the ptarmigan. Now, as I lowered the glasses and let my eyes wander over the lower slopes, the floor of the corrie began to move.
My first reaction was that such movement could only be achieved by a trick of the light infused by the heat haze, a kind of mirage. My second was to discount the first and focus the binoculars. All across the steeply-sloping floor of Coire Fuadaraich, hundreds of red deer were getting to their feet. There is no question in my mind that they had been disturbed by the white teeshirt. For as long as they had held their nerve, their heat-of-the-day stillness had served them well, so that even the herd’s huge presence lay as undetected as a rock-still ptarmigan. But now they were restlessly on their feet, and unease went through the herd as an upstart breeze troubles the surface of a still pool. And for those few moments when that unease sought purpose and direction, their chaos of small movements was as eye-catching as a white teeshirt. Then the herd galvanised itself, all indecision done, purpose and direction determined. It chose flight and it chose to climb.
The corrie is tall and narrow. At its base was the source of unease and the deer sought distance from it, which meant not only the steep climb up to the bealach, but also a steadily narrowing climb. The highest deer turned to face uphill and began. The others, as widely scattered below them as the corrie allowed, crammed together behind them so that the whole mass of deer formed the shape of an inverted funnel that poured uphill. The lowest, furthest deer were almost stationary, but they had formed up like an army, waiting, while the first wave began to climb at the double.
The higher they climbed, the narrower and steeper the terrain, so the first wave grew slimmer and those compelled to fall back from its edges formed up immediately behind the leaders and the herd massing below made way for them, all of this forming and reforming at a steep uphill gallop. Then I heard them.
I sat directly above the bealach. That downward view now filled with a stampeding river of deer that flowed uphill. And as it flowed and the frontrunners strained up the last steep slopes below the bealach, it thundered. I had never heard such a sound before. It rose on thermals of warm air like distant muted drumming, hundreds of drums. I guessed five hundred head of deer, two thousand hooves, two thousand drums. Their sound gathered and rose, a ragged concerto of drumming that climbed the mountain by its airspace, that seemed to arrive in my ears by way of my spine, so that I felt myself straighten my back in response.
The herd changed colour as it climbed. Far down in the corrie where the back markers had only just begun to jostle uphill, the bright flood of haze painted an orangey-yellow layer across their summer-red backs and flanks, and in the growing heat, their hides shone. But up at the head of the corrie where the walls of the two mountains leaned closest and the air was bluer and patched with broken shadow, the deer darkened to woodier shades.
The front of the column reached the bealach and crossed it no more than five abreast. I wondered if they might pause there to reassess the threat of the white teeshirt, but the momentum of the massed ranks at their back was irresistible, and they charged across the level ground headlong down into the Dubh Chorein without breaking stride. And as they crossed and the hordes followed, the thunder of hooves climbed not just the airspace but throbbed up through the very rock of the mountain, and because I sat on the mountain’s uppermost rocks, through me too, and I shivered at its thrill.
As the front third raced downhill, the middle third hit the bealach, and the final third charged up through the narrows, the whole stretched out herd took on the air of a single creature with a pliable spine, a colossal snake, say, but a snake that thundered as it slithered. Then the last of them was over the bealach and not one paused to look back, and the sound dwindled away and the sun lit the backs of the last few, and the sound of them was replaced by the scent of them, for that too had climbed the airspace on the thermals and lay as a cloud about the summit rocks. Then silence rushed in and two hillwalkers appeared by the summit cairn. One waved and pointed, and called out, ‘Did you see the deer?’
I waved back and smiled and nodded, but the thing was done and no words came. The walkers headed off for the further cairn along the mountain’s short summit ridge. I picked up my notebook and pencil and wrote down the first words that came into my head, even though they were not my words:
There are more reasons for hills
Than being steep and reaching only high.
High up on Suilven or high up on Ben Vorlich, it is surely one of the great truths of all good, true and loving earth writing.
The white teeshirt and its muted companions did not climb the mountain. Their expedition seemed to stall when they mobilised the deer. When I finally left the high ground I saw them retreating far down the glen, the unwitting originators of what I still consider to be one of the more extraordinary hours of my life. Whatever they may have seen and heard from below, it was surely beyond their comprehension to envisage how the flight of the deer herd looked and sounded and smelled from above.
I will remember it forever.
A little while after the event, I made an interesting discovery about the corrie. Fuadaraich – it is a very unusual name. Many corries have simple names that recur all across the landscape – Gaelic words meaning rough, for example, or rocky, or a particular colour, or a species of tree, or a place where deer calve, that kind of thing, practical names that describe the landscape perfectly. But I never came across another Coire Fuadaraich. One day I went in search of its meaning. I am no Gaelic scholar, and I have that little learning of the language that is a dangerous thing. But it has named most of my preferred landscapes and so it intrigues me. And although I have found no reference to the precise spelling of fuadaraich, Gaelic spelling on OS maps made in Southampton was ever an inexact science. In fact the spelling of all written Gaelic of a certain age is alarmingly flexible. Fuadaraich is close enough to fuaraich to be worth considering, and fuaraich is a verb meaning to cool or to become cool, and fuarachadh (the same sound with the addition of an inconsequential final ‘uh’ syllable) is a noun meaning the act of cooling, relief from heat. And I thought then how in the heat of that early afternoon all the deer were lying down in a corrie named for the act of cooling, of relief from heat, and it could not fit the circumstances more perfectly.
The deer knew the corrie as a place to lie up in oppressive warm weather, and so would the shieling folk of Glen Ample who doubtless named that landscape. And so would its wolves. One effect of the presence of wolves on the ground is to manage deer herds with the kind of relentless efficiency that we (as the only species that now manages deer) could never begin to emulate. A wolf pack is more or less constantly on the move within its territory, and for that simple reason, deer are more or less constantly on the move too. The absence of wolves these last two centuries has made the deer more or less sedentary.
The absence of native trees in Glen Ample is a direct consequence of the absence of wolves, and the browsing of hordes of sedentary deer. In the days of the wolf and the fewer, more mobile deer, the glen was lightly wooded – birch, rowan, a few pines and aspen; alders on the burn are all that have survived. A fairly brutal intrusion of dense plantation spruce high on the west flank of the glen around 30 years ago was not what nature had in mind. The map still marks ‘Coille Baile a’ Mhaoir’ a mile to the north of the lower slopes of Coire Fhuadaraich, and coille is the Gaelic word for a wood. No tree dignifies the place now.
Suppose, then, the half-a-dozen walkers with the white teeshirt in their midst had been a pack of as many wolves, and perhaps three hundred years ago. The wolves would have had light woodland on their side, and in that circumstance they were all but invisible when they chose to be. The accidental effect achieved by the appearance of the walkers would be precisely the effect desired by the wolves. But they would have come in a fan from below the deer, and the deer would have run as they ran from the walkers. But whereas the walkers provoked an orderly retreat, with the herd bunching behind the leaders and the back-markers slowed to a trot perha
ps twenty or thirty abreast, while the front of the herd galloped five abreast across the bealach, the wolves panicked the back-markers and scattered them wildly, and with the deer both trying to run and hemmed in by the corrie walls, the wolves made the easiest of killings. And whereas the walkers scared the deer out of the corrie of cooling for a few hours (after which they would wander back and resume the browsing-to-the-bone of the treeless glen) the wolves’ instinct for travel had the crucial effect of keeping the deer herd constantly on the move.
This teaches you two things about red deer. One is that in the days of wolves, the deer were travellers too because the wolves insisted on it, so there was far less scope for the lame and the old and the sick to survive; the herd was smaller and healthier because the wolves insisted on that too. The other is that the red deer is at least every bit as much a woodland animal as an animal of the bare hillsides. John Buchan wrote in his famous 1924 novel of the Highland deer forest, John Macnab:
Great birch woods from both sides of the valley descended to the stream, thereby making the excellence of the Home beat, for the woodland stag is a heavier beast than his brother of the high tops.
In those parts of mainland Europe where red deer still live mainly in forests you find stags a third bigger than the Monarch of the Glen and his kin. So by keeping deer on the move the herd is smaller, the animals larger and healthier, and woodland flourishes to such an extent that it becomes forest and a healthy forest can sustain a healthy deer population. The agent that makes all this possible is the wolf. It bears repeating: in a northern hemisphere wilderness, with the wolf in place everything in nature makes sense, but in the absence of wolves nothing in nature makes sense. We have taken upon ourselves the role of the top predator, and such is our inefficiency in the job that we first eliminated nature’s genius of biodiversity in the wolf, then instructed the landscape to evolve as a bare land overrun by deer and sheep, then – a last madness – we invented a forestry industry to grow trees nature would not have chosen and in a way that nature would never have chosen to grow them. And then we shut the deer out from these forests.