The Living Mountain

by Nan Shepherd

  This forest blazed with real fire in the early summer of 1920. One of the gamekeepers told me that forty of them were on the watch for ten days and nights, to keep the fire from spreading. And by night, he said, the tree trunks glowed like pillars of fire.

  Not much is left now of this great pine forest. Yet in the glens that run up into the mountain, there are still a few of the very old firs that may have been the original Caledonian forest. Old trees still stand in Glen Einich, as they do at Ballochbuie on the other side of the mountain; and by the shores of Loch an Eilein are a scatter of enormous venerable Scots firs, their girth two and a half times the span of my (quite long) arms, the flakes of their bark a foot and a half in length and thick as books, their roots, exposed where the soil has been washed away above the path, twisted and intertwined like a cage of snakes. Here and there also, notably by the sluice gates at the exit of Loch Einich, can be seen, half-sunk in the bog, numbers of the roots of trees long perished.

  This sluice dates, like those on other of the lochs, to the late eighteenth century, when the ancient wood rang with the activity of the fellers. The trunks ready, the sluices were opened, and the trees guided down on the rush of water to the Spey. There is a vivid description of it, as a child remembered it, in Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus’s Memoirs of a Highland Lady. When the timber was first realised to be a source of wealth, and felled, small sawmills were erected on the various burns—tiny clearings, with the saw, a but and a ben and a patch of corn; but soon it was found more profitable to float all the timber downstream to the Spey, where it was made into rough rafts and so carried to Fochabers and Garmouth. The very sites of these ancient sawmills are forgotten. Today come the motor lorries, the sawmill and all its machinery making a compact township for the time that it is required; and outsiders, not the men of the place, fell and lop and cut. Only the old ways still linger here and there as where a native horse, tended by a man deep-rooted in the place, drags the chained trunks down from inaccessible corners, and is led back for the night to one of the ancient farms on the edge of the moor.

  The first great cutting of the forest took place during the Napoleonic wars, when home-grown timber was urgently required. A century later we have seen the same thing happen. In 1914 and again, and more drastically, in 1940, the later wood has gone the way of the former. It will grow again, but for a while the land will be scarred and the living things—the crested tits, the shy roe deer—will flee. I tremble especially for the crested tit, whose rarity is a proud distinction of these woods.

  I have heard people say that they have watched in vain for these exquisite tits, but, if you know their haunts (I shall not give them away), they can be conjured easily from a tree by simply standing still against its trunk. You have heard the stir and small sound of tits, but at your approach they are gone, there is not a bird to see. But stand quite still, and in a minute or two they forget you, and flit from branch to branch close to your head. I have seen a crested tit turn itself around not a foot from my eye. In the nesting season, however, they will scold like fishwives. I have been scolded at by a pair of them with such vehemence that in pure shame for them I have left their tree.

  How fierce was the rush of water when the ancient sluices on the lochs were opened, an eighty-year-old woman made plain to me when she told me how it was once used to outwit the gauger. For a drop of the mountain dew was made on the far side of the Beinnie, in a thick place beneath Cam Elrig where I once lost my path; and when the man who made it had the word passed to him that the gauger was on the way, he had no time to hide the stuff. Indeed, then, when the word came to him, he was nearer the sluice than the still, and to the sluice he went—I can see him spangin’ on, heel to the ground, with the loping stride of the Highlander bent on business. So when the exciseman came, turbulent water raced between him and the drop whisky. And no crossing it that day at the least. Nor perhaps the next.

  Gaunt remnants of pine trees high on the mountain sides show that the earlier forest went further up than the present forest does. Yet here and there a single seed, wind borne or dropped by a bird, has grown far above the main body of the trees. Some of these out-liers show the amazing adaptability of this tree. They can change their form at need, like any wizard. I know one, rooted a few paces from a 2900 feet summit, a sturdy plant but splayed to the mountains and almost roseate in structure, three feet across and not more than five inches in height. There it clings, plastered against the arid ground. I shall watch with much interest to see how much larger it will grow, and in what direction.

  Dead fir roots, left in the soil long after the tree is gone, make the best kindling in the world. I know old women who look with the utmost contempt on paper as a fire-lighter and scorn to use more than one match to set a fire going. I know two such old women, both well over eighty, both living alone, one on the Spey side of the mountains and one on the Dee, who howk their fir roots from the moor, drag them home and splinter them. Then you may watch them, if you visit their frugal homes when the fire is out, build the rossity reets (we call them that on the Aberdeenshire side) into a pyramid with their brown hard wrinkled fingers, fill the kettle with a cup from the pail of well water, hang it on the swye and swing it over the blazing sticks. And before you have well settled to your newse the tea is made, and if the brown earthenware teapot has a broken spout (‘my teapot has lost a tooth’), and tea splutters from it on to the open hearth and raises spurts of ash and steam, you can call it a soss or a libation to the gods as you feel inclined, but it will not make the tea less good nor the talk less racy.

  Of the inconspicuous things that creep in heather, I have a special affection for stagmoss—not the hard braided kind but the fuzzy kind we called ‘toadstails’. I was taught the art of picking these by my father when I was a small child. We lay on the heather and my fingers learned to feel their way along each separate trail and side branch, carefully detaching each tiny root, until we had thick bunchy pieces many yards long. It was a good art to teach a child. Though I did not know it then, I was learning my way in, through my own fingers, to the secret of growth.

  That secret the mountain never quite gives away. Man is slowly learning to read it. He watches, he ponders, patiently he adds fact to fact. He finds a hint of it in the ‘formidable’ roots of the moss campion and in the fine roots that the tiny eyebright sends into the substance of the grass to ease its own search for food. It is in the glaucous and fleshy leaves of the sedums and the saxifrages, through which they store the bounty of the earth against the times when the earth is not bountiful. It is in the miniature size of the smallest willow, whose woolly fluff blows about the plateau as the silky hairs of the cotton grass blow about the bogs. And in the miniature azalea that grows splayed against the mountain for protection, and lures the rare insects by its rosy hue, and flourishes, like the heather, on granite; whereas granite cannot meet the needs of many of the rare mountain flowers, that crave the streaks of limestone, or the rich humus of the micaschist—like that rarest of all, found in only one spot in the Cairngorms, the alpine milk-vetch, its delicate pale bloom edged with lavender, haunted by its red-and-black familiar the Burnet moth: why so haunted no one knows, but no milk-vetch, no Burnet moth. On a wet windy sunless day, when moths would hardly be expected to be visible at all, we have found numbers of these tart little creatures on the milk-vetch clumps.

  The more one learns of this intricate interplay of soil, altitude, weather, and the living tissues of plant and insect (an intricacy that has its astonishing moments, as when sundew and butterwort eat the insects), the more the mystery deepens. Knowledge does not dispel mystery. Scientists tell me that the alpine flora of the Scottish mountains is Arctic in origin—that these small scattered plants have outlived the Glacial period and are the only vegetable life in our country that is older than the Ice Age. But that doesn’t explain them. It only adds time to the equation and gives it a new dimension. I find I have a naive faith in my scientist friends—they are such jolly people, they w
ouldn’t fib to me unnecessarily, and their stories make the world so interesting. But my imagination boggles at this. I can imagine the antiquity of rock, but the antiquity of a living flower—that is harder. It means that these toughs of the mountain top, with their angelic inflorescence and the devil in their roots, have had the cunning and the effrontery to cheat, not only a winter, but an Ice Age. The scientists have the humility to acknowledge that they don’t know how it has been done.

  EIGHT

  Life: Birds, Animals, Insects

  The first time I found summer on the plateau—for although my earliest expeditions were all made in June or July, I experienced cloud, mist, howling wind, hailstones, rain and even a blizzard—the first time the sun blazed and the air was balmy, we were standing on the edge of an outward facing precipice, when I was startled by a whizzing sound behind me. Something dark swished past the side of my head at a speed that made me giddy. Hardly had I got back my balance when it came again, whistling through the windless air, which eddied round me with the motion. This time my eyes were ready, and I realised that a swift was sweeping in mighty curves over the edge of the plateau, plunging down the face of the rock and rising again like a jet of water. No one had told me I should find swifts on the mountain. Eagles and ptarmigan, yes: but that first sight of the mad, joyous abandon of the swift over and over the very edge of the precipice shocked me with a thrill of elation. All that volley of speed, those convolutions of delight, to catch a few flies! The discrepancy between purpose and performance made me laugh aloud—a laugh that gave the same feeling of release as though I had been dancing for a long time.

  It seems odd that merely to watch the motion of flight should give the body not only vicarious exhilaration but release. So urgent is the rhythm that it invades the blood. This power of flight to take us in to itself through the eyes as though we had actually shared in the motion, I have never felt so strongly as when watching swifts on the mountain top. Their headlong rush, each curve of which is at the same time a miracle of grace, the swishing sound of their cleavage of the air and the occasional high pitched cry that is hardly like the note of an earthly bird, seem to make visible and audible some essence of the free, wild spirit of the mountain.

  The flight of the eagle, if less immediately exciting than that of the swifts, is more profoundly satisfying. The great spiral of his ascent, rising coil over coil in slow symmetry, has in its movement all the amplitude of space. And when he has soared to the top of his bent, there comes the level flight as far as the eye can follow, straight, clean and effortless as breathing. The wings hardly move, now and then perhaps a lazy flap as though a cyclist, free-wheeling on a gentle slope, turned the crank a time or two. The bird seems to float, but to float with a direct and undeviating force. It is only when one remarks that he is floating up-wind that the magnitude of that force becomes apparent. I stood once about the 2500 feet level, in January when the world was quite white, and watched an eagle well below me following up the river valley in search of food. He flew right into the wind. The wings were slightly tilted, but so far as I could judge from above he held them steady. And he came on with a purposeful urgency behind which must have been the very terror of strength.

  It was this strong undeviating flight on steady wings that made a member of the Observer Corps (my friend James McGregor reports—the Observation Post was in his highest field and his croft, I believe, is the highest in Scotland) cry out in excitement, ‘Here’s a plane I can’t identify! What’s this one, do you think?’ McGregor looked and said, without a glimmer, ‘That’s the one they call the Golden Eagle.’ ‘Didn’t know there was such a one,’ said the other; and he could hardly be convinced that he was looking at a bird and not a plane. And just this morning, in my own garden on Lower Deeside, fifty miles from the eagle country, I caught sight of three planes very high against white clouds, wheeling in circles round one another, and my first amazed reaction was ‘Eagles!’

  Mr Seton Gordon claims that the Golden Eagle rises from her eyrie clumsily, especially when the air is calm. I have never had, I was going to say the luck, but I should say rather the assiduity and patience to see an eagle rising from the eyrie, but I have watched one fly out from the vicinity of an eyrie, alight in heather some distance away, rise again and again alight, and there was nothing noteworthy in its movement. It is the power in the flight that enthrals the eye. And when one has realised, as probably one does not do at first, that it is a power which binds the strength of the wind to its own purpose, so that the more powerful the wind the more powerful is the flight of the bird, then one sees how intimately the eagle, like the moss campion, is integral to the mountain. Only here, where the wind tears across these desolate marches, can it prove the utmost of its own strength.

  To see the Golden Eagle at close quarters requires knowledge and patience—though sometimes it may be a gift, as when once, just as I reached a summit cairn, an eagle rose from the far side of it and swept up in majestic circles above my head: I have never been nearer to the king of birds. And once, on the edge of the Braeriach side of the Lairig crags, I saw an eagle soar out below me, glinting golden in the sun. And I have seen one near on a hillside, intent on something at his feet. But getting close to him is a slow art. One spring afternoon, while I was idling among the last trees on the Speyside end of the Lairig path, watching the movement of tits, a voice by my side asked: ‘Is this the way to Ben MacDhui?’ and looking down I saw what at first glance I took to be a street gamin of eleven. I said, ‘Are you going up alone?’ and he said, ‘I’m with him.’ So turning I saw behind me a second youth, lanky, pasty and pimply, hung round with gadgets. They were both, perhaps, even the undergrown one, nineteen years of age, and they were railway workers who had come all the way from Manchester to spend their one week’s leave in photographing the Golden Eagle. And please, where would they find one? I told them of some of my encounters. ‘And could you have photographed that one?’ they asked. They knew, I found, the books. Those two weedy boys had read everything they could find on their subject, and though they had never been in Scotland before, they had walked in the Lakes. ‘The distances,’ I said, ‘are different. Don’t try Ben MacDhui till tomorrow, and take the whole day to it.’ And I remembered an old shepherd in Galloway, whom I had asked which spur of the hill I should take to go up Merrick. When he had told me, he looked at me, and said, ‘You’ve not been up before? Do you know what you’re undertaking?’ ‘I’ve not been up before, but I’ve been all over the Cairngorms.’ ‘The Cairngorms, have you?’ His gesture dismissed me—it was like a drawbridge thrown forward. So I said to the boys, ‘Don’t go up Ben MacDhui today—it’ll be dark in another four or five hours. Go on by the path you’re on and see the Pools of Dee and perhaps look around the corner into the great Garbh Coire.’ ‘Will there be ledges there?’ they asked; and repeated that what they had come for was to photograph the Golden Eagle. I never saw them again—I hope I dissuaded them from going up Ben MacDhui that day—I didn’t even attempt to dissuade them from photographing the Golden Eagle. The eagle itself probably did that quite effectively. But I liked those boys. I hope they saw an eagle. Their informed enthusiasm—even if only half informed—was the right way in.

  Imagination is haunted by the swiftness of the creatures that live on the mountain—eagle and peregrine falcon, red deer and mountain hare. The reason for their swiftness is severely practical: food is so scarce up there that only those who can move swiftly over vast stretches of ground may hope to survive. The speed, the whorls and torrents of movement, are in plain fact the mountain’s own necessity. But their grace is not necessity. Or if it is—if the swoop, the parabola, the arrow-flight of hooves and wings achieve their beauty by strict adherence to the needs of function—so much the more is the mountain’s integrity vindicated. Beauty is not adventitious but essential.

  Strong flight is a characteristic also of another bird that haunts not the precipice but the plateau itself—the small unassuming dotterel. You are wander
ing one summer day on a plateau slope when your ear catches its plover-like cry. You pause and watch—no bird is there. Then you move softly towards the sound, and in a moment one bird, then another, rises in short low flight, comes to earth again and runs, crouched to the ground like a small grey mouse. Shape, movement, colour, are all so mouse-like that the illusion almost might deceive you, were it not for the vivid black and white of the head, the glowing breast, and the white tail feathers. You wait, and soon the birds forget you. On one slope, off the recognised route to any particular destination, a nesting place or perhaps a gathering place for flight, of these small birds, I have seen them by the score, running a little way, and pausing, and running on again, almost domestic in their simple movements. Yet in autumn this humble bird flies straight to Africa.

  The other bird that nests on the high plateau, the ptarmigan, is a home-keeper. No flights to Africa for him. Through the most ferocious winter, he stays where he was born, perhaps a little lower on the slopes, and dressed for winter by changing to the colour of the snow.

  The creatures that dress like the snow to be inconspicuous against it—the ptarmigan, the snow bunting, the mountain hare—are sometimes cheated. They are white before the mountain is. When blue milkwort is still in blossom on the last day of the year, it is not surprising to see a white stoat blaze against a dull grey dyke. Few things are more ludicrous in Nature than a white hare ‘concealing’ itself, erect and patient beside a boulder, while all round it stretches a grey-brown world against which it stands vividly out. A white hare running over snow can be comical too, if it is running between you and the sun—a shadowed shape, with an odd ludicrous leggy shadow-skeleton, comical because the shadows alter the creature’s shape. But if the sun is behind you and strikes full on the running hare, only the ears show, and a dark thin outline to the back. If the snow lies in fields, the running hare may not be noticed at all, till it flakes off at the edge of the snow patch, gleaming white. Breaking suddenly into a hollow, I have counted twenty white hares at a time streaking up a brown hillside like rising smoke.