by Nan Shepherd
Deer on the other hand are conspicuous in snow. In a completely white world, one can see from a high shoulder a herd feeding a thousand feet beneath, vivid black specks on the whiteness. But then they do not need to hide themselves from peregrine and eagle. Actually in winter and early spring, their coats are greyish, the colour of dead snow, bleached heather and juniper and rocks.
Stay-at-home though he be, the ptarmigan has power in his wings. In startled flight, his wing-beats are so rapid that the white wings lose all appearance of solidity, they are like an aura of light around the body.
Like all the game birds, ptarmigan play the broken wing trick when an intruder approaches their young family, to lure the enemy away. I have had the trick played on me so many times that now I hardly notice the parent birds, but always and eagerly I watch the behaviour of the young. Once near the summit of Braeriach, I halted dead at the rise of one, then the other parent, seeking with my eyes for the youngsters. There was one, three feet away, another nearer, and another. My eyes came closer and closer to myself—one ptarmigan chick was not two inches from my boot. Seven of them crouched within a radius of a foot or two, and they might have been birds carved from wood for all the life they showed. I stood for a long time and as long as I remained motionless, so did they. But at last I yielded to the mounting temptation (which I try always to resist) to touch and fondle one of these morsels. So I stooped to the one nearest my boot. And instantly the whole seven, cackling, were off. A noisy undignified scramble, contrasting strangely with their carved immobility.
Very near the summits, on the most stony braes nest the snow buntings. Both in song and in person these small creatures have a delicate perfection that is enhanced by the savagery of their home. Sit quietly for a while in some of the loneliest and most desolate crannies of the mountain, where the imagination is overpowered by grim bastions of the rock, and a single snow bunting will sing with incredible sweetness beside you. To have sat on one of the high stony fields around seven of a clear summer morning, when the sun has just drawn up the morning mists from the corries, and seen the stones come alive with small forms like flakes of the stone blown eddying upon the air, is to have tasted a pleasure of the epicure. Watching carefully, one sees that two of the dozen or so birds are males, the rest are the members of their two young families. The females are already about the business of bringing out a second brood.
Ranging the whole mountain mass are the hoodies, black and grey, the mountain scavengers. Wheatears bob and chuckle on the boulders, or flash their cheeky rumps as they fly to another stone. And in the burns of the highest corries the white-dickied dipper plunges beneath the water. A lonely song by a solitary burn reveals the golden plover. But why should I make a list? It serves no purpose, and they are all in the books. But they are not in the books for me—they are in living encounters, moments of their life that have crossed moments of mine. They are in the cry of the curlew sounding over the distances, and in the thin silver singing among the last trees that tell me the tits are there. They are in an April morning when I follow a burn to its sources, further and further into a fold of the hills, and a pair of long-tailed tits flash and are gone and come again. Or in a December afternoon of bitter frost when a dozen of these tiny tufts, disproportionate and exquisite, tumble from a tree beside a frozen stream. Or a July day when one small tree holds thirteen crested tits. Or in a March day (the only time I have found anything attractive in the grouse) when against the snowy hillside a pair of these birds pursued each other in lovely patterns of flight. Or in the mating ecstasy of the kestrel, or the fighting blackcock suddenly discovered one morning in a clear place among juniper. Or in the two woodcock that follow each other night after night low over the trees just beyond where I lie still awake outside the tent.
And so many that I have omitted. Just as I have omitted so many exquisite flowers—dryas, timeless as white jade, bog asphodel like candle flame, the purple-black hearts of cornel. I have missed the wagtails, yellow and pied, and the reed bunting precise as a dignitary in his bands, the seagulls and oyster catchers come up from the sea, the crossbills and the finches, and the wrens. But I cannot miss the wrens. So tiny, so vital, with such volume of voice. It may not be fact, but in my experience the wrens are more numerous on the Dee side of the range than on the Spey side. In the high tributary valleys, Glen Quoich, Glen Slugain, among the last of the trees, they are common as eyebright. There’s a skeleton of a fallen tree in Glen Quoich, a vast leggy things all the legs to the ground and the trunk a ridge of spine above them, a magnificent example of prevailing wind—twinkling through its bony ribs I have watched a family of nine young wrens. And once in Glen Slugain a pair of golden bumble bees (as it seemed) sped past me in a whorl of joyful speed. But it couldn’t be—they were too large. I stalked them. They were young wrens.
It was near the leggy tree that I saw rise some way off down the stream, a bird so huge that I could only stare. It wheeled and vanished. Two enormous wings, with a span that I couldn’t believe. Yet I had seen it. And there it was coming back, upstream now, the same vast span of wing: no body that I could see; two great wings joined by nothing, as though some bird had at last discovered how to be all flight and no body. And then I saw. The two great wings were a duck and a drake, following one another in perfect formation, wheeling and dipping and rising again with an unchanging interval of space between them, each following every modulation of the other; two halves of one organism.
Wild geese are only passers here. One blustering October day I watched an arrow-head of them, twenty-seven birds in perfect symmetry, flying south down the valley in which I stood. I was near the head of a deep glen, the watershed rose steep above me. Up there the wind must be ferocious. The geese were there now. They broke formation. Birds flew from one arm of the wedge to the other, the leader hesitated, another bird attempted to lead, their lovely symmetry became confused. It seemed as though the wind were beating them back, for the whole line, blunt-headed now, edged round, one bird leading and then another, till they gradually rounded the top of the glen and were flying back the way they came. As I watched, they flew into a cinder-grey cloud, in an undulating line like the movement of a fish under water. The dark line melted into the darkness of the cloud, and I could not tell where or when they resumed formation and direction.
It is tantalising to see something unusual, but not its ending. One January afternoon, in a frozen silent world, I saw two stags with antlers interlaced dragging each other backwards and forwards across the ringing frozen floor of a hollow. Their dark forms stood out against the snow. I watched till dusk came on and I could barely see but could still hear the noise of the scuffle. It is the only time I have seen this phenomenon of interlocked antlers, and as I have always been told that stags so caught cannot extricate themselves and fight on till one or both die, I wanted badly to see what happened. I went back next day but found no stags, dead or alive. The crofter-ghillie in whose house I was staying said that they probably saved themselves by the breaking of an antler.
The roaring of the stags set me another problem to which I have not found a definitive answer. On one of those potent days of mid-October, golden as whisky, I was wandering on the slopes of Ben Avon above Loch Builg. Suddenly I was startled by a musical call that resounded across the hill, and was answered by a like call from another direction. Yodelling, I thought. There was such gaiety in the sound that I looked eagerly about, thinking: these are students, they are hailing one another from sheer exuberance of spirit. But I saw no one. The yodelling went on. The yodelling went on all day, clear, bell-like and musical; and it was not long till I realised that there was no other human being on the mountain and that the stags were the yodellers. The clear bell notes were new to me. I had heard stags roar often enough, in deep raucous tones. Bellowing. The dictionary would have me believe that belling is merely a variant of bellowing. For me belling will always mean the music of that golden day. All the time I listened, there was not a single harsh note.
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But why? That is what I don’t understand. Why sometimes raucous and sometimes like a bell? Hillmen whom I have asked give different suggestions. That the bell notes are from young stags and the raucous from old. But against that, one gamekeeper sets the tale of a gruff-voiced bellower that the shooting-party to a man declared would be an old beast and that turned out when they got him to be comparatively young. That the note changes to express different needs. But that theory does not seem to be borne out by the way in which two stags kept up an antiphon one day in my hearing, the raucous answering the bell across a ravine with absolute consistency. That stags are like human beings and some have tenor voices, some bass. Then were they all tenor stags on that morning when the hill broke into a cantata? All young? or all tenor? or all in love with the morning?
Normally deer are silent creatures, but when alarmed they bark like an angry dog. I have heard the warning bark far off on a distant slope and only then been aware of the presence of a herd. Then they are off, flowing up the hill and over the horizon. Their patterns against the sky are endless—a quiet frieze of doe and fawn and doe and fawn. Or a tossing forest of massed antlers. Or with long necks to the ground, feeding, like hens pecking. Those mobile necks are a thought uncanny at times. I have seen five necks rise like swaying snakes, a small snake-like head on each, the bodies hidden. Five hinds. And I have seen a hind turn her head to look at me, twisting her neck around until the face seemed to hang suspended in air alongside the rump and some atavistic fear awoke in me. Bird, animal and reptile—there is something of them all in the deer. Its flight is fluid as a bird’s. Especially the roes, the very young ones, dappled, with limbs like the stalks of flowers, move over the heather with an incredible lightness. They seem to float; yet their motion is in a way more wonderful even the ground. The lovely pattern of the limbs is fixed to the earth and cannot be detached from it.
Indeed there are times when the earth seems to re-absorb this creature of air and light. Roes melt into the wood—I have stared a long time into birches where I knew a doe was standing and saw her only when at last she flicked an ear. In December an open heather I have found myself close upon a feeding red doe so like her background that I had thought the white scut another patch of snow. She becomes aware of me, her ears lift, her head goes sharply up, the neck elongated. I stand very still, the head drops, she becomes again part of the earth. Further up on the slopes one can watch a fawn learning his hillcraft from his mother, pausing in exactly her attitude, turning a wary head as she turns hers.
But find a fawn alone in a hidden hollow, he will not endure with his mother’s patience. It is not easy to make a doe move before you do, but when the fawn, after his first startled jump to the far side of the hollow, stands to gaze at you on the other side, if you keep perfectly still he grows restive, moves his head now side on to you, now front, an ear twitches, a nostril, finally he turns and walks away, like a reluctant but inquisitive child, pausing at every third step to look back.
I have never had the incredible fortune, as a young doctor I know once had, of seeing a hind give birth; but I have found very young fawns, left by their mothers beside a stone on heather. Once I had gone off the track to visit a small tarn. Something impelled me to walk round the back of the tarn, scrambling between the rock and the water, and then to continue downwards over a heathery slope that is not very often crossed. From the corner of my eye I noticed two or three hinds making off; and a moment later I came on a tiny fawn lying crouched into the heather near a stone. It lay in an oddly rigid way, the limbs contorted in unnatural positions. Could it be dead? I bent over it—very gently touched it. It was warm. The contorted limbs were fluid as water in my hands. The little creature gave no sign of life. The neck was stretched, stiff and ungainly, the head almost hidden; the eyes stared, undeviating. Only the flanks pulsated. Nothing moved but the pulsing flanks. There was no voluntary movement whatsoever, no smallest twitch or flicker. I had never before seen a fawn shamming dead, as young birds do.
A young squirrel, caught upon his own occasions, will behave like the young fawn you have surprised walking out alone: both are a little reckless about humanity. I have come upon a small squirrel the size of a well-grown mouse, on the ground under fir trees, scampering from cone to cone, picking up each in turn, scrutinising, sampling, tossing it away, with a sort of wilful petulance in his movements such as I have seen in small children who have too many toys. He becomes aware of me, pauses, eyes me, eyes his cone. Cupidity and caution struggle within him, I am quite still, caution loses, he goes on with his game among the goodies. When he stops to crunch, I move forward. At last I move so near that he is suddenly alarmed. He makes for a huge old pine tree whose bark hangs in scales so thick and solid that his small limbs can hardly compass them. He can’t get up; and now, like his red-gold parents, he wallops his thin long ribbon-like tail, not yet grown bushy, in a small futile way, and scrabbles against the mountainous humps of bark. At last he is up, he runs out on a side branch and jeers down at me in triumph.
Other young things—leverets in the form wrapped in silky hair—fox cubs playing in the sun in a distant fold of the hill—the fox himself with his fat red brush—the red-brown squirrel in the woods below, whacking his tail against the tree-trunk and chattering through closed lips (I think) against the intruder—gold-brown lizards and the gold-brown floss of cocoons in the heather—small golden bees and small blue butterflies—green dragon flies and emerald beetles—moths like oiled paper and moths like burnt paper – water-beetles skimming the highest tarns—small mice so rarely seen but leaving a thousand tracks upon the snow—ant-heaps of birch-twigs or pine-needles (preens, in the northern word) flickering with activity when the sun shines—midges, mosquitoes, flies by the hundred thousand, adders and a rare strange slowworm—small frogs jumping like tiddly-winks—rich brown hairy caterpillars by the handful and fat green ones with blobs of amethyst, a perfect camouflage on heather—life in so many guises.
It is not just now sheep country. The sheep were cleared to make room for deer; today in one district the deer are giving place to Highland cattle, those placid and abstemious beasts to whom thin fare is a necessity and whose shaggy winter mats protect them from the bitter winds. They look ferocious and are very gentle—in this resembling some of the blackface ewes, hags as ugly as sin that are found in every mountain flock, grim old malignants whose cankered horns above a black physiognomy must, I feel sure, be the origin of the Scots conception of the Devil.
NINE
Life: Man
Up on the plateau nothing has moved for a long time. I have walked all day, and seen no one. I have heard no living sound. Once, in a solitary corrie, the rattle of a falling stone betrayed the passage of a line of stags. But up here, no movement, no voice. Man might be a thousand years away.
Yet, as I look round me, I am touched at many points by his presence. His presence is in the cairns, marking the summits, marking the paths, marking the spot where a man has died, or where a river is born. It is in the paths themselves; even over boulder and rock man’s persistent passage can be seen, as at the head of the Lairig Ghru, where the path, over brown-grey weathered and lichened stones, shines as red as new-made rock. It is in the stepping-stones over the burns, and lower in the glens, the bridges. It is in the indicator on Ben MacDhui, planned with patient skill, that gathers the congregation of the hills into the hollow of one’s hand; and some few feet below, in the remains of the hut where the men who made the Ordnance Survey of the eighteen-sixties lived for the whole of a season—an old man has told me how down in the valley they used to watch a light glow now from one summit, now another, as measurements were made and checked. Man’s presence too is in the map and the compass that I carry, and in the names recorded in the map, ancient Gaelic names that show how old is man’s association with scaur and corrie: the Loch of the Thin Man’s Son, the Coire of the Cobbler, the Dairymaid’s Meadow, the Lurcher’s Crag. It is in the hiding-holes of hunted men, Argyll’s Sto
ne on Creag Dhubh above Glen Einich, and the Cat’s Den, deep narrow chasm among the Kennapol rocks; and in the Thieves’ Road that runs south from Nethy through prehistoric glacial overflow gaps—and somewhere on its way the kent tree (felled now) to which the prudent landlord tied a couple of his beasts as clearance money. It is in the sluices at the outflow of the lochs, the remnants of lime kilns by the burns, and the shepherds’ huts, roofless now, and the bothies of which nothing remains but a chimney-gable; and in the Shelter Stone above Loch Avon, reputed once to have been the den of a gang some thirty strong, before the foundation stones that hold the immense perched rock shifted and the space beneath was narrowed to its present dimensions: wide enough still to hold a half-dozen sleepers, whose names, like the names of hundreds of others, are recorded in a book wrapped in waterproof and left within the shelter of the cave.
Man’s presence too is disturbingly evident, in these latter days, in the wrecked aeroplanes that lie scattered over the mountains. During the Second World War more planes (mostly training planes) crashed here than one cares to remember. Like the unwary of older days who were drowned while fording swollen streams, or dashed from the precipices they attempted to climb, these new travellers underestimated the mountain’s power. Its long flat plateau top has a deceptive air of lowness; and its mists shut down too swiftly, its tops are too often swathed in cloud, pelting rain or driving snow, while beneath the world is in clear sunlight, for liberties to be taken with its cruel rock. I stood one day on the Lurcher’s Crag and heard the engine of a plane, and looked naturally upwards; but in a moment I realised that the sound was below me. A plane was edging its way steadily through the great gash that separates the two halves of the plateau, the Lairig Ghru. From where I stood, high above it, its wing-tips seemed to reach from rock to rock. I knew that this was an illusion and that the wings had ample room; that the boys who shoot their planes under the arch of a bridge, or through the Yangtze gorges, had the same exuberant glee as the boys below me were doubtless experiencing; yet if mist had suddenly swept down, that passage between the crags would have been most perilous. And even in the brief time needed to negotiate a plane through the Lairig, mist might well descend in this region of swift and unpredictable change. I have experienced this. Out of a blue sky cloud has rushed on the mountain, obliterating the world. The second time I climbed Ben MacDhui I saw this happen.