The Last Wilderness: A Journey into Silence

by Neil Ansell

  I came upon a cleft in the cliffs, where the two walls of rock suddenly turned inland and faced one another across a narrow dark ravine. As I approached, there was a flurry of life as a raven burst from its nest just inside the mouth of the ravine. It flew up, calling in alarm, and settled on the clifftop close by, hunkered down with its neck feathers all puffed up in a ruff, trying to make itself bigger, shouting at me in annoyance. It bobbed with each croak, like a cat trying to cough up a fur-ball. Within seconds its mate flew in, circled low above me, and perched on the facing clifftop, so that the two of them were on either side of the entrance close above me, like guardians of the gates. I looked from one to the other as they each tried to drive me away from their nesting site, and then I noticed something that gave me pause. Beside one of them, amongst the heather on the cliff edge, was what appeared to be a skull, with its two empty orbits staring straight out to sea. It didn’t look like the skull of a sheep or deer; it had a high domed forehead, like a human skull. I felt that I had no choice but to investigate, and started to make my way closer to the ravine, much to the increased annoyance of the two birds. As I approached, though, the skull deformed and elongated, like the skull of an alien. It was an illusion, an unlikely white rock with two black holes that made it look like the perfect image of a human skull.

  The raven is the most mythologised of creatures. In the Icelandic ‘Edda’, the two ravens Hugin and Munin, representing thought and memory, sit at the shoulders of Odin, and each day they fly out to report back on the world of men, while Odin waits for their return, anxious that they will abandon him. To the natives of the Pacific Northwest, such as the Haida and the Tlingit, the raven was a trickster god, responsible by deception for the creation of the world. Often, their association is with death and bad omens; as carrion feeders they are depicted as intermediaries between life and death. Edgar Allan Poe’s raven was ‘grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous’. And yet, although I had just been faced by the absurd coincidence of coming upon a wild raven perched alongside what had at first sight appeared to be a human skull, I had felt not the least trace of alarm. I supposed it must stem from all the time I had spent among ravens at my home in Wales, where they were my neighbours, my constant companions, and so I could not see them as being charged with any symbolic weight at all, but only as fellow creatures, intelligent and with their own dark beauty.

  One more substantial headland lay between me and my destination, and as the day was wearing on, I decided to climb the hill and cut a corner inland rather than following the rocks. My route led me onto a bare moor of grass and heather, and I soon began to wonder if my sense of direction would hold, or if I would inadvertently drift away from the sea and range too far inland. I felt that I had gone far enough and when I came upon a stream, I decided to follow the water down, as the safest course. A sudden waterfall dropped into a hidden hollow in the moor to a reedy tarn where seagulls bathed. By the waterside a small herd of red deer hinds grazed. They raised their heads at my approach, then trotted casually off up the hillside, glancing back at me to check I was not in pursuit. One remained behind, and allowed me to come much closer. She walked slowly, deliberately, after the others, broadside to me so she could see me. At her side, always touching her flank, was her calf, trying to keep up with her on overlong, wobbly legs. This was the very beginning of the calving season, and deer can walk from birth. I wondered if this could even be baby’s first steps, and stopped in my tracks, so as not to panic them.

  Red deer had been rather elusive so far on my walks in the Rough Bounds, though on my winter journeys at least, the train journey over Rannoch Moor had passed through a vast congregation of them, hundreds if not thousands. Arguably, the red deer is no longer entirely native; just as our wildcats have hybridised with domestic cats, our red deer have mingled with the closely related sika deer, introduced here from Japan and East Asia. It sometimes begins to feel as if the entire natural world is actually our own creation; an unforeseen consequence of our inveterate meddling.

  I am not a purist about these things, though. I would never argue that we should automatically eliminate anything that we have introduced, and bring back those we have destroyed. Undoing matters is itself another attempt to manipulate the world. The brown hares in our fields have been here long enough now that they have earned the right to stay, even though they have been partially responsible for driving our native mountain hares into the remotest fringes of their original range, just as the grey squirrel has driven out our native red squirrels. In Ireland, where the brown hare never reached, the Irish hare – the local variety of the mountain hare – lives quite as happily in the lowlands as the uplands, and has entirely abandoned the habit of turning white in winter. The red deer, across much of its range, was originally a creature of the forest rather than the hill. We have created a new reality, and we can hardly undo the past when we cannot even put a stop to the declines of the present. Our first priority must be to safeguard what we have left before it is too late. As for biodiversity, so it is for climate change; we cannot make things better until we have found a way to stop making things worse.

  I made my way back down to the shore and continued along the rocks until I finally saw the white strand I had been aiming for. There was a single small tent on the beach. I was not surprised to see it there; an hour before I had been picking my way around a narrow ledge on the cliffs when I saw the kayaker I had spotted earlier out on the water, slipping methodically through the calm water. It seemed a very serene way of exploring this coast, compared to my trek. I had presumed earlier he was likely headed for the same beach as me, but doubted there would be much chance of my getting any further ahead.

  The strand was in a small sheltered bay, a perfect arc of white sand with a little stream running through it and a rock jetty to either side. Two rocky islands in the mouth of the bay sheltered its waters; this was why sand had been able to collect here. Far away across the sound I could see the long peninsula of Ardnamurchan, out to the lighthouse at its tip, the westernmost point of the mainland. The bay teemed with life, compared to the rocky coast which had offered a parade of oystercatchers and fluttering rock pipits in the main. A ringed plover scurried along the sand ahead of me, and terns plunge-dived into the clear shallow water. There were the heads of swimmers out in the bay too – the dog-like heads of seals; the grey seals of these wilder shores rather than the harbour seals I had watched in Loch Sunart. A flotilla of eiders bobbed in the water; handsome birds in crisp black and white, with their distinctive steep foreheads and smudge of pastel green. They were all drakes; the ducks would be out on the islands, tucked up in eiderdown. A black guillemot flew low across the bay, jet black, with a crisp oval patch of startling white, and a crimson gape and feet; a bird of primary colours. Puffins get all the press, but I have a particular fondness for the black guillemot. While the other members of the auk family such as the puffins, common guillemots and razorbills nest in vast, noisy colonies, black guillemot pairs will go off alone to find a quiet nook of their own. They are solitary birds, like me.

  I walked over and introduced myself to the man on the beach; he was indeed the person I had seen earlier. I told him I didn’t think I had time to move on and leave him in peace, but I would pitch my tent at the far end of the beach, behind rocks and out of sight, and I offered to help him carry his heavily laden sea kayak up the beach to save him dragging it. Here was someone else who organised his life in such a way as to allow himself the freedom to seek the wild places. He worked the boats, four months on and four months off, and most of his free time he spent in the Cairngorms, where he lived. He was a volunteer assessor for a group of inner-city youngsters on a sea-kayaking expedition as part of an award scheme. I worried briefly that we were about to be joined on the beach by a party of teenagers, but he had gone on alone; they and their instructor would not make it this far today, and would camp a couple of miles back along the shore.

  When I admired the spot w
e had both chosen for our camp he told me of an even more spectacular beach an hour or two further west. He always used to aim for it but it was easier to reach from the road-head than our camp, and had become too well-known, too busy for his liking. For all the welcome he had given me, which had even included the irresistible offer of morning coffee, this was clearly a man who liked his solitude. He decided he should go and check on his charges, and so I ended up having the beach to myself for the evening. I took a small bottle of malt whisky and my field glasses and clambered out to the tip of the rocks at the edge of the bay. There I found a perfect observation post, a cleft in the rocks where I could sit back comfortably and look out over the waters, as if I was on a throne of stone.

  Out among the rising heads of the seals were diving birds; three of them. They had thick bills, grey heads, chequerboard backs, and zebra-striped breasts. Black-throated divers, in their full summer regalia. This bay must have been full of fish, with the seals and divers all diving repeatedly and successfully. The last time I had seen them in summer plumage had been half a lifetime ago, in a favourite Swedish lake. It was not a particularly large lake, but it was deep into the woods and had to be approached through the trees. This meant you could arrive entirely without being seen. There was a single islet topped with a half-dozen Scots pines, at the top of which perched a huge osprey nest that had evidently been extended each year until it was the size of a hay bale. A pair of divers nested here, and their unearthly wails drifted across the water, giving the place an extra layer of magic.

  Another pair of divers flew into the bay. They can seem graceless and cumbersome in flight; they fly low to the water, and their feet trail behind them. Divers are designed for the water; their feet are set far back so they are ungainly on land, looking as though they are always about to tip onto their bellies. These new arrivals were not more black-throats, however; they were our other nesting diver, the red-throated, with long pale grey necks, a splash of crimson on their breasts, and brilliant red beady eyes. Both species are scarce breeders, and on these islands are found almost exclusively in the Highlands. It felt like a great privilege to have five of them in close proximity at the same time. Strange-looking birds, beautiful but otherworldly. With their small heads but great thick necks for swallowing fish whole there is something reptilian about them, for all their elaborate plumage.

  The sheltered waters of the bay were smooth and mirror-calm, unmarked save for the ripples from the diving birds and seals, but suddenly a wave rolled in; a single low wall of water like a tidal bore. I looked back to see where it might have come from, and there at the tip of the island something big and black and snub-nosed rose from submarine depths. It was a whale, with a thick backswept dorsal fin, and a blunt ‘melon’, the swollen forehead that it uses as a sonic lens for echolocation. It paused on the surface for a moment and then dramatically rolled onto its side, crashing down on the water and sending out another wave. Then a second whale rose alongside it and did the same before they both sank into the deep water. These were not true ocean giants but pilot whales, smaller but still impressive, almost the size of a killer whale. I thought I had lost them, that they must have swum behind the island, but then one rose again in exactly the same spot, and again. It was impossible to know how many there were, but I repeatedly saw two or three rising together, and estimated that this must be a pod in double figures. As I watched, transfixed, I could see there was a method to what they were doing. In the midst of them was a circle of water that was white and wild, churned into chaos. They had made a trap, had surrounded a shoal of herring, and were engaged in a feeding frenzy.

  Pilot whales are not inshore animals; they spend their lives far out to sea at the edge of the continental shelf, but they are known to follow prey inshore, and are prone to occasional strandings as a result. I had spent many hours sitting on beaches all over the world, and yet I had never seen anything quite like this. In fact I had never seen whales in British waters before, and always imagined that if I ever did it would be from the bow of a boat. Their show continued for over an hour, though it felt like one frozen moment, out of time and place, something that could never be forgotten, as the huge mammals roiled in the waters of the bay. After a while they had company, too; dolphins, drawn in by the commotion, leaping in pairs over the waves churned up by the whales, giving the impression that they were doing so out of sheer joyfulness. They were not the more familiar bottlenose dolphins that often come close to shore, that I had watched all over the world, that I had even swum with – not by intention, but because I happened to be in the water when the dolphins came by. These were the more decorative short-beaked common dolphins, that normally live out in deep water like the whales, and that were undoubtedly camp followers. They were elegant creatures that looked tiny alongside their gigantic cousins, with a splash of pale yellow on their sides and racing stripes. I felt unreasonably privileged to be here, to experience the joy of seeing them, so completely unexpected, in this remote little bay. It felt like a gift.

  When my fellow beach dweller came paddling back into view a little while before sunset, I was still sitting out on the rocks. I told him about the whales, and he said he had just been watching an otter along the shore, and it had allowed him to come surprisingly close in his kayak. I decided to walk a little way along the shore to gain a better view of the sunset over the Small Isles. Dazzled by the sun as it dropped towards the horizon, I stopped to listen to a cuckoo that was calling, loud and clear and bell-like. It is such a far-carrying call. I was reflecting on how a single calling bird can fill a whole valley with its repetitive chant, on how it is so often heard and so seldom seen, on how it is actually far less common than you might think, when I saw it sitting on a rock about ten feet away from me, and found myself almost embarrassed by the sheer wrongness of my musings; it hadn’t been far away at all. I watched it for a while as it posed for me, flicking its wings. Cuckoos are such odd-looking birds; their wings too low, their tails too high. They look as if they have been assembled out of spare parts, a Frankenstein’s monster among birds.

  This bird seemingly wanted to add injury to insult, for it woke me the next morning at the very break of day. I peered out of the flap of my tent and watched it as it flew back and forth over the sands of the bay, calling over and over, with a long trail of pipits strung out behind it in close pursuit, like the tail of a kite. And I forgave it; in fact, I felt fleetingly sorry for it. It must be confusing to be a cuckoo. The pipits were the closest thing it had ever known to parents; they had been its constant, its tireless providers. Then it had flown off to Africa for its annual holiday, and when it returned home, they wanted to drive it away.

  My colleague on the beach came by to fill his kettle at the stream that ran by my tent, and we had morning coffee together. We discussed nature writing, of which he was something of an enthusiast, and then went our separate ways, one by water, one by land. I followed the coast around the head of the peninsula until I finally made it back to the road-head on the north side of the Rhu. There I shed my load, hiding my pack under a clump of gorse, and headed into the village for supplies. It was only about an hour each way into the village, though I was hobbling now, with my wet foot a mass of blisters. A family of greylag geese floated on the calm waters of Loch nan Ceall in a row, six fluffy goslings in the middle, and the parents alert and watchful front and back, like a protection detail. On a little island close to shore, a half-dozen harbour seals dozed in the sun. A group of trainee kayakers was out on the water with their instructor, and one of the seals caught up with the party to investigate, popping its head up alongside each of them in turn.

  I had chosen a site for my new camp that was very different from the previous night’s wide-open expanse of sand and sea. Here at the mouth of the bay were little nooks of weedy beach hidden in niches along a coastline of ragged rocks. I tried walking barefoot along the beaches, but they were not sand, and were entirely made of tiny shards of what looked like coral tha
t dug into my feet like broken glass. These so-called coral beaches of the Highlands and Islands are not actually made of true coral at all, but maerl, species of coralline red algae that grow without roots on sandy seabeds, forming beautiful branching nodules of calcium carbonate. The mouth of the harbour was filled with low rocky islands, dozens of them, which overlapped one another so that there was no view of the open sea, and the waters of the bay were freakishly calm. There was a channel of still water perhaps two or three hundred yards across between me and the islands, where seals and eiders bobbed.

  I found a small level and sheltered patch of turf backing onto one of the beaches. I brushed away the carapaces of crabs left by feeding otters, then pitched my tent and went out to sit on the rocks for the evening. The water was so still and clear that I could see right to the sea floor, with whole forests of kelp gently waving in an undersea breeze, and between them little flocks of darting fish. As the evening wore on the midges came out to play, the worst so far, and eventually I was driven back to my tent to zip myself away from them for half an hour.

  Later, a light sea breeze picked up, and I was able to emerge again. The sun was setting behind the islands, and a swan was flying in low, straight towards me. Even from a distance I could tell that it was not a resident mute swan but a whooper. It is strange how two birds that look so alike can feel so very different; the mute is stately and serene while the whooper is wild and restless. It should not have been here. The whooper is a winter migrant; just a few pairs stay to breed each year, on the Shetlands and Outer Hebrides. Perhaps this bird had been injured and was unable to cope with the arduous flight back to the Arctic tundra, and had stayed on alone, waiting for a mate that would never come. As its path crossed the headland, it flew right above me, perhaps twenty feet away, and I could see the distinctive lemon yellow of its bill. It looked down at me and whooped three times; a call that sounded full of yearning, the call of the wild.