The Last Wilderness: A Journey into Silence

by Neil Ansell

  I returned to the bothy bearing a full load of firewood, all I could carry, and enough to last the night. I had left the door of the bothy open, and as I approached the wren flew out. My neighbour had been visiting. I fetched out the bothy’s bow-saw and began to saw up my fallen branches into fire-sized logs.

  It had begun to seem as though I would have the place to myself for the night, but not long before dark a young couple arrived. They had cut things very fine; having seen how good the weather was, they had decided on a whim to drive over from Edinburgh. They walked down to the sea to forage for mussels while I clambered up onto the rocks at the end of the bay to watch the fiery sunset. When I returned they were cooking up an elaborate stew on the bench outside the bothy. They were very well equipped. As darkness began to fall and the first stars appeared, a bat flew in suddenly as if from nowhere, and swooped up and down the front of the bothy, twisting and turning low above our heads, so close that I could feel the breath from its wings on my face. Though the couple had not been to this spot before, they regularly headed out to the Western Highlands to find a bothy for the night. We talked of landscape and wildlife, and I spoke of otters. Neither of them had ever seen one, and so I told them that the best time to look for them is after sunset but before dark, or after first light but before sunrise. It is easier to see things when you are alone; you have to remember that two people together make twice as much noise, and that is before you even start talking.

  Of course, it is also true that two people double the chances of spotting wildlife. I imagine that what we see is always just a small fraction of what is there; that the vast majority of wildlife sees us, or hears us, or scents us, well before we are aware of it. I like to think of an apparently empty landscape being full of creatures waiting for me to pass out of range. It pleases me to think that there is a hidden world, just out of view, and to create a mental landscape around me that is much more filled with life than it appears. And when I do have a wild encounter, I feel I have crossed a threshold and been granted access to an alternate reality, a world that lives in parallel to my own. There have been many times in my life when I have watched wildlife with other people, when it has been a shared experience, one that may even have helped me forge a lasting connection with others. But it is very often the solitary encounters that stand out strongest in memory. They have an intensity that is diluted by company. It may in part be that wildlife is less threatened by the solitary intruder into their domain, but I think that mostly the difference takes place in my head, that I am able to engage with the wild personally rather than socially; one to one, head to head, heart to heart.

  The clear cloudless skies that had made the late afternoon so exceptionally warm had the opposite effect once darkness fell. It quickly became bracingly cold, and there would certainly be an overnight frost. Stags began to roar in the nearby hills. I went inside briefly to prepare a driftwood fire. Outside again, the sky was already thick with stars. There was no moon at all, but this was the starriest sky I had seen in years, and the three of us stood with our heads tipped back, looking up. Though I had not sought it, once again I had fallen into good company.

  A deer bellowed from close by, startlingly loud. I could just make out the rump of a deer not twenty feet away. I had no light, of course, but my two companions had top-of-the-range high-powered head torches. I had assumed that the deer would immediately flee from such brightness, but they seemed not to be concerned at all by the sudden blast of light. They looked up without flinching, and then continued grazing. There was a solitary stag with a dozen hinds, a couple of them little yearlings. If I had come this close in daytime, they would have panicked and run for the hills, but here in their own domain, the rules of engagement seemed to have changed. It was as if they had no frame of reference by which they could judge us as any kind of threat, and they went about their business as if we were not there at all. The stag had his work cut out, and barely had a moment to feed. Every time one of the hinds began to drift away from the group, he would race after her, forcing her back to the herd, like a sheepdog rounding up an errant lamb, nudging her in the rump with his nose. Then he would throw back his head to the stars and give a full-throated bellow that echoed through the night, and would be answered by distant stags in the hills.

  The grass that grew around the village on this low ridge of wind-blown shell-sand was close-cropped turf, almost like a lawn, like the grass that grows around a rabbit warren. I presumed that the deer must come here every night, that this was the choicest grazing, with grass far sweeter than the acidic tussocks of coarse grass up on the moors. My companions and I retreated from the eye-watering cold and went to sit by the log fire and share stories. You may think of this book as being a tale told round a campfire. I could talk all night, if there was someone who wanted to hear, until the sun rose over the eastern hills. I could start all over again, on another night, by another fire, and tell a completely different set of stories, excavate a whole new set of memories. There are so many stories in a life, and so little time in which to tell them.

  As the evening wore on the answering calls of the stags grew closer, and shadows passed right by the window in the candlelight. As the calls grew still louder, we headed out again. The deer were huddled around us in the darkness, grazing right up to the bothy, butting their heads against its walls. We could hear their breathing. My companions switched on their head torches. Dozens upon dozens of eyes looked up and shone back at us, but again, without flinching at all. In every direction that we could see, as far as the light reached there were deer; we were in the dead centre of a huge gathering of them.

  It reminded me of a time long ago. Of course it does, you say, everything reminds him of something else. Hitching across Australia, and running low on funds, I decided to stop off in South Australia for the fruit-picking season. I set up camp on a site in the heart of the wine region, and watched as it slowly filled with trailer-dwelling seasonal workers, like something out of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The vines were not yet fully ripened, so I passed a couple of weeks as I waited picking pears. Tree fruits are not particularly good earners, but at least I wasn’t picking peaches. You could always spot someone immediately who had spent a day working the peaches; they would return to the campsite ash-grey and with a thousand-yard stare, and would walk like a zombie straight to the shower block. The peach fuzz got everywhere, no clothes could protect against it, and it was insanely itchy. Then the grapes ripened, and I started to make good money. I was used to piece-work and had the knack of it; not just the physical knack but the mental knack. The trick is in your focus on the job at hand; not to let your mind begin to wander, for it can make you slow down without even realising it. I took pride in trying to be the best earner on any field I was put on. The days began before light. The idea was to be on the field waiting for the very first moment it was light enough to see the bunches of grapes. We worked with a bucket of water into which we repeatedly dipped our T-shirts, for by mid-afternoon the temperature would hit the hundreds and work would be called off for the remainder of the day.

  When the season was over I indulged myself with a trip out to Kangaroo Island, a good-sized island about a hundred miles long off the coast of South Australia. Much of the island is untamed bush held as a nature reserve. The wildlife of Australia is strikingly alien to that found almost anywhere else in the world, and there was much that I was hoping to see for the first time: echidnas and platypuses and koalas among them. I also hoped to see the penguins. There was a beach where a large colony of little penguins roosted each night, coming ashore at sunset after a day spent fishing out at sea. I had never seen a penguin in the wild.

  I hitched to the beach with a companion, and we sat on the shore and waited. There was no sign of life, no penguins out on the water. The sun set over the sea, and not a penguin in sight. It grew dark, and still nothing. So we unrolled our sleeping bags on the rocks, and went to sleep. In the middle of the night, my compani
on shook me awake. She’d heard something. I sat up in the darkness. She was right, there was a kind of low muttering. It would never have been enough to wake me. I fumbled around in my pack for a torch, and switched it on. We were surrounded by a circle of penguins, just a few feet away, all facing in at us. I raised the torch beam higher, and thousands of eyes shone back at us. The entire beach was completely covered with penguins, huddled together shoulder to shoulder, every one of them staring straight at us. The only patch of beach unoccupied by penguins was the few square feet where we lay. I switched off the torch, rolled over, and went back to sleep.

  In the morning when we woke at first light the beach was entirely deserted. It was hard to believe that we hadn’t dreamt up these penguins. We strolled the beach looking for evidence, and finally found a solitary late riser, one little penguin hiding under a rock looking like a stuffed toy abandoned by a child. Actually, it didn’t remind me of a generic stuffed toy, but of a particular straw-stuffed penguin that I’d had as an infant, from which I had been inseparable. I wonder if that ragged penguin, just about the same size as this little fellow under a rock, had been the trigger for my childhood obsession with birds and animals, which became apparent from the moment I had the words to express it. Perhaps it had been a comfort to me through those unremembered childhood illnesses that left me half-deaf.

  I have been delving into my past with this journey, putting memories into words, until I have finally reached a point before memory, before words. There is nowhere else left to go from here. Memories are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; the completed puzzle is a whole life. If I found enough pieces I could begin to join them together, to assemble an entire life out of memory, but I suspect it would take longer to complete than to live it.

  It was early when I woke beside the cold ashes of the fire, and there was no sound from the others, away in another room, so I rose and crept out for the dawn. It was light enough and I had perhaps nearly an hour before sunrise. I made my way down to the beach. The air was still now and chill, with a wintry nip in every breath, and the sky was perfectly clear and cloudless; not like the other days of this visit when the morning had always started off cloudy. I christened the sands; every footprint from yesterday had been washed away during the night. Reaching the rocks at the edge of the bay, I began to pick my way around them, staying close to the water’s edge. Sometimes the ledge I was following faded away and I would reach an impasse, a low cliff, and would have to backtrack, pick another route, or cut inland over a ridge. Veins of quartz ran through the grey slabs of rock, meandering like a river seen from the sky. These rivers of crystal were things of exquisite beauty, though it would be easy to pass them by unnoticed. I pulled out my phone to take a photo; there was just enough charge left. My cameraphone had been no use for trying to take pictures of wildlife, but it was good for close-ups, and for landscapes. I scrolled through my record of the past year’s wanderings. There were tight shots of autumn leaves and lichens, of seashells and birds’ eggs and the footprints of birds on the beach and wildcats in the hills. There were landscapes of rocky shores, of sunrises and sunsets, of lochs and islands, of pine woods and snow-capped mountains. There were no people in these shots, and certainly no pictures of myself. There were a few shots of bothies and ruined crofts and old trails, but no contemporary houses or roads; I had been inspired to preserve a landscape with no visible trace of human existence. As with photography, so with writing. I cannot write everything, and so the process of pinning things down with words becomes as much a process of exclusion as of inclusion. My inclination had always been to seek out the natural world, to hunt for what remains of the wild and to focus on that. I had been looking for the last wilderness, and had found it, even if it had largely been a wilderness of my own mind.

  On the slopes that rose from the shore were dense stands of bracken, brown and dying now, but not yet collapsed for the winter. There were little copses of coastal oak, wild and untouched, wizened and battered, still hanging on to their leaves, though they were useless now. It was still strange to see what looked like giant oaks but in miniature form; they distorted the sense of scale and proportion.

  Sometimes I think that I would just like to stop; to give up on the constant roaming, the wandering, the reflecting on the past, the dwelling on the future. To say that enough is enough; enough with the restlessness, the forever wondering what is over the next horizon. To pick a place and say that this will be perfect, everything I need is here. I will just sit down and never get up; instead of going out into the world I will let the world come to me, and see what it brings. I will wait and watch the world turn about me; I will sit in silence and let silence fall. It will be a place of rest, a place where I learn to finally appreciate what is there rather than being fixated on what is missing. And when I think of choosing a place to stop in, I think of one that looks very much like this: a rocky windblown shore, mountains and sky, woods and water. These are the basic elements of what I really need.

  The end of my journey was fast approaching. In the next few days I would return home, and my year of exploring the Rough Bounds would be over. I never did get to see my wildcat – although I liked to think that my wildcat saw me – and this was a good thing, I told myself, for it gave me a very good reason to return. I would spend the winter with my daughters, resting, and hopefully returning to full health, while I considered my future. Perhaps I would get my hearing tested; if nothing else, then I would at least get a number that would tell me the exact frequency at which my hearing fell off a cliff. I might be offered a hearing aid, for although my past experience with them has not been encouraging, I am told that the technology is constantly evolving. I doubted there was any way of getting my birds back, although the truth was they had never quite left me. If I closed my eyes and concentrated, I could just about make out the echo of them preserved in memory; the piercing call of a sandpiper on a mountain river, the endlessly repeated descending trill of a willow warbler in a spring wood, the winter wren suddenly breaking the silence of a frosty morning.

  There was a scatter of islands; I crossed between wet, weedy rocks to a tidal island, simply because I could. It covered perhaps an acre and held a few scattered trees and a rocky peak that made it almost as high as it was wide. On its far side, facing out to sea, was its own hidden coast. I found myself on a rock that dropped straight down into deep water and a churning forest of kelp, just a few feet beneath me, and looked out. Soon the sun would rise. I stood there and waited. And then the otters came.

  There was a pair of them: a mother and cub, as before. They were following the shoreline just a little way out from the water’s edge, coming closer with each dive. As I had seen much further off in the bay by the little bothy on the crags, the cub was mirroring its mother’s dive, following her down a moment after she disappeared. This cub had mastered the art of the dive; surfacing, not so much. While the adult would rise smoothly and gracefully for air, the cub had no patience at all. It would burst back into the light, bobbing up like a cork, rising so fast that almost its entire body cleared the water, and then it would crash back down with an untidy splash. It was learning the ropes, though; on one occasion it emerged with a cockle held between its front paws like a squirrel holding a nut, and juggled with it and nibbled at it inquisitively.

  They came nearer and nearer, following a path that would take them right beneath me. There were not many times that I had been so close to wild otters. I remained motionless, but surely they must have seen me standing on my rock just above their heads. Perhaps because I was on land and they were in the water they sensed no conceivable threat. Finally, after another dive, the cub burst out of the water right beneath my feet, so close that it felt as though I could almost have reached down and stroked it. Until now, the mother had risen first and the cub had followed straight after, but this time the mother stayed down for a moment longer. The cub seemed shocked to find itself alone. It jerked its head to left and right, its panic risin
g, and it began to call plaintively for its mother. I could see its little mouth opening and closing; if otters had lips I would have seen it pursing them to whistle. And yet I could hear absolutely nothing at all. The mother rose gracefully a few feet away, and the baby otter streamed through the water and threw itself at her, nuzzling her and wrapping itself around her, as if they had been parted for hours. Its sheer savage joy was palpable, and I could not help but feel it too.

  Dawn was fast approaching. Soon the sun would emerge above the mountain peaks across the loch. The high tops above me were already touched by light. I decided to climb the hillside, to meet the sun. I waded up through bracken and tussocks of yellow grass and into the scattered woods, then paused and looked back down at the panorama of the loch. There must have been an unseen cleft in the mountains across the bay, for the light first appeared at right angles to me. A misty green ray of light appeared from the midst of the hills and swept down the mountainside opposite, then bathed the waters of the loch in a pale radiance, like the beam of a lighthouse slowly turning. I could feel the world moving beneath my feet, unstoppable, irrepressible. Above me the hillside was bathed in golden sunshine, in a long horizontal band that crept ever closer, moment by moment. I struck out for the hills, walking into the light.