I miss the stags that used to winter close to the house, for now there are young trees planted over the hill face between Camusfeàrna and Druimfiaclach, and the deer have been forced back behind the forest fence, so that there is none, save an occasional interloper, within a mile of the bay. In the first winter that I was at Camusfeàrna I would wake to see from the window a frieze of their antlers etching the near skyline, and they were in some way important to me, as were the big footprints of the wildcats in the soft sand at the burn’s edge, the harsh cry of the ravens, and the round shiny seals’ heads in the bay below the house. These creatures were my neighbours.
English visitors who have come to Camusfeàrna are usually struck inarticulate by the desolate grandeur of the landscape and the splendour of pale blue and gold spring mornings, but they are entirely articulate in their amazement at the variety of wild life by which I am surrounded. Many Englishmen are, for example, quite unaware that wildcats are common animals in the West Highlands, and assume, when one refers to them, that one is speaking of domestic cats run wild, not of the tawny lynx-like ferals that had their den, that and every other year, within two hundred yards of my door. They bear as much relation to the domestic cat as does a wolf to a terrier; they were here before our first uncouth ancestors came to live in the caves below the cliffs, and they are reputedly untameable. When I first came here the estate on whose land the house stood had long waged war upon the wildcats, and a tree by the deer-larder of the lodge, four miles away, was decorated with their banded tails hanging like monstrous willow catkins from its boughs. Now, since the estate has turned from general agriculture to forestry, the wildcats are protected, for they are the worst enemy of the voles, who are in turn the greatest destroyers of the newly planted trees. Under this benign regime the number of wildcats has marvellously increased. The males sometimes mate with domestic females, but the offspring rarely survives, either because the sire returns to kill the kittens as soon as they are born, and so expunge the evidence of his peasant wenching, or because of the distrust in . which so many humans hold the taint of the untameable. It is the wild strain that is dominant, in the lynx-like appearance, the extra claw, and the feral instinct; and the few half-breeds that escape destruction usually take to the hills and the den life of their male ancestors. An old river-watcher at Lochailort, who for some reason that now eludes me was known as Tipperary, told me that one night, awoken by the caterwauling outside, he had gone to the door with a torch and in its beam had seen his own black-and-white she-cat in the fierce embrace of a huge wild torn. Thereafter he had waited eagerly for the birth of the kittens. When the time came she made her nest in the byre, and all that day he waited for the first birth, but at nightfall she had not yet brought forth. In the small hours of the morning he became conscious of piteous mewing at his door, and opened it to find his cat carrying in her mouth one wounded and dying kitten. In the dark background he heard a savage sound of worrying and snarling, and flashing his torch towards the byre he saw the wild torn in the act of killing a kitten. There was a green ember-glow of eyes, the flash of a big bottle-brush tail, and then the torch lit up nothing more than a pathetic trail of mangled new-born kittens. The single survivor, whom the mother had tried to carry to the house for sanctuary, died a few minutes later.
Wildcats grow to an enormous size, at least double that of the very largest domestic cat; this year there is one who leaves close to the house Homeric droppings of dimensions that would make an Alsatian wolfhound appear almost constipated. It is comparatively rarely that one sees the animals themselves in the daytime, for they are creatures of the dark and the starlight. Once I caught one accidentally in a rabbit snare, a vast torn with ten rings to his tail, and that first year at Camusfeàrna I twice saw the kittens at play in the dawn, frolicking among the primroses and budding birch on the bank beyond the croft wall. They looked beautiful, very soft and fluffy, and almost gentle; there was no hint of the ferocity that takes a heavy annual toll of lambs and red-deer calves. Before man exterminated the rabbits they were the staple food both of the big leggy hill foxes and of these low-ground wildcats, and every morning I would see the heavily indented padmarks in the sand at the burrow mouths. But now the rabbits have gone and the lambs are still here in their season, and where there has been a strong lamb at dusk, at dawn there are raw bones and a fleece like a blood-stained swab in a surgery. Then come the ravens from the sea cliffs, and the hooded crows, the ubiquitous grey-mantled scavengers, and by nightfall there is nothing to show for those slow months in the womb but white skeleton and a scrap of soft, soiled fleece that seems no bigger than a handkerchief.
Among the mammals it is, next to the wildcats, the seals that surprise my southern visitors most. Right through the summer months they are rarely out of sight, and, being unmolested at Camusfeàrna, they become very tame. In the evenings they will follow a dinghy through the smooth sunset-coloured water, their heads emerging ever nearer and nearer until they are no more than a boat’s length away. It is only a change in rhythm that frightens them; one must row steadily onwards as if intent on one’s own business and unconcerned with theirs. The brown seals, with their big round skulls and short, dog-like noses, are everywhere, and I have counted more than a hundred in an hour’s run down the shore in the dinghy; besides these, which breed locally, the Atlantic seals stay round the islands from May till early autumn, when they return to their scattered and comparatively few breeding rocks. The Atlantic seals that spend the summer at Camusfeàrna probably breed on the rocks west of Canna, by a long way the nearest to me of their colonies. They are never in large parties away from the breeding grounds; through the long still days of summer when the sea is smooth as silk and the sun is hot on the lichened rocks above the tide they loaf about the Camusfeàrna islands in twos and threes, usually bulls, eating largely of the rock fish and storing up energy to be used recklessly on their harems in the autumn, for during the rut the bulls may not feed for many weeks. To one who sees them for the first time the Atlantic seals seem vast; a big bull is some nine feet long and weighs nearly half a ton. They are splendid beasts, but to me they lack the charm of the little brown seal with its less dignified habits, inquisitive and dog-like. Once, on the rocks off Rhu Arisaig, I picked up a brown seal pup no more than a day or so old – he had the soft white baby coat that is more often shed in the womb, and he seemed for all the world like a toy designed to please a child. He was warm and tubby and not only unafraid but squirmingly affectionate, and I set him down again with some reluctance. But he was not to be so easily left, for as I moved off he came shuffling and humping along at my heels. After a few minutes of trying to shake him off I tried dodging and hiding behind rocks, but he discovered me with amazing agility. Finally I scrambled down to the boat and rowed quickly away, but after twenty yards he was there beside me muzzling an oar. I was in desperation to know what to do with this unexpected foundling whose frantic mother was now snorting twenty yards away, when suddenly he responded to one of her calls and the two went off together, the pup no doubt to receive the lecture of his life.
The red-deer calves, too, have no natural fear of man during their first days of life, and if in June one stumbles upon a calf lying dappled and sleek among the long green bracken stems one must avoid handling him if one wants to make a clean get-away. I used to pet them and fondle them before I knew better, and my efforts to leave led to more frenzied games of hide-and-seek than with the seal pup, while a distracted hind stamped and barked unavailingly. But while the calves during those first uninstructed days display no instinctive fear of humans, they are from the first terrified of their natural enemies, the eagles, the wildcats and the foxes. I have seen a hind trying to defend her calf from an eagle, rearing up with her ears back and slashing wickedly with her fore-hooves each time he stooped with an audible rush of wind through his great upswept pinions; if one hoof had struck home she would have brought him down disembowelled, but though she never touched more than a wingtip the eagle grew wa
ry and finally sailed off down the glen, the sun gleaming whitely on the burnish of his mantle.
It is the helpless red-deer calves that are the staple food of the hill foxes in June, and the young lambs in April and May, but what they live on for the rest of the year now that the rabbits have gone and the blue mountain hares become so scarce, remains a mystery to me. Possibly they eat more seldom than we imagine, and certainly mice form a large part of their diet. Some years ago I went out with a stalker to kill hill foxes after lambing time. The foxes’ cairn was some two thousand feet up the hill, and we left at dawn, before the sun was up over hills that were still all snow at their summits, silhouetted against a sky that was apple-green with tenuous scarlet streamers. The cairn, a big tumble of granite boulders in a fissure of the hillside, was just below the snowline, and by the time we reached it the sun had lifted in a golden glare over the high tops. The terriers went into the cairn and we shot the vixen as she bolted, and the dogs killed and brought out the five cubs; but of the dog fox there was no sign at all. We found his footprints in a peat hag a few hundred yards below, going downhill, and he had not been galloping but quietly trotting, so we concluded that he had left the cairn some time before we had reached it and was probably unaware of anything amiss. We sat down under cover to wait for his return.
We waited all day. The spring breeze blew fresh in our faces from where the sea and the islands lay spread out far below us, and we could see the ring-net boats putting out for the first of the summer herring. All day there was very little movement on the hill; once a party of stags in early velvet crossed the lip of the corrie on our right, and once an eagle sailed by within a stone’s throw, to bank sharply and veer off with a harsh rasp of air between the quills as his searching eye found us. In the evening it became chilly, and when the sun was dipping over the Outer Hebrides and the snow-shadows had turned to a deep blue, we began to think of moving. We were starting to gather up our things when my eye caught a movement in the peat hags below us. The dog fox was trotting up hill to the cairn, quite unsuspicious, and carrying something in his jaws. The rifle killed him stone dead at fifty yards, and we went down to see what he had been carrying; it was a nest of pink new-born mice – all he had found to bring home in a long day’s hunting for his vixen and five cubs.
At first sight it is one of the enigmas of the country around Camusfeàrna, this great number of predators surviving with so little to prey upon; in the air the eagles, buzzards, falcons, ravens, hooded crows, and on the ground the wildcats, foxes, badgers and pine martens. There is no doubt that a surprising number of the animal species spend much time during the off season – when there are no young creatures to feed on – in my own hobby of beachcombing. In the soft sand around the tide-wrack I come constantly upon the footprints of wildcats, badgers and foxes. Sometimes they find oiled seabirds, sometimes the carcase of a sheep, fallen from one of the green cliff ledges that throughout the West Highlands form such well-baited and often fatal traps, or of a stag that has tottered down from the March snowdrifts to seek seaweed as the only uncovered food, or they may creep upon sleeping oyster-catchers and curlews as they wait in the dark for the turn of the tide. But whatever they find it is to the shore that the fanged creatures come at night, and at times, perhaps, they find little, for I have seen undigested sand-hoppers in the droppings of both wildcats and foxes.
The ravens and hooded crows, though they will peck out the eyes of a living lamb or deer calf if he is weak, are in fact offal feeders for the greater part of the time. The hoodies spend much of their time about the shore in the late summer and midwinter, opening mussels by carrying them up to house-height and dropping them to smash on the rocks, but at most other seasons of the year there are routine harvests for them to gather elsewhere. In the back-end of winter, when the ground is as yet unstirred by spring, the old stags that have wintered poorly grow feeble and die in the snowdrifts and the grey scavengers squawk and squabble over the carcases; a little later, when the first warmth comes, and the hinds interrupt their grazing to turn their heads and nibble irritably at their spines, the hoodies strut and pick around them, gobbling the fat warble-grubs that emerge from under the deer-hides and fall to the ground. When the lambing season comes they quarter the ground for the afterbirths, and from then on there are the eggs and young of every bird lesser than themselves.
Of my human neighbours, the MacKinnons, I have so far said little. Calum Murdo MacKinnon is always given both his Christian names, for there are so many Calum MacKinnons in the district that Calum alone would be ambiguous; there are so many Murdos as to make that name by itself ineffective too; and there are so many Murdo Calums, which is the true sequence of his names, that to retain his identity he has had to invert them. This was a common practice under the clan system, and is still the general rule in many parts of the West Highlands, where the clan names still inhabit their old territory. Sometimes he was abbreviated to ‘Calum the Road’ (in the same way I have known elsewhere a ‘John the Hearse’, a ‘Duncan the Lorry’, a ‘Ronald the Shooter’ and a ‘Ronald Donald the Dummy’ – the last not in any aspersion upon his human reality but because he was dumb). But the necessity for this strict taxonomy is a strange situation for one whose nearest neighbour other than myself is four miles distant.
Calum Murdo, then, is a small wiry man in middle age, who, when I first came to Camusfeàrna, had for long been the roadmender responsible for several miles of the single-track road on either side of Druimfiaclach. It might be expected that a Highlander living in this remarkable isolation would have few topics of conversation beyond the small routine of his own existence; one would not, for example, expect him to be able to quote the greater part of the Golden Treasury, to have read most of the classics, to have voluble and well-informed views on politics national and international, or to be a subscriber to the New Statesman. Yet these were the facts, and I fear it must have been a sad disappointment to Calum Murdo to find his new neighbour, of a supposedly higher educational level, to be on many subjects less well informed than himself. He would impart to me much fascinating and anecdotal information on a host of subjects, and would close every session with a rounded formula: ‘And now, Major, an educated man like yourself will be fair sick of listening to the haverings of an old prole.’ Over a period of ten years he has contributed much to my education.
With Calum Murdo’s wife Morag, a woman of fine-drawn iron beauty softened by humour, I found an immediate common ground in a love of living creatures. One reads and hears much at second hand of the spiritual descendants of St Francis and of St Cuthbert, those who experience an immediate intimate communication with bird and beast, and of whom wild things feel no fear, but I had never encountered one of them in the flesh until I met Morag, and I had become a little sceptical of their existence. What little success I myself have with animals is due, I think, solely to patience, experience, and a conscious effort to put myself in the animal’s position, but I do not think that any of these things have been necessary to Morag. She frankly finds more to like and to love in animals than in human beings, and they respond to her immediately as if she were one of themselves, with a trust and respect that few of us receive from our own kind. I am convinced that there exists between her and them some rapport that is not for the achievement, even by long perseverance, of the bulk of those humans who would wish it. It would not, perhaps, be difficult to find more understandable explanations for individual cases in which, with her, this rapport seems apparent, but it is the number of these cases, and the consistency with which the animals’ behaviour departs from its established pattern towards mankind, that convinces me of something not yet explainable in existing terms.
A single instance will be enough for illustration. Across the road from the MacKinnons’ door is a reedy hillside lochan some hundred yards long by fifty wide, and every winter the wild swans, the whoopers, would come to it as they were driven south by Arctic weather, to stay often for days and sometimes for weeks. Morag loved the swans
, and from the green door of her house she would call a greeting to them several times a day, so that they came to know her voice, and never edged away from her to the other side of the lochan as they did when other human figures appeared on the road. One night she heard them restless and calling, the clear bugle voices muffled and buffeted by the wind, and when she opened the door in the morning she saw that there was something very much amiss. The two parent birds were at the near edge of the loch, fussing, if anything so graceful and dignified as a wild swan can be said to fuss, round a cygnet that seemed in some way to be captive at the margin of the reeds. Morag began to walk towards the loch, calling to them all the while as she was wont. The cygnet flapped and struggled and beat the water piteously with his wings, but he was held fast below the peaty surface, and all the while the parents, instead of retreating before Morag, remained calling at his side. Morag waded out, but the loch bottom is soft and black, and she was sinking thigh deep before she realized that she could not reach the cygnet. Then suddenly he turned and struggled towards her, stopped the thrashing of his wings, and was still. Groping in the water beneath him, Morag’s hand came upon a wire, on which she pulled until she was able to feel a rusty steel trap clamped to the cygnet’s leg, a trap set for a fox, and fastened to a long wire so that he might drown himself and die the more quickly. Morag lifted the cygnet from the water; he lay passive in her arms while she eased the jaws open, and as she did this the two parents swam right in and remained one on either side of her, as tame, as she put it, as domestic ducks; neither did they swim away when she put the cygnet undamaged on to the water and began to retrace her steps.
The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy Page 4