Gods of the Morning

by John Lister-Kaye

  As we approached the setts in the dusk she seemed to slough off her human-ness and transmogrify into something more than half wild. I couldn’t understand how she sat so still. She denied cold and rain, she ignored itches – a gnat landing on her nose – she seemed to become part of the wood herself, part of the tree, the soil, the still evening air. She had developed the discipline and serenity of a Buddhist monk and the concentration of a hypnotist. Little wonder the badgers accepted her so unconditionally. Cubs took biscuits from her hand; adults sniffed at her legs and set scent on her shoes – the ultimate acceptance of a wild badger – claiming her as their own. It was Eileen who wrote in one of her books, ‘I think badger-watchers are not entirely human.’

  *  *  *

  The tracks stop and I stop with them. Has my fox plucked a sound from the night air into those black, A-frame, ever-swivelling sensors? Snatched a molecule of scent and cradled it in olfactory awareness? Or is it a combination of senses working together? One front pad has swivelled slightly to the right. I think he’s looking and listening to the right, and his prints are pressed deeper and smudged, as though they have shifted fractionally, as if he was about to move and thought better of it. For a moment we are one, the fox and I, sharing the same chill oxygen, senses straining, poised, expectant.

  He is still on the farm track, but right beside the verge of long, ragged grass and frost-killed weeds. Then he moves on, slowly, just a few short paces . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . and stops again, closer now to the verge. I try to guess how long he stood there. The pads are pressed home and have crumbled slightly at the edges from the warmth of his feet. I think he was rigid, frozen into listening mode, taut as a piano wire, and not just for a few seconds.

  On again, but it’s all different. The prints are bunched up, short and staccato. I can’t decide whether he is stalking because he’s seen something or just leoparding forward, a few inches at a time. Then it’s all clear: the story is plain, there for the deciphering, like suddenly discovering a new panel of hieroglyphics on an ancient tomb, revealing everything. My pulse quickens. I’m with him, eyes unpicking the signals, brain flicking through a scrapbook of images, conjuring new ones. Because I’ve seen it on film, in photographs and witnessed it myself through binoculars, this little bit of the fox I do know. Without that knowledge the tracks would be an incomprehensible mess, but I can match the mess to the image and paint a masterpiece in my head.

  It was hearing, I’m sure. He first picked up the rustling through frosted stems a few paces back down the track. That’s why he stopped, to listen. He knew it was a mouse or a vole and his taut, pointed ears, like radar scanners, and his nose focused in together, collecting data, building the image and the range. In snow, small mammals have to tunnel around beneath the surface to feed, probably oblivious to any dangers that may be lurking above. Then he stalked, my fox – five short, finely placed steps, one by silent one – to the edge of the grass. He paused again, head cocked, ears trained down, wet nostrils quivering wide, eyes burning into a patch of snow half right and a foot or two into the verge.

  I think he stood poised there for several seconds until, with a springing pounce, his strong back legs powered him up in an arcing curve to land exactly where he knew his prey was, front pads both pounding together to dash the small mammal into confusion, instantly followed by the sharp snout, probing deep into the frosty mat of the grass.

  It didn’t quite end there. He caught that wood mouse or, more likely because of the grassy habitat, a field vole (Microtus agrestis), and flicked it up with his teeth to get it clear of the grass. Five strands of torn yellow grass lay on the snow as though he had shaken them from his mouth. The vole landed a foot away, almost certainly mortally injured, and he snapped it up again, leaving only a slight imprint such as you might make with two fingers pressed gently in.

  My fox has wafted through our winter landscape unaware that he was leaving his signature for anyone who cared to read it. That I did is my route to him and his world. It is a world I cannot join or ever hope to understand fully, but it is one that delivers up a particular and private fulfilment. He has been here: bright-eyed, alert, as taut as a bow-string, fluid and sensuous, luminous with heat and life. I have followed: rapt, absorbent, charged, intent. Our lives have crossed and I am the happier for it. I see the fox as a survivor, a sublime embodiment of all the things I love so much about nature: the necessity, the opportunism, the independence of spirit, the wholeness of being, the absolute distillation of wildness. My fox went on. I turned back to the house to get on with being human again.

  6

  A Swan for Christmas

  Some full-breasted swan

  That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,

  Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood

  With swarthy webs.

  ‘The Passing of Arthur’,

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  . . . as I have seen a swan

  With bootless labour swim against the tide

  And spend her strength with over-matching waves.

  King Henry VI, Part 3, Act 1, scene iv,

  William Shakespeare

  Medieval kings loved to eat swans. Roast swan is widely recorded as a speciality that was laid on for the wedding feasts, banquets and royal celebrations of Merrie England. I have tried it a few times, and won’t bother again. They must have had culinary skills I lack and, I suspect, husbandry secrets I don’t care to think about.

  We have two swans in the Highlands: the large archetypal mute swans of Swan Lake and which grace calendar pages, swans we all know from city lakes and rivers, which have virtually no fear of human beings, and we have the slightly smaller and, to my mind, far more refined, straight-necked whooper swans that overwinter here and migrate to the Arctic to breed.

  Our whoopers arrive here with the winter. They come later than the autumn flocks of grey geese and seem to haul winter along behind them. They migrate in from Iceland and Arctic Scandinavia in small family groups. Every year we expect to have between ten and twenty in the valley. They like the sheltered lochs that are slow to freeze and they will stay on the open water of the Beauly River and its oxbow lakes when the ice comes. In extreme frost – I have seen the river freeze over only a few times in my forty years – they repair to the tidal shallows of the east coast, where I have occasionally seen whoopers gathered in huge flocks.

  A few of them die here every winter. Electricity distribution lines criss-cross the glen and the river in several places. Flying swans – both the delicate whoopers and the much heavier resident mutes – spot the thin wire too late. They collide and it kills them; if not straight away, then slowly in the agony of a broken wing and starvation. I am not emotional about the death of wildlife; it’s a fact of everyday wildness to which I am entirely reconciled. But to see a glowing white swan flapping in helpless circles beneath the wires never fails to anger me. Over the years I have braced myself to despatch several and I’ve found the fox-strewn feathers of many more. In one dreadful event a few years ago six whoopers crashed into the wires together at the spot where they cross the river fields only half a mile from my home. Two were instantly electrocuted, one cygnet died of a broken neck and the other three suffered broken wings.

  Once or twice I have taken a freshly dead carcass and tried to cook it – not to be recommended. I have come to the conclusion that the swans of medieval feasts cannot have been of the migratory ilk: they must have been resident mute swans, and were most likely fattened up for royal fare. The whoopers I have sampled have been lean, stringy and as chewy as old hemp rope. I have even tried carefully removing only the breast meat and casseroling it slowly in a low oven, but with little improvement. Those breast muscles have just powered the huge birds for many hundreds of miles of migration. Swan is no longer on my menu.

  Whooper swans fly and feed by night and day. As they fly they call to each other, which is how they arrived at their onomatopoeic name. It is a soft-edged bugling phonet
ically described as a whoop, pitched like a B flugelhorn, with a fatter, mellower tone closer to that of a French horn than a trumpet or military bugle. Typically the call repeats itself three or four times, a single unhurried note with an inaudible snatch of breath between each one. When six or seven birds are flying together in close formation, wings almost touching, their soft flugelings overlap in a rare and disturbing music that can be heard for miles.

  If they leave the river at night and head up over the forest to our little eight-acre loch, they have to pass within a few hundred yards of my bedroom window. I hear them far off and I’m out of bed in a flash. In bright moonlight they gleam like mercury as they pass.

  Two weeks before Christmas I heard them clearly, the sound pealing through the damp, cold air, like a call to arms. I couldn’t wait for morning – dawn frustratingly late at 8.40 forty. I hurried up the hill, easing back to stealth as I topped the rise at the dam. The loch sits in a hollow surrounded by dark pine forest with a broad marsh at the south-western shore, open moorland beyond. There they were, seven of them, glowing like virgin brides at the far end of the loch. They were feeding in the shallows, probing and sifting the mire for their favourite mix of aquatic weeds and roots – a sort of peaty vichyssoise. Their heads rose and fell as they dabbled, and every few minutes they would flute to each other in intimate, barely audible hoots, quite distinct from their flight calls.

  I watched them on and off for four days. Whenever I needed to get out of the house I headed uphill to the loch. Sometimes they were out of the water in the marsh, standing or walking freely, their necks immediately upright if they saw me, bright nares shining daffodil yellow in the winter sun. Three were cygnets, unmistakably grey and without the hallmark yellow bills that make them so distinct from mute swans. Hatched in the Lapland or Iceland summer, this was their first migration south, a journey that would hopefully be repeated many times.

  On the fifth day I arrived just in time to see them go. I stood silently among the birches at the dam. Very slowly they paddled line-abreast down the loch towards me, long necks as straight as walking sticks. They seemed uneasy, no doubt very well aware that human presence had been seen there every day. Their muted calls were edgy and nervous. Heads swivelled anxiously. As they approached the dam one mature bird bugled loudly, as if giving a signal. As one they turned and thrashed their long white wings against the dark water, rising up from the surface and paddling furiously into a diagonal take-off down the full length of the loch towards the marsh. The morning air rang with the loud flaying of fourteen powerful wings and feet; the surface was momentarily whipped into seven long trails of creamy foam.

  Six swans lifted weightily into the cold, misty air. They cleared the marsh by only a few feet and banked away south, still rising, over the heather moorland and the crowns of dark pines until they were clear of the hills. The seventh bird failed to gain enough height. It was forced to abort its take-off and crashed clumsily into the marsh. Its companions circled overhead. The air rang with their throbbing wing-song; their flugeling calls now rimmed with anxiety echoed loudly from the forest fringe. They circled twice, each time higher, but constantly calling out to their fallen friend. Then they lifted away over the forest and were gone. The last I saw of them was a silhouetted chevron against paler clouds, high above the pines heading away towards the river in the valley far below.

  The fallen bird paddled urgently back to the dam. A bow wave flowed out from its breast and into a spreading wake behind. It turned to try again. This time it seemed to rise well. By halfway down the loch it was clear of the water, only the downdraught from its wing tips rippling the surface. But it couldn’t seem to gain any more lift. As it neared the marsh it lost its nerve and aborted again, thrusting its black feet forward, emergency brakes furrowing the surface as it crashed down in an undignified tangle of wings and water.

  I watched it try twice more, but with decreasing success. The last attempt was half-hearted. It seemed to have realised it was too weak to lift off. It cried out. Now the soft flugeling I love so much was keened with stress. The loch fell silent. I retreated. Perhaps if it rested it would get off in an hour or two.

  But it didn’t.

  I went back several times each day for the next two days. The swan had taken up a position on the edge of the marsh where it stood looking lost and forlorn. It was sporadically feeding – or, at least, going through the motions of feeding. I have lived at Aigas long enough to know that our loch offers very limited food for water birds in winter. Mallard come and go, but never stay long. The water is too acid and too peaty and it freezes regularly, sometimes for long periods and to such a depth of ice that we can skate safely. I could see that my swan had given up trying. I decided to act.

  I don’t normally interfere with nature. On many occasions I have been in a position to frighten away a predator and save a life, a sparrowhawk hauling down a hapless blackbird or chaffinch or hooded crows stealing chicks from a robin’s nest, but the predators have to live too and I do not like playing God. Anyway, Darwin’s mantra echoes constantly in my head: ‘It is the fittest that survive.’

  Yet this seemed to me to be different. I love whooper swans and it would have distressed me deeply to watch it starve. But I also felt that there was an element of rotten luck in the bird’s plight, something not its fault, like tawny owls that see a chimney and decide to explore it as a nest hole, only to find themselves sitting in a fireplace, trapped in an empty bedroom, unable to fly back up the chimney, doomed to starvation. My swan had flown in with its healthy family companions. It didn’t know it lacked the strength to get off again until it tried, and by then it was too late. I was sure there was insufficient natural feed in the loch to build it up again.

  My best guess is that migration had taken too much out of it. Perhaps it was an older bird – its pure white plumage and bright yellow bill markings told me it was certainly mature. Perhaps they’d had to battle against strong head winds. Perhaps the subtle shifts in our winter weather patterns had pushed them off course, making the journey longer and more arduous than usual. Perhaps my swan was carrying a parasite burden or some other ailment. I have no way of knowing – to me, it was just a sad, knackered swan and I knew very well that nature gives no quarter. I walked slowly back to the house. We feed the birds on our bird table every day. Why should the poor swan be different? Besides, it was nearly Christmas. I decided to feed it.

  I stole a bucketful of mixed corn – wheat, barley and chopped maize – from Lucy’s chicken-feed bins and spread it in generous handfuls along the edge of the marsh. The swan backed off to the middle of the loch and eyed me warily. I went away. A few hours later I sneaked back to the birches and watched through binoculars. It was feeding, head down in the rushes exactly where I had put the corn. So were six greedy mallard.

  Word got out. Over the next week the mallard numbers increased dramatically. I put a bucketful of corn out every day to ensure that there was always enough for my swan. At one point there were sixteen mallard guzzling there. I could hardly blame them: they are real survivors. But my swan was feeding too and by now it had a permanently bulging crop at the base of its neck. Its plumage shone like fresh snow. It looked well.

  After ten days I had begun to wonder if it would ever be able to leave. That clear frosty morning I walked up the hill with my bucket, the Jack Russells dashing about at my feet. I saw no need for stealth or caution: the swan was always there at the marsh. At the dam I stood and scoured the entire loch now sealed with a skim of ice. No swan. I walked round the loch searching, praying I wouldn’t find a swan corpse. No swan. It had gone. I walked up the moorland through the deep heather in case it had tried to walk out and to reassure myself that it could never have taken off from there. No swan. I went back to the marsh. Not a sign except for regular extrusions of very healthy-looking green dung and a few preened feathers where it had roosted at the water’s edge.

  My swan had flown away.

  Was it the plunging temperatu
re and the ice forming around it that had triggered its move? Did it know instinctively that if the ice thickened it would be stuck for good? Or had my high-quality feed restored its confidence as well as its strength? I would never know.

  Later that day I drove slowly down the valley, eyeing the river wherever I could get a good view through the trees. There were a few places I knew the whoopers liked to hang out – an oxbow lake and a stagnant meander with a grassy bay about three miles upstream. I parked the car and walked across a rough croft meadow crisp with rime. As I neared the riverbank I heard the clear ringing call of whoopers coming from just beyond my view in that very bay. Then the thrashing wind-throb of multiple feet and wings. A line of lashing white wings whirled past me and away down the river. I watched them rise majestically into a bright winter sky of stabbing blue. Silver-shouldered they banked in a broad circle above the trees and headed back upriver over my head. They were in a shallow V, four on one side, three on the other, necks outstretched, wings powering in a unison of perfect timing. Seven glorious whoopers, wild and free. In seconds they were gone from my view, but their flugel-horns rang out loud and clear.

  7

  The Day the Sun Stands Still

  The night is darkening round me,

  The wild winds coldly blow;

  But a tyrant spell has bound me,

  And I cannot, cannot go.

  The giant trees are bending

  Their bare boughs weighed with snow;

  The storm is fast descending,

  And yet I cannot go.

  Emily Brontë (1818–48)

  Some four or five thousand years ago, in the wind-scoured yet sandstone-fertile archipelago of Orkney, an individual, or perhaps a group (a committee?) of the nameless, raceless people we have clumsily branded Neolithic or late Stone Age sat round the fire and hatched a plan.