As the male stepped forward, so the chicks – I was never sure how many, probably four – thrust their ugly, bulging, blind-eyed heads into the air and gaped their vulgar yellow-rimmed throats, red and huge, like so many lurid cactus blooms wobbling on extended stalks. The male bird belched noisily and regurgitated a foul, multi-coloured ragout of putrid carrion, thrusting it into the yawning gapes with indelicate precision.
I had to descend before the snowstorm visited further life-threatening horrors upon me in the dimming light of late afternoon. I was no novice in the mountains and I knew very well how dangerous they can be if one is caught out and forced to spend a night among them. I stood up. Both adult birds stared at me in a fleeting moment of utter disbelief before they leaped together into the bitter wind, clashing pinions in their panic to go.
9
A Dog’s Life
. . . and every dog will have its day.
Hamlet, Act V, scene i,
William Shakespeare
January, it seemed, had done its worst. As the month freewheeled to a close, that same un-winterish breeze from the south had swung slowly to the south-west, staying there, prevailing, soft, damp and beguilingly felicitous. The Highlands’ craggy face was splashed with light rain, freshening the winter grass and the whiskery lichens that adorn our trees, like green-grey tinsel. The snow had vanished from the hills. Surely winter couldn’t be over yet. It had fooled me, not just the great tits, for a week, drawing life out of winter crannies so that suddenly there was birdsong and bustle everywhere I looked.
The badgers knew it. They emerged and tore up frost-killed grass and bracken with their teeth and claws, rolling it together and shuffling backwards with it tucked under their chins, down into the dark ventricles of their setts for fresh bedding. At one entrance I placed a slice of dry hay bale from the stables just to see if they would take it. It vanished that night, scarcely a stem left, whisked underground without a second thought. After some essential housekeeping, they foraged for earthworms across the lawns and the moles joined them, heaving their tumps of spoil into a chain of mini-volcanoes of crumbly brown loam.
Every afternoon I walked, quietly watching and wondering what effect these sudden moods of unseasonable weather were having on our wildlife. Did it matter that the great tits got fired up a month too early? Would they adjust their nesting calendar? Would the essential caterpillars they need to feed their chicks on be available at the right moment if they started nesting now? And what if the frost and snow returned? If all the looping caterpillars the great tits habitually rear their chicks on were killed off too? Could they cope? And if they lost that brood of chicks to starvation and the cold, would the parent birds just start again later on? Would the earthworms be able to retreat?
The badgers would be all right, I was sure. They would duck below ground and curl up again, refreshed and strengthened by the nourishment they had taken in. Similarly the pipistrelle bats. They don’t mind coming out of hibernation at all. They can dip in and out of their torpor several times in a winter without penalty. But what of the moths I see the bats snatching at night from around the outside lights? Can they close down again? Go back to their crevices and chill, literally, or are they caught out by the next cold snap, immobilised and rigid, so that their energy resources are burned up prematurely? Do entire generations of moths perish, or just a few, or perhaps none at all?
It is the invertebrates that trouble me. They are the uncountable legions from which whole food chains build, eking energy directly or indirectly from the great universal gift of carbohydrate that surrounds us and passing it on to a myriad higher organisms. Without the bugs the swallows can’t skim the summer skies; the brown trout, the otter and the osprey would fade away; the rooks would fail and the goshawk would vanish for ever into the dark woods.
But hasn’t this happened many times before in the millions of years our wildlife has been evolving? Ice ages have waxed and waned. This glen was covered with an ice sheet three thousand feet thick as recently as twelve thousand years ago, a mere blink of an evolutionary eye. Surely their long genes conceal a trump card to get them through. What aces we have never dreamed of are encrypted into the dizzy spirals of their DNA?
While all these thoughts fizzed around my brain I found myself walking aimlessly towards the top of the garden through a spring-like chorus of birdsong brought on by a sudden salvo of low sun. Robins, wrens, great and blue tits, dunnocks, and a blackbird alarming at my presence led me to a corner of neglected shrubbery ruled by rampant rhododendrons and labyrinthine laurels, a ragged yew clump and some towering thujas – western red cedars from north-west America – planted 130 years ago during the Victorian craze for exotic conifers.
It was in the ancient hollow stump of one of these trees that I once found a hedgehog hibernating, curled like a fist and swaddled in moss and leaves. Checking it out was easy this time. The stump was empty, as I’d known it would be. Our hedgehogs have disappeared in recent years. It is rare to see one now, even on the roads. I am suspicious that the on-off winters of recent years have tricked them. In a run of days as mild as this they could so easily come out of hibernation, find nothing to eat and then be unable to go back. They starve.
And I had another reason for visiting this tucked-away grotto of the unkempt garden. It is where sparrowhawks often come to pluck their prey. Many times I have found the tell-tale scatter of feathers beneath the gnarled old yews. Sparrowhawks will kill and pluck their prey almost anywhere if they are not disturbed.
During the spring and summer months when the hawks can hunt in good daylight at four in the morning, it’s not unusual to find the signs on the lawns right out in the open. But when there are people or dogs about they will cart their prey off gripped in their needle talons, often still alive, to some familiar shady corner where they can feed unseen and undisturbed, often using a stump as an altar for their dire executions. As Alfred, Lord Tennyson had it:
A sparhawk proud did hold in wicked jail
Music’s sweet chorister, the Nightingale
To whom with sighs she said: ‘O set me free,
And in my song I’ll praise no bird but thee.’
The Hawk replied: ‘I will not lose my diet
To let a thousand such enjoy their quiet.’
There is no doubt that sparrowhawks stake out our bird feeders and tables. It is a common complaint from suburban gardeners who love and feed their birds. Both species of British true hawks (those with rounded wings – accipiters, not falcons), the goshawk and the sparrowhawk, are masters of guerrilla warfare; ambush is their primary tactic, the art of surprise followed by a sudden snatch raid of dazzling speed. Of course it distresses people to see their favourite robin or chaffinch snatched right in front of their windows, and it happens to us. I have often pondered the many ways in which we advantage or disadvantage our wildlife by interfering with natural selection. There are no easy answers, but on balance, although bird feeders and tables probably provide an easier hunt for sparrowhawks, feeding the birds enables them to survive hard winters and consequently to breed more successfully. I erect chicken-wire foils around our tables with the mesh sizes large enough for sparrows, chaffinches and tits to slip through, but which frustrate the hawks’ first surprise attack. They work well.
When a snatch is successful the hawk doesn’t kill the prey instantly, like a falcon’s stoop usually does: it has to fly to an undisturbed site with the wretched chaffinch – chaffinches are very commonly taken – in its talons and only then does it kill it. The ghastly plucking begins. The curved beak, as sharp as a fishhook, clears back the feathers and goes for the jugular. The helpless prey is plucked alive until its arteries are ripped asunder and the blood pulses out. The bigger the bird, the longer and messier the kill. Nature observes no cruelty; killing is its daily round. As J. A. Baker famously wrote in his classic work, The Peregrine:
The word ‘predator’ is baggy with misuse. All birds eat living flesh at some time in their lives. Consi
der the cold-eyed thrush, that springy carnivore of lawns, worm stabber, basher to death of snails. We should not sentimentalise his song and forget the killing that sustains it.
My instincts were sound. Sure enough, there had been a recent kill and the altar had not been a tree stump but a boulder marking the grave of a dog. I bent to examine the feathers – black-barred, brown and cinnamon through to bright henna: a woodcock. I was surprised. Woodcock aren’t on the sparrowhawk’s regular menu. I suspect they are too well camouflaged, blending almost miraculously into their woodland habitat. But these were not normal times.
Many of our winter woodcock are Scandinavian and Russian migrants, arriving in December in thousands and dispersing quickly into woodland habitats far and wide. Unlike other waders, particularly the shorebirds such as curlew, knot, redshank or dunlin, woodcock are not gregarious. They live lonely, undercover lives of secrecy and covert undertakings. We rarely see them unless they are flushed out of dense thickets by the dogs, when their characteristic graceful, looping flight wings them silently away through the trees. This one was caught out – not by frost, but perhaps it, too, was fazed by the sudden, unseasonal upward lurch of the thermometer. Perhaps it had ventured too far out of its mossy and ferny thickets. The burning dandelion eye of the sparrowhawk misses very little.
* * *
In the dense shade of the old yew clump there is not just one dog grave, but a line of similar stones. Six, to be exact. Five rough boulders in a row and one a cut stone with an inscription: ‘Max, 1968–1981’ and something in Latin underneath. I dropped the woodcock feathers and bent to rub the moss off the stone. I had certainly not forgotten the dog, but I had momentarily forgotten the inscription. I love to come here quietly to remember them all and the decades they span: the Labradors, Max and Jubilee; Hobson, my first Jack Russell; Butch, another Labrador; then Rough and Tumble, two more Jack Russell brothers. The most recent is little Tumble, whose valiant terrier heart finally failed after fifteen years of constant, unwavering loyalty.
We didn’t plan it, but dogs have always been an important ingredient in our Highland lives. My first, Max, a yellow Labrador, was bright, alert, desperate to please and, as a consequence, very easy to train. I learned early that a well-trained dog was a useful adjunct to studying wildlife. Over the thirteen years of his life, Max found hundreds of ground-nesting birds without ever harming one. He would tell me with a glance and a wag of the tail if we were close to deer or foxes, hares or rabbits; he located exciting finds, such as capercaillie, ptarmigan, dotterel and woodcock nests, wildcat dens, otter holts, new-born roe deer fawns and, on one occasion, a woman who had suffered a heart attack and collapsed into deep heather in the dark. Max saved her life; we rushed her to the hospital just in time. On many more occasions, by adopting the ‘set’ position and freezing at a scent, he would warn me that other wildlife had recently passed through.
If you’ve had an exceptional dog, when it dies and you want to replace it, the spectre of invidious comparisons looms up, like a fog. Max was my bachelor dog. He was my only child and loved one, my constant companion through good times and bad, the more cherished because I had nursed him back from puppy distemper at nine weeks old, and because he bridged two great changes in my life: the first, moving from England to forge a home and a career in the Highlands, and the second, marriage and the birth of my children.
Only ten days after collecting him from the breeder Max had become wretched and fevered; a blond, limp bundle unable even to lift his head. The vets told me there was no hope. Reluctant to give in, and more out of distraction than from expectation, I teased drops of milk and glucose into his throat through a pipette. He clung on. By day he lived inside my shirt and at night I fell asleep with my hand on him in my bed in an attempt to monitor his fluttering heartbeat. After a week he began to rally, and after three weeks, I knew he would pull through. I had a puppy again, but by some unforeseen mutual alchemy a special bond had taken root.
He grew up to be intelligent, intuitive and loyal beyond any definition of absolute dedication I could have imagined. He became my shadow, redefining the expression ‘dogging my heels’, travelling everywhere with me in my car. Pleasing me seemed to be his entire life’s purpose.
Training him was a mutual-adoration process: I was keen to fulfil his soaring ambition to please and he was desperate to succeed. It was as though I could teach him almost anything I wished and he would grasp it as soon as we had begun. I hung tassels onto lever door handles and he quickly learned to pull them open, then push them closed behind him, letting himself in and out of my cottage. He had an excellent nose and could search and retrieve over great distances. His mouth was as soft as jelly; I trained him on hen’s eggs and never once did he break or drop one, delivering them delicately into my hand as if each was a precious gift.
Once, when he was about six years old, I took a group of field centre visitors to the summit of a four thousand-foot mountain in Glen Affric on a fine June day to search for the exquisitely delicate, red- and pink-flowered alpine azalea, Loiseleuria procumbens, which creeps an inch high over the thin tundra summit. It was a long walk in – over four miles – and another mile of steep, breathless haul to the ridge. We found and photographed our azalea and ate our sandwiches at the summit cairn in brilliant sunshine. Max settled down beside me and fell asleep. Then we slowly headed down. At the bottom of the mountain a woman named Kirsty suddenly realised she had left her binoculars at the cairn. She wanted to go back, but I pointed out it would take at least an hour and a half. It was already four in the afternoon with more than four miles still to walk to our vehicle and five other guests all keen to get home for tea. I could not let her go back up the mountain on her own.
I told her not to worry and that I would return for them myself the following day. She wasn’t happy with that, worried that it would rain or the binoculars might be stolen by other climbers. It was a tricky moment. I could feel the others glaring at me, all agitating to get home. I looked at Max. A proposition loomed up that might allow us all to continue walking out. ‘It’s just possible,’ I ventured, not really believing it was, ‘that Max will go back and get them for you.’ There were incredulous looks all round, but over several days they had seen how roundly trained he was and not even Kirsty chose to challenge me.
I took her cardigan and held it to his nose. I rubbed his ears affectionately, pointed back up the trail and called, ‘High lost!’ He set off back up the path at a fast lope. The last we saw of him was his thick otter tail gyrating enthusiastically as he vanished into the grassy contours of the mountain. We started the long walk out.
An hour later the sun had gone and we arrived at our vehicle cold and tired. I kept looking over my shoulder – no sign of Max. Everyone loaded their rucksacks into the Land Rover, some changed their boots, others stood about looking apprehensive. An uneasy silence had descended over us all. It had been a long, arduous day and my guests were getting stiff. No Max. ‘Jump in,’ I urged, as nonchalantly as I could. ‘I’m not worried about Max. I’ll run you home and come straight back for him.’
It was the last thing I wanted to do, an extra thirty-six miles there and back, but I couldn’t really keep them waiting any longer. I fired up the engine and turned the vehicle round. Just as I was about to let the clutch up there was an electrifying gasp from everyone on board, then a cheer as they all tumbled out of the vehicle. Down the track, still fifty yards away, Max was padding towards us with a pair of black binoculars held firmly in his mouth. His tail was wagging energetically; his eyes shone with unfettered canine pride. Kirsty burst into tears.
I hated to be parted from Max even for a day. On the occasions that I had to go away we both pined and I came home to rapturous, whole body-wagging welcomes to the very end of his long life. At the age of thirteen – a good age for a Labrador – he suffered a stroke and a little while later he died, swiftly and painlessly, with his head in my lap. I mourned him then and I mourn him now. I knew in my bon
es I would never have another dog like Max. Such is the price of love that, whether we resist it or not, some small part of us dies with the beloved so that, as we emerge from the moment, we know in our hearts that nothing can ever be quite the same again.
I buried Max beside the yew grove and planted thirteen daffodil bulbs on his grave, one for every year of his blessed life. Soon afterwards, honouring a local Highland tradition – many country houses have dog cemeteries with walls or railings around them – I erected a small stone carved with a Latin inscription, Quo non praestantior alter, written of loyal Misenus, son of Aeolus, of whom in Virgil’s ‘Æneid’ it is said, ‘Than whom none more excellent’.
I missed him terribly. Life seemed wearisome without a dog, the days empty, the house and the car strangely unwelcoming. But I knew I did not want another Labrador. The notion that I could just go out and buy a replacement seemed unthinkable, an alien country I had no stomach to visit. The very idea seemed a betrayal to Max and an injustice to any new dog, which, through no fault of its own, was never likely to be able to meet my galactic expectations. Besides, a son of Max from a local friend’s Labrador bitch, a lovely gentle dog called Jubilee (born in 1976), had been given to my small children. He was a perfect children’s dog, gentle, adoring, adored and adorable, but he was theirs, not mine, and nothing I could do would ever change that. So I scoured the livestock column of the local paper until I found something completely different. A Jack Russell terrier puppy for ten pounds. When I arrived at the house in the back streets of Inverness to a barrage of frantic barking from a bobbery pack of adult terriers of deeply dubious lineage, I thought I had made a mistake.
There wasn’t much choice – only one left. So I called him Hobson and took him home, not at all sure what I’d bought. Nicknamed Hobdog by my children, he matured to be a splendid little character: loyal, feisty, tireless, endlessly enthusiastic and a wonderful companion. He went everywhere with me. He was as much my dog as Max had been, but he was also entirely different: the self-willed nature of the terrier breed made him an indomitable character and much more testing to train. But I loved him for it.
Gods of the Morning Page 10