Gods of the Morning

by John Lister-Kaye

  Martens are still limited in their range, but they have spread south and east throughout the Highlands and down into Fife and the Central Belt, even to the outskirts of the great Glasgow conurbation. Here, in these glens of the northern central Highlands, they are now widespread, even common. It is no longer a rare sight to see one dead on the road – a sure indication of a mobile population currently estimated at between three and four thousand animals.

  Alicia tells me at present we have four or five individual martens occupying our ground on a more or less permanent basis. For several years she has been awarding them names according to the characteristics of their pelage: Spike, Blondie, One Spot, Thumbs, Patch and so on. Some stick around for several years, others seem to disperse quickly, or perhaps get killed off on the roads or by the few people in the glen who don’t like them because they raid hen runs, if they can. Our resident martens den in the stables’ roof and occasionally in the lofts of estate cottages and outhouses. I am often amazed by their ability to find a tiny entrance hole under eaves. Our field centre guests love to see them from the hides and are happy to sit out the long summer evenings waiting for them to come in to a bait of peanuts and jam.

  *  *  *

  It is dawn, the moment in the day I have always loved most. It’s a long-standing obsession and it hauls me out, out and about, often doing nothing in particular, just enjoying watching the light lift and the world around me pulling on its clothes for the day. September dawns are often still and cool with a tang of freshness all their own. Mists hang motionless over the river fields. The only bird singing is the ubiquitous robin, tinkling his gentle, melancholic aria that always presages the first light of day. Mark Cocker has called the robin ‘the first god of the morning’. He is right.

  Each morning I let Lucy’s twenty-eight chickens out by pulling the cord that lifts their hatch. One by one they tiptoe into the new day with mildly bemused expressions, slightly lost, as though such a thing has never happened before, rather like inexperienced travellers getting off at an unfamiliar railway station. Then something seems to click and they remember where they are and what to do. With a flap and a scratch they head straight into pecking mode without any of the wary looking round you might expect of a bird so regularly ravaged by furtive, dawn-slinking predators. I throw them a scoopful of grain to reward them for their patience.

  Not so the two cockerels, Saddam and Bashar, who have been out-crowing each other for the past hour from within the cobwebby, ammonia-choking darkness of their hut. Every morning their muted cries invade my surfacing consciousness an hour before dawn. Letting them out spins them into a frenzy of territorial crowing, strutting, shaking of blood-red combs and floppy wattles, fluffing out of neck feathers and extravagant tails. It is as though their rampant avian masculinity had been shut down for the night indoors and is suddenly and alarmingly Jack-in-a-box released. They become sexual tyrants, leaping on top of unsuspecting, innocently corn-pecking hens, treading them to the ground and forcing them into sudden cloacal embraces they cannot possibly have seen coming – rooster rape, by any other name.

  For once I haven’t got the Jack Russells with me. I sneaked out earlier than usual, leaving them snoring in their baskets beside the Aga. I will return for them later. This gentle autumn has recently produced some glorious dawns and sunrises of candyfloss clouds and still, echoing air. I wanted to be out there without the intrusive bossiness of the dogs, on my own, free to follow my nose and my instincts. I walked quickly away from the hens’ paddock and turned up the old avenue of limes and horse chestnuts, picking my way through the prickly shells of fallen conkers on the path. When they land some of them split open, revealing the deep amber shine of the seed socketed into its fleshy cup, reminding me of the liquid eye of a big old shire horse I once knew.

  Last year’s leaves crinkled underfoot, now with a light scattering of new ones in pastel green and grapefruit yellow, the early fallers of an autumn slow to mature. If we get a sharp frost, in a week or two’s time this path will be so thick with drifts of fresh leaves that I will have to wade through them. The big limes and chestnuts have something approaching three million leaves each. The avenue has eleven evenly spaced trees on either side, each 140 years old, planted by the Victorians to line a carriage drive now long disused. Before winter sets in they will deliver to the ground a snowfall of over sixty million leaves. Little wonder the soils are so rich. Leaf litter, we call it. If only human litter were so universally beneficial to the world.

  I crossed the burn on the little bridge where the water from the high moor, brandy-wine brown, gossips a private conspiracy between mossy stones, hurrying down to lose itself in the dark deeps of the Beauly River. There is something profoundly reassuring about a stream. Although the water is simply adhering to the laws of physics, its many moods award it a complex personality as rich as any human being’s, at the same time being utterly dependable, far more than many people I know. It is a constant, always there, whether loud or muted, friendly, angered, even outraged in times of spate. It’s not in a hurry today but it’s difficult to pass over and I stand on the bridge for a moment or two, smiling inwardly.

  Just then I got the overpowering sense that I was not alone. I have experienced it many times before and I’ve long since given up trying to explain it. If it is a sixth sense, I cannot define it beyond observing that it is seldom wrong and I value it greatly. Like a line from a cheap thriller, I feel someone’s eyes drilling into the back of my head. I turned slowly. At first I couldn’t see anything and thought I must be mistaken, but then, as pure and shocking as coming downstairs and finding a stranger in your kitchen, our eyes meet. Only ten feet away and at my eye level, a pine marten, the size of a slender cat, was perched upright in the central fork of a rowan tree beside the burn. His black front paws rested on a diagonal branch and his long, elegant tail floated below. He was staring straight at me. I was rooted. How long had he been watching me? Why hadn’t he run away? Why had he let me get so close? What secret tapes were fizzing inside that tight little torpedo of a skull?

  He was magnificent. His head was angular and pert, the sharp little face reflecting a sharper intelligence within. His ears were small and rounded, pale-rimmed at the top. His wet nose gleamed in the morning light. Dressed from head to tail in velvet suiting of dark chocolate, a V-shaped bib ran down his chest and between his forelegs, a bib as rich and glowing as apricot cream. A single spike-shaped smudge of cocoa at the bottom of his bib gave him away. I know this marten. Alicia named him Spike when he first appeared at one of the hides, a fine, full-grown dog marten we see often, a marten with pizzazz, who visits the hides and has been around for a couple of years. Unblinking, his eyes were as bright and beady as polished jet.

  A pine marten’s life is simple. They are driven by need and fear – those two. Need for food and a mate; fear of man, the dread predator, the exterminator. Occasionally a golden eagle, swooping unseen from high above, will catch a marten out in the open; shreds of fur or a fierce-toothed skull turn up in eyries from time to time, and just occasionally, very rarely, martens fight among themselves and one gets so severely mauled that it wanders off to die, but nothing approaches the threat humans have historically posed. They have been trapped for their shining fur, as soft as mink, they’ve been shot for stealing hens, gamekeepers have poisoned them for taking game, and we run them over on the roads; not so long ago our efforts drove them to the very edge of doom.

  He hasn’t moved.

  So here we are: the man and the marten. I’m glad he doesn’t know that we have persecuted his kind to extermination throughout most of Britain and I’m glad that in this stretched moment of frozen exchange he doesn’t yet see me as so dire a threat as to trigger instant flight. The seconds tick by. My eyes are locked on his – his on mine. I’d like to say that it’s a game of who will flinch first, but just at this moment I’m not so sure. My brain has emptied down, nothing to offer. For as long as it will last, time has stopped. Spike is gla
ring at me, like an angry drunk at the other end of the bar, daring me to look away.

  Very slowly I withdraw my wits from his metallic, levelled gaze. I know why he is there. It is a rowan tree. This is his time for gorging on rowan berries and he does not like to be disturbed. He has been to the top of the tree and several weighty clusters of fat, ripe fruit lie scattered on the ground between us. He was on his way down to get them, now caught in the act. He wants those berries. Something in the core of his being is telling him he needs them. I think his mouth must be watering. His dilemma is twofold: to come on down for the spoils, or let discretion win and flee, to leap away through the trees as fleet as a squirrel. If he ventures down to get the fallen berries he must come closer to me. If he flees he could be gone in a flash of chocolate fur. He can see those berries; they are his. I know that if I move even an inch, he will go. Indecision and indignation have clashed in his feisty marten brain. For the moment it is stalemate.

  I have seen martens on countless occasions, far too many encounters to remember any but the most exceptional, but I have never been fixed by a glare like this before. It is as though I am no longer in control and I have to wait for his next move. The chess analogy is irresistible: I have to wait; that is the rule of the game. We could be here for a while.

  His gaze never flickers and I can’t read it. Past experience dictates only one realistic option: that his nerve will eventually fail and he will turn and vanish into the trees. After all these years of seeing and thinking I understood pine martens, I would have put good money on it. Oh! We are so smug. We gain a little familiarity and a little knowledge and we think we’ve got it sorted. It’s all good interesting stuff, this wildlife, but we humans are the superior beings, the smart-arses who boast about wildness as though it is a commodity, something we have invented for our own pleasure and can dabble with as we please. We think that wildlife behaves as it always does, predictable and presumed – you can tempt it in with a bait, trap it, radio-tag it, catch it on camera, plot it on a graph and check it all out in a book. In so far as we’re prepared to concede that other species have wills of their own or possess cognitive intelligence, we insist that they are locked within the limitations of their species’ hardwiring. All we have to do is read the wiring and we’re home and dry. Job done. We think we know the pine marten.

  We are so reluctant to acknowledge that wildness is a quality we humans only vaguely comprehend, that it isn’t exclusively ours to do with as we please and that it also embraces other human dimensions, such as wonder, enchantment and rapture, the unpredictable, the illogical, the sensual, the spiritual. Science is about exploring, measuring and testing things. It is also very good at dismissing things it can’t check out with an experiment. Enchantment and joy are not so readily assessed. I was enjoying this encounter, no doubt about it. But the smugness of our own imprinting was wrapping me round like a fog. I had fooled myself into thinking my superior brain was back in control. Just a matter of waiting – yes, a game of who will blink first, and I was in charge. And it would be Spike, as I had made up my mind it must be. But that wasn’t how Spike saw things this morning. Something entirely other was fizzing through the hot cloisters of his acute little brain. What I hadn’t understood, hadn’t even considered an option, was that this long needly stare was a carefully calculated musteline risk-assessment. It was as though he had sussed that I wasn’t going to give in – had weighed it all up and was carefully considering his options, plotting his final move, his check mate. Not in a week of waiting would I have been able to predict what happened next.

  Without the slightest hint of panic or hurry he turned away and disappeared down the far side of the trunk of the rowan. Ha! I thought. I’ve won. I was wrong. Oh! I was wrong, wrong, wrong. There was nothing hard-wired about this second god of the autumn morning. He appeared again at the foot of the tree and in three quick bounds he came straight towards me. From only five feet away a chittering yell of abuse broke from his throat, hurled at me with all the contempt he could muster. Then he snatched up a bunch of berries – his berries – threw me a disdainful glance and vanished back into the undergrowth.

  19

  Arthur and the Treecreeper

  If you wish your children to think deep thoughts, to know the holiest emotions, take them to the woods and hills, and give them the freedom of the meadows; the hills purify those who walk upon them.

  Nature Essays, Richard Jefferies

  He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of the moon and the colours of dawn and dusk.

  The Man Made of Words, Scott Momaday

  I’m out with a torch. I have done this little nocturnal expedition many times over many years. Tonight I have a companion who is here exploring nature with me for the first time. He is young and keen and lives a long way away, so we don’t often get the chance. He is my grandson, Arthur, just five years old, still young enough to sit on my shoulders, which is good because what we are out to see is eight feet off the ground.

  I’m taking Arthur to see some huge trees called giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum), famous for their impressive size, their very long lives – some over three thousand years in their native California – and their thick, spongy bark, which evolved as a protection against natural fire, so soft and spongy that you can punch it without hurting your fist. The name ‘sequoia’ is a corruption of Sequoyah (1770–1840), a celebrated Cherokee Indian jeweller who became famous for creating a Cherokee syllabary and teaching his tribe to read and write. The sequoia we’re heading for is one of six fine specimens, exactly a hundred and thirty-six years old, and, vying with the Douglas firs, at over a hundred and sixty-nine feet, among the tallest trees in the Highlands (the tallest is a Douglas at two hundred and nine feet). They were planted with most of the rest of the compact eight-acre Aigas arboretum of fifty exotic and native species when, in 1877, a grandiose Victorian extension was being built onto the front of the much more modest Georgian (1760) House of Aigas. It was the fashionable thing to do – more than that, it was almost mandatory, mandatory, that is, if the owners were to achieve the social status they almost certainly craved.

  It is difficult now to imagine the pressures for social elevation that prevailed in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Britain had achieved a global empire upon which the sun never set. The Industrial Revolution had created massive wealth from the expansion of British colonies around the world, which created apparently endless new markets for goods of every description. Suddenly there was an emergent class of industrialists and merchants: a nouveau riche of factory, foundry, mill and mine owners, among many other trades and services.

  The middle-class Victorians from Glasgow who built the 1877 extension to this old house travelled north to the Highlands for many different reasons. They were second- and third-generation shipping merchants who had become rich by shipping people – mostly impoverished Highlanders looking for a new and better life – to the New World and bringing back to Glasgow cargoes of cheap American timber to fuel the burgeoning building trade.

  The Scottish craze of the day among the leisured classes was to own at least one bank of a salmon river, a grouse moor and a slice of the hills, then to build a castle or grand sporting lodge – the most permanent and visible statement of wealth you could achieve. No country house or sporting lodge of that pretension was complete without extensive landscaped grounds and an arboretum, which, in its own way, further celebrated the colonial successes of the Victorian era with trees from colonies and dependent territories all round the world.

  The giant sequoia had been accidentally ‘discovered’ in 1852 by a bear-hunter called Augustus T. Dowd in the Calaveros Grove in the Sierra Mountains of California (although, of course, it had been well known to Native Americans for centuries). He was astonished
at the staggering size of the mature trees. One giant in particular was felled, taking a team of loggers twenty-two days to bring it down with axes and cross-cut saws. When the annual rings were counted it proved to have been 1300 years old. In a sketched and widely publicised display for the entire world to celebrate, thirty-two people were able to dance on its flat stump.

  Some needly fronds and seed quickly found their way to Albert Kellogg, the botanist in residence at the newly formed Californian Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. It wouldn’t be formally described until a year later; then only sneakily brought about by an English botanist determined to make his name. Commendably, Kellogg didn’t want to get it wrong, so he waited until he had time to visit the mountains and see the great trees for himself. But he made the mistake of sharing his excitement with William Lobb, a visiting tree-collector sent to gather seed for an English tree nursery called Veitch & Co.

  Seeing a chance to achieve immortality by attaching his name to a dramatically large species of tree new to science, Lobb behaved like a shameless cad. He slunk off to Calaveros Grove to collect his own seed and make sufficient field notes to be able to claim the credit for formally describing the new species. He dug up two small seedlings, carefully packing them in moss. Without saying a word to anyone he took ship straight back to England, arriving on 15 December 1853, and presented some of his specimens to John Lindley, professor of botanical studies at the University of London. By 24 December the official description was registered. To Lobb’s well-deserved chagrin, Lindley chose to name it Wellingtonia gigantean, in honour of the Duke of Wellington, the national hero who had died a few months earlier.

  There then ensued an international row that would run for decades. The Americans were outraged that the world’s largest and oldest tree – their tree – should have been named by an English botanist who had never been to America and only seen a ‘stolen’ seedling. But in those days Britain’s august institutions still governed the world of science, and the rules of botanical nomenclature were on Lindley’s side. An impasse followed, with the Americans calling the tree Washingtonia gigantea and refusing to recognise anything else.