Back of Beyond

by David Yeadon

  The picture he painted sounded very bleak. I asked him how he thought it might all end and he chuckled again.

  “Maybe with a few more cheeky bastards like that one,” he nodded over at the bar where the hubbub still continued. “At least it makes ’em think a bit.” His face tightened. “They’ve all got families that’ve lived ’round here for God knows how long—forever, more’n likely. If they want to stay they’ll stay. Some go off for a while and come back. Some you’ll never see again. But it goes on y’know—and they’re still around to argue about it.”

  We stood on the edge of the quay. A chilly breeze blew in off the loch and wavelets clicked against the seawall. “You staying long?” he asked. I said I had no plans.

  “Best way,” he murmured. “Best way.” And then, “If you’re around tomorrow I’ll show you a few places, if you’d like.” So I stayed and delayed my next journey.

  It’s the only way to travel.

  The Outer Hebrides left many more memories: the Sunday silences on Lewis when no buses run and everyone is “at the stones” (at church); the colors of Calum Macaulay’s tweeds produced in his weaving shed—all the tones of the lochans and the rocks and the moors captured in his sturdy cloth; Catherine Macdonald knitting her woolen cardigans and jumpers from hand-dyed island wool; the stooping winkle pickers of Leverburgh whose sacks of tiny shellfish leave the island by ferry for the tables of famous Paris restaurants; that first taste of freshboiled island crayfish; ninty-three-year-old Donald Macleod carving sheep horns into elegant handles for shepherds’ crooks; the sight of a single palm tree against the enormous lunar wilderness of Harris (the offshore Gulf Stream keeps the climate mild here).

  Then I remember Derek Murray at Macleod’s tweed mill in Shawbost eyeing with pride the tweeds collected from the homes of his crofter-weavers; the strange conversations in “Ganglish”—an odd mix of Gaelic and English; the lovely lilting names of tiny islets in the Sound of Harris—Shillay, Boreray, Coppay, Berneray, Tahay, Ensay, Pabbay; the huge Blackface rams on the machair land with their triple-curl horns; the gritty and occasionally grim Calvinist protestantism of Lewis compared with the Catholic-Celtic levity of the Uist and Barra islanders in the southern part of the chain.

  Finally I remember that Hebridean light—sparkling off the turquoise bays, crisping the edges of the ancient standing stones of Callanish on a lonely plateau overlooking Loch Roag, making all the colors vibrant with its intensity and luminosity, making the place just the way I knew it would be….

  Magic.

  7. SCOTLAND—TORRIDON

  Learning with Lea

  A peat fire glowed in the hearth and my cup of tea steamed. “He’ll be back in a while.” Mrs. MacNally adjusted the crochet cover on the little afternoon tea table and eyed the plate of shortcake. “Now go on, help yourself to another. He won’t be long at all.”

  It was warm and cozy in the study of the old farmhouse. There were books everywhere, piled on the chairs by the door, on the desk, spilling out of Heinz Beans cartons in the corner by the potted plants.

  “He loves his books,” she whispered.

  Outside the wind howled through the pines, a broody huddle of trees in this treeless place. Clouds were moving fast; the surface of the Loch Torridon was leaden gray most of the way across to the crofts of Annat. Sudden shafts of sunlight struck the water and burst into silver shards, shimmering for a moment, then disappearing. Seagulls were silhouetted black and moving inland.

  “It’ll be a storm tonight. Look at the sheep.”

  Across the salt marshes I could see them snuggled together in the hollows of old grass-covered dunes.

  “They always know. Much better than barometers.”

  A mahogany clock ticked on the mantelpiece. My wet boots steamed along with the tea in the reassuring warmth of the peats. I felt utterly comfortable in the small room surrounded by all these books and framed photographs of eagles, foxes, and badgers. I reached for another piece of shortcake.

  “He’s coming.”

  There was just the sound of the wind. I followed Mrs. MacNally through the hall and outside to the gravelly track that linked the farm to the valley road. Way in the distance I saw the Land-Rover, splashing through puddles and banging over the ruts with the single-mindedness of a tank.

  Suddenly I felt tiny. The tight human scale of the house where I’d arrived after hours of boggy hiking was gone, and I was staring once again into one of the wildest landscapes of Scotland—the high “empty lands” of Torridon. Straight ahead the seven summits of Liathach rose almost vertically from the cleft of Glen Torridon to shiny quartzite domes that gave them the appearance of perpetual ice cover. Behind Liathach was the gray bulk of Beinn Eighe, the razor ridge of Creag Dhubh and, far beyond, the solitary giant of Slioch towering over Loch Maree.

  Few outsiders come to this part of the country. It’s far too remote and difficult a region for the casual traveler. The weather is notoriously fickle; the great peaks often vanish for days on end in sluggardly sea frets; infrequent “blue days” quickly turn black in sudden mountain storms. Walkers have vanished forever in the peat bogs behind the mountains, out beyond the Pass of the Winds.

  Here are some of the world’s oldest rocks displayed in clear Grand Canyon sequence from the six-hundred-million-year-old quartzite caps through the pink sandstone strata to the more than two-billion-year-old-Lewisian gneiss bedrock. One wonders at the original height and bulk of these monoliths, but millions of years of earth movements, erosion, and glaciation have failed to erase their impact as you emerge from the lower peaks of Glen Shieldaig Forest, turn east at Shieldaig village, and come face to face with them across Loch Torridon. You feel you’ve entered some secret world here. As a child I remember catching a glimpse of their white summits on a ferryboat from Skye. They appeared briefly through sea mists, flashed in the sun, and vanished again. No one else on the boat saw them, and I later wondered if I’d imagined the moment. But now finally I’d come back and found that they were just as real and magnificent as I’d hoped.

  “He’s here.” The mud-splattered Land-Rover came to a halt near the windbreak of pines, and Mrs. MacNally grinned like a young girl. “Late as usual.”

  It’s hard to think of Lea MacNally doing anything “usual.”

  I first heard his name by chance as I chatted with Donald MacDonald at the general store in Fasag village on the north side of Loch Torridon.

  “Lea’s a real man of the land. He’s the National Trust warden here and knows every nook and crevice and every bit of bog around Beinn Eighe. He’s a very canny man, keeps to himself—a pretty wild one too in his younger days. They say he’d outfox any keeper they put out there. He knows all the tricks of the red deer. He thinks like a deer—knows where to find them and what they’ll do next. If you’re walking up around here, talk to Lea first. And listen to what he tells you. If it wasn’t for Lea there’d be no more reds left in Torridon now. He’s the one that keeps them alive—an old poacher fighting off the poachers! He’s the Deerman. That’s what we call him.”

  So now there were two cups of tea and two pairs of steaming feet in front of the peat fire. Lea gazed quietly at the glow. He’d been out on the moors for more than twelve hours, and his small wiry frame was almost lost in the cushions and folds of the big armchair.

  “Y’see,” he began slowly, “the one thing you’ve got to understand is that these creatures—all the mountain animals—everything’s against them. It’s not just your poachers and suchlike. It’s the little things you don’t even think about—wire fences, plastic bottles, broken glass, even a backpack thrown away. Deer comes up, gets the straps tangled round its antlers and mouth—starves to death. Sometimes the things I see—the way they’ve died—it makes you want to weep.”

  He paused. “Come and look at this.”

  We left the cozy room and walked down the hall to the old dairy. “I’m making this into a museum of sorts. It’ll not be finished yet awhile.”

  Le
a turned on the light and I gasped. The place was a charnel house of skulls, bones, and antlers, scores of them, all carefully labeled.

  “Most of these creatures died because of someone’s carelessness.” Stark photographs told the stories: a huge stag choked to death on an iron tent peg; another tangled in barbed wire; two “knobbers” (young deer) torn apart by an unleashed dog, another whose jaw had been smashed by a weekend-hunter’s bullet, leaving it unable to eat or drink….

  “These hills teach—or at least they should teach—respect. First of all respect for yourself because this is some of the toughest walking-climbing country in Britain. But respect too for the creatures who live here—the deer, foxes, badgers, eagles, wildcats. This is one of the last places you’ll find them. Most other habitats have been wiped out long ago. By the time everyone starts to get all upset it’s too late—they’ve gone. And they’ll never come back. All we’ve got left are photographs and cranks like me prattling on about preservation and suchlike….”

  Our conversation carried on well into the night and over the long slow days that followed as I roamed the high hills here and began to see life in a new, quieter way. I put aside plans for my great hike across the Torridon wilderness for a while and instead sat quietly among the great golden surges of gorse and broom, watching and listening.

  “A deer can smell you half a mile away even on a calm day,” Lea had told me. “But we’ve got senses we never use. We can smell animals too. Its hard at first but if you give yourself time…”

  I saw rare ptarmigan in the lower rubbly hills, among the glacial boulders, suddenly rise up like a snow squall. I watched a fox “mousing” on tiptoes with its back arched like a cat, trailing a rabbit. I saw skeins of geese and whooper swans heading south in great fall migrations across the tundra landscapes of Mulcach. One warm evening I watched a young buzzard practicing divebomb attacks on clumps of tufted grass. Grasping its “prey” it soared a hundred feet, dropped it, and then caught it again before it hit the ground.

  I saw woodcocks and grouse so well camouflaged in the burned browns of autumn bracken that you could almost step on them without noticing. I watched the cruel ways of the hoodiebird, a pernicious scavenger and attacker of weak creatures, always going for the eyes of its victim first and then slaughtering slowly with cool dispassion.

  I heard but never saw the lonely wildcat. She was out one night hunting near my tent; something alarmed her and the dark was cracked open by her terrifying scream and hiss. The following morning I saw paw marks leading to a narrow gap in a scree pile and the remains of the two tiny voles outside her den.

  It was the height of the red deer rutting season, but they were far too cunning and elusive for me. They stayed well back in the wilderness, beyond the waterfalls of Allt a Bhealaich; occasionally I would spot a small herd moving like wispy shadows across the umber grasses of the bogs. In the evenings the clack of horns in the ritual male duels and the bellows of the stags would echo down the high valley of Coire Dubh Mor.

  Eagles were always around. At first they were wary of me, but after a while they ignored my flailings among the heather. One actually saved my life. It was a misty day high on the quartz flanks of Laithach. The morning had been clear and bright and I set off climbing the steep sides of the mountain with every intent of being back in Annat for afternoon tea at the Earl of Lovelace’s Torridon House Hotel. But I’d forgotten the fickleness of the Scottish climate. With no warning at all, a sea fret moved in off Loch Torridon, wrapping the mountains in a clammy gray fog.

  I decided to sit it out, but after half an hour or so I was wet and impatient. So I began the descent as best I could, trying to memorize my route around the eastern flank of the mountain. The fog became thicker and colder. My inner voice warned me to find a hollow and wait till it passed, but stupidly I kept on going. Then out of nowhere came a shriek, a cracking of twigs, and a flurry of brown wings. Ahead of me a huge golden eagle reared up from its eyrie, its hard eyes staring right at me, its crooked beak open and tallons outstretched. I slipped and fell hard on the quartzite; the eagle shrieked again and soared off into the fog. I could feel the rush of air from its wings.

  My legs were useless, they’d gone to putty. I felt nauseous and pulled myself into a crack in the rock as far from the nest as I could. I stayed there for what seemed like hours until the fog finally lifted. Then I could see the eyrie quite plainly, a three-foot-high pile of twigs and bark perched among rocks on the edge of a vertical drop that ended four hundred feet below in a splay of dark scree. If the nest hadn’t been occupied, if the eagle hadn’t shrieked, I’d have walked right off the edge into foggy oblivion.

  After that little escapade Lea joined me on some of my rambles. “You’re not really ready yet,” he told me when I described my planned hike across Torridon. “Wait a few days. Watch the creatures with me.” And how he loved the creatures of Beinn Eighe—his territory, his creatures, his lifework to protect them as best he could and yet to respect their wild, spontaneous spirits.

  We wandered over the low rubbly hills littered with glacial boulders. “Can you imagine the ice,” he said, pointing to the ancient gouged valleys, “hundreds—thousands—of feet thick, great white ice cliffs high as Beinn Eighe?”

  He told me hard, cruel tales of the old days when the hills were the home of wild rustlers. “Way back of Liathach there’s the Pass of the Dividing—a cold place, that—they once killed one of their women there. She stole an ox liver before they divided the meat, tried to hide it under her shawl. That’s one of the best bits of an ox. They chased her, stripped her, sliced her head off, and struck it on a pole in the pass. They say it was there for a good quarter century or so—screaming in the nights. Gory stuff. Hills are full of these tales. Amazing anyone goes out after dark!”

  Lea is responsible for organizing the annual culls of deer to keep the herds from becoming overpopulated and underfed in the long winter months. “I do it because I know they’d starve if I didn’t. Twelve stags and thirty-five hinds—sixteen percent of the herds. But I don’t enjoy it. And I don’t always like the people we get on the culls either.” He described the art of “still-stalking,” where you have to crawl on your belly sometimes for miles through marsh and nettles and spiky gorse. He used a polite phrase: “On a cull you’re very much at the mercy of the capabilities of the guests.”

  “Which means?” I said.

  “Well—some are not as fit as you’d like them to be.”

  We laughed.

  “In other words,” he said, “you get fed up of fat, rich, city wiz kids and would-be great white hunters messing up a good day’s stalking. Can drive you barmy!”

  “You talk like a poaching man.”

  Lea laughed. “A reformed poacher—very much reformed.”

  From stories he told me, his past life had been as checkered as a chessboard, but he’d finally found his calling one day years ago on the moors of northern Scotland. “I’d seen it all before. Deer killed by stupidity—our stupidity, not theirs. But this one time it got to me—it really got to me. A pregnant hind wounded by some jackass idiot with a gun he couldn’t use, her bottom jaw blown off—can you imagine the agony…the deer calf dying inside her…starving to death in a pain she can’t even begin to understand…and for no reason, no purpose at all…I wept like a kid that day. I really did. Then I decided—well Lea, somebody’s got to do something about all this so it might as well be you….”

  The day before my hike I lay in tufted grass by the side of a peaty stream. The brown waters frothed over rocks, curling in the shallow places, swirling into still, dark pools. I could see trout in the shadows, their tails moving just enough to hold them stationary in the current. I did something that I’d always wanted to do as a boy but never had the chance. I slid my hand gently into the water, allowed it to drift under one of the trout, and let it rise until the fish rested in my palm. Then very gently I stroked its belly, backward and forward. I expected it to dart away immediately but it just
lay there. As I continued stroking I could feel the fish settling its weight into my hand. It seemed to sense no danger. Only an inch or so from the surface of the stream I could have easily flipped it right out and enjoyed a delicious dinner that night. But I couldn’t do it. I’d make a hopeless backwoodsman. I just continued stroking until it eventually eased downstream and vanished into the shadows.

  Finally I had gathered energy and know-how for the trek across the heart of the Torridon wilderness—the vast emptiness of Mulcach from Annat to Shieldaig Lodge overlooking Loch Gairloch. After careful coaching from Lea on the best route, the notorious bogs to avoid, and the fickle wiles of highland weather (I scoured the great skyscapes for warning signs like a lost mariner), I felt more than well equipped for what was, after all, only a twenty-mile hike, at least, as the crow flies. Had I realized what lay ahead I would have stayed in my cozy bed at the Loch Torridon Hotel or at least prayed for the abilities of that mythical crow and flown the distance.

  It all began so idylically—big breakfast of juice, kippers, and soft Bannoch buns at the hotel and out into an early dawn light with bags full of sausage sandwiches (special request) and slabs of whisky cake tucked into my rucksack. The black highland cattle by the loch gave me curious, bleary-eyed looks; the sheep hardly noticed me at all as I bounced across the springy sea pastures past the curves of golden sand to the village. I’d planned originally to do it the hard way by scaling 3,456-foot-high Liathach and then heading northwest by Beinn Dearg to Loch a Bhealaich.

  “Don’t be a madman, man,” Lea had warned and laughed. “Liathach’s enough for anyone in a day—and going down the backside’ll finish you. That mountain—don’t play around with her. She’s a killer.”