by Jim Crumley
The first lesson: proper forests, proper Highland forests, are not endless and impassable, they are open, they harbour different densities of trees, their understorey varies, they like clearings, their resident mammals demand clearings; at any one time, any time at all in the entire history of the Great Wood, after say the first few post-glacial centuries, there is every age of tree from inches-high shoots to hoary old veterans of 70 or 80 or 90 feet in height and 10 or 11 or 12 feet in circumference and 200 or 300 or (once in a blue moon) 400 years, trees that felt the passing brush of wolf fur, that succumbed to beavers, trees that received the handed-down sense of lynx, bear, auroch, boar, reindeer, elk.
And dead trees. Dead trees standing, dead trees whose fall was broken and arrested by their neighbours so that they decay at an acute angle while their roots give up the ghost in mid-air, dead trees that lie prone but still give of themselves after death, feeding legions of bugs and birds and enriching the soil where they moulder. With the trees on one side and space on the other, you begin to sense the imminent change. Where there are trees they are no longer tall, they no longer walk the earth on elephant feet, they no longer come at you in clusters and snuff out the known world.
Then you reach the crest.
Then you reach the last tree.
You step beyond, and in that beyond lies one of the great revelations of this landscape or any other.
You have simply climbed above the forest, the forest that now tumbles away from you down to a hidden river, then flattens and sprawls then climbs again to hap the lower slopes of that hierarchy of all the Highlands’ mountains – the northern Cairngorms in all their massive glory, thumb-printed by the ice into plateau-topped corries, sundered by the ice into the vee-shaped trench of the Lairig Ghru, a landscape of grander than grand gestures, of huge gestures, and from the very spot where you stand all the way to the mountains there has unfurled a magic carpet of every green shade in and beyond your imagination such that an early bard pausing where you now pause (but millennia before you) might have let a Celtic phrase escape from his lips that might be summarised and translated today as ‘behold the Broad Plain of the Firs’.
You have not reached the last tree of course, merely the last one of the first part of the forest. The last tree is still miles away, and by then you will be breathlessly and hopelessly in the thrall of mountains. For the moment you have won both a respite from the trees and an insight into the nature not just of Rothiemurchus but also something of the nature of the Great Wood itself, for Rothiemurchus is its most tantalising echo. My response to arriving at this particular milestone is likely to be one of three recurring urges, depending on the day, depending on my mood, depending on the nature of the journey (a few hours out along the Gleann Einich track or a few days in the high country); sometimes two or three of those urges will surface simultaneously, and these will be the best of all days.
One: I want to sit with my back to that last pine tree and stare at all this for hours and make sense of it and write something of it down.
Two: I want to wander away off-piste, downhill, through the forest to the river, then on and on and up and up and make a necklace of the corries and finally breast the rim of the plateau where the known world expands into un-dreamed-of breadths and wraps itself in the sky.
Three: I want to devour more and more miles of this track, knowing how the ocean of trees ebbs and flows and leans here and there towards the river, and the red deer and the roe stand and watch, and a tall and handsomely limbed pine bears strange fruit that gleam dully blue-black in the sunlight (a covey of blackcock), and a crested tit (a dapper little pinewood specialist with a crest like a crossword puzzle grid designed by Picasso) breezes across the track and lands upside-down on a pine frond six feet in front of me; knowing how the track wanders at last among the southernmost outliers of the forest, then abandons even these at the Tree of the Return, and that beyond there is such an amphitheatre of mountainsides with Loch Einich in its throat and that . . . and oh, what must it have been like 5,000 years ago before the people got hold of it all, when the only tracks were the work of such as deer and fox and badger and cat and the wolves that held sway over them all, over everything, and the anthem of their raised voices might travel five miles on a still evening . . .
*
And sometimes I get no further than the river and because I like to write where I am surrounded by my raw material I sit with my back to one more pine and unpack a lunch and a notebook and make a quiet space in my head and try and graft myself onto the tree and become a piece of the forest landscape and have the natives of the forest treat me accordingly. Sometimes nothing happens at all and I finish my lunch and the pages of the open notebook in my lap are punctuated only by crumbs. Sometimes, however . . .
. . . I had been watching a roe deer that had walked out of the trees on the far side of the river, watching her graze and scratch her ears with a hind foot, testing the wind, drifting almost soundlessly in and out of spotlights of sunshine, no more than a yard or two at a time. She was all curves and angles, poised, graceful, relaxed and alert at the same time. She was startled twice, once by a jay that screamed from the branches above her head, once by a raven I heard but never saw. She turned her back on me and began to browse her way back into the deep green of the trees and away from the river.
I watched the river instead. It was high and hoarse and fast, fuelled by a week of rain that had tumbled spring snow from the mountains, and it surged past within a foot of the top of its natural banks. Then a red squirrel came to drink. She was on the roe’s side of the river and when she first appeared she was head-first and halfway down a pine trunk where she had paused, limbs splayed wide, tail flattened against the bark and pointing straight up the tree. It was a long stillness (for a red squirrel). What next?
She looked around. She watched the deer, which ignored her. She galvanised, scrambled down, bounced across a few yards of open ground to the water’s edge then stopped dead. The water roared past a few inches beneath her feet. She leaned her nose towards it and pulled back, apparently fearful of the press of water. She sat back, tail curved now, arching up and then away from her back. She looked around. The idea that she was weighing her options was irresistible, but quite possibly wrong. But then she did this: She bounced back to the same tree she had descended, and hit the trunk running. The deer’s head turned and watched, first with head inclined left, then right. Then it stepped away and missed the show. The squirrel took a right at the first stout limb and ran along it. She jumped. She landed on a much more slender branch, still running. I realised then that the slender branch belonged to a different tree. (I catch on more slowly than red squirrels in the matter of pinewood geography.) She reached the trunk of the new tree, descended a couple of feet, and (still running) took to another branch. This branch was broken about eight feet out from the trunk, broken but not snapped off, and beyond the break it angled down towards the water and rested not in the river but on a rock with a steep triangular face that was broken only where the river had worn out a little scoop. The squirrel ran out to the break, bounced over it onto the slope of the broken branch, reached the rock, spread herself wide and head-first across its triangular face and froze. Then she lapped all the water she needed from the scooped out hollow.
There followed a movement much too fast for my eye, in which she reversed her position so that she faced up the rock with her tail snug against her spine. Then she retraced her steps, back up the broken branch, over the break, along the branch to the trunk, up the trunk, along another branch, leaped over the oblivious roe deer’s turned back onto the original tree, reached its trunk, ran up it and vanished into the canopy.
Questions:
Did she know about the broken branch?
If she did, had she used it before?
Did it come into her reckoning only when the river was too high and turbulent to drink from the bank?
Or was it the first time she had used it?
Did she weig
h up other possibilities first?
Did she know that the rock held water?
If so, how did she know?
Had she seen it from above?
Was the whole thing a sophisticated, calculated manoeuvre?
Or was it all an improvised, spontaneous work of instinct rather than intellect?
Answers: I have no idea.
As I walked back up from the river to the track, it occurred to me that moments like that one happen every day all over the forest, that while I find them astonishing and marvellous, in nature’s scheme of things they are simply the punctuation marks that litter the workaday life of such a forest, that they have happened forever, and that every day that I am not in the forest to see them, they go on happening in their hundreds. There will have been a time when such a squirrel was hounded through the trees by goshawks, and on the ground by wolves and lynx, as well as the predators it is still familiar with today like pine marten and fox, and occasionally wildcat and more occasionally still, golden eagle. The goshawk, although it is very slowly edging north and west from strongholds in the Borders and Aberdeenshire, is still either rare or absent from almost all its former woodland strongholds.
About the golden eagle: where it still nests in trees (a very small percentage of the 400 or so breeding pairs in Scotland, and almost all of them around the Cairngorms pinewoods) it will occasionally surprise a red squirrel, and you have to imagine that the red squirrel has a wariness of golden eagles within its DNA – they have, after all, cohabited here for a few thousand years. But I have seen red squirrel drays in the woody mass of an osprey eyrie, and an osprey eyrie looks a lot like a golden eagle eyrie, an osprey being basically an eagle-shaped bird. Even allowing for differences in size, wing shape, tail length, colour and voice, it suggests a sophisticated knowledge of bird species so that the squirrel is confident of its own safety in the company of the fish-eating osprey whereas the proximity of a golden eagle is more or less a death sentence. Such is the complexity of relationships among the natives of the Great Wood, such is the awareness demanded of the natives by such a world of trees.
*
Sometimes a single tree is as potent as a broad plain full of firs. Here is a case in point. The tree is lopsided. Here, I make an aesthetic judgment. The tree is perfectly balanced for its own requirements; there is no such thing as symmetry among Scots pines, and its south burgeons better than its north. You expect that – the hunger for sunlight in a hard climate. The lowest branches begin one third of the way up the trunk, leaning south. The north-facing branches begin halfway up the trunk and they are half the length of the lowest south-facing branches. The trunk is straight, but just as it reaches the crown it lifts a finger to the north, a slender counterweight to the south-facing bias of the foliage, a fingerpost pointed at the Arctic.
The tree seems to commend itself to me. Alone-ness may be part of the appeal, for alone has almost always been my preferred way through the landscapes of the Cairngorms. At a certain point on the track I start to watch for the tree, for it has become a kind of talisman. It has not always been alone. The corpses of dead comrades, each supplying its own bleached and still-rooted headstone, commemorate the conviviality of lost woodland. They stand all around or they lie where they fell. All are shrunken or broken or both. The notion of a battlefield is irresistible. But this one tree has survived alive and intact. It stands on a low ridge. Its situation confers status its modest size hardly merits, as if nature has made it a plinth to stand on. You see it from below as you walk the Gleann Einich track, but you do not see it against the sky. Instead nature has painted it into place on a mountain-shaped canvas, and it is that which accords it distinction in a forest of so many trees.
That mountain shape is the profile of Carn Elrig which is as solitary in the Cairngorms’ scheme of things as the tree. Carn Elrig stands – uniquely – apart from the massif, severed by a moat of space as deep as the mountain. It is a lowly mountain by the standards of Cairn Gorm and Braigh Riabhach which it contemplates, but like the tree that keeps it company, it seems to summarise its own landscape – the Cairngorms in microcosm. It climbs from a thin frieze of trees around its north-facing prow through first heathery then bouldery phases to its own small, flat and gravelly plateau summit. It is as if nature had made a tiny scale model of what it had in mind for the Cairngorms, left it lying around for reference while it built the real thing, then forgot to tidy up after itself, leaving its prototype to its own fate.
One tree, one mountain, pine needles and granite. Be fruitful and multiply. For long enough, for those first 5,000 years after the great ice, and for God knows how long before it, they did just that, until the great grazing tribes of animals, fluctuations in climate, and the remorseless spread of the people began to unpick the Great Wood at the seams.
I like to walk until I set the tree against the mountain, the dark green against the dark grey (the white if it is winter), and by virtue of the changing sightline from the path below, move the tree until it aligns perfectly beneath the summit of the mountain, and make of that painterly composition a symbolic harmony of pine and granite and of the space between them that also binds them. I like what I have done with mountain and tree over the years, the way I have made them dance to a tune in my head. There is that point in the late afternoon or the evening, after a day up among the plateau spaces or Braigh Riabhach’s corries, when the tree comes into view, but while I have been supping with the mountain gods it has wandered off on assignments of its own. See how far it has gone astray from the centre of the mountain! So I have come on it from a certain direction like a good collie penning a troublesome ewe, and I fix it with my collie’s stare until it goes and stands where I want it. Then I admire their profound simplicity of form, their profound symbolic imagery. For tree and mountain are indivisible in my mind. Pine trees are as fundamental to the Cairngorms as granite and wedges of old snow in August.
Each time I return to the Cairngorms, I head first for the Gleann Einich track and Carn Elrig. It has become something of a ritual. I walk with something of the purpose of the pilgrim, for with my every forward step I am trying in my mind to reach back. Uniquely among the woodlands of Highland Scotland, Rothiemurchus is far-flung enough, it is diverse enough in its repertoire of atmospheres and rich enough in the species of nature it sustains to be able to impose itself on a solitary wanderer seeking some kind of sense of the Great Wood of Caledon. Here and there, and for minutes at a time, I can convince myself that yes, this is what it must have been like.
It makes demands. The first is to slow my footfall. The second is that I must read nature. The third that I possess sensations. The first time, this was just my track to the mountains. But over the decades my mind has adapted to its force field so that now I think of it as its own world. Now we are forever asking questions of each other. ‘The thing to be known grows with the knowing.’ Now, within the first five minutes I am less of the outside world and more of the pinewood. I have become almost fluent in its slow speech. I walk to its pibroch rhythms. I possess many of its sensations.
It is at its best in sunlight, or in rain, or in a big wind, or in windless and heavily falling snow. If it is a sunny day in the world beyond the wood I see how the sun imbues the pervasive bottle green with other shades – black, dark blue, yellow, gold – and all of them still essentially green. Shadows are hard and brittle, not pliable and dappling like an oakwood. They lie among the trees like dark lace, each tree casting its shadows on several others like ragged netting. There are few pale shades in the depths of the pines and their companionable junipers. The air fills up with scent, a hybrid of pine and juniper. Nothing on earth builds a more fragrant campfire.
A rainy day intensifies the scent and layers it enticingly with bog myrtle blown in from unseen heathery clearings. A pinewood glows in rain; the very trees shine and their colour intensifies. The deeply contoured bark deepens to something improbably red. The junipers acquire a second fleece of silver.
On a d
ay of boisterous winds the pinewood rocks. The canopy sounds like squads of jackdaws. The slenderest ends of trunks and limbs lean at unaccustomed angles and crackle and groan and squeal against each other so that you half suspect you have blundered across a treeful of capercaillies.
Heavy and windless snow cancels all of that, lays a pale grey shroud over everything that is dark and hard-edged and makes silence, utter silence that is somehow the opposite of peaceful – silence laced with tension. Possess that sensation too and imagine the impact of such a snowfall on hundreds of square miles of forest. Perhaps the Romans were finally unnerved by a forest made silent by weeks of heavy snow and lacked the stomach to wait for spring, knowing that the deeper the winter, the stronger the wolves grow. Perhaps the reputation of both forest and wolf forged something altogether more fearful and unnerving than the sum of the parts. The huge, slow aurochs felt it too, knowing that as the snow deepened and they weakened as feeding grew more difficult, the wolves were at their peak. The reindeer and the moose know it in today’s Norway. In my head it is the pinewood’s memory of wolves that puts the tension there when it snows hard and windless.