Gods of the Morning (9 page)

With my two Jack Russells, Nip and Tuck, I was up and out early on the 24th. The dawn was cool and clear. The wind had vanished and the floods were seeping away. The rain threat had been displaced by that of Christmas Eve and my lifelong unpreparedness and inability to match up to expectations, a failing I've never managed to crack or to conceal. The very thought seemed to be dragging me away from the whole prospect of the holiday's overblown materialist imperatives. I decided to head off up the hill for a proper walk.

Forty minutes later I puffed and panted up the steep heather slope to our own archaeological high point at seven hundred feet on the glen's rim, an Iron Age fort – now just a pile of stones – overlooking the Beauly River and the snaking glacial valley of Strathglass far below. My timing was immaculate.

Like molten gold from a crucible, the first touch of sun spilled in from the east, from the glistening horizon of the Moray Firth, so bright that I couldn't look at it, flooding its winter fire up the river, right past me and on up the valley. The river trailed below me, like a silk pashmina thrown down by an untidy teenager. Strands of mist over the water were fired with yellow flame, as though part of some mysterious ritual immolation. The new-born light raked the steep glen sides, floodlighting every rocky prominence and daubing deep craters of black shadow so that the familiar shape of the land vanished before my eyes. I was in a wonderland, strange to me and a little unnerving. The dogs sat uncharacteristically silent at my feet, noses lifting to test the air, but stilled as though they, too, could sense the moment.

Unaware of our presence above him, a roe buck was slowly picking his way up the slope in front of me. He was out of the dogs' sight and I stood still, despite being silhouetted against the western sky. I hoped he would keep on coming. Dense broom and gorse crowded the south-facing slope and I lost him in it for several minutes. I was about to turn for home when he reappeared, much closer now and to my right, still heading up. There was no wind.

I could see that he was beautiful, not a bit scrawny as winter roe can sometimes appear, but refined and shapely,
the taut musculature beneath awarding body and form to his winter fur, as soft and uniform grey as a Lifeguard's greatcoat. His nose was jet black and a bright white gorget stood out from his throat, like a mayor's badge of rank. He had cast his short, spiky antlers back in October and the new set was growing under dense furry velvet, liquid bone oozing up day by day to be hard and ready by April. They were well on, like the stumpy horns of a giraffe, the spiky tines still fully to form. He radiated quality. He had entered the winter well, with fat rounding his shoulder blades and flanks. Even if it proved to be hard weather for the next two months, he would emerge fit and strong at the end of it, well placed to begin the long build-up to the July rut.

He wasn't just beautiful – he also knew it. He was idly browsing on broom and bramble shoots, plucking them with the insouciant air of a narcissistic aesthete in sharp little flicks of the head. Every few moments he would stop chewing, lift his head and look around with a studied pose of self-belief. There was no hint of alarm or even wariness, just a haughty and quizzical exploration of his domain, perhaps to see if any other buck had dared trespass on his patch. As he did so, his raised head, in perfect profile, was as elegantly statuesque as one of those expensive life-size bronzes to be seen in sporting galleries.

A rag of cloud slid across the sun, dulling its fire for a moment. I looked down at the glen and the river fields and they were there again, as they always had been, familiar and predictable. When I looked up my roe buck was only a few yards away. He had risen to a small rocky spur at the same
level as me and the dogs. He had seen me, but hadn't yet identified me as human. His head was up and he was delicately testing the air for scent. Black nostrils twitched and his ears swivelled. As is so often the case with deer, he needed the confirmation of scent to believe what he was seeing. He was staring straight at me. Our eyes collided in a silent, slow-motion crash. He was magnificent. It was a stretched, frozen moment of gripped breath and a riveted stare, impaling him and willing him to stay. Just then the low sun punched through the cloud in a fury of dazzling fire, instantly turning my roe buck and the rock he stood upon not to bronze but to the purest, gleaming gold. It was as though someone had stolen him from Tutankhamen's tomb and planted him on that rock, like a totemic effigy atop an outrageously ostentatious sarcophagus.

Here was my Maeshowe moment, my witness to rebirth and the beginning of the new solar year, the sun's gilded rising bringing the renewal of life, growth, opportunity and the spiritual fillip I had sought.

I was transfixed and the dogs never moved. We stared at each other, that ormolu roe buck and I, for several long, exaggerated seconds before he silently turned and slipped away into the thicket behind him. I stood gazing blankly at the empty rock as if by doing so I could conjure him up again. I waited, expecting to hear him crash away through the undergrowth, as roe deer so often do when they are disturbed, but nothing came. Just the empty silence of the morning. It was as though he had never existed.

My failed winter-solstice party now seemed irrelevant. I
might have missed the moment of the sun's absolute stasis, but for those few seconds a shared fusion of renewed life and vigour had burned in me and the buck. I whistled to the dogs to follow and began the slow, slippery descent to the moor. I think I had begun to understand what the architects of Maeshowe had meant.

8

The Gods of High Places

Did ever raven sing so like a lark,
That gives sweet tidings of the sun's uprise?

Titus Andronicus
, Act III, scene i,
William Shakespeare

There is nothing dull about a raven. As glossy as a midnight puddle, bigger than a buzzard, with a bill like a poleaxe and the eyes of an eagle, its brain is as sharp and quick as a whiplash. Surfing the high mountain winds, ravens tumble with the ease and grace of trapeze artists, and their
basso profondo
calls are sonorous, rich and resonant, gifting portent to the solemn gods of high places. Ravens surround us at Aigas, and they nest early.

Yesterday, a puzzling January day so gentled by a southerly breeze streaming to us from the Azores that it could easily have been April, I sauntered the half-mile to where the road lifts and snakes east, then veers north high above the river to look down into the black waters of the Aigas gorge, most of which is invisible to the casual passer-by sealed in his car. A day so beguiling under the cool winter sun that great tits began sawing and dunnocks bubbled and trilled from the roadside broom thickets. I wanted to see if the ravens were
attending their habitual nest site on a vertical cliff over-hanging the satanic flow of the Beauly River.

They weren't, although a faint ‘cronk' from somewhere high above and beyond the forested horizon echoed back at me from the rock walls. I hadn't expected them to be at the nest site so early in the year, but because that seductive airstream had brought the rooks back to their nests for an hour or two before vanishing again, it got me thinking of crows in general and climate change in particular.

Attempting to draw conclusions about aberrations in climate from one or two odd incidents is risky and always bound to be proved wrong when suddenly everything happens in reverse. It is also unwise to work from the premise of any ‘norm'. What defines normal weather, and when did it become normal? Is a winter bound to be defined by cold and snow? Clearly not, since Britain and many other parts of northern Europe have experienced mild, wet winters off and on for decades. And yet most careful observers are convinced that our climate is changing. All I can do, trapped in our Highland glen, is to watch and monitor the common standards of climate, temperature, precipitation and wind speed, and do my best to work out the impact these fluctuating parameters have on the wildlife around us. I thought the ravens might throw some light on this conundrum.

Ravens are always the first to nest every year – nests built in early February, eggs laid towards the end of the month – but if the weather is clement our gorge pair often spend a few late-January days repairing the twiggy stack, now a
yard high, that they have used for the last decade. The Aigas gorge is a perfect site for raising their brood of greedy, belly-bulging, reptilian fledglings. (As I write this, I am struck by an irresistible word-play: ravens nest in the Aigas gorge; ravens gorge in the Aigas nest.)

The valley is U-shaped and glacial, stretching back twenty-two miles into the Affric Mountains. As the ice thawed ten thousand years ago the meltwater streams created the broad, meandering flow of the river, which, on hitting a fault line in a wall of friable and ice-shattered conglomerate rock, washed out two separate channels, presenting us with a fifty-acre island, Eilean Aigas, bounded on both sides by a deep gorge with rushing falls and creating an ideal site for someone to come along and build a dam for hydro power, which was precisely what happened in the 1950s.

The gorge and the impressive Druim Falls, studded with rapids roiling round huge mid-stream rocks known as the Frogs, became a celebrated Victorian beauty spot and remains so, but the flooding of the falls by the hydro scheme caused the rapids to vanish, unless the river is very low when they re-emerge as foaming turbulence never quite breaking the surface. In a boat or canoe the going between damp and ferny seventy-foot walls is calm and eerily silent, but as you approach the flooded falls the flow suddenly springs into life as it grounds upon the submerged rocks, heaping up over them, carrying the air with them so that you are engulfed in rushing and streaming chevrons of white water.

The hydro dam (20-megawatt generation) undoubtedly cramped the gorge's tourist appeal, but not for the birds.
The high, vertical cliffs stretching for a quarter of a mile are ideal as a secure nest site and are variously occupied by jackdaws, kestrels and peregrines, grey wagtails and dippers as well as the ravens, while cormorants whitewash the rocks with guano as they haul out on the Frogs to hang their oil-less feathers out to dry.

*  *  *

Time was – and not so very long ago – the carrion-eating raven was aggressively persecuted right across Britain. With the historical exception of those at the Tower of London, the bird was despised by farmers, gamekeepers, landowners and shooting interests. Its very blackness was the signal for vilification and, wherever possible, annihilation. Little wonder they retreated to the far-flung mountain wilds and inaccessible coastal cliffs of the UK – this in marked contrast to Ireland where, in a gentler agricultural and less rapacious game-shooting culture, ravens were seen as useful scavengers and cleaners-up of the countryside, much helped by their legendary and fabled status in Celtic folklore and mythology. As a consequence Irish ravens live alongside human activities, frequenting farms, woods and country towns just as other crows do. Every ruined castle in rural Ireland usually has at least one pair of ravens nesting in it.

In Iceland ravens are common and fearless. They raid the racks of drying cod and mix with gulls as the fishing boats unload their catches, and it is from the old Norse
hrafn
that they arrive at their name. In far-flung Svalbard there is no
real conflict with humans and no one thinks twice about a raven. They hang about the only town of Longyearbyen, scavenging from rubbish dumps. If a dead whale or a walrus is washed ashore they flock in to squabble over it like hyenas. The Inuit and other northern native peoples revered the raven, deeply embedded in their mythology and folklore, according it god-like status, and wore carved ivory and bone shamanic fetishes of the birds to ensure good hunting. The Inuit believed that the raven created the world.

Here in the Highlands things are very different. When I came to live here in the late sixties, if you were lucky enough to see a raven at all it was either dead or always a fleeing silhouette quickly vanishing over a lonely mountain horizon. Even offshore in the Outer Hebrides and the Small Isles ravens were extremely wary of the sight of man and it is probably only the acute intelligence of the species that enabled its survival at all.

Back in those days I knew a deer-stalker employed by a local sporting estate who always, as a matter of course, left the gralloch (Gaelic for intestines) of the shot deer on the mountainside laced with strychnine from a little aspirin bottle he kept in his waistcoat pocket: ‘For eagles, hoodies and ravens,' he would growl, with a Machiavellian gleam in his eye. He is long dead and some of the traditions and values of his generation have progressed to a more tolerant culture, although such illegal practices still cast a shameful shadow over the nature-conservation successes of recent decades.

Not any more in this neck of the Highland woods, I am
pleased to relate. The advent of wildlife tourism as an economic force, legal protection and a wider conservation understanding has permitted raven numbers to increase and the birds to nest at least in some areas, unmolested. They are now part of our daily lives. I listen out for the guttural ‘cronk, cronk' as they pass overhead every day. If a solitary black bird rows into view (rooks are almost never solitary), I stop what I'm doing to look for the wedge-shaped tail or to get the measure of its bulk to distinguish it from carrion or hooded crows. As the years have flicked by, their daily appearance here, their criss-crossing of the glen from high moor to hill, has become predictable, a reassuring norm, something we note with pleasure, and a characterful addition to our resident avifauna.

Confident of that interest, as a chunky silhouette crosses or that unmistakable plunking call reverberates from the woods, I don't hesitate to point and call to my friends and field centre colleagues, ‘Ha! Raven!', yet I find myself still wary of my audience. Those farmers and crofters aplenty who charge ravens with killing lambs and many, not just old-school, gamekeepers are quick to condemn all crows, but especially hoodies and ravens, and will still do their utmost to kill them. ‘The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge.' (
Hamlet
, Act III, scene ii.)

This autumn, when two rutting stags engaged in a head-to-head tussle, they were unfortunate in choosing an old fence line high on the moors as their duelling ground. One beast became entangled in rusty old wire and, when vanquished, was unable to escape. Whether he died from
the vengeful lunges of the other stag, or whether he starved, we never discovered, but his carcass was quickly found and stripped to bare bones by the ravens. I heard them calling to each other across the hills, talking in that funereal, monosyllabic bassoon chatter, gathering numbers from afar as if by doing so their chances of being ambushed would be greatly reduced or, perhaps more likely, cementing their cryptic social structure by sharing the spoils of such rich pickings. Like vultures on the Serengeti, ravens seemed to appear from nowhere. It was the presence of more than twenty flighting in that told us the carcass was there. As I approached they rose up in cronking alarm while I was still hundreds of yards away, the morning air momentarily blackened by their panicky departure.

On occasions I have staked out a carcass to enjoy watching ravens or to show them to others. I built a tree-top hide looking out over the moor for just that purpose, but I quickly discovered that, even though the birds have enjoyed a comeback, their long history of persecution has left its mark. They are extremely wary of people or of anything suspicious. Raven intelligence is legendary and has been comprehensively researched by scientists and naturalists throughout the raven range.

My wildlife cameraman friend Lindsay McCrae, who works with the BBC Natural History Unit, tells me with much frustration but a lot of admiration that when filming ravens from a hide he discovered that at a hundred yards they could tell the difference between a real telephoto lens sticking out of a camouflaged hide and a mock one left in
place when Lindsay wasn't there. In our own tree-top bird hide, an observer sneezing or absentmindedly pulling out a handkerchief to blow his nose would be spotted at two hundred and fifty yards' range and would cause the ravens to disappear for several hours at a stretch. In Scotland it is still very difficult to get close to a wild raven.

*  *  *

Many years ago I was heading for home from a lengthy hill walk in our local mountains. It was early March and I had grown weary of the winter and of being stuck indoors. I took to the hills knowing very well that the days were still short, that the snows were by no means past and that mountain weather could be as treacherous as any ocean squall. Foolish is he who goes to the mountains unprepared. The day dawned bright and cloudless. I was able to push uphill quickly in strong sunshine, a welcome surge of early spring warmth at my back. But as it wore on a sinister cloud bank began to muster in the west. Ignoring the signals I hurried on, keen to traverse a high ridge where the wind had scoured away the snows leaving the smooth, lichenous tundra as easy walking.

In startling white winter plumage, ptarmigan rose from under my feet, scuttling away among the rocks or belching like drunks as they flew over the cornice and disappeared from view in a pied flurry of sunlit wings and coal-black outer tail feathers. Suddenly the sun was gone and a scowling wall of snow cloud breached the ridge on a scything wind
that swirled with the first flakes of what would become, with terrifying speed, a white-out blizzard. I knew I had to get off the ridge, but in the direction I needed to go the rock fell away beneath a near-vertical snow cornice built up over months of winter and frost – always an extremely dangerous winter feature – falling to a precipitous boulder field that cascaded a thousand feet to a steep snow slope far below.

Just before the blizzard engulfed me I found a place where the cornice had collapsed and the reliable rock underneath stood out, grey and solid. It was a relief to escape from that wind. Very gingerly I scrambled down into the boulder field, easing myself between rocks as big as bungalows. I needed to get down, down to a lower and safer altitude before the storm closed off my retreat. I ran, scrambled and slithered, leaping from snow drift to glissading slope, steeply down as fast as I dared. I must have descended at least six or seven hundred feet in a few minutes and was happy for it. But not for long. The blizzard came roaring in behind me so thick and fast that in seconds I could see nothing. I could barely see my own boots, let alone where I was placing my feet. I knew I couldn't go on.

I groped my way to a huge boulder and crawled in under its lee. I cut a small snow cave with my hands and, thinking it would pass, lay down to wait it out. For perhaps half an hour I was safe enough. It was still only three o'clock and I had plenty of daylight left. But the storm was just getting going. The wind shrieking over the mountain crest was creating a vortex below, into which the snow was being
sucked. It fell thicker and heavier and the wind swirled angrily round me. Snow heaped in, smothering my boulder in just a few minutes with a thick blanket, which, scoured by the wind, broke and fell across my shallow cave so that it began to fill. I realised I had to move or be buried alive.

I crawled out into that blizzard not knowing where I was going, except down, painfully slowly, groping forward like a blind man, testing each step for firmness, hugging the rocks, stumbling often. There seemed to be no let-up. The storm raged above me in the high tops with the roar of a train emerging from a tunnel. At best, visibility was three feet. For an hour I crept insect-like down that mountain slope. I had only the vaguest idea where I was until, quite suddenly, the wind dropped, the snow withdrew to a few floating flakes and, for a handful of fleeting minutes, I glimpsed the palest of suns veiled in a woollen shroud.