Season in Strathglass (11 page)

44

Outside the Tomich Hotel, Kyle is going round ‘The Six' with a clipboard, assigning them boats – they'll split into pairs and he and Dennis and another gillie will accompany them. Kyle is a solidly built man, foursquare in his black reefer jacket. Greying locks curl under his cap. Kyle manages the fishing for his cousin Donald the circumnavigator.

There are tales about Kyle, a harum-scarum in his youth with a penchant for fast cars. He once sold Maseratis in the Highlands. It's said he mollified the police in France who flagged him down for breaking the speed limit by giving them a spin in his sporty car. This day, he's driving a borrowed all-terrain vehicle and offers a lift up the track to the lochs while the others take an easier route through the forest. He climbs aboard stiffly, grumbling in a rather posh accent (public school, I suppose) about his bad knees and we jolt away. Twice gates barring the way have to be opened. My job.

We park on a grassy patch about a quarter of a mile from the boathouse on Loch a'Ghreidlein, where the others join us. The blue sky is lightly
barred with wispy white clouds which cast shifting shadows on brown moorland and dark forest. Blue mountains to the north are splashed with snow. It's cold. Dennis says it was minus two at Drumnadrochit last night.

Out of car boots comes the kit, the rubber boots, the overtrousers, the jackets, the satchels, the whippy rods and fine lines. These reflect individual peccadilloes – wet flies and dry flies are meticulously arranged in Richard's multi-pocket vest, one side wet, the other dry. ‘He's a bit obsessional,' Dennis mutters. There's much fiddling with reels and rods raised like lances in the air.

I follow Dennis and his two clients to the boathouse while the others head for the next lochan in the chain, Loch na Beinne Moire. The boathouse, just a wooden hut with a table and a few chairs in it for lunching, is a room with a view. A big window looks north towards faraway mountains. A small cairn nearby is dedicated to ‘a lover of the countryside'.

‘I once had a man who sat beside that cairn all morning with a bottle of malt whisky,' says Dennis. ‘Kyle went up to him and asks, “Are you not fishing, sir? Have you fallen out, or what?”' Not a bit of it. On his first casts of the day the man had caught two big fish, one after the other. ‘It was sheer luck of course,' says Dennis. ‘Fish were feeding on the surface and he just flicked out his first cast and got a five-pounder, which he put back. He changed the fly and on the very next cast he got another just as big. So he retreated with the bottle and sat there just looking at the hills and swigging.'

‘His partner in the boat couldn't have been too pleased,' Mark observes.

‘His partner got nothing,' says Dennis.

Mark says he likes to get a couple of nice fish in the boat before he can relax.

What's a nice fish? ‘Plate size,' says Dennis. ‘In this small loch anything over three pounds is a very good fish.'

As Dennis clambers into the rowboat moored to the jetty, he spots a small insect rippling the water.

‘A sedge,' says Mark, scooping it up in the hollow of his palm, where
it lies like a small, scrolled-up brown leaf, whereupon Richard produces a lookalike from his pockets and we compare the living insect and the artefact. The similarity is striking.

Dennis says, ‘The sedge is the biggest fly we have up here. They normally hatch in June and when they start hatching the fish feed on them exclusively. There's maybe a five-week period when the fish feed on them and nothing else, so that's all we go out with – sedges.'

Mark observes that, since the sedge swam towards the boathouse unmolested, the fish aren't biting. There's hardly a breath of wind and the water's flat calm – not ideal conditions. Nothing dimples the surface.

‘We're always trying to fool the fish,' says Mark. ‘If the fish thinks it's a real fly in its right environment, at its right depth, at it's right speed, doing the right thing at the right time of year, it'll take it. You've presented an offering to a wild creature and it's accepted it as the natural thing. When you catch a fish that way, you're really hunting.'

The boat edges out from the jetty, Dennis pulling on the oars. The little blue-hulled craft with its bright red gunwale looks a picture on the still water. ‘Tight lines!' – it's what you say. Rods are raised in an antic dance, lines flick across the water, invisible flies dimple the surface with a kiss.

I wander across to neighbouring Loch na Beinne Moire, discover the remains of a storm-shattered boathouse grey with age and reached or possibly not reached by a rickety bridge on stilts. Shan't put it to the test. Beyond that, the going gets rough so I turn back to climb little Beinn Mhor again. From its height, I see the blue rowboat motionless in the water and the small figures of Mark and Richard plying their rods with Dennis resting on the oars. No voices can be heard. I see the changing colours of the water, sometimes ruffled, sometimes dead flat, reflecting blue sky and puffy clouds, with the sandy bottom of the shallows showing faintly through. Also the spit of rock named by the Six as Kenzie's Point after Forbes (whose surname is MacKenzie). It's an outcrop of the limestone seam that lies under the lochan and determines the chemical make-up of the water – and even subtly affects the character and taste of the trout that breed there. Or so says Dennis.

From a spot close to the Celtic cross, three of the five lochans are now in view, Loch na Beinne Moire with its distinctive serpentine and fretted shoreline being visibly the largest. At its extremity, a boat is heading for what I make out to be a narrow channel linking it to a further lochan, possibly in hope of finding better luck there – the occupants of the boat are three specks of life in a still landscape of sombre browns.

Five walkers in a row, brightly dressed, came trudging up the track from Guisachan laden with heavy backpacks. They halt near our parked cars, mop their brows, ease packs off their backs and consult maps. I hasten down hoping for a word but, long before I reach the track, they're gone, straggling round the hump of the hill and out of sight, making for Corrimony I guess. A track is marked clearly on the map but on the ground it's a different story, as I know, having once, with Catherine, missed my way through the intervening woodland.

45

Catherine and I are invited to lunch at Tim's. There's home-made pizza and salad served at a table by the open glass doors – Tim, Catherine and I and Tim's wife Alice. The sun's shining and a bee from Tim's apiary is buzzing at an orchid which prompts Tim to remark on the orchid's marvellous efficiency as a receptor of pollination. This leads to a discussion between him and Catherine on moths (her special interest) and then, by a tangent, to the mention of Sir John Lister-Kaye whose home and field centre at Aigas is just along the road to Beauly. He's an excellent naturalist and a great enthusiast, says Tim – we should see him in the field with his clients or students or whatever you call them, where ‘he makes a drama of everything'.

Down below us in the field, we see Tim's five brown heifers. He says they often come up to the house and peer through the kitchen window. He talks to them all the time and they follow him. Alice, who lectures in Inverness, says she'd like to have a couple of black cattle of her own when she retires – I think she fantasises about leading them in the cattle ring at the Black Isle showground.

Tim says he and Alice still can't believe their luck in finding this spot for a home. They kept trying to buy old cottages, of which there are plenty in Strathglass in various stages of decay, but no one would sell. Mostly people wanted to keep them in the family. Then they saw ground advertised here at Mauld. When Tim enquired, he was told schedules had already been sent to 300 applicants and one was coming over from South Africa to see the ground, so it looked hopeless. For one thing, they'd no house to sell, having lived until then in tied accommodation. But Tim drafted three short paragraphs describing his background and his plans for the future and it must have struck a chord with the seller – Iain Thomson, a former soldier, shepherd, cattle farmer, now turned author – for his offer was accepted. There was joy when the letter was opened and maybe disbelief. Can this be true?

Tim says four offers higher than his were received so something in those three short paragraphs must have taken Thomson's fancy. They scraped funds together and took a mortgage and here they are. Tim says his early background was not dissimilar to Iain's, which may have helped. He was a stalker in youth and he worked for his father in forestry, besides which he's a great outdoors man, a climber, and he keeps fit. Every year, he does the Highland Cross, the coast-to-coast race between Kintail and Beauly through Glen Affric, running and cycling over the passes.

This time I see his precious old Porsche unwrapped – a dazzling yellow, with an official badge fixed in front of the bonnet that says ‘Le Mans Vintage Tour'. He and Alice will drive to France for a vintage Porsche rally later in the year – not to race but to bask in the atmosphere, the sunshine ‘and enjoy the food and wine'.

46

By the Abhainn Deabhag burn, near Cougie, a fine morning in June.

In
the burn, rather, ankle deep, with George, known to his friends as Darkie because of his black hair and boxer's blue chin. But I shan't call him that.

We splash downstream. The water's low and a bed of round stones like cobbles gleams under the surface in the shallows. Taking care not to slip.

George carries a bucket of water in which a swarm of tiny salmon fry squirm and flicker and dart. He scoops up a ladleful, a dozen or so at a time. Once out of the melee they glitter with an intimate radiance, brassy and spotted on the back with a flash of silver on the belly and just a hint of diaphanous fin. He tips them into the water and they wriggle away, tails flicking as they scurry for shelter among weeds or under stones.

I think of whitebait. Possibly you could pop them in the pan.

We move from shady pool to swift flowing riffle, tipping the fish into the water in penny numbers. Stones roll under our feet.

‘No predators about,' says George, looking around. Which is good. These fry would be tasty morsels for any wading bird.

The two- or three-month-old fishlets were collected from the hatchery early this morning. Fingerlings is what Dennis calls them, which is descriptive. When the time comes the young fish, grown to six inches long, will set off on their journey to the sea, with the long drop over the Plodda Falls to negotiate and dams to pass. In two years' time, after a perilous ocean voyage, the survivors will find their way back upstream as grown salmon, when Dennis and his clients and their fraternity stand in wait.

During the rest of the day George and a few others – among them a student, a crofter and the hatchery boss's daughter – stock the burn with as many as a hundred thousand fish, of which only a fraction will survive to face, amongst all the natural hazards overcome, the diligence of anglers.

George tells me that he used to be a water bailiff, patrolling the river on the lookout for poachers. Thickset and burly, his black hair tinged with grey, with a bull neck and black-stubbly jaws, you can see he'd be a daunting figure. One look at him would be enough to make your average poacher give up and come quietly. It's no surprise to hear that he boxed for the army and won money prizefighting at fairground booths.

He has a liking for field sports. He shoots geese on the Cromarty shoreline and, sometimes, crows for a farmer whose crops are at risk. And of course he fishes.

‘I shoot nothing that I don't eat'. Except the crows, I suppose. Or does anyone eat crow pie? Country folk used to.

‘I catch nothing I don't eat.'

47

High summer and a heatwave. It's been like this for days. They say tomorrow will be the warmest yet.

I'm booked into the backpackers hostel at Cannich where, under a green tin roof, it's oven hot at midday and, by evening, the air is barely cooler. A Chinese girl in the kitchen is preparing a meal for herself and her boyfriend – a simple salad of lettuce, tomato and onion, lighter and more appetising than my heap of spaghetti. But there's a reason for my pasta. The theory is that it will sustain energy tomorrow when needed.

At seven, I phone John MacLennan. ‘He's not back from the hill,' says his wife. When I call later, he admits to being knackered – his word – by a long hard day in the blazing sun. Will it be as long a day tomorrow? ‘Probably,' says he.

I go for a cooling stroll in the night air and, on my return, find an English couple seated in elderly chairs in the lounge with a bottle of wine between them on the table. I produce another for goodwill. They tell me they're freelance hill guides, here for a few days with a party of 16 Faro Islanders who are lodged at the hotel. They booked by email, sight unseen, and are toughing it out there stoically. Greasy breakfasts are their chief complaint.

Gerald the guide says the Faroese, who count themselves keen hillwalkers, found the two hills they tackled on their first day out a struggle. Perhaps it was their packed lunches – dried cod with whale blubber, he says with wonder rather than distaste. One hill was enough of a challenge yesterday and today they ambled in the Affric woods. We find an atlas in the lounge, look up the Faroe Islands and find the highest hill to be 500 metres at most so they don't get much of a test at home.

They're a mixed bunch of mainly professional people from the
different islands, among them a doctor, a teacher and two pharmacists. They get together for an expedition once a year. Gerald says that, before setting off in the morning, they form a circle and sing a chorus and, on the route as the fancy takes them, they'll burst into song. On their second night in Cannich, they danced at the Slater's Arms till half past one in the morning.

I wake early and, at 5.30, I'm sitting at a table in the corner of the lounge writing up my notes in the sooty aroma of the bygone fire in the stove. I have the hostel cat for company.

It rained quite hard in the night, though it barely cooled. As day breaks, the mist begins to lift, parting here and there to reveal patches of blue sky. It's going to be warm again and maybe hotter still.

John pulls up in his 4x4 and points me to the back seat. He has a wary way of looking at me under his brow. In the village, we pick up Chris, who's also a stalker, though mostly he works as a joiner. He and John wear deerstalker hats and tweed breeches in a green check, the standard outfit. ‘There's only one gun today,' says John, meaning his client, not the rifle lying beside him in a faded canvas cover. So there will be four of us on the hill.

We park on a grassy patch beyond Fasnakyle Power Station near the derelict kirk and wait for the client to arrive. ‘Come on, Andrew,' says John, tapping the wheel impatiently, and at length a car sweeps round the bend in the road and pulls up beside us. Out steps Andrew carrying a six pack of beer which he stows in a cold box at the back of the 4x4 before taking the front seat beside John.

We take the tourist road the length of Loch Beinn a'Mheadhoin then follow the forestry road on the south side of Loch Affric. There's no hint of a breeze to ruffle the glassy surface of the water where trees, rocks and the green and brown hillsides are mirrored in sharp clarity. At the head of Loch Affric, a crescent of yellow sand dips into the dark shallows at the water's edge.

Taking a rough track beyond the head of the loch, we reach the
isolated cottage at Athnamulloch. From a shed across the river nearby John brings out a small bug-like vehicle that will take us further up the glen – an Argocat, the standard stalker's vehicle on rough terrain. There's just room for John and Andrew in the cab, while Chris and I go steerage in a kind of tub at the back, seated uncomfortably on hard thinly padded benches. As I climb aboard my hand touches a sticky patch on the rim. There's blood on my fingers and a puddle of blood on the floor – evidence of yesterday's kill.

For several hard miles, we follow a track to Alltbeithe, lurching into potholes and rearing over boulders while Chris and I hold on grimly. Ahead of us John's broad shoulders hunch over the controls.

Alltbeithe is a youth hostel now. The house that stood here is gone, replaced by a timber bunkhouse. People are strolling about outside and we're greeted by the warden, a young woman in a sun top. High hills surround us. John trains his telescope on Ben Attow, a ghostly eminence in the grey haze, and, after an interval, he spots deer high up. ‘Moving up fast,' he says. ‘Maybe there are walkers about.' Stalkers and walkers are not usually the best of friends but he shows no irritation. It's a neutral comment.

We board the Argocat again and splash across the river, scoring the grassy flats of the valley bottom with tyre tracks before turning into a neighbouring glen in the hope of finding deer on the far side of the ridge. At first, nothing. John, Chris and Andrew silently sweep the tops with their glasses without success until Chris sights a couple of stags on a high crest – but they're too distant to be of interest. I glimpse them briefly, two pinprick antlers outlined against the bleached sky. Eventually, a few beasts come into view below the long high ridge that leads to Ben Attow and we'll go for them.

Before setting out, Andrew and Chris apply plasters to their feet, raw from their long stalk yesterday (Chris was wearing new boots.) John gives each of us a horn-topped stick from the back of the Argocat. Andrew casts off his jacket and I decide to abandon my rucksack as an unnecessary encumbrance. Conscious of the heat, we're walking light – all but Chris who has to carry the gun.

The ground in the valley bottom is boggy but we soon reach firmer ground. The slope is steep, the sun merciless. Ahead of me John slings his jacket over his arm and rolls down his stockings, breeches flapping round his brown calves. A haze veils all the surrounding landscape, softening the sharpest peaks. The sun strikes down, the air is humid. Sweat rolls off John's bald head and runs down his neck. Only an occasional whisper of breeze gives any relief.

We halt, lie flat on our stomachs and gulp mouthfuls of water from a small burn running through the undergrowth. It's a disappointment. The water's tepid, not the ice-cold draught I expected.

We return to the climb, breathing hard, saying little. Sometimes Andrew or Chris is ahead of me but always John takes the lead, setting a measured pace as we zigzag round rock or grassy bluffs taking care to keep hidden from the unsuspecting deer somewhere above us. From time to time, we pause to rest briefly, leaning on our sticks or scooping up more mouthfuls of water.

Finally, John moves ahead on his own, disappearing beyond a rocky bluff to spy out the land. We must be close. No one speaks. John returns and sits on the grass. I watch him take the gun and then five bullets. He slots the last one into the breech and slides the bolt home. He's put on his jacket again.

‘Wait here,' he instructs before Andrew and he continue upwards.

Chris and I remain, silent or talking softly now and again. Time passes. Huge pyramids of hill surround us, moody in the light-absorbing haze, all plunging into the narrowing valley called Fionngleann – named, I speculate, after Fingal the Ossianic hero. The Argocat is a black dot far below near the deserted cottage of Camban, a ruin of bare stone walls and green tin roof. Two waters stream down the side of the hill facing us, one a startling dash of white as it drops through a gorge. At the valley floor each turns in an opposite direction – one flows westwards, the other, the Allt Cam-bàn, which is a source of the River Affric, bends eastward on the start of a long journey which will feed its waters, after passage through many lochs and over falls, into the Glass and then the Beauly rivers and finally the North Sea.

Not a sound. The shot, when it comes, is softer than I'd expected, muffled by the bank of hillside between us. ‘We'll wait a while,' says Chris. Minutes pass, then another shot and a third. Another pause, then Chris rises and I follow, to find John and Andrew sitting reflectively on the grass. And the stag? John points to a half-hidden dun-coloured rock-like shape a couple of hundred yards down the slope. We move down towards it.

The stag has fallen at a slant, his head bent back – a handsome head, the blue-black eye still moist and lifelike and not yet glazed. We gather round. John kneels, takes his knife, cuts into the breast and slits down the belly. Blood flows and stains the grass. John wrestles the beast on to its back and, as it starts to slip down the grassy slope, he braces his leg against it and calls on me to grab a hind leg. It comes to rest and I feel the dead weight. John thrusts his hand into the belly cavity and drags out the stomach bag, grey and glistening like a dumpling, and then the bunched folds of intestine streaked with a smear of mustard-yellow faeces. They say the beast will have been feeding for body weight in preparation for mating – stags build up their strength before the rut, which is a time of stress during which they barely eat. John's hands and bare shin are bloody, the leg of his breeches is soiled, there's a daub of yellow shit on his hand which he wipes on the grass. He sizes up the animal and estimates its weight at, say, 15 stone.

He makes an incision in a hind leg through which Chris feeds a strap attached to his rope then they lever the body into position for the drag downhill. Chris winds the rope round his stick, which he holds with both hands behind his back parallel to the ground. He braces himself, takes the strain and starts to drag the beast behind him. It's a long way down to the vehicle. John says that, when he was young and worked in Affric with his father, they used ponies – though generally they didn't need to come this far to find deer. We've come many miles to reach this spot. ‘Would you like to walk a pony all the way up the glen?' he asks. The Argocat's quicker.

John turns to help Chris manoeuvre the stag for the first and trickiest stage of the drag, telling Andrew to move on upwards. He'll catch up with us later.

We watch them depart, skirting the steeper slopes and dodging hollows, and, in a little while, we find a rocky outcrop where Andrew decides to wait for John's return. It's pleasant to rest in the sun. We chat. Andrew tells me he farms cattle and sheep near Buxton in Derbyshire, selling produce by mail order and on the Internet. Before he came to farming, he was an architect, living in the country but with a practice in London. When a local farmer decided to sell his smallholding of a hundred acres, Andrew bought the land and gradually added more parcels of land to it.

We have a good vantage point. We watch through binoculars as Chris, alone now, diminishes. Halfway down the hill, he strips off his shirt, mops his brow and starts hauling again. There's no sign of John. Half an hour has gone by and he should be back. Where can he be?

He's above us – that's where. There's a whistle – we look up and see him on the skyline, waving. It's not exactly a friendly wave, I think. When we meet again, there's a hint of frost – he's not best pleased, after a strenuous search along the high tops, to find us lounging below like sunbathers. But he's a model of restraint and says nothing. Together we move down the steep irregular ridge, noting as we do so a few deer gathered in a corrie overlooking the neighbouring glen.

We see the tiny Argocat inching forward. ‘I hope he stops,' says John and he does. Chris gets out of the vehicle and makes contact by radio-telephone. He's instructed to drive into the next glen and rendezvous with us at a gravel bank beyond the peat haggs.

We move down the ridge cautiously towards the knot of deer, edging off the skyline to avoid alerting them. Once again, John and Andrew continue while I stay. They move over a crest and then, lying on their backs, feet first, heads tucked low, disappear from sight while they wriggle towards the herd below them. It's a tricky manoeuvre. I wait. An arc of sound breaks the silence, an increasing and then diminishing rumble as a plane crosses the clear sky trailing echoes as it disappears from sight.

The shot surprises me. Reverberating round the hills, it seems louder than before. One shot, no more. Wait. Move on cautiously.

I find John and Andrew sitting on a scarp with the deer some way
below them at the foot of a sharp drop. Andrew moves first at a half run and we follow. John pulls back the thick hairs on the beast's shoulder to reveal a small red-rimmed orifice where the bullet has entered. It's a good shot, a clean kill.

By now, Chris has moved into the glen and we watch the Argocat splash along by the river. John sets off at speed, the beast slithering behind him. Sometimes he has to dodge aside to prevent it clipping his heels.

Andrew and I ford the river where it shallows while the others load the stag onto the vehicle. Now two stags lie side by side in the bucket leaving little room for the passenger – me. Andrew stands behind the cab, straddling the bench seats, legs flexed against bumps and jolts, scanning ahead like a ship's captain on the bridge. Chris has joined John in the front. I squash in as best I can beside the animals. The journey back is economy class. Bump, thump, jolt, shudder. The late afternoon sun still delivers its hammer blows and a cooling shower of spray is welcome when we plunge into a water-filled hole.

My dead companions lurch heavily against me in a less than neighbourly way. I discover that the hide of a stag, as I try to fend it off, is coarse and hairy. It takes energy to defend my space. A large head with brownish tongue lolling is too close to my face for comfort and the tine of an antler threatens to stab my chest.

Relief comes at last at Athnamulloch, where we transfer to the 4x4. I stretch out on the back seat, pleasantly fatigued. It's been a strenuous outing. ‘I'd call it an average day on the hill,' says John. ‘You should try it when the weather's bad,' says Andrew. ‘Try it in October.'