to inspect the game books and to listen spellbound to my grandfather reminiscing with my father about those pre-war expeditions, about their extravagant bags of hundreds of grouse in a day, always, for some arcane reason, counted in ‘brace’. Talk of shooting until the gun barrels were too hot to hold; of blunt and characterful gamekeepers who ruled their estates with forthright opinions; of pointers, terriers and retrievers; of walking up ptarmigan in the highest hills or stalking roe deer in the woods; of crawling through mountain bogs with a tweed-clad stalker to close in on a stag. I was enthralled and longed for the opportunity to travel to Scotland myself, to partake of this grand, glowing Highland tradition.
At some point during those impressionable years I had found in the library at the Manor House a fine green cloth-bound volume with a gold thistle embossed on the cover, entitled Wild Sports and Natural History of the Highlands (1848) by Charles St John, the younger son of Viscount Bolingbroke. Beside it, also in handsome green cloth bindings in two volumes, embossed with ‘Ye Hunter’s Badge’ of the heads of a red deer stag, a sea eagle, a salmon and a seal, all enclosed within a heraldic shield, was John Colquhoun’s The Moor and the Loch (1880). Both were best-sellers of their day; the acknowledged sporting handbooks of the period, which graced the library shelves of every sporting lodge and country house in Britain.
Inspired by my grandfather’s tales of the Highlands, I took the books down and studied them wide-eyed with awe. Eventually I would inherit them. Recently I looked them out again, blew the dust from their tops and plunged back into their rough-edged pages. I not only wanted to refresh my memory, but was also on a journey to revisit the old buzz I had gleaned from them so long ago. I wanted to try to figure out just how they would have influenced my formative awareness of the bizarre contradictions and conflicts that then existed – and for many still do – between ‘sport’, natural history and nature conservation.
It was in those celebrated tomes that I first encountered the Scottish wildcat. Both books contained a chapter dedicated to the species, accompanied by crudely effective pen-and-ink illustrations of what the artist imagined a wildcat should look like. The results certainly look wild, but that is where the resemblance ends – not so surprising since both authors freely admit that the wildcat is very rare, so it is most unlikely that their illustrators had ever seen one. But John Colquhoun and Charles St John certainly had. They both claim proudly to have hunted down and killed many wildcats. More than this, St John openly advocated the extirpation of wildcats as heinous vermin.
I remember heaving down the weighty two-volume Webster’s dictionary to discover the meaning of extirpate. As a ten-year-old I was shocked. ‘To root out, to destroy totally, to EXTERMINATE.’ Why, I struggled to comprehend, would anyone seek to wipe out such an exquisitely beautiful wild animal? I read on.
St John insists: ‘the damage they would do to the game must be very great’. He then recounts the demise of one wildcat he happened upon while fishing in Sutherland. Armed with a stout stick he pursued her with his terriers
until she took refuge in a corner of the rocks . . . As soon as I was within six or seven feet of the place she sprang straight at my face . . . Had I not struck her in mid air as she leapt at me, I should probably have got some severe wound . . . she fell with her back half broken among the dogs, who, with my assistance dispatched her.
Then in slightly more conciliatory tone he adds, ‘I never saw an animal fight so desperately, or one which was so difficult to kill.’
Colquhoun, writing thirty-five years later than St John, opens his short treatise on the wildcat by firmly stating, ‘The wild-cat [sic] is now rare in this country.’ He goes on to say, ‘Although I have spent a great part of my life in the most mountainous districts of Scotland, where killing vermin is . . . my own recreation, I have never seen more than five or six genuine wild-cats.’ He then describes them with creative hyperbole thus: ‘the hair long and rough, the head exceedingly broad, ears short, tusks extremely large’ and ‘the great length and power of the limbs’. He builds a picture of a truly fearsome beast. ‘Lambs, grouse, hares, are all seized with equal avidity . . . The female fears nothing when in defense of her young, and will attack even man himself.’
Much of this is sensationalist baloney, which begs the question whether Colquhoun was exaggerating to excite his readers, or even whether his claim to have seen and killed wildcats was actually true. That question might also be fairly addressed of Gavin Maxwell in the early chapters of Ring of Bright Water:
Wildcats grow to an enormous size, at least double that of the very largest domestic cat . . . Once I caught one accidentally in a rabbit snare, a vast tom with ten rings to his tail, and that first year at Camusfeàrna I twice saw the kittens at play in the dawn . . . there was no hint of the ferocity that takes a heavy toll of lambs and red-deer calves.
Although laced with his enchanting lyricism, much of the rest of Maxwell’s anecdotal record rings largely implausible:
The males sometimes mate with domestic females [entirely true and now a very real problem for the species] but the offspring rarely survives [certainly not true] either because the sire returns to kill the kittens as soon as they are born [highly unlikely] and so expunge the evidence of this peasant wenching, or because of the distrust in which so many humans hold the taint of the untamable [appealing, but sadly also untrue]. It is the wild strain that is dominant, in the lynx-like appearance, the extra claw, and the feral instinct; and the few half-breeds that escape destruction usually take to the hills and the den life of their male ancestors.
Yes, the pure wildcat is markedly bigger than a large domestic tabby, but certainly not ‘at least double that of the very largest domestic cat’. And it has marginally longer limbs and a broader skull also with fractionally larger canine teeth, but ‘the great length and power of the limbs’ and ‘ten rings to his tail’, ‘the lynx-like appearance’ and ‘the extra claw’ are all pure myth. Now having first-hand experience of many wildcats, both alive and dead, there is no extra claw and I have never seen one with more than six distinct rings to its tail, and many have only four or five.
Other writers and observers have chosen to perpetuate this feline mythology – the wildcat’s fierceness, its fangs, its untamable reputation, its size and dramatic strength – but much of it is simply fabricated or dramatic exaggeration. The obvious and overriding fact is that the animal is WILD. Of course it is fierce. Of course it is strong. It is a predator and needs a vicious bite to secure and kill its prey, just as do the fox and the badger, the otter, weasel, stoat and pine marten, if you are daft enough to test any of them on soft human flesh. And in common with all of the above, if cornered or attacked by man or dog, all of them will struggle and bite as fiercely and as savagely as any wild animal. I know very well how strong the wildcat is.
When I first came to live in the Highlands in the 1970s, I had a collection of ornamental wildfowl – ducks, geese and swans of many different species. They were secured in a large enclosure fenced to six feet with stout netting to keep out foxes and badgers. During the first few years I was puzzled to find that birds as big as geese were disappearing without any obvious indication of the culprit; ducks and geese vanishing off their nests but never any sign of a struggle. So I set a large cage trap baited with a dead wood pigeon. In the morning I found myself staring into the flaring green eyes of a wildcat. I drove it to Glen Affric twelve miles away and released it into the ancient forest of the Caledonian Pine Reserve. Soon the predation started again. I reset the trap. Again I caught a cat, another large wildcat tom, hissing, spitting and angrily flicking its bushy tail. Off I went to Glen Affric again, marvelling at the strength of a cat that could snatch a weighty Canada goose from its nest and then climb a six-foot fence with the bird in its teeth, leaving scarcely a feather behind.
As Gavin Maxwell relates of his Highland home in the 1960s, back in those days wildcats did not seem to be rare on the west coast or in the remoter reaches of these glens. On winter nights we would often
