trials did she ever complain about her ghastly, crippling condition, never once gave up hope or gave in to the slightest flicker of self-pity. We all knew she was seriously ill, but we blindly and stupidly refused to believe it. It’s called denial.
Suddenly it was night. She leant on my arm as she walked slowly and unsteadily, only a few yards, all she could manage, away from the dim lights of the Palacio, out into the warm, thick darkness. Her aluminium stick clicked with each step and her breath came short and sharp. Stars winked and glistened high above us and a weakling moon hung like a segment of white peach among rags of back-lit cloud. We stood and listened to the night sounds of Las Marismas: nature’s wild orchestra in its finest fling. Far off geese haggled excitedly out on the distant water, the soft fluting of flamingos rising and falling, broken by shrill arpeggios of waders from the shallow lagoons in front of us. ‘I love this.’ Words whispered with an instinctive reverence for wildness. I knew exactly what she meant.
My dream was as vivid as a dream can ever be. I was with her in body, mind and spirit. Right there. I could see the moon-gleam on her greying curls and I could hear the way she rested her front teeth invisibly on her lip and drew air through them with a thin, barely audible whistle when she was thinking. I could feel the warmth of her arm as that old familiar perfume wafted out to bind me to her as it had done ever since I was a small child climbing into her bed.
Our conversation was brief – no need for elaboration – words primed with resonance of the moment, the place, the mood. A collusion of loaded silence and love piling in like grace. I felt my spirit lifting off and soaring to the stars. It was as though something I had been searching for all my life was suddenly there beside me. We laughed together, as one.
I don’t know how long it lasted – difficult to tell with dreams – but I sensed that it was long enough to slough off the thirty-four years since her death, long enough to whirl back through the Spanish darkness to those transcendental moments of unity I had never thought I could know again. In all the intervening years I had never come so close, never so distinctively re-lived her presence with such intensity, never guessed that it was possible. I woke up wondering where I was.
The room was hot and airless. I rose and went to the casement, flinging it wide. A breeze off the marshes as soft as thistledown caressed my face. There, only a few yards away, was the moonlight flickering across the black lagoon, the gossip of distant geese, the woodwind of flamingos floating into satin air, the redshanks’ piccolo piping and the insistent whistles of wigeon drakes. Then it came. From somewhere deep inside me, from some visceral cavern I didn’t know existed, catching me completely unawares, an unstoppable upwelling of emotion rose volcanically within me, choking, convulsing, overpowering. Tears flooded down my face.
I recognised it instantly, as instinctively as you know the sound of your own voice. Grief – Latin: gravare, heavy; Old French: grever, to burden – that weight, that overwhelming burden of desolation I thought I’d conquered thirty years before had never gone away at all. It was still there, hidden, padlocked, forgotten, lurking deep in the darkest canyons of my hippocampus, silently waiting for this moment.
* * *
I returned to rainy Scotland buoyed up and inspired by the Spanish project and determined to pursue my mother’s influence further. I had learned so much, not just about captive breeding. Twelve years ahead of us, they had made and resolved many of the mistakes with lynxes we were now making with our wildcats. For hygiene, we were diligently removing cat faeces every day.
‘No,’ Antonio had said, ‘leave them in for at least a week or two. They contain pheromones, important territorial signals.’
‘Oh,’ I answered blankly, wondering why the hell I hadn’t thought of that.
* * *
For thousands of years since the last ice cap retreated, these deeply glaciated glens, carved through unyielding metamorphic schist, have stubbornly resisted the severest ravages of mankind. Drawing strength from the rock beneath, nature has always fought back. It is how so much of the Highlands’ precious wildlife has been able to cling on. Ours is a land of golden eagles tilting on glider wings and the metallic screams of peregrines echoing from the walls of the river gorge. I never cease to catch my breath when I see the Bourneville blur of pine martens filching food from the bird tables. My heart beats faster at the sudden flash of a salmon shimmering up the rapids, and every autumn dawn I awaken to the hills echoing with the roaring of rutting red deer stags. Although we very rarely see them, somehow, against all the odds, a few Scottish wildcats might have managed to hang in there too.
One of the many joys of living among the mountains is arriving home after forays further afield. On a clear day, turning west just after Inverness, the Highland capital, the great grey rampart of the nearly 4,000-foot Affric mountains looms out of the distance, solid and reassuring. I never tire of that rugged molar horizon, a welcome home that wafts my spirit skyward like the red kites we so frequently see wheeling and soaring over the rich dark soil of the Black Isle fields. Without those mountains my life might have been entirely different.
A squealing, wiggling welcome from my two Jack Russells, Nip and Tuck, a spousely hug with hot tea and a slice of my wife Lucy’s banana cake settled me straight back into cosy domesticity. Oh, it was GOOD to be home. But for me home has always been so much more than the cushioned refuge of the complacent. I have lived at Aigas so long that the land has claimed me, shaped me to match its wildness and its contrary needs, so that whenever I’ve been away I need to relocate and tune up again like a harp that has had to travel. So as soon as I tactfully could, I slipped out into the fresh cool of the evening and walked briskly uphill to the secret forest location of our wildcat project. I needed to stand and look at them with the brighter, wider eyes of the Spanish experience.
We haven’t given our cats names. They are identified by gender and their pens: ♂ in Pen 1, ♀ in Pen 2, ♂ kitten in Pen 4 . . . and so on. There’s no good reason why we shouldn’t name them, but, respecting their innate wildness – as far from fluffy moggies as wolves from a poodle – we have avoided humanising them as much as possible. They have all been DNA tested and are high quality, over 89 per cent wildcat – probably as good as we are going to be able to find in the remaining wild population. By careful selective breeding we can further diminish the hybrid genes, sharing high quality kittens with other captive breeders to broaden the gene pool and reduce the risk of inbreeding.
The pens are big and built on the woodland edge, with grassy spaces between natural cover of broom, brambles and thickets of wild raspberries; the damp patches have sprouted clumps of grasses, rushes, docks and nettles – as natural a wildcat habitat as we can achieve. Sunlight flickers through the trees, gnats dance, bees drone, the breezes shimmy through. Unthinking, wild birds – chaffinches, dunnocks, wrens and robins – dip and bob just out of reach, keeping the cats alert and, unlucky for some, foraging mice and voles make the mistake of blundering in.
As the still evening air settled around me I stood at the gate to Pen 2. The male, a big rangy tom with attitude, jumped silently down from a high perch. Panther shoulders rolling in sinister ripples beneath the fur, he stalked slowly but purposefully across to stare me out. Ten feet from the wire, he sat on his haunches and glared. He glowed with all the assurance of a million years of evolution. He was magnificent. I resented the wire and wanted to be in the pen with him. When I moved to unlock the gate he hissed, lips curled and long fangs gleamed. His ears flattened and he crouched; his whole mask bristled with rancour. The emerald eyes flared, long white whiskers arrayed in a bright fan. This cat has a history of disliking men and makes his feelings clear. The black club end to his ringed tail twitched. And that stare – you get the feeling that he is in charge of the world.
We keep human presence to a minimum. Every day one of the rangers enters the pens to feed and to clean away the detritus – bones, feathers, the scaly legs of quail or
