off to a low mound – it’s Follow My Leader. The strongest lamb – at least a week old – gets there first and bags the high point; the others are jostling, pushing, competing. He holds his ground, bleating assertively – King of the Castle. The air vibrates with their high-pitched, stuttering din. The expectant ewes graze quietly, apparently unaware of four black, scanning, scouring eyes.
Competition: that’s what it’s all about. We’re all competing, all the time, although like Emerson we merrily choose to wrap it in fluff, sentimentalise it, rose-colour it, to conceal it in any way we can. We’re not good at facing up to unpalatable truths. But we are all competing for space, light, food, mates and power, each and every last one of us: archbishops, civil servants, vagabonds and vicars, knaves, princes and prostitutes, welders and trapeze artists, bus drivers and bakers – even naturalists. Any excuse will do. Even the colour of our drinking water would become a competition for authority if I rose to the challenge.
The great tits are frantically competing for caterpillars; competing against other bird species and other great tits. The caterpillars are competing with each other for the starch-filled cellulose they need to grow; they’re munching for all they’re worth, gripped by the fear that somebody else’s mandibles will get there first. The leaves are competing for light; far below, the roots are jostling with the root hairs of other plants for water and minerals, grabbing, grasping, gripping and hanging in there for all they are worth. The whole thing is one ghastly, urgently swirling, deadly serious game of King of the Castle.
Years ago I read in Sir Dudley Stamp’s thoughtful analysis of nature conservation in Britain that our post-industrial societal values were no longer determined by those of primary food producers – farmers and fishermen – and that since most of us no longer had to worry about where our food was coming from our attitude to nature was one step removed from reality. Back in 1969 Stamp was right, as was Emerson in 1836. Relieved of the worries of primary food producers who, throughout the Third World, still struggle for soils and against agricultural pests every day of their lives, we can waft through the woods musing loftily, ‘To what end is nature?’
A vehicle crunches slowly up the track and parks at the field gate. It is Geordie, now in his sixties, whose crofting family have kept sheep and cattle on this land for centuries. Tam, his black and white border collie, leaps from the back of the pick-up and clears the fence in a high, excited bound. Tam is a young dog and still has to be worked through. Enthusiasm for the task in hand is fine, but over-exuberance is counter-productive. Geordie calls him in with a wave of his long crummack and they move up the slope together with the dog at heel.
Those who give their lives to working with animals also gift themselves to the land. They know it and love it, and, over time, it adopts them and shapes them to its will so that they become a part of the landscape, blending with it in economy of movement and sureness of foot, hand and eye. The gentle philosophy of the hills and glens shapes their weather-sculpted faces, delivers broad smiles and a knowing nod in place of unnecessary words.
I watch man and dog walking quietly among the ewes. Tam drops to command, lying obediently while Geordie eases in and catches up a lamb with the looped handle of his crummack. He checks it out; the ewe grates loudly, a stammering ‘He-e-e-e-e-y!’ of disapproval. She stands her ground and faces him; crossly she stamps her neat little front hooves, first one and then the other. He gives her lamb back, placing it gently on the cropped turf. It runs to its mother and immediately suckles, tail a-shimmer like a ribbon in the breeze. Geordie is a primary food producer, although I don’t think he sees himself or his hill sheep as competing with anything much, except perhaps the weather.
Most of the competition was over long ago. With fire and axe men cleared this land from climax forest, using the timber and burning the brush, exposing the fertility of the forest soils to the sun and the rain. Grasses rushed in. With competition eliminated, those colonising plants had the light and the nutrients to themselves. Pasture flourished and those long-forgotten men and women thought it was good. They planted their meagre crops and tended their animals here for thousands of years, keeping the forest at bay and slowly but systematically removing the unwelcome competition from wildlife such as deer, wolves, wild boar and bears. They went to bed with their bellies full and slept soundly at night. There is no doubt who was winning their game of King of the Castle.
But competition never sleeps; it is built into the very spiral of the DNA double helix. Like love and hate it is built in, a part of us all. Just as tribal societies all over the world persistently fought among themselves for the land and its resources and the security and the options for living that came with it, so did the Highland clans. That pressure never lifts. Even now our new Scottish parliament is fingering the legal rights of those who own the land. At least in this glen we no longer kill each other.
Unconcerned about land rights or food production, and also with his belly full, Ralph Waldo Emerson could afford to wax lyrical about the woods:
I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.
In his darkest dreams it can never have occurred to Emerson that, by exactly the same process as Geordie’s patch of Highland hillside was shorn of its forest, his own Massachusetts woods would soon be almost entirely cleared. Nor that within the span of just two human lives – little more than one hundred and seventy years – the human population of the USA would be approaching 300 million and the world 6.45 billion, with such patches of wilderness (mostly deserts) that are left teetering on the very margins of ecological viability. Suddenly his question seems acutely relevant. To what end is nature now? And what if the Hokey-Kokey is what it’s all about?
Geordie returns to his Toyota pick-up. I watch it bump away down the track; Tam stands in the back, head out at the side, tongue lolling and ears flapping in the wind. He has done his rounds; for now the competition seems to have lapsed, the lambing is going well, the sheep are okay. I walk on.
If I’m honest, I don’t really like sheep. The Highland hills have suffered badly from overgrazing since the old cattle economy ended in the early nineteenth century and the Highlands’ agriculturalists rushed into sheep. Wool profits and hill sheep fortunes have waxed and waned like a tide for two hundred years, but they have never gone away. Throughout the twentieth century the crofting world of small-scale agriculture seems to have pivoted around the sheep as its principal source of revenue and employment. It has spawned a sheep culture of its own, which is immediately evident to any traveller through the crofting counties: bare hills and close-cropped sward, lambing pens, dry-stone fanks, wind-tanned faces, quad bikes, collies and wool sacks hanging from their summer gallows. Yet I have come to respect those who have given their lives to caring for their livestock; those who never complain about the long, unsociable hours, the foot-slogging toil, the driving rain and sleet or the summer midges; all those who fiercely defend crofting as a way of life, regardless of whether it makes economic sense or not. I feel an empathy for Geordie and his black-faced ewes – ‘blackies’ – and their leaping, gambolling, bleating progeny, scattered across the hill like currants in a bun.
The trail takes me up the burn and through the spruce plantation to within a few yards of the old pine where the hoodie is perched. He is alert and wise to human movements. He has watched Geordie come and go – they both have. Hoodies know the range of a shotgun, the shape of a rifle. They know they are hated and that they are also dependent upon man’s activities to raise their young. They could choose to live safely high in the mountains where contact with man would be minimal, but life up there would be tougher. Without the constant food supply provided by farming and crofting they would have to work harder, compete more, defend a larger range, and, like the great
