vagaries of climate and season. Their presence here is a calculated decision; a risk assessment perpetually grinds inside their black, angular skulls.
For a while this pastoral scene is idyllic. The birds sing; a buzzard wheels overhead, lazily spiralling higher and higher with the barometer. The sky is ribbed with the mackerel cirro-stratus of incipient high pressure. I see the hoodie’s head tilt sideways as it eyes the buzzard, assesses the threat and weighs up the competition. It cries out: three rasping calls as rough as scraping your exhaust pipe on a stone, as if to alert its partner still back there on the boulders overlooking the slope. All hawks are a threat, even to these finely tuned predatory villains.
I’m close to the loch now. The drinking water nonsense is still fizzing in my head. I wander closer, almost as if I have to check out the colour for myself. If I’m not careful that letter could spoil my day. I must think like Emerson, be aware of ‘the perpetual presence of the sublime’. It works. These eight acres of cloud-reflecting sky are as close to sublime as I’m likely to get today; I never tire of the surprise that greets me as I top the rise and see over the dam for the first time.
From the east the loch is sheltered by the woods. In these conditions the surface immaculately mirrors the world in which we live. It has sun and clouds and woods brimming to its shores. Birds trace through and the ospreys and herons draw wide arcs around its rim. Over the other side, near the marsh and where the water lilies are surging upwards from their long winter sleep, my friend and neighbour, Pat MacLellan, is fly fishing, although, like me, he comes for the escape not the catch. (‘Don’t know what it is, John, but those damn trout just seem to laugh at me.’) I see his rod and cast whip elegantly back and forward in double show. The green hull of his rowing boat is precisely replicated beneath him, and through my binoculars I can see his khaki baseball cap shimmering gently, a perfect upside-down image in the glowing water. We wave to each other and I turn away smiling. Pat always makes me smile.
As I walk away from the dam I see that the hoodie on the pine has gone. Something chills deep down inside my guts. I know it wasn’t me that put him off. We had eyed each other up, that hoodie and I, and passed on. I didn’t rattle him, nor, then, for all his reputation, did I have good cause to suspect him of any imminent foul intent. I leave Pat to the laughing fish he almost certainly won’t catch (although, astonishingly, he holds the loch record!), and head back down the trail to the field edge. Up with the binoculars to check out the other bird in the boulders: not there. Now I know they’re up to no good.
To gain a vantage point I have to head uphill again to a spur that overlooks the loch and the pasture. It is steep and I have to push hard against gravity for fully ten minutes. At the top I’m out of breath and can’t hold the binoculars still enough to scan the broad grass slopes in front of me. I rest. The land is quiet. Nothing seems to have changed. The hoodies have gone, just vanished. I’m suspicious, but, fears temporarily allayed, I perch on an old log while the pounding in my breast subsides.
On the very edge of hearing, a cry as thin as tissue peels away from the bright grass slope like a sliver of paint from a barn door. I am not even sure I heard it. In a broom bush beside me a willow warbler takes over, claiming the morning in a long cascade of descending notes. I love him but I wish he would shut up. I clap my hands and he’s off in a flicker of lemon tea. I hold my breath. The cry comes again, weaker, if that is possible, but higher pitched and so edged with pathos that I know my instincts were right.
I vault the fence and run out into the short grass. Two ewes start away from me, tails bouncing. Their strong lambs dash in behind them, heading away down the hill. In front of me, still a hundred yards out, is a small glacial terrace that runs across my vision in a low ridge concealing some dead ground. It seems to take an age to get there. As I top the rise I feel that low-slung clawing again in my abdomen. There is dirty work afoot and I am sure of it. But there is nothing: no lambs, no ewes, no hoodies, nothing – just a cropped green emptiness nestling in a Highland hollow on a May morning. I feel a little foolish.
As I turn to walk back down the slope the cry comes again. It is close, so close that I have failed to see its source almost beneath my feet. There, just a yard away, its outline blurred by a pale clump of last year’s grass, is a lamb. It is tiny, lying with its back to me, so weak that it can barely lift its head. I realise straight away that it is the twin of one of the stronger lambs that ran off with its mother as I vaulted the fence. Ewes with twins are often bad mothers, abandoning a weakling lamb if it can’t keep up, favouring the strong with milk so that the weakling gets steadily weaker. If the shepherd isn’t quick to catch up all three and pen them so that the weaker twin can get its required quota of colostrum and first milk, it is certain to fail. On his rounds this morning Geordie saw the strong lamb and missed this little fellow, already failing, and the hoodies knew it. That is why they were so patient, so fixed in their stances and their watch. As usual, they were ahead of the game.
I scoop up the frail body in one hand. It is as light as a rabbit, and flabby with hollowness. Its legs dangle uselessly. It makes no attempt to resist. Then I see its bloodied face. On one side there is a bare bony cup where an eye should have been, and on the other the shrivelled remains of an eye lurks in its crater like a burst balloon. Blinded and abandoned it was bleating out the last faint strains of its imminent doom.
Like I said, you can’t impugn a hoodie crow. Whatever foul trick you think it might be capable of, you are too late. It thought of it first and acted swiftly upon its surest, most devastatingly effective instincts. The birds had gone. They had done their fell work and cleared off to wait out the inevitable consequences. What they want is a carcase; their task was to immobilise it in such a way that food for their own young was guaranteed. There is nothing I can do but end the wretched animal’s misery.
‘. . . The simple perception of natural forms is a delight . . . in their eternal calm a man finds himself,’ wrote Emerson. Not today. This particular flash of natural forms brings little delight. I’m not a primary food producer but I do know and understand the rough old rules of nature. Sublime it may be, but this morning I will give transcendentalism a miss. It’s tough out here, and it always has been. I head back down the trail. The lambs are still playing King of the Castle.
5
Dawn
. . . and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper.
– Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
June was once described to me as ‘a few sleepless weeks charged with all the desperate, procreative amperage of spring’. It is certainly true that at these northern latitudes the long hours of spring daylight banish night to a brief, twilit apology. The sun’s last stain trails below the horizon and emerges again an hour later with another name – dawn.
Dawn is the moment that sets it all a-spinning, sounds bugles, lights fuses, shifts moods and tugs insistently at the leashes of biorhythms. Dawn fires energy into red corpuscles and chloroplasts, explodes buds, fluffs out breasts, swells syrinxes with song, stretches out the incubating osprey’s wings, whispers the shadowy red deer hinds back to the moor, charges the flick in the squirrel’s tail, wafts the tawny owl back to his roost and, throwing a last glance over his shoulder, the reluctant fox vanishes into the damp darkness of his fetid lair. Dawn is a new look, another chance to tilt at the windmills of fate; it is its own alpha and omega, the exuberant manifest of hopes unknown. Dawn is the poetry of the incipient day.
By the middle of our June nocturnality really no longer exists. Bats are forced to hawk their insects in sunlight, foxes stroll and badgers scratch in the strong evening sun; both forage in broad daylight for much of what in that other long, introspective season from August right through to May is commonly called the night.
