The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy

  At Camusfeàrna itself I began studying its economy, and realized that the questions of transport and communication lay at the heart of all our problems. To buy in bulk and to store in bulk was the only possible solution. Food, whether for humans or otters, was costing us many times its face value because of the necessity to buy hurriedly and in small quantities, often from great distances. I have used the simile earlier; it would apparently cost little to live in an Antarctic weather station – but, living there, the moment one tried to establish daily or even weekly contact with the outside world the cost of living would be greater than that at any five-star hotel. Because practically every telephone call necessary to my function as managing director of a company in distress was a trunk call, and often a protracted one, and because some of our temporary employees would often hold interminable conversations with their girlfriends hundreds of miles distant, the telephone bill itself became a major problem, and one which I could do little to solve; if the employees were denied the right to use the telephone they would leave, and if they left I should not have time to write.

  But on the transport and supply side there was an obvious remedy and I began by buying deep freezes that could contain enough food both for animals and humans for months at a time. This, though it represented an almost final drain upon my private resources, did temporarily solve a major problem.

  It is perhaps worth mentioning, for any improbable others who might somehow find themselves in the same situation that, though at Camusfeàrna we were surrounded by natural food of all kinds – shellfish ranging through cockles and mussels to oysters; fish of many species; edible fungi and much else – the average adolescent will not eat any food to which he has not been brought up. The situation is almost parallel to that obtaining in primitive Muslim cultures, in which, for reasons long forgotten, some birds, beasts and fishes are ‘unclean’, while others, so alike as to be almost indistinguishable, are lawful food. I remember being sent out in the marshes of Southern Iraq to shoot for the pot because we had nothing to eat; the majority of birds that passed my way were of a species of wader called godwit, and I shot as many as I could. When I returned with my bag it was sharply and vocally divided into clean and unclean; there were two species, the bartailed godwit and the black-tailed godwit, and one (I forget which) was not clean food. The extremely unpalatable pigmy cormorants and African darters, were, on the other hand, clean, and I was reproached for not having killed them.

  Time and time again I tried to explain to some new temporary employee at Camusfeàrna that when he had been new born he had liked only his mother’s milk and subsequently what food she served him after he was weaned; that to survive in the world one had to adapt oneself to new foods that were habitual to the people among whom one was living, but always to no avail. Food had to be ‘as mother made it’ (usually, it turned out, from tins) and its provision at Camusfeàrna was extremely expensive. Gastronomically, the adventurous spirit attributed to the British was completely lacking; we were surrounded by free food that no one would eat, but which would have been very costly in more sophisticated society. (I remember a Greek sailor on my brother’s yacht being offered a little vol-au-vent of caviare and being asked what he thought of it. He replied that the pastry was excellent, but he didn’t like the ‘black stuff in the middle’.)

  All this struggle was paper and telephone work; the physical target I had set myself, some sort of rejuvenescence – and above all the exhilaration of contact with the elements and the natural world, that had formed so great a part of my life – was steadily receding, for there just did not seem to be time for physical exercise. I was losing the battle on both fronts, although like Queen Victoria I was not interested in the possibility of defeat; I believed that it simply did not exist.

  I had my minor trivial triumphs in the economic field. Because our mail was not delivered to Camusfeàrna but to a wooden box on the roadside at Druimfiaclach, two and a half miles away from us by jeep track, the daily collection of letters was costing us a small fortune in petrol and mechanical deterioration – a mild word to use of, say, broken axles and half-shafts. I applied to the Post Office for subsidy, and was refused. I, in turn, refused to take no for an answer, and at the end of an impassioned correspondence I was awarded £100 annually for collection of mail for Camusfeàrna and for the old croft across the field. With this and many other economies effected in the whole management of the establishment I had no real doubt that I could make the place viable once more.

  But I felt the absolute necessity of occasionally getting far away from that desk at which I sat for something like twelve hours every day, trying to give six to the writing of a book and six to company management, eating snack meals and ending each day too tired to talk. Though the sporting tradition and the blood-thirstiness of my youth had largely deserted me (why is fishing so widely considered a respectable blood-sport and shooting in any form so despicable? – I suspect here an identification with weapons used against man, and that if man-hooking was part of warfare there would be an equal outcry against the patient angler) I accepted in October an invitation to stalk at a distant deer forest. This had been one of my major hobbies in the past, and I felt that – if I were still physically capable of the tremendous effort involved – it might prove to be the tonic I so badly needed.

  It was. The days that I spent on the hill, in worse weather conditions than it is easy to visualize, gave to me a feeling of complete and utter release, of a unity with nature that I had long lacked at Camusfeàrna.

  One afternoon especially, though it was bloodless enough to satisfy the most squeamish, is fresh in my memory as I write.

  From where I stood on the hilltop, with the wet wind tearing in great gusts at my face and sodden clothing, I could see no further than a radius of twenty yards into the surrounding mist. The abyss below me to my left, a two thousand foot fall of scree and rock-face and straggling heather, was filled with moving grey-white cloud; here on the bare summit of the huge ridge, where all that grew underfoot was lichen and mosses amid granite chips, small ragged clouds, darker than the mist that covered all the hilltop, came streaming up out of the great blanketed gulf; they sailed by swiftly and low overhead and were gone into the dimness that covered all. The only sound was the rushing of the wind as it broke and scattered the drops of ever-falling rain.

  Suddenly, from far away, from the hidden hill-face beyond the gulf, borne thin and clear on the wind, wild and elemental, came the sound that during all the many years I have spent among the red deer of Scotland, in their aloof tempestuous territory of rock and mist, has never lost its fascination for me – the voice of the stag in rut. It begins low and throaty like a bull’s roar, then hollows out to a higher, dying cadence, that seems to hold at the same time challenge, despair and frustration. I stirred to that desolate music as I stirred to the whip of wind and rain, to the ice-cold cling of my drenched clothing, to the hard ache of long unused muscles that had climbed from the infinitely distant floor of the glen below. With the water running down my neck and spine all the way to water-logged shoes, with the cold so bitter that I was conscious of my own shivering, I felt an actual buoyancy, an uplift of spirit. This was my world, the cradle of my species, shared with the wild creatures; it was the only world I wanted, and I felt that I had no place at a writing desk.

  In these primeval situations man the hunter reacts to unexpected sound as does man the hunted – instantaneously. Suddenly, from no more than fifty yards away, from just inside the encircling mist, came the same wild voice, magnified by my loss of vision to a nearness, an immediacy, that set my heart hammering and my eyes straining; the instant drop to a prone position was atavistic. (There is, I have always found, something revitalizing, re-energizing, in this contact between hands and body and the small growth of the mountain earth.) Wind and cloud whined past my face, but borne on them now was the strange, elusive, pungent smell, musky and sour-sweet, of the rutting stag.

  In the edge of the mist shapes without
apparent context formed and re-formed. A tuft of heather, only yards away, assumed the aspect of a far-off wooded crest, a whitened, weather-worn double heather-stem took on the shape of the distant antlers of an archetypal stag.

  I began to crawl forward, wet belly to wet heather that changed after a few yards to soft black peat, relic of vegetation rotted a million years ago, and the dark paste was thickly packed beneath my finger nails. The smell of the stag grew stronger.

  With tremendous impact now his voice came again, so near to me that it was I who was afraid, returning in that moment to the dim red dawn of our race when man was both hunter and hunted. In exactly the same instant I saw his horns before me, indistinct but twenty times the size of the impostor heather stems, and from the corner of my right eye I saw simultaneously the ears of a hind, blurred by the mist, but so near to me that I could have touched them with a fishing rod. I was right in among the deer, and the wet, stinging wind was whipping at my left cheek, so that my scent must have missed the hind’s nostrils by inches rather than by feet, but she was still unaware of my presence. The cloud which lay on the hilltop began to thicken and whiten, and the stag’s horns became intermittently invisible, but when he roared again the sound seemed even nearer than before. I slipped the leather foresight protector from my rifle, and lay with my chin pressed to the ground, the wet woodwork clammy in my palms and my teeth beginning to chatter.

  The small, tattered black clouds still raced by low overhead, forming a ceiling, so that one felt as if in a small fog-filled room, crowded with invisible inhabitants. Then, driven by the wind, an eagle swept low out of the speeding clouds, so low that as he saw me the rasp of air between the great pinion feathers of his wings as he sheered off was audible even above the din of the gale and the rain. He tilted upwards and away from me and was at once lost in the clouds. But the violent sweep of those vast wings as they banked not ten feet above me must have set up some momentary shift in the direction of wind current, for the hind was suddenly towering dimly over me. She was not more than fifteen feet away, but she looked as though seen through frosted glass. She gave one grunting, exhaling bark, and faded quickly into the murk.

  With the deer gone, I was left upon the clouded hilltop with the light going, soaked and with the almost horizontal rain cutting to my ribs, and five miles to walk home in the dusk, but I was content. Here, perhaps, I was beyond the range of the rowan tree.

  10

  Hounds and Hares

  I went back to the paper war at Camusfeàrna, and in November I returned to hospital at Inverness for the abdominal operation I dreaded so much. I left Camusfeàrna with a reasonably calm mind, for my literary commitments were fulfilled, the lighthouse mortgages now seemed certain, and the deep freezes were full of food for dogs and humans and fish for otters.

  I was back at Camusfeàrna within forty-eight hours. The X-rays had shown the ulcer to be completely healed, and the surgeon said he could find no excuse whatsoever for operating. At that moment I felt that the tide had turned on both battle fronts, and that victory was in sight.

  Although paper work had now become my daily routine, I had one more venture that autumn into the outdoor world that meant so much to me. For three years I had owned a vast deerhound called Dirk (the replacement of a predecessor by the same name, who had met a tragic death by drinking petrol) and in September I bought for him a mate, a bitch called Hazel. Both were, by deerhound standards, past their prime, for they are a short-lived race – past their prime, that is to say, either for coursing or for breeding, and by purists the former is considered the criterion. However, when I bought Hazel I was invited to join that select body the Deerhound Club, and to bring both hounds to the annual coursing meeting in the central Highlands.

  I accepted, and entered Dirk and Hazel; not that either of them could be expected to put up much of a performance, Dirk because he was completely inexperienced, and Hazel because as a bitch who had already borne several litters of puppies she was seemingly already too old for speed. But I was, apart from anything else, intensely curious to see for myself this sport, about whose unthinkable brutality I had received so many circulars from anti-blood sport bodies and individuals. Hares, I had been told, were literally torn slowly in half, screaming the while, by the coursing couple of hounds that overtook them. Hares do scream when in pain, and that voice is horrifying like the wailing of a distressed human infant, producing in all but the most hardened and impervious observer a feeling of identification that is nauseating. I had heard it often, not only in the man-made situations of the shooting party, but from hares taken by foxes and eagles, whose predatory instincts could patently not be banned without still further blood-letting by man. No hare can ever die of old age – and very rarely indeed does any other non-predator do so – so that the killing of a hare by a man-controlled dog rather than by fox or eagle (or by the wolf exterminated in Scotland by man) seemed to me nearer to the ecological normal than the undoubted horrors of the battery farm and the fat-stock slaughterhouse. The predators, on the other hand, do quite often die what for some curious reason we call ‘natural’ deaths – that is death from old age or disease – as opposed to violent and painful death at the hands of some species other than man.

  If these ‘natural’ deaths (and both categories must surely be accepted as natural to anyone who deplores man’s intervention on the scene) are for some reason less regrettable than the normal bloody deaths of the non-predators, then it appeared to me that the anti-blood sport societies should confine their energies to the carnivores; who, without man’s pursuit, might die of malnutrition and exposure. Most of all I felt this in the case of otter-hunting, the only blood sport (other than bull-fighting) in which the animal has virtually no chance of survival – because, unlike fox-hunting, the whole ‘field’ of human followers is actively combined with the hounds to make impossible the escape of a harmless predator that is actually beneficial to man. The fact that otters do somehow survive in otter-hunting territories, in however decreasing numbers, is a tribute to their exceptional mental abilities, which sometimes prove superior (if the animal is adult) to those of a large group of humans and hounds trained in their pursuit.

  *

  The quarry at this coursing meeting was the blue or mountain hare, which turns white in winter, and before describing those days I ought perhaps to say at the outset that although I saw some thirty or forty hares killed I did not see one that did not die instantly – ‘chopped’ by the hound’s jaws so that its neck was broken, and not once did I hear a hare utter a sound. This is in marked contrast to a hare taken by fox or eagle, and the fact merits some consideration by those who condemn the sport as I have seen it.

  This was a mixed meeting for deerhounds and salukis, and the large and comfortable hotel where the members stayed was considerably fuller of dogs than of humans. In the morning the long procession of cars drove some miles to an old farm house high on bare moorland. It was bitterly cold weather; snow lay everywhere in patches, and from a dull sky it blew in, fine and powdery, on a keen east wind. Under the orders of the red-coated judge (I am not certain whether the convention of calling red ‘pink’ extends beyond fox-hunting circles) the party spread out in a long line across the moor, each owner leading his or her hound or hounds. Jimmy Watt led Hazel and I led Dirk. Some thirty yards ahead of the line walked the slipper, attired as the judge, his two selected dogs on a special coupled leash that could be slipped at the pull of a finger. The judge had to be extremely active, for points were awarded to each hound not only for his pure speed and stamina, but for his contribution to the kill by cooperation with his partner; thus in the case of a long course over broken ground the judge must keep hounds and hare in view, and with the aid of binoculars be in a position to observe the details of the kill and the part each hound has played.