The Nature of Winter

by Jim Crumley

  The rook in Scotland is mostly a Lowlander, thanks to its preferred feeding terrain, which is grassland, cereal fields, newly cut grass in public parks and even big gardens. Invertebrates, especially crane fly larvae and earthworms, and grain, are high on the list, but rooks never learned the more-or-less-anything-goes opportunism of carrion crows, jackdaws and ravens. The farmland of Aberdeenshire is something of a hotspot, and you’ll find rookeries of almost 3,000 nests there, and a huge winter roost supplemented by Scandinavian birds. Many different species of birds flock in winter, of course, and vast numbers are not essential to create spectacle. A small birch full of goldfinches or waxwings has got enough vibrancy and colour and original design to make my day. And a dozen ptarmigan in level flight across the frozen shroud of Loch Coire an Lochain of Bràigh Riabhach will stay vivid in my memory for years. But when sixty thousand rooks take to the air at once and darken the sky and terrify your ears as if all the pipe bands of hell had struck up at once, then you are watching one of nature’s truly great and truly inexplicable works. You watch, you listen, and your mind grows numb around a single question: what’s it for?

  But, of course, not every one considers such an eruption of birds as a wonder of nature. If you happen to be the farmer whose fields are in the path of the bird-lava as it descends, you have a different word for the rook. The printable version is “pest”, for a winter rook roost on the march has a capacity to destroy young plants on a scale that is both impressive and – for the farmer – potentially disastrous.

  Never having farmed, I don’t know what the solution to that is, although it has always seemed to me that shooting out a rook’s nest is one of life’s more pointless acts of folly. But there have been endeavours in the matter of killing rooks on such a scale that they sound more like the campaigns of ancient Greek heroes – even Greek Gods – than anything even tangentially connected with agriculture. One of the most famous episodes in the history of rooks concerns one of the Earls of Haddington – or at least of his East Lothian estate workers – who, between the years of 1779 and 1793 killed 76,665. It is another of those improbably precise figures that punctuate the annals of some of natural history’s more unnatural backwaters, and the answers to why the number is so precisely recorded, and what was so important about that particular span of fifteen years, have not been handed down with the numbers. I’m suspicious of all such routinely regurgitated accounts, but if you work on the no-smoke-without-fire theory, you will at least go along with the notion that here was a feat of rook-killing worthy of a Zeus, an Atlas, an Adonis, or even a Nemesis. The other conspicuously missing piece of information is whether or not it made any difference. It could just be that, in 1794, the Earl of Haddington abandoned his estate’s rook-killing policy on the basis that it was a variation on the theme of farting against thunder.

  Notwithstanding the earl’s little local difficulty, it is undeniable – to a nature writer at least – that we would do better to accept the rook’s often mesmerising contribution to the Lowland landscape of Scotland, to learn to live with and admire that winter eruption in our midst like a black fireworks display, to turn our finer feelings and an appreciative eye on nature’s way of manipulating the landscape, whatever we as a species may want to do with it. Sooner or later, floods, wildfires and volcanoes go quiet and give us peace and time to rebuild until the next time. It’s part of the price we pay for sharing the planet with all of nature’s tribes. Sometimes it’s just good to acknowledge that in addition to the many achievements of our species, we are still bit-part players in nature’s greater scheme of things.

  And if you ever wondered about the origins of the expression “bare-faced cheek”, which we are apt to think of as the most audacious of human qualities, consider the young rook in his second year when he moults away his facial feathers, leaving that grey-white bare face that is the badge of all his tribe. The first bare-faced cheek of all, then, was the bare-faced cheek of the rook. So we’re probably related. But we still sing better than they do.

  * * *

  Suddenly the glen bursts free from its straitjacket of spruces into an open, sloping arena garbed in well-spaced, hand-planted, young Scots pines. You can tell at a glance which one nature prefers and I almost never disagree with nature. Sunlight and snowlight smite you in the same instant and with an almost physical force, like benevolent winds. Waters pour down through mountain walls, churn and foam over falls, gather in the floor of the glen into common cause and head for Callander, which lies smoking frostily far below in the middle distance over your shoulder, beyond the spruces. All this I have drunk in greedily like one demented with thirst, thirst for high, bright, airy, wild places where ravens cavort and cough and chuckle in the blue-white airspace. For as long as I can remember, I have been that demented man.

  It may only be February, but the ravens are already stroppily territorial, insufferable neighbours as usual, diving down at the head of a trotting fox on a dead-straight mission with his mate at its far end, roughing up a passing heron (which showed a surprising turn of speed in response), and generally making a spectacular nuisance of themselves. It seemed as if only I, of all the glen’s creatures that day, was enjoying their presence.

  There was so much light. The sun bounced off the high snow slopes above about 1,500 feet so that the male raven flashed glossy shades of inky blue whenever it burst out of shadow, a thing it seemed hell-bent on doing again and again in a series of rapid, turbulent circles from the lee of the darkest mountainside out into the open glen, each circle punctuated with hoarse, falsetto guffaws and short upside-down sprints, and swoops and climbs of such fluid grace and accomplishment that they flowed seamlessly into each other and levelled out again at the same circling height, a frenzy of deliberately eye-catching histrionics.

  Somewhere nearby was his mate, watching in admiration (hopefully in admiration, otherwise what is the point of so much gleeful nonsense?) or pointedly fussing over the nest with her back turned, the subtext of that posture being that it is a fair distance from the corrie headwall to the nearest source of twigs, and further still (this being another Commission estate and therefore sheep-free) to find enough wool to provide a lining snug enough to thwart late-winter’s blast. And time was marching on, and proper spring was waiting in the wings.

  A kestrel was working the sunlit side of the glen, a shimmer of copper a-tremble on an airy stance, fan-tailed, black wingtips working sleekly in tandem with the wind, the head-down hunter of a nature writer’s dreams and a short-tailed field vole’s nightmares (it does occur to me from time to time that my presence in a wild landscape is at odds with almost everything else that moves there). It began to descend by jerky flights of uneven steps and landings, a pause on every landing, until it was no more than a dozen feet above the tops of the nearest pines, eyes intent on the slightest waver of mountain grass that might mean a vole losing its nerve and breaking cover.

  Ravens do not approve of kestrels in this glen or anywhere else. The circling game that had been drifting in and out of the shadows and in and out of my mind, was suddenly abandoned in pursuit of a higher purpose. With wings half closed, the raven made a missile of itself, aimed itself at the kestrel and headed down a shaft of sunlight at speed, the archetypal hun in the sun. It was closing fast when the kestrel crash-dived feet-first into the grass. The raven pulled out a yard above and powered back up into the air, back-flipped at the end of its upward curve, completed the 360-degree roll with a second right-way-up flip and dived again. The kestrel saw it coming this time and sped away over the corrie floor, dodging through the pines more like a hawk than a falcon. The raven abandoned what had suddenly become a pointless pursuit, if indeed it ever had a point in the first place. It is often harder with a raven than any other bird to make out the blurred line between pointed aggression and pointless high-jinks-for-the-hell-of-it. It rose again in a long curve that took it back into the lee of the mountain then straightened out into a shallow climb aimed directly at the nest crag, where
it landed and vanished among overhangs, boulders and shadows.

  A bruise-coloured cloud was bearing down on the glen and the corrie out of the north-west, the unambiguous shade of snow in the offing. It announced itself with a series of icy flurries that soon thickened into draped curtains, curtains that hung in loose grey folds all across the headwall, yet the sun still shone and a species of airy sorcery began to transform the corrie’s highest reaches. I put the binoculars on it just to watch the effect of the snow’s dance among sunbeams, and slowly a snowbow began to arch palely across the whole headwall.

  It seemed to have proved too much of a temptation for the ravens, for they suddenly appeared together high above the nest crag from where they charged the arch of the snowbow with a black counter-arch of their own. From my unique vantage point it was as if they had set out to burst the multi-coloured arch apart, to put a black breach in it, for there was a moment, as vivid in my mind’s eye now as it was in the flesh, when the two birds, not a yard apart, were a blaze against the bow’s bands of pale colour, so that it looked for that instant as if they had broken it in two. And once was not enough. They repeated the manoeuvre from different heights and angles five times, and every time they dived down in a curve, and if they were not mimicking the glorious curve of the snowbow I don’t what else they could possibly have been up to. Each time they flew down, they burst the bow apart as I saw it, but of course the bow would be advancing before them as they flew, so they could not know they were having that effect. But it did look as if they knew they were mimicking the downward curve of the bow.

  SNOWBOW AND RAVENS

  There, where the bow crouched

  between the forest and the falling snow,

  so low it failed to touch the sky,

  there, two ravens clad

  in slicked-back glossy blacks, unfurled

  their line astern attack that burst apart

  the pale and the bright arcs, victory-rolled

  and tally-ho-ed on down the valley,

  where, shouting loutishly,

  they failed to see the snowbow

  heal itself behind their backs.

  The snowcloud smoored the sunlight, and the snowbow withered, faded away to that absolutely untraceable nothing that only tricks of the light can achieve, the flakes thickened and the snow began to reach down into the very depths of the glen. I edged into the lee of a rock to wait out the shower, for already I could see the far edge of the cloud where the sky was pale in the north. I wondered where the ravens went.

  Then “Kruuk!” said a rock about twenty yards away, and there was a raven sitting on it that was not there seconds before, yet I had not seen it arrive. For perhaps two minutes I watched the snow touch down and melt on the bird’s head and back, for it had turned to face into the wind and the direction of the falling flakes and with its beak pointing straight upwards, an attitude I had only ever seen once before – in whooper swans. The raven held that pose dead still until the snow stopped, and the irresistible conclusion was that it was enjoying the effect.

  As the snow relented and the sun resumed, the raven shook itself like one emerging from a trance, scattering melted snow in droplets in a wide circle, croaked a second croak, leaned out into the wind on wide wings and lifted off into a low, slow glide like a hunting eagle, then curved out towards the middle of the glen again and surged forward into a shallow climb back up towards the nest crag and at once it was joined in the air by the second raven. For those two minutes I must have had two ravens perched within a few yards of where I sheltered, but I had not seen the first one arrive and I never knew the other one had been there at all.

  There are salutary lessons at your disposal every time you go out into nature’s company. This is a glen I know as well as I know anywhere. I know what to expect when I get there, and every time I leave again, what I take away with me is the lesson offered by what I did not expect. There is an intimacy at work between those creatures that live their lives here through every hour of the day and night and every season of the year. And in addition to the knowledge of the place that I have accumulated over the years, I also know this – that it does not amount to a thousandth part of the knowledge that lives on in the bird-brain of a raven. And if I live to be a hundred and I am still capable of walking up here, it would never once have occurred to me to play a game with a snowbow.

  But my mind was bright and crackling with vivid images as I headed back downhill into the valley of the shadow of the spruces. An unkindness of ravens . . . whoever thought that one up was an idiot.

  * * *

  It was that hour of a midwinter afternoon my mother and her parents would have called tea time, which is to say any time after about a quarter to four. And for a quiet hour in an empty house I was sitting in my living room writing with a fountain pen in my hand and an A4 notebook in my lap. There are very few things in life I enjoy more or engage with more deeply than that wholly organic wet-ink-and-paper journey to the source of word-making. I had reached a bit of an impasse at the table where I usually work in the next room. So I switched off the laptop onto which I had been transcribing some handwritten notes, gathered up my thoughts and my notebook and pen, and migrated to a sofa to try and unfankle the knot in the only way I know how, which is by hand.

  So I wrote by the soft light of a single table lamp, which was just about enough. I sat with my feet up so that I faced the bay window. It doesn’t have what you might call a view, just a patch of sky above a dense thicket of trees and scrub, all of it constrained by the diagonal rooflines of two different houses across the road, so that the space between them is a wide inverted triangle. The thicket climbs a steep bank above a small burn that is unseen from the window. The trees were completely dark, unfathomable at that hour. They grow in two tiers, the thickly crowded bushy ones just above the burn, then the taller and more spaced out trees at the top of the bank where the sun can get at them. In midwinter, their bare branches are etched against the sky.

  For much of that hour, then, I had been unconscious of the world beyond the window. My eyes, like my heart and mind, followed the pen’s smooth journey across the page, the slow stitching of a word garment the page will wear for as long as the notebook survives. I am a relentless chucker-out of things, so we are not talking about immortality or archives here. It will be lucky to survive a year.

  I made progress. The knot began to loosen. Then something caught the corner of my eye and I looked up. There was a new moon high up in the window, not only that but the space below the moon and above the trees was full of jackdaws flying from right to left across the window in a ragged but more or less constant procession of squadrons from a handful at a time to fifty or sixty at a time. Their destination was obvious. A mile away in that direction is the rookery wood, part of which serves as the jackdaws’ winter roost.

  That midwinter-to-late-winter “tea time” hour embraces the last of the light and it embraces jackdaws. It has become my jackdaw hour too, for they have more or less ritualised the procession. The flight is never less than playful. Sudden scrums break off from the mainstream, run through a few manoeuvres of roughhouse aerobatics, then rejoin the general southward progression towards the wood.

  For the moment then, the writing hand was still, and I watched the window’s meagre ration of sky. In its lowest understorey it lured a yellow tint, which crept across the window from the sunken sun in the south-west. It spread and intensified over a few minutes, firing up the light behind the bare branches. But it faded as the moon brightened, and that higher band of sky eased away from that palest of pale blues (a shade which momentarily recalled the day-long shade of the snow on Beinn a’ Chrulaiste; it belongs exclusively to late winter and no other fragment of nature’s year) to an almost colourless silver. Considering it was my living room window and a quiet street on the edge of Stirling, it was briefly and surprisingly beautiful.

  And all the time until the sky was truly black, the jackdaws sped by, and in my head I supplied the soundt
rack that never lets up when jackdaws are on the move, and which sounds like ricocheting bullets in a good western film, or so I have always thought.

  Then, at the darkening, a star came and pinned itself to the sky just to the right of the moon, and that changed everything, for suddenly my mind’s eye was not seeing a skyscape that had just emptied of jackdaws but a work of art. For such a moon and such a star in just such a juxtaposition were the most recurrent motifs in the works of George Garson, a device which was in turn his own homage to one of his artistic gods – Samuel Palmer. For his 70th birthday, his wife Jean had somehow found a small Palmer etching, a rural landscape with a crescent moon and a star, and for those last ten years of his life, he kept it more or less within touching distance.

  In my own family, such a moon is known affectionately as a Garson moon, for it adorned his letters, cartoons, cards, hasty sketches, one beautifully worked large pencil drawing, finished paintings, and one small slate mosaic, and in one way or another his love of the very image that now stole into my window touched us all.

  I don’t have tea at what my mother used to call tea time any more. But sometimes it coincides with the end of a long writing shift and I pour a small whisky. As it happened, that tea time of the jackdaws and the moon and the star was one of those whisky moments. The whisky happened to be Orcadian, which was accidentally and happily appropriate, and the water I splashed into the glass came from a plastic bottle I had filled from the snow-fuelled burn in the raven’s glen under the mountain. I raised my glass to the ghosts of Salmuel Palmer and George Garson, to the free-flying tribe of jackdaws, and to the sense of well-being I recognised when all three decided to drop in on me unannounced one late afternoon at the end of winter.