The Nature of Winter

by Jim Crumley

  Chapter Twelve

  A Diary of Late Winter

  Two miles west of Stirling, a discreet forest track slips away uphill from a quiet backroad, climbs and hairpins its way up the north-facing slopes of a low range of flat-topped hills. These define the valley of the Upper Forth on its southern side, the fertile flat-bottomed fields of the Carse of Stirling. Forestry operations have clear-felled the lowest slopes, and in the process they have opened out one of the most revealing insights into the fundamentals of Scottish landscape.

  Right in front of me, right in the middle of my panoramic view in which Lowlands tilt deferentially northwards towards Highlands, and exactly at my eye level about 200 feet above the Carse, two buzzards worked along the newly revealed slopes and the near edge of sunlit fields. They flew slowly in independent but constantly interconnecting circles, one sunwise, one widdershins. From time to time they called to each other, that plaint, that down-curved glissando through a minor third, kind of bluesy. Miles Davis would have liked it. And Stan Getz. Something in the languorous curves of flight and flight-call and the loosely coiled river far beyond them seemed to me to make companionable, harmonic sense, as if they were aware of each other and agreed for that tranquil and sun-smitten moment to move to a common rhythm. It amazes me how often the moods of jazz and nature evoke each other. I wonder why jazz has not made more of the phenomenon down the years. There again, any inspection of the lifestyles of jazz music’s defining stylists is not going to reveal too many students of nature.

  I homed my binoculars in on the female buzzard. For the moment, her mate had moved further east and drifted behind me towards the edge of the standing timber higher up the hillside, but she held up into the north wind, paused there dead ahead of me and hung for a few seconds, then eased out of that airy stance to draw a level figure of eight. She repeated it three times as if she was trying to scratch it deeper into a flat disc of space. Whenever her curving flight brought her round to face the hillside, she revealed herself as what ornithology calls a “pale phase” bird, her breast almost white but with a scarf-like band of pale brown. Buzzard plumage is a thing of almost infinite variations on a theme of brown and cream and off-white.

  She began to rise, resumed a circling flight, until she had placed herself on the sky just above the easternmost summits of the long arc of mountains that so defines this landscape, the unmistakable signature of the Highland Edge. She locked herself into a series of sunwise circles, five of them, wide and dead level, and not for the first time in my life I envied the buzzard’s perspective of this landscape. With her leisurely, head-down scrutiny, she knows every curve and hidden fold of the river, and with her careful level scrutiny of the horizon, she knows the pageant of mountains as I never will. At that moment she read my mind, abandoned the fifth circle and set off due west in a straight-winged glide, and as I followed her in the glasses the mountain roll call drifted through the lenses . . . Ben Vorlich, Stuc a’ Chroin, Beinn Each, Ben Vane, Ben Ledi, Stuc Odhar, Ben Venue and, most westerly of all, Ben Lomond. These are the front rank of the mountains, the ones which define the Highland Edge, the ones which signifiy to buzzard and buzzard-watcher that beyond them all is changed; there be dragons. Behind these, dropped hints of others lurk, some higher and whiter . . . Ben Chonzie, Ben More, Stob Binnein, the Arrochar hills beyond Loch Lomond including the Cobbler, Beinn Ìme, and another Ben Vorlich. High pressure had begun to build, the sky was clearing following yesterday’s heavy mountain snow then rain. The mountains still held some of the snow, but their rivers would be convulsed with meltwater. The sun was strong in the middle of the day, but with the wind out of the north, it offered no warmth.

  The buzzard wheeled far to my left and retraced her flight, going east now, the order of the mountains reversed as she flew. She came past me about a quarter of a mile out over the fields, and there her mate reappeared rising from below her and fell in with her, darker and more compact, and he led her on a wide curve of flight that leaned out against the pale gold of Sheriffmuir and the long eastward sweep of the Ochil Hills.

  South of the Ochils, two ancient volcanic plugs almost close the valley of the Forth, but the river has always plied a snaking course between them, shaping not just the lie of the land but a thousand years of the history of the whole country. The more southerly of those volcanic plugs accommodates Stirling Castle, the other the national monument to William Wallace. Both were carefully sited to be visible for many miles, from flat fields, from surrounding hills, from the mountains. It is, it has always been, a landscape to be reckoned with.

  A kestrel slipped discreetly into the airspace they had vacated. I am convinced that the kestrel’s decline and the buzzard’s new prosperity are not coincidental, that the one prospers at the expense of the other. The Carse still holds a fair number of kestrels, but the buzzards outnumber and out-muscle them and they have to work harder than ever for their living. The buzzards have even found niches inside Stirling itself, where they give the grey squirrels a hard time of it.

  This kestrel faced the mountains and the north wind. Its dialogue with the wind was always much more fluent than the buzzard’s. The sun lit it from above and behind with a fetching coppery sheen that shimmered as the bird hovered. I climbed with the track as I watched it, and at first it was above me, then at eye level, then below me, as it navigated the airspace in vertically downward intervals to a new hovering perch on nothing at all. After the buzzards, this was an utterly different approach to the same landscape, and thanks to my own elevated stance on the hillside, something of the possibilities of flight stole into a corner of my mind.

  Then, in a stacked pile of wood that was nothing more than smashed fragments of felled trees, a wren emerged from its nearest edge and perched there, blinking in sunlight (it must be gloomy inside such a woodpile). It whispered a few syllables to the wind, then scudded a few yards towards the heap’s northern end, and having risen no more than a single vertical foot, disappeared again into its woody sanctuary. That too was one of the possibilities of flight.

  * * *

  Two days later, far out among the fields of the Carse, the snow all but gone from the mountains, the river looking bloated, pools of standing water in the stubble fields, and the light in the early afternoon had a strange silvery quality. There was an alacrity in the air as if nature had tired of winter already and wanted to get on with the year. I had paused to watch two large flocks of birds that had just alighted in the same field. One was mostly the Scandinavian thrushes – fieldfares and redwings, about 300 of those, I guessed; the other was a mix of finches, yellowhammers, siskins, corn buntings, linnets, and goodness knows how many there were of them. As they fed, they seemed to establish a kind of no man’s land in the middle of the field, with the thrushes on the far side of it and the finch-sized birds closer to the single-track farm road and its fringing hedges.

  The birds were clearly nervous. They knew better than I that, sooner or later, such a gathering of so many small birds in a single field was bound to attract the attention of a predator. At every small or substantial alarm, as small as a dog bark and as large as a snorting tractor on the road, the finch flock fled to the hedges and filled the air with their voices. A shudder went through the thrush flock as they stopped to assess the threat then fed on. The finches poured back into their portion of the field and fell silent. Then there was a fox in the field.

  I saw it first just as a patch of colour in the furthest corner. There is a small wood over there, then a deep and steep-sided ditch and a fence and a hedge, and if the fox had come from the wood it must have negotiated all three. There was a thin strip of longer grass by the hedge and the fox was there, half in and half out, dead still, assessing the possibilities. It was a big field, the fox had at least fifty yards of open ground to the nearest bird. I had expected a flat-out sparrowhawk or peregrine, not this dead-slow-and-stop stalk in the long grass. But no bird flinched.

  Except one. That one was a heron of all things; it appeare
d from somewhere beyond the corner of the wood, all wings and dangling legs, homed in on the fox and screeched, the way herons do when they are discomfited by pretty well anything. The fox turned in its own length and vanished beneath the hedge. The air above the field convulsed. The finches exploded up from stubble to hedge, a low-level, high-voltage retreat. But the fieldfares and redwings rose in silence and flew in disciplined order to a pair of tall ash trees, one each side of the road, and suddenly the bare branches were thickly clustered with a foliage of thrushes. I turned back to the far corner: the heron stood precisely where the fox had been.

  Then I realised that the whole episode had been watched by a buzzard, huddled and fluffed up on a telegraph pole, and in that bulked-up form and from behind, it had the look of a crouching eagle. I decided to move on, edged the car towards the buzzard’s pole. It put up with me creeping slowly past, but as soon as I stopped it stepped off and glided down to a yard above the ground, crossed the field beyond, then rose again to another pole a hundred yards away. There it perched side-on, fluffed its feathers again, trapping a cushion of air with which to fend off the north wind, and held its wings loose and unfolded, like a compact eagle. I was intrigued because it had not flinched when the fox and then the heron and then the small bird chaos intruded on its afternoon. It didn’t even seem to be watching. Perhaps it was as simple as this: it had a specific prey species on its mind, vole most likely, and it was watching a known vole terrain (it carries that kind of knowledge the way you or I know where the good cafés are). Or perhaps it was even simpler: it was well fed, it was tholing a cold winter afternoon, and there was nothing on its mind at all.

  Late in the afternoon I edged my car down the rough access track to Flanders Moss, a regular haunt towards the south-west corner of my working territory, and a few miles to the west of the buzzard pole where the flat fields of the Carse run out and give way to wetland and forest and the land starts to curl up at the edges towards the foothills of the Highlands. The Moss used to be a reliable winter roost for hen harriers, but in the early decades of the 21st century, nothing at all about hen harriers is reliable. They still turn up, but they are few and far between. For that matter they are few and far between everywhere on the face of the land, and we have the grouse moor industry to thank for that.

  The mountains had dragged new snow showers across their south-facing slopes, but low sunlight carved an eerie wedge of yellow light across the foothills and only the foothills, for it neither glanced off the falling snow nor flooded over the wide sprawl of the Moss, which lay robed in its own mysteriously tea-shaded shadow of winter heather and winter grass. Its hundreds of watery patches and its puddles, pools and ponds reflected no colour of any kind, yet there was an unearthly beauty in its utter colourlessness, a very rare thing in nature. There were pine marten scats on the path.

  I followed the edge of a birch wood to the south-east corner of the Moss where the birches form a containing right angle. From here, the Moss offers the widest horizon in all the land of Menteith. Only lochs normally have this kind of spaciousness, but in the wider Trossachs area they are all hemmed in by forests, hills and mountains. The Moss is like a huge wheel laid flat on its tabletop of water and moss and heather and peat with only a thin “tyre” of rimming trees. The foothills and the mountains lean back and keep their distance.

  In the last of the light I climbed the reserve’s observation tower on the off-chance that a harrier or two might slip in under cover of dusk. I was just halfway up when I saw a harrier-shape through the timber spars of the tower. By the time I reached the top, it was not in sight. What I had seen was a female, which is to say it was brown, and in that light and against that bog-at-dusk background, the chances of finding it again diminished by the second. I simply scanned the land with the glasses, moving slowly from south to north and from east to west, hoping against hope of catching something which looked like a piece of the Moss that had taken flight. And that was exactly what I found, and for about twenty seconds and at the very furthest edge of reliable vision I saw its impossibly slow flight, its wingtips just inches above the ground, the white blaze at the base of its tail occasionally showing up to confirm that it was what I thought it was. Then it passed behind a screen of small birch scrub and I didn’t see it again.

  Every time I see a hen harrier out here, which is not often, or up on a quiet corner of the Ochil Hills, or above the trees at Glen Finglas, I am reassured to this extent, and this extent only: it’s one more hen harrier that has slipped through the net, one more that those who like to “manage” nature with a shotgun in one hand and a dose of poison in the other have not yet shot or poisoned or otherwise removed from the face of the land.

  * * *

  The blizzards charged eastwards across the land, leaving the mountains breathless and beautiful for a day or two. Then the temperature rose, the rains came, it grew too mild for anyone’s winter comfort . . . by the end of January it had become an erratic pattern, a predictable sequence of events. Not even the rains set in for long, and the fitful appearance of watery sunlight became a kind of default setting, so that from time to time and day after day, the sodden land was briefly ablaze where the sun bounced and dazzled from every imaginable form of standing, running and dripping water. I lived in wellies, I ploughed a four-wheel-drive furrow around the backroads most afternoons, squelched among woods and fields and foothills in search of swans and foxes, hares and deer, river otters, restless and bewildered shoals of birds; and as I ploughed and squelched I tried to piece together a sense of how nature was facing up to this too-warm, too-spasmodic winter, writing down whatever turned up.

  There was one upside to the whole chaotic mess: rainbows.

  Seared in my mind even now is a moment when I had just clambered back into the car after a long wander by the river and the discovery of a family group of six mute swans finding the swollen current hard going. There can be few stronger swimmers in the bird world than mute swans, but again and again their attempts to make headway upstream failed and the cob would urge his brood up onto their feet then into a wave-thrashing, feet-pounding, running flight on the surface of the water, and in that way they would cover fifty upstream yards before subsiding back onto the surface, at which point they were once again incapable of headway. The process was repeated again and again, while I scratched my head trying to understand why they didn’t just fly, or get up on the bank and walk. I don’t know how long I watched, but when I eventually plodded back to the car and clambered in, started the engine, edged forward from a watery verge onto the road, I was no sooner mobile than something astonishing filled the driver’s door mirror. I reversed the few yards I had just driven, grabbed a camera, and jumped out. Wedged between the bottom of the Ochil Hills and the Wallace Monument on its wooded rock was a fat lump of rainbow.

  Not only was the sun very low, but it was working on two fast-moving showers of rain about a mile apart. One consequence was a double rainbow, but the main arch was also of a double thickness. Where the pot of gold should have been, between the monument and the hills, was one of the showers, and it was lit gold. It was that point of collision between the rainbow’s double-thickness arch and the lit rain that produced that fat wedge of saturated rainbow colours, and even as I watched it, it contrived a ghostly twin image of itself.

  Then, as the gold shower moved on towards the east, it had a curious effect on the base of the rainbow, as if it was nibbling into it from the edge so that from time to time, bits of the rainbow were missing. The arch had vanished, so that there was only this leaning-over wedge towering over the monument. The spectacle was as bizarre as it was beautiful, and it produced a somewhat bizarre response, for I suddenly had the notion of a colossal rainbow-shaded tree trunk being gnawed at by a golden beaver. I stood and stared and stared, and as nature-as-sorcerer went through its paces I started to laugh at the joy and the wonder and the sheer madness of it all.

  * * *

  Snow was promised by breakfast. I had heard thi
s before on a dozen different weather forecasts, and none of them had delivered, at least not in my neck of the woods, not below about a thousand feet. I woke at four in the morning, peered round the curtains at a white street and heavy snow falling in a big wind. Oh joy. By breakfast time the sun was out of course, and although snow showers punctuated the morning they had already lost their fervour and I felt cheated again. But it was the first time in four years I had needed to select four-wheel drive to get out of the street, so that was something.

  I travelled the Carse by its wee roads, and the Ochils and all of the lower hills were white, the fields were white, the wee roads were white. The mountains were lost, still snowing up there behind and beneath those piles of grey-black clouds. Birds were on the move everywhere, homing in on the stubble fields in huge numbers. The fieldfare and redwing flock had doubled in size in a few days, likewise the masses of small birds. Everything on the ground faced into the north-east wind. Everything that flew in over the hedges would reach a point in the field where they would wheel through ninety degrees, stall and land . . . facing the same way as the rest. The feeding was conspicuously frantic, and it became clear that it was being plundered between brutal showers when the sky darkened, the wind (and the wind-chill) picked up, and everything bolted for cover. It evolved into the most restless of days. The weather was restless, the sky was restless, the birds were restless. Clouds tore along hillsides and packed themselves thicker and thicker against the mountains. The sun shone and vanished, shone and vanished. The moon arrived and stood over Stirling Castle, and vanished, and so briefly did Stirling Castle, briefly obliterated from its ancient stance, a feat which was never accomplished by English kings and Oliver Cromwell.