I sit until Malcolm snores and then pad outside to the tool shed. He keeps everything orderly and clean in here, too. As quietly as I can, I pick out two spades, then I follow the stream up the gulley to find a grave site for the bear.
We bury her near a holly tree. It’s hard to find a place where the ground is not too rocky and in the end we pile stones over the grave as well as earth to keep it secure. Païvi weaves a little hoop of rushes and flowers, a mini wreath, and lays it on one of the rocks.
‘Will Malcolm forgive you?’ she says.
‘I don’t know.’
‘He doesn’t like bears.’
‘No.’
‘Madabout,’ Tanka says. ‘You need a man who likes bears.’
I nod. It’s Petr who comes straight to mind, sitting on the rock beside that forest pool, dripping. But then I think about what’s growing inside me.
Can I survive on my own? I’ve broken what Malcolm and I had. The look in his eye last night said everything. I can’t go back on it, undo it. I can’t unsee the contempt he eyed us all with. I don’t really believe what we’ve done is wrong, but it has breached some line I didn’t know was there, some boundary of the acceptable.
‘I wonder what Hansel is doing,’ Tanka says. Païvi looks up at him and he puts an arm around her.
She leans into him. ‘He needs a mate. We mustn’t give up.’
I’m crying again. ‘Here, Madabout.’ Tanka reaches out and gathers me into his hug. Païvi wraps her little arm around me, too. My friends. ‘We don’t give up, OK? We need to get Hansel a mate. We can’t leave him only free bear in Scotland, if we must set her free from Edinburgh zoo, we must.’
Through my tears I find myself giggling. I pull away from the hug and blow my nose. ‘There are some bears much closer than that, you know.’
Tanka lifts a questioning eyebrow.
‘Only a few miles that way.’ I point up the glen, past the Cromalt hills, east towards Glenmathan.
‘You’re joking? Can we go and see, please?’
‘Later, maybe. It’s really tough country. Crags and knolls and bogs. We’d need a map and compass. I’ve never been all the way up to the fenceline.’
‘I’m hungry,’ says Païvi.
‘Me, too.’ I lead the way back to the croft. It’s full morning when we get back and there’s no sign of Malcolm. A note on the caravan table says, ‘Gone home to Moray.’ The word ‘home’ stands out a mile. I scrunch the note into a ball and bin it.
‘He’s gone to cool off,’ I say to Tanka. I look in the cupboard. There’s bread, eggs, enough for breakfast. I wonder when he’ll come back. Whether I’ll wait for him.
We agree to cancel the Rock Ness gig. None of us is in the mood. Païvi makes the call, then Tanka asks about Glenmathan. We look at maps and begin, addicts that we are, to plan. I explain that I know Luke Retsil, the landowner, from the reintroduction feasibility study and we decide to pay a visit. When I phone, Luke’s at home and happy to be called upon.
We drive to Glenmathan the next day. By road it seems a great distance, all the way east to Bonar Bridge and then westwards again, up the wooded glen. At the huge security gates at the edge of the estate, I speak into an intercom and the barrier slides open with a clang. As we drive up to the big house, I point out to Païvi and Tanka the hill where I saw the bears on my first visit. As I do so, I realise it’s on the west side, in the general direction of the croft, appropriately enough.
I’m not sure how pleased Luke Retsil is to see me. It’s been a while since our paths crossed. He stretches out in his armchair as if he would rather be rowing or riding and surveys the three of us with some suspicion while telling us the story of his acquisition of the large Highland estate and the creation of what he terms a ‘wildlife reserve’ containing all of Scotland’s original predators. It’s clearly a well-rehearsed and often told story.
He begins to relax as soon as we establish that he and Tanka have mutual acquaintances in land management. They both spent several years in Poland in the post-Soviet era and worked with some of the same people on conservation of traditional hunting forests. Tanka imitates one particularly dim District Forest Officer’s insistence that beavers are only good for hats, and Luke laughs and slaps his thighs.
Having established that the Finns are friendly, he turns to me. From his questions he seems to assume I’m a government employee, and thus potentially a thorn in his side, despite my role in the bear reintroduction study. But when I mention Romania he sits up and takes notice.
‘Of course, you know Scazia!’ he says. ‘You told me last time we met. Have you seen him recently? I tried to get him to visit but he said he won’t come, said he’s nursing a broken heart as a result of some Scottish woman. It’s not you, is it?’
I hope I’m not blushing too hard. I tell him I’ve not seen Petr for a year and that I’m officially on the staff of the Trondheim Institute of Environmental Sciences, but currently ‘on a kind of sabbatical’.
He still looks a bit suspicious. ‘What did you think about the Ecological Restoration Act?’ he asks.
‘Well, obviously it was good news for lynx, but I was really gutted by how far short it fell from what we really need.’
He nods. ‘Absolutely. Toothless nonsense.’
I decide to press the point. ‘I mean, how are we going to reverse the ecological decline of the Highlands without bears and wolves to help? We’re fooling ourselves if we think stalking can keep deer destruction under control.’
Luke grimaces. ‘I quite agree.’
I know I’m starting to rant, but I can’t help myself. I have to get this off my chest. ‘I can’t believe the Parliament’s narrow-mindedness. You know they completely ignored what all the conservation bodies and most of the community-owners were saying. Even the evidence from the tourist industry was that a lot of people like the idea of big carnivores, but the toff lobby is too strong, and so we’re still stuck in twentieth century ideas of how Highland estates must be run.’
As I rave on, Luke becomes animated, sitting forward in his chair, shaking his head and nodding in all the right places. ‘It’s a disaster for us here,’ he says, ‘at least in terms of what we really want to do. It means these bloody prison fences staying like they are for the foreseeable future.’
He explains for Païvi and Tanka’s benefit that he had hoped the wolves, bears, lynx, boar and elk that he has introduced would develop viable populations that could be released further afield. Now the boar and lynx might conceivably be able to distribute further but the wolves and bears will have to remain captive.
‘And the bears in particular are doing very well,’ he says. I hope my wide grin doesn’t seem inappropriate. ‘They get a varied diet, breed well, but they really need more ground to roam. I’ve made offers on the neighbouring estates but no one’s prepared to co-operate. It’s a crying shame, really it is.’
‘What would happen if one got out?’ Tanka asks, his face all innocence.
‘Well, we can track them, of course. They’re all chipped, so we’d have to follow it and try to recapture it before someone shot it. And, of course, I’m supposed to report such an event to the authorities.’
‘And would you?’ I ask.
‘You know, since they knobbled the Restoration Bill…’ He tails off and looks out of the window. ‘Between you, me and the gatepost, what I would want to do would be just wait and see what it got up to.’
‘Let nature take its course, as it were.’
He nods and we exchange a side-glance. I feel a jolt go through me, as if permission has been granted.
‘Of course, it won’t happen, so it’s all theoretical.’
‘Is there no chance of them breaking out of their prison?’ Païvi asks.
‘Not really, to be honest. The fences are top of the range. Though accidents do happen, you know. Windblown trees and snow are the main issues we don’t have much control over, but the alarms would still go off. Look.’
He gets u
p and shows us a screen in the opposite wall. ‘This is our animal monitoring system.’ We watch the animals moving about, a scatter of blips on a map of the estate flashing as radio tags beam out co-ordinates. It’s the same system we use in Norway, and I realised I’ve picked up much more from Anja than I appreciated at the time. Luke seems impressed by my questions.
There’s a knock on the door, and a young man pokes his head into the room. ‘Sorry folks, I’ve another visitor to attend to,’ says Luke. ‘You’ll be very welcome here any time,’ he smiles as we make our goodbyes. ‘Really, please come again. It’s such a pleasure to have knowledgeable, enthusiastic people visiting – I tire of all the naysayers sometimes.’
Behind the surface ease, I see a man who has ploughed a lonely furrow for many years.
Malcolm has indeed made himself scarce. When he fails to come back for three days, I call him. He says he’s got a casual harvest job but won’t tell me where, saying he doesn’t want to see me. I hang around on the croft hoping to hear from him, thinking into the gaping space he has left in my life.
By July, I’m still officially employed (although still in suspension) by the Institute in Norway. I keep in touch with Anja. The government advisory team has disbanded, following a storm of protests and conflict between farmers and environmental groups. Anja has eventually managed to get permission for a controlled release, behind fences, of two males and two more females, at a site in the far north of the country, but everyone knows this is tokenism. Fences are fences. Anja’s project has failed in spirit, though eventually all of its official boxes are ticked.
With the political situation in tatters, the partnership project between Norway and Scotland has effectively also failed, but Anja finds some funds to pay me to complete the paperwork, so I go through the motions of reporting on the site identification process, stakeholder consultation and feasibility assessment. In the arcane language of European bureaucrats it is impossible to distinguish success from failure. In document after document I tease out endless shades of grey.
I make a couple more visits to Glenmathan to see Luke Restil, the first a brief call, for which I have the excuse of getting him to fill in one of my consultation forms. He’s one of the few landowners from whom I can guarantee a positive response to the idea of bears.
My second visit is at Luke’s request, to join a team monitoring all of the bears, doing an estate sweep, guided by the GIS, to check up that those they haven’t seen for a while are in good condition before autumn arrives. I manage to wangle to be on the northwest corner, nearest to Ben More. Luke and I ride out on the traditional grey Highland ponies called garrons. It’s a blustery day. The wind in the birches and long bracken keeps up a constant whispering, an endless stream of breezy gossip.
At the far north of the estate, we sight three bears, two females and one male. I have my camera with me and take dozens of shots of the bears in the drama of searchlight sunbeams against dark clouds. The male is big, though only seven years old. The females are both cubless; the young five-year-old female is the older one’s daughter and she has fresh scars from mating. If she has cubs in spring, they will be her first. The other, a fifteen-year-old, is one of the original releases.
Luke communicates the sighting to the rest of the monitoring team, then says, ‘We saw her earlier in the year with a cub. She seems to be alone now. We think the male killed the cub.’
‘Have they mated?’ I ask.
‘More than likely,’ Luke says. ‘It’s becoming more and more of a problem, the males killing cubs. The females don’t have the ground to get away. I’ve seen them like this before, looking out through the fence, it breaks my heart. See that craggy ground? It looks full of great hiding places, but they can’t get out there.’
I look out across the hills that lead away westwards. Over the brow are the woods I’m coming to think of as home.
‘But males killing cubs is quite normal, isn’t it?’ I say.
‘Yes, but not in these numbers, we don’t think. We think it’s the first sign of overcrowding.’ Luke shakes his head. ‘Hard to believe they’d be too successful for their own good, isn’t it?’
I wish we had tagged Hansel so we would have some idea of his movements. Instead, I’m trying to keep my ear to the ground regarding sightings, but there’s no word. Through July, nothing. The deer stalking season begins and, in August, rumours start about bear scat, full of bilberries, being seen in Glen Strathfarrar. He’s moved north, into more open country.
I live with dread for the news of a bear shot on the hill, but it doesn’t come. I marvel at Hansel’s ability to keep hidden, protected by his instinctive fear of humans, his sharp nose keeping him out of sight of walkers and stalkers.
Malcolm is about as elusive as the bear. He says he is back working at Fenwick Farm, having a busy summer, driving the monster combine harvester for eighteen-hour days, and has no time to visit the croft.
I’m hurt, but it isn’t as if I’m unused to being single – until a year ago it was my normal state and I find I revert to solo life and keep busy. Once my grant reports are complete, I’m effectively a free agent.
Spending the long summer days on my own, I get to know the ground behind the croft up towards Glenmathan with the intimacy of home. I’m drawn to that land with a tug tighter than I’ve ever felt anywhere. I carry a notebook and spend hours sketching eagles, wild flowers, red deer, a stoat, a beetle, whatever I happen upon. It feels essential to try to catch them in images. I haven’t sketched so much since school days. At nights I begin drawing out designs for panels, bringing all the sketches together into one whole celebration of the ecosystem. Always they have a bear at the centre. I create these pictoral webs of life, over and over, as if I’m attempting to cast some magic spell.
I find I like the caravan more and more. I’ve unpacked my boxes from Norway and installed some of my own things, cushions and comforts, bright colours and smells of home. It’s a bit less orderly now than when Malcolm was here, but it feels more comfortable. The nesting instinct is strong, and being alone here is fine. I like being able to eat simply, sleep early and long, get lots of air and exercise. But it is Malcolm’s croft. I know it can’t last.
I can never bring myself to tell him that I’m pregnant and our time together has become so sparse it seems no great deceit. There comes the day in August when he says he wants to see me but hasn’t time to get to Assynt.
We agree to meet for lunch in the Juniper Seed restaurant in Inverness. It’s a neutral place. We sit at a table upstairs, looking out over the River Ness, flowing past in an unseemly hurry, full to the brim. My eyes are drawn to it and tugged rightward with its current, until it disappears past the window frame. It’s either that or look at him. I let my eyes be dragged away again. When he says, ‘It’s over,’ I know that what he actually means is, ‘I don’t love you any more,’ and I realise I’m relieved. Whatever was between us withered the night Gretel died.
‘I suppose I’d better move out off the croft,’ I say.
He’s facing out into the restaurant, watchful of the other customers. ‘Doesn’t bother me. It’s your van. I don’t think I’m going back. I’ve got a place at East Neuk, one of the Fenwick farms. It looks like they’ll keep me on full time.’
I pick at the shared bowl of vegetables we’ve hardly touched. ‘But it’s your croft.’
‘Ach, I only got it because of you. I knew you’d love it there. You always liked the woods.’
‘Yeah, but…’ I think about this. ‘If I’m going to stay, I should sublet it or something, then.’
‘Can I not just sign it over?’ It’s impossibly generous of him but he clearly means it. ‘I’ll come and get my stuff. If you can sort the bureaucracy, it’s yours. I want shot of it.’
I take a deep breath. ‘Is it the Fenwick House woman, Juliana Penville-Banks?’ I pronounce her name Julie-Anna.
‘Shooli-Arna,’ he corrects. ‘She hates people saying it like that.’ He doesn’t seem remotely
surprised by my guess.
‘Congratulations.’ I just manage to bite my tongue before a sarcastic comment emerges. ‘Quite a catch.’
‘Well, it goes back a long way.’
‘Oh really?’ I stop eating. The gnocchi is too rich, anyway. ‘How long?’
Malcolm chews his mouthful of steak, cutting as he eats. Between swallowing and inserting the next chunk into his mouth, he says, ‘We’ve known each other since we were thirteen, and got engaged two years ago.’
I put my fork down. Inside it’s like a match dropped on a pool of petrol, a wall of flame. ‘Engaged? You mean you’ve been engaged to her all through this, us?’
‘Well, I suppose, more or less, yeah, but I’ve known you even longer.’
I stare at him in disbelief, burning. ‘You suppose?’
He pops another forkful of steak into his mouth.
‘What was this about?’
He chews.
‘You’re telling me I was just your bit on the side?’
He shrugs, and shakes his head, swallowing. ‘You’re not supposed to get serious with men anyway, are you? Isn’t that some sort of breach of your hippy feminist code?’
I push back my chair, and as I stand, pick up his half-full large glass of Shiraz and throw the contents into his face. I’m glad it’s a white shirt. I hear the glass shattering on to the floor as I storm out, past the other diners.
I’m due to visit Glenmathan again when I get a message from Luke putting me off. Yuri has produced a new circular, full of all the same allegations, and it seems to be doing the rounds of an ever wider audience. I wonder if Luke has been one of its recipients.
I sketch endlessly, worrying whether I’m being paranoid, or whether I should be doing something in self-defence.
One rainy morning I’m in the caravan, and check my mail to find a missive from Yuri, just for my eyes, as far as I can tell.
Dear Callis
Musical bears. Whatever next?
Bear Witness Page 25
