Yuri
I ram my phone into my bag, stow the bag in a cupboard and get out of the caravan. He must somehow know about the band’s big speaker boxes being used for smuggling bears and about my involvement. How? What else does he know?
I stomp off for a walk, taking my habitual track up through the plantation to the high point, marching until I’m breathless. At the top of the hill I wail into the wind. The Assynt mountains ranging the western horizon are mere stumps, their summits swallowed by cloud. Rain begins to spatter my face. I pull waterproof trousers out of my coat pocket and prepare for a drenching descent.
Before I’m halfway home it’s lashing down and I’m soaked with sweat on the inside and rain on the outside of my clothes. I don’t think pregnant women are supposed to do this sort of thing, but I don’t really know. I want to ask Mum, but of course I can’t. For the first time in ages, I’m grief-stricken again. I find myself tumbling into a pit of self-doubt. I’ve failed at my job, ruined my career, made a total mess of my lovelife, alienated my friends. What sort of a mother will I be? Sooner or later I’ll be arrested for wildlife crimes and then even my dad won’t want to know me.
When I limp, sodden, on to the croft, the post has come. There’s a small parcel from Norway, inside it a slim book with a card from Karl, full of good wishes.
I change all my clothes and make tea. Rain batters the caravan roof. It’s like living inside a drum.
The book, by Kathleen Jamie, is called Findings. I’m entranced. The wild rhythm of the rain suits the text. An hour later, reaching for my sketchbook, I find my tea has gone cold and the storm has eased to a finger-tapping on the roof. Outside, rain-laden trees are exuberant and lush, every leaf gleams, and dozens of birds have emerged and are hopping and flitting about in the clearing, each with its own story of the deluge.
I prop Karl’s card up on the shelf, open the caravan door, and begin to draw.
At the end of August I visit my father for his birthday. I’ve bought him a book about eagles and I’m going to suggest that we visit the nearby bird sanctuary to see if we can spot any of the golden eagle young that fledged this year, but before I’ve been home half an hour the doorbell chimes. Dad answers it, and when I hear the voice in the hall, approaching the sitting room, I spring up from the sofa and back towards the kitchen door.
If Yuri is as surprised to see me as I am him, he doesn’t reveal it with anything other than a slight pause in his tread as he steps into the room. ‘Callis, it is pleasure to see you.’ He tilts his head like a heron.
Aghast, I stay by the kitchen door. Nothing will persuade me to shake hands with the man. I want to tell him to get out. Instead, I say, ‘Yuri, what a surprise.’ Then indignation flares. ‘What are you doing here?’
Dad frowns. ‘I invited him.’
‘I came wishing my good friend Derek happy birthday, and with good news for his football club.’
‘More good news?’ Dad claps Yuri on the back. ‘Take a seat, and can I get you a dram, or a cup of coffee or tea or something?’
Yuri lowers himself on to the edge of one of the big chairs, feet together, then relaxes back into it as if it’s the most comfortable thing he’s ever sat in. ‘Coffee is perfect,’ he smiles at Dad, then sweeps his gaze round to me. I’m stony faced.
‘You couldn’t make us some coffees, love?’
It’s a relief to be out of the room, though I want to put salt or worse in his drink. I resist, make him a weak, instant brew in a supermarket mug and select the blandest biscuit from the tin for his saucer. I pour what’s left of this morning’s freshly ground filter coffee into Dad’s favourite cup with a chocolate wafer on the side. Then I go back through to the sitting room, deliver the drinks without a word and stand by the window with the sun behind me so Yuri has to squint to look my way.
‘Are you not having any?’ Dad says. He has a beseeching expression on his face, and it occurs to me that this meeting might be his idea of trying to help ‘patch things up’ between me and Yuri. I’ve never fully explained my suspension to him. He probably has no idea how vindictive Yuri has become.
‘No, I’m fine. Quite jittery enough already,’ I say.
Dad wrinkles his forehead at me. ‘Did you hear what Yuri was saying?’
I shake my head.
‘His company, you know, UPP, are going to match the funds for the new minibus for the squad, up to sixty per cent, and we know we can get the rest from the Lottery, so that’s in the bag. Isn’t that brilliant?’
‘Brilliant,’ I say.
Dad chunters on about the money already being transferred to their bank account, what a terrific sponsoring company they are, how well they understand the club’s cash-flow situation, what a help the bus will be to the boys, the hassles they have been having with the old van, and Yuri sits nodding, his obsequious smile trained on Dad, not even glancing in my direction.
Dad finally pauses to take a slurp of coffee and Yuri takes a polite sip of his. I unclench my toes, thighs, shoulders and jaw, and breathe in.
Yuri looks at me. ‘You are farmer now, I hear.’
‘No, I’m still an ecologist. And I’d be grateful if you would stop telling everyone in the environmental world about your ludicrous claims against me.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He lifts his hand to shield his eyes from the sun behind me.
‘Callis.’
I look at Dad. ‘What?’
‘Yuri’s my guest.’
‘Yuri’s trying to ruin my career.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘It is not nonsense. Look!’ I pull my phone out of my pocket, flick to the latest nasty circular about me that Stig forwarded on, and pass it to Dad. ‘That’s just one of the hate mails he’s been sending.’
He peers at the screen.
‘Open the file,’ I say. It’s the letter ‘to all concerned’, containing the usual allegations of data theft. It begins, ‘I am disappointed to find Callis MacArthur to be an untrustworthy and duplicitous colleague.’
I pull the phone out of his hands and open an earlier message, then pass it back. ‘This one’s similar. He sent it about a month ago, to everyone involved in our European project.’
Dad reads the text, then looks first at me and then across the room to Yuri, whose smile is more forced.
‘So I don’t care if he’s your special birthday guest or not, Dad, he’s a monster and he’s trying, and succeeding, to make my life a misery. I don’t know why he’s so keen on sucking up to you and spending UPP Forestry’s petty cash on your club, but if I was you I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.’
‘You use harsh words, Callis,’ says Yuri.
I snort. ‘Thief, untrustworthy, deceitful – are those not harsh?’ I turn to Dad. ‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t know what to think, love. I don’t like the look of these, but…’
‘He’s not produced a shred of evidence, you know. The Institute’s done a full investigation and there’s still nothing but his word that I stole anything. It’s outrageous. You’re outrageous.’
I point at Yuri, who shakes his head and addresses himself to Dad as if I’m not there. ‘She is avoid truth, Derek, as usual. She does not understand scientists need only truth. She stupid girl, in love with fairy story bears.’
I can see Dad bristle.
I say, ‘I do love bears, of course I love bears, I’ve always loved bears, haven’t I Dad?’
He nods.
‘And this government team role was the best job I’d ever been offered, the most exciting scientific challenge I could imagine being offered, except to do the same thing in Scotland, maybe, but you’ve had to go and ruin it all for me, make it a trial. I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but you won’t crush me, you won’t.’
‘She not understand science at all, Derek.’
‘You arrogant bastard.’ I take a step towards him. ‘Your version of science has nothing to do with reality. It is no help to any
one. You think because a task requires scientific information to be applied to an actual real world problem, like preventing animal extinction, then it is no longer rigorous.’
‘It is not.’
‘It is so!’ I realise I’m shouting but now I’ve started I can’t stop. I shake my finger at him and let all the months of frustration roar out. ‘You have some crazy idea that scientists can’t help with decision-making, and must just hide in the lab counting pollen grains. You seem to think that anything else at all is corrupt or false. Well, I think that’s just a reflection of what you are. The fact that you can only see corruption and cheating, that’s all about you. You wouldn’t recognise an honest, passionate scientific breakthrough if it smashed your front windscreen.’
Yuri blinks at Dad. ‘She is…’
But Dad’s shaking his head and in his policeman voice he says, ‘I think you’d better no’ say any more about my daughter. If you don’t mind.’ He gets to his feet. ‘I think enough’s been said.’ He bends to pick up his coffee cup, empties it and hands it to me. ‘I’ll show Yuri out.’
Tanka calls during the second week of September. ‘Hey, Madabout.’
I grin into my phone. I never fail to cheer up at that voice.
‘We’re coming for equinox. It is time for pagan ceremony to open summer fence and let winter out for play.’
I grin even more widely.
He and Païvi arrive mid-morning off the ferry in Aberdeen. I spent the night with Dad, and have borrowed his car. He looks very grey, but after a forensic examination of all my correspondence with Yuri and the papers concerning my suspension he is at least on my side on that issue. When he started on an enquiry about Malcolm, however, I couldn’t get away fast enough.
Tanka has a very heavy rucksack. I help him heave it into the boot of the car. ‘What the hell have you got in there?’
‘Traditional ceremony equipment,’ he winks. Industrial-scale hydraulic wire cutters, it transpires, when we unload at the croft.
I let Païvi and Tanka use the caravan and, leaving them to settle in, go off to pitch a tent in my favourite glade, glad for the excuse to be deeper in the woods. They feel like my woods these days and it’ll be good to sleep out here. I gather some late chanterelles, hedgehog mushrooms and a big cep on the way back to the caravan, where I find Païvi picking raspberries and Tanka padding around, scrutinising my garden.
‘You’re putting down roots,’ he says. I nod.
‘Are you living here alone now?’ Païvi asks. I nod again. ‘When is your baby due?’
I’m surprised, but somehow comforted that she can tell. ‘Is it that obvious?’
‘A little obvious,’ Païvi giggles, handing me a particularly luscious raspberry.
I pop it in my mouth. ‘February.’
Païvi hugs me and I want to sing or cry or both.
‘Are they your drawings?’ Païvi nods towards the caravan. ‘In there?’
‘The animals, yes. just some sketches I’ve been doing.’
‘They’re beautiful, aren’t they Tanka?’
‘Yeah, they are like wood carving or something, all the creatures of forest.’
‘You’re very talented,’ Païvi says.
‘You’re lovely to me.’ I’d forgotten what it felt like to have friends around.
I show them the latest message from Yuri.
‘He’s Russian, you say?’ Tanka frowns. ‘I bet it’s that new sanctuary guy, Sasha, I don’t trust.’
‘And so?’ Païvi shrugs.
‘Yeah.’ Tanka places his big hand over hers on the table. ‘They arrest us for doing good for bears. So what?’
‘It would be great publicity. Bring them on!’ Païvi chortles.
‘Don’t worry, Madabout.’ Tanka puts his other arm around me. ‘You do nothing bad.’
I know various laws concerning wildlife crime and there are no doubt many regulations I don’t know that I’ve already breached, but I stay quiet. I wonder what it takes to be as gungho as these two and wish I had it.
The next day is the equinox. I wake up in the woods early and the Finns already have a light on in the caravan. We set off just after first light. I know the area well enough now that I no longer need a map, though I carry it anyway, plus a compass in case the weather changes on us, but it’s a bright, clear morning, with a fresh westerly wind. I set a fair pace and Tanka lopes along. Païvi skips across the rough ground beside him, humming a guileless tune. We make good progress.
We stretch out our arms in greeting to a passing buzzard and laugh as a raven flip-flops above us, croo-crawing at its soaring partner. We salute a stag, not yet roaring but practising his patriarch stance on the skyline.
It’s a good eight miles to the Glenmathan fence line as the raven flies, tough going on such terrain, with no way of heading straight. We weave a circuitous route around bogs, lochans and craggy obstacles and make it to the fence by just after 2pm.
My legs are aching and my right heel has developed a blister. But it has stayed dry and for that we are thankful. I revive with food and a brew of tea, while Tanka surveys the fence, then unpacks his rucksack.
‘How you managed to carry that, I don’t know. You must be exhausted,’ I say.
‘I’m as strong as bear,’ he growls and we laugh.
‘Are those strands some kind of alarm?’ says Païvi, pointing to two threads of cable running through the fence.
‘Yes, no problem, easy to jump.’ Tanka scrambles up to the top of the fence and attaches some red wires with crocodile clips to a couple of places, then clambers down and repeats the exercise on the lower alarm wire. He lays out his kit. ‘OK.’ He grasps the cutters and grins at me. ‘You pump there, and I show you how it goes. Then you take over.’
He marches up to the fence and I start stamping on the foot pump. His cutters snip through the galvanised steel wire like scissors cutting wool. After half a dozen strands he stops and hands me the shears. I step up to the fence.
‘Watch out for spring back,’ he says. ‘Take it about halfway up. And don’t cut red ones.’
I grasp the clippers, a handle in each hand, and snip. It’s as easy as cutting dead heads off daffodils. I work my way up from the bottom, and with each snip the wires spring aside, curling backwards from the gap like a tent door unzipping, leaving a growing triangle of space. I lop away my fury at the bureaucrats, the lawmakers, the naysayers, the pessimists, the critics, the farmers, the wingers, the doubters, the fearmongers, the apathetic, all the people who have done their bit to stop the bears coming back. I cut up Malcolm’s duplicity and slash away Yuri’s accusations. I chop them all aside, and what remains is a gap in the fence big enough for a large furry animal to walk straight through.
Païvi produces a newspaper bundle from her small pack and tips it out on to the moss on the outside of the fence. A tumble of chanterelles, raspberries and rowan berries fall out.
‘Ursus!’ Tanka booms in a deep voice.
Païvi giggles. I reach into the outside pocket of my bag and draw out the bar of chocolate I intended saving for that bit of the return journey when I would be completely knackered. I snap it in half, unwrap one piece and lay it among the mushrooms and fruit. I look up into Tanka and Païvi’s quizzical faces.
‘Bears love chocolate,’ I say. ‘More than anything. They do.’
I haven’t let myself picture Petr for ages, but as the words come out of my mouth I recognise them as his and remember his daft expression, tongue out, eyes rolling, begging for a square of my bar of Divine. A shiver goes through me. Something clenches at my belly.
‘Are you OK?’ Païvi asks as I sit down.
‘Just a bit dizzy,’ I say.
Tanka is picking up the cutters. ‘We better move,’ he says. ‘Long way back.’
‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ Païvi looks concerned.
‘I’m fine.’ I get to my feet. We set off. At a high point we scour the land over the fence with binoculars. It’s Païvi who spots the bear,
the small brown shape in the trees near the fence line, coming in and out of view as she moves behind trunks and emerging further on, heading in the right direction.
‘Can we wait and watch?’ Païvi says. Tanka looks at his watch and shakes his head.
‘Trust her, she’ll find it,’ he says. It’s impossible not to believe him.
It’s much harder going on the way back with tired legs. The weather, kind until now, carries out the west coast performance for which it is so famous. Clouds muster from the sea and a squall comes galloping across the muir. Led by a chilling wind, pewter clouds unleash a cold, battering rain over us, before cantering away towards Glenmathan. I picture the bear, imagining her sensibly sheltered under a birch tree, unlike us, stumbling across snaring heather.
But as fast as the weather deteriorated, it changes again and the clouds part to brilliant blue, with sunshine slicing across the hills, beaming and blinding. We reach the back of the woods as the last sunset lights glint. Bracken glitters, clusters of wet rubies hang heavy from rowan branches and birch leaves flutter to the ground. We brush our way through the drenching undergrowth into the dusk, weary now, and still two miles from home.
Tanka and Païvi have to be patient as I lumber along, slowing them down. Somehow they remain resolutely, insistently cheery. I don’t know how they do it. I stumble, get up, slip on a rock and fall again, bruising my hip, staving my hand, and get up again.
‘Come on, Madabout, nearly home,’ Tanka cajoles.
I plod along, trying to be stoic, but shattered. I can’t understand what’s making me so feeble. Only the thought of the bear moving towards the gap in the fence buoys me up enough to keep moving. All the way home, inside my head, I’m still cutting the fence.
Dark is fully upon us when we reach the croft and I crash gratefully into the caravan, too tired for anything, but obedient as Païvi instructs me to take my wet clothes off. My bloody base layer shows the price I’ve paid for the day.
It’s the start of the worst of nights, as I part company with the last vestige of Malcolm’s role in my life. His baby, our baby, my baby has died, and all night I bleed, from womb and heart.
Bear Witness Page 26
