The Last Wilderness: A Journey into Silence

by Neil Ansell

  I first came to this area decades ago, as a twenty- or twenty-one-year-old. I had a new girlfriend, and we had uncovered a mutual ambition – to go trekking in the Andes. There was one small obstacle to our dream; our lack of resources. But this was the time of budget flights to New York, and we reckoned that once we had crossed the ocean it could cost us next to nothing. We would hitch America coast to coast, sleeping by the roadside as we went, and then we would turn our faces to the south. With a bit of luck we might even pick up some odd jobs. The idea was that we would travel without a tent or a backpack; a small shoulder bag would suffice. All we needed was a sleeping bag and a change of clothes. One change was enough, we could wash our spares when we got a chance, and could always pick up replacements; every country has clothes.

  Scotland would be our dummy run. We would test our mettle, see if we had what it took to stand by the roadside all day and camp out in all weathers. We had one person to call on during our trip to Scotland, a man who lived in one of the coastal villages and ran a fishing boat out on the sound. I can’t say he was then a friend – I had met him only once, when he had offered an invitation over a beer. He was the friend of a friend, the sort of person you always remember and turn to when you are travelling.

  When we arrived at the village, he was getting his boat set up, so we spent the day with him out on the sound. We criss-crossed the choppy waters, hauling in the gill-nets he had laid the previous day, taking out the catch, and resetting them. He was fishing for what he called crayfish. They are more often called spiny lobsters, and though they are not closely related they do look rather like large lobsters, without the fat front claws but with long whip-like antennae, and pound for pound they are worth more than any lobster. There was a by-catch of crabs, one big salmon from a net he had laid near the mouth of a river, and a couple of real lobsters. When the day’s work was done, we headed for shore with a trail of gulls in our wake. I asked our host what the crayfish tasted like. I’ve no idea, he said, I can’t afford them. They were worth too much for him to consider eating one. They would go to smart restaurants in London, he supposed, or to the Continent, where they were considered a delicacy. The crabs he would eat. He threw them in a big chest freezer in his back room; it was already almost full to the brim. Then we went to the village pub.

  At the pub, he slapped the salmon and a lobster on the bar, and the barman appraised them. These would win the three of us some bar-food and a night’s free drinking. I liked this moneyless economy. Over beer, I talked with the certainty of a twenty-year-old about the principles I had been living by; that possessions are an unnecessary burden, and that it is better to own no more than can be fitted into a single small bag. Our host smiled indulgently. Surely, he said, the problem is not the things themselves but the attachment to them. Isn’t it better to have anything you like, but to be able to leave it behind without a care?

  I wonder. I wondered then, and in a way I’m still wondering now, decades on, after all these years of sometimes living by these ideals, and sometimes being a little more relaxed in my approach, but still, always, to a greater or lesser degree. His point was well made, but I had my doubts as to whether, if I’d had my own well-appointed fisherman’s cottage, my thirty-foot fishing boat, my freezer full of crabs, it would really have been quite so easy for me to shrug it all off without a second thought, to turn away without regret, without a backward glance.

  The next morning we took to the road. We did not have an itinerary, or much of a plan beyond wanting to cover as much ground as we possibly could. Mostly we just went where the lifts led us. We crossed from Aberdeen to Oban; from the Hebrides to the Cairngorms. I remember watching puffins and grey seals off the islands. I remember a night of sleety rain when we took refuge in the waiting room of a little unmanned railway halt, and it felt like a hotel after all our nights under trees. I remember a chill night in Ullapool, where we sat on the dock and shared a bag of chips, our first hot food in days, and it felt like luxury.

  I no longer have the endurance that I had back then; I am not twenty any more. At a milder time of year I would likely still do things in much the same way, hitch-hiking and camping out, but winter was approaching and I had booked myself a week’s stay at a hotel in the village of Strontian, at the head of the loch. It was way off season, such that the locals seemed a little bit bemused by my presence, here alone. It is a very beautiful part of the world but I came here for solitude, so off-season suited me better. I was the only guest at the hotel; I had paid for the cheapest room and had been upgraded to the best room, so that I woke to a panoramic view over the loch. For just two nights another guest came to stay. She was a young fish vet from Barcelona, in the area to conduct a health check on the local fish farms. I told her that I had never met a fish vet before, that I had never even known that such a job existed.

  On my first morning I woke to perfect sunshine, yet with snow still on the hilltops. I was told that this was exceptional, that it could be the last sunny day of the year, and that it was not unknown for there to be rain every day for weeks on end, for though the microclimate here was strangely mild, such that the snow of the hills might not reach down to sea level for the whole winter, it nonetheless had a disproportionately high rainfall; hence the rainforest. I decided to strike out along the loch-side on the single-tracked road that led thirty miles west to Ardnamurchan Point. Almost the whole way was wooded, and I could look down through the tangle of branches to the glinting waters below, or up to the snowcap of Beinn Resipol that loomed over the valley. As I walked I was followed by little parties of long-tailed tits that looped through the trees beside me. Flocks of these little birds, with their tails longer than their bodies, are constant winter companions. They are not that closely related to the other tits, though they are often fellow travellers. They are always in groups, usually with other small birds. Today they were in the company of redpolls. They bob from tree to tree, one at a time, like a relay team, in constant fizzing motion, and in constant conversation. But this group for some reason seemed to be travelling in silence. Buzzards mewled above, and I could hear the piping of oystercatchers and the kraak of the ever-present herons down on the shore but not the smaller birds. About five or six miles further along the loch was a hide, nestled on a wooded promontory that looked out to Garbh Eilean, Rough Island, a small outcrop capped with trees that lies just offshore, with a fleet of rocky skerries around it that supposedly serve as a magnet to wildlife.

  The hide was well appointed, and just the sort of place I would have very happily overnighted in, back in the day. It had open slots for windows that looked straight out to the islands, and no back wall, being more of a lean-to design, but it offered enough protection against the wind and rain. It has become something of the habit of a lifetime, a reflex action, to appraise the potential of every empty shack, every ruin, every bridge, as an emergency overnight shelter. I parked myself on the bench and looked out; the hide even had its own telescope. At first I could see no sign of life, but as time passed a gathering began. A seal was swimming the narrow channel between shore and island. It seemed to be enjoying itself, porpoising, leaping clear out of the water again and again, back and forth in front of me as if it was putting on a show. Eventually it hauled itself out onto the rocks at the edge of the island.

  This was a harbour seal. Having spent more time out on the Hebrides than on these calm inshore waters, I was more familiar with the grey seals of wilder seas. The harbour seal is a little smaller than the grey, with a noticeably smaller head and shorter snout, and what seems like a permanent quizzical smile on its face. It is certainly more cheerful-looking than the rather doleful and lugubrious-looking grey. Neither is particularly common in global terms; the British population of both species forms a significant share of the world population. It is easy to think of the characteristic wildlife of Britain as being our land animals, our deer and fox and badger, and our songbirds, but what really marks out these small islands is our
vast and convoluted coastline. The large majority of the world’s gannets and shearwaters live here, for instance; birds that most of our residents may perhaps not see in a lifetime. This is our real natural glory, perched on a rock face on a wild Atlantic shore.

  Soon more seals began to follow in the wake of the first. Perhaps that exuberant display, with all its noisy smack-downs onto the surface of the water, was a message from a scout, an all-clear designed to draw in the others. Before long there were six of them hauled out on the island. While greys lie flat out, with their blubber spreading around them as if they are melting in the heat, these seals have a habit of holding their heads raised up, and their tails arched upwards too, to form a seemingly uncomfortable curve, so I could not help but think that they looked like a little colony of smiles.

  There was a small, dainty-looking grebe diving off to one side of the hide. A Slavonian grebe, in muted colours now for the winter. It is a bird I would love to see in its glorious summer plumage. But this would require a trip of its own; it is not a bird you are likely to stumble across, for there are perhaps only thirty pairs breeding here each summer, in a handful of Scottish lochans. Further out on the loch was what looked like a giant version of the grebe; a black-throated diver, also in its winter drabs. Closer in, floating on the channel between the island and me, was a pair of red-breasted mergansers, crisp-looking little sawbill ducks; a male and a female already paired up. We have history, this bird and me; in my years in Wales I would occasionally get to see them on the river, and finally tracked them down to their nesting site hidden in a shallow burrow on an overgrown bank – the first nesting record for the county. My long hours of closely watching this secretive bird have left me with a fondness for them, a feeling of personal attachment.

  They worked the channel in perfect synchrony, repeatedly diving for small fish. They swam side by side, almost touching, and with the female lagging behind the male by a head’s length. The male would dive, and a fraction of a second later the female would follow suit. I silently counted out each dive; each one took me to a count of twenty or twenty-one, and I wondered if this consistency was down to the size of the little birds’ lungs, or the depth of the waters. The male would always pop up first, with the female again a brief moment behind him. If the distance between them had widened as they broke the water’s surface, they would close the gap, as if they could not bear to be parted, with an urgency that was utterly charming.

  A second pair of mergansers rounded the head of the little island, also fishing, and with each dive they closed in on the first pair, as if they wanted to join them. But the first male seemed to take great exception to their presence, and especially that of a rival male. Facing the interloper, he stretched his neck upwards and tipped back his head to the sky, his sharp hooked beak opened wide. Then he lowered his head to the water, his neck stretched out ahead of him, and powered off after the intruder. The water behind him churned up in his wake as if he had a little outboard motor. The chase seemed to continue underwater, but the new pair would not be driven off; they continued to dive for fish, and seemed to make a point of rising each time as close as possible to the others, as if to deliberately annoy them. As the birds all drifted off together, still bickering, my attention was drawn to a pulse in the kelp at the water’s edge right below me. It was a big male otter, almost burrowing through the fronds of seaweed that lay collapsed on the tideline. He raised his head suddenly, as if he had caught wind of me, weed draped over his head like a bonnet. Then a voice behind me said a loud hello, and he was gone in a flash.

  It was a local woman who had greeted me, walking her dog. I told her she had just missed an otter, and she said she had a holt near to her home, and saw them often. She had pine martens too, living in her shed, and she put food out for them every day. They would come to her bird table daily, as regular as clockwork. Pine martens are beautiful animals, rather like giant stoats. Nationally, they are extremely rare, but here on the shores of Loch Sunart, they are more common than in other places, because of the extent of the local woodlands. They are numerous enough that they are a source of local controversy. While some locals encourage them with treats, others are trying to drive them away, for they have a reputation for raiding henhouses. I was invited to drop by and see them for myself.

  It was a tempting offer, and I have no doubt that if I lived locally, I would be feeding these animals myself, and looking forward to their visits, but I could not help but think how much I would prefer to run across one unexpectedly, even if it was just a fleeting glimpse of one in the treetops, rather than seeing one by appointment. It is to do with the quality of the experience. It makes me wonder what I am actually seeing when I am out watching nature. I can see an animal in a zoo, up close and personal, and yet it feels as if it barely even counts. I can watch a television documentary, and gain an intimate insight into the private life of an animal, and yet it is no substitute at all for the real thing. Nothing can compare to the joy inspired by even a brief encounter with a scarce and beautiful wild animal in its natural element. It is not about what I have seen, it is about forging a momentary connection with the wild, and finding a place in the world for my own wild heart.

  Yet if the value of such an encounter is in the raw experience of the moment, rather than the representation of it, this creates a dilemma for someone like me who wants to try to write about nature. All I can offer is a second-hand experience. I am not talking here about the sharing of information, as in a field guide or a monograph, but about observational nature writing. I can attempt to offer a snapshot of a moment in time, perhaps unrepeatable in its details, a portrait of an individual animal, at the moment that its path in life crossed with mine. I can talk about my response to this encounter, the thoughts and memories it evokes, while never forgetting that the natural world has not been placed here for my benefit; it is not here to teach us life lessons, but exists always and only for itself.

  I have, in fact, seen a pine marten in the wild before, years ago when I was living in Sweden. In many respects, the landscape where I was living then was rather like a giant version of Scotland, or at least as Scotland might have been before the vast majority of the boreal forest was lost. Most of the animal life you can see in Scotland you can also see in Sweden, and in addition there was a scattering of animals that were long ago native here, but have been driven to extinction throughout the British Isles, such as elk and wolf, bear and lynx. Being surrounded by so much wildlife in Sweden had revived in me my childhood love of nature. I had thought all the knowledge I had accumulated when young had been lost in the years of city living, but in fact I had forgotten nothing. All those keenly observed childhood sightings, all the field notes taken, all the obsessive reading and studying; it was all still there, lying in abeyance, like a bird that fluttered in the back of my brain, waiting to be given its freedom and to take flight once again.

  My preference since childhood had been for solitary watching, and that has remained the case ever since. But on this occasion I had a companion, a fellow enthusiast. He had returned home to Sweden after a few years away on the squatting scene in Amsterdam, bringing with him a Dutch partner and her young son, and they had settled in a little red-painted clapboard sommarstuga on the shores of a wooded lake. On the opposite shore was the ruin of an old limekiln, on the chimney of which was an ospreys’ nest, and we often rowed out to take a closer look. Ospreys were everywhere here; they were commoner than buzzards. Every lake seemed to hold a pair, and there were lakes everywhere, but it felt like a gift to be able to watch them as they hunted and carried fish back to the nest.

  On his return home, my friend had developed an overwhelming interest in nature, and birds in particular, and I was the only person he knew with whom he could share his obsession. He was a quick student; I could see that it would not be long before he knew everything that I could teach him. His English and my Swedish were at a comparable level, fluent but with gaps, so we would find ourselves from
time to time in the position where we saw a bird, and were both able to recognise it, but only able to name it in our own language. So we were educating each other.

  He wanted to take me to an extraordinary place he had found; a place that would require an overnight visit. We were living on the shores of the Baltic Sea, and the spot he took me to was a small, heavily wooded promontory at the water’s edge. Nearly all of Sweden is thick with forest, but this was different; it was a mixed deciduous wood, mostly oak, a rare thing this far north. As midnight approached and it began to get dark, we set off. This was the northern summer, and it would be dark for only a couple of hours. We drove to the road-head, to where the wood looked black against the sky behind a latched gate. When we stepped through the gateway it was almost pitch dark beneath the trees, and the wood was roaring, so that we were almost unable to hear ourselves speak for the torrent of sound.

  I have heard the nightingales sing in England. They have an astonishingly powerful voice for such a small creature, but their numbers have always been few enough that the song of each bird has been discrete; one singing in the bushes here, one in the trees across the ride, and so on. Here in the roaring wood in Sweden were so many, all invisible in the canopy of night, that it was as if the whole wood was alive with one voice. The sound poured down on us from above; it felt like nothing so much as ducking my head under a waterfall. It was almost overwhelming.

  This was actually a different species from the nightingale of home. These birds were the thrush nightingale of the north, and a new encounter for me. We picked our way slowly along the path through the woods. There was barely any light under the cover of the trees, and at one point I tripped over a badger; evidently it had not been able to hear me coming. I am not sure which of us was more surprised. When we emerged from the far side of the woods it was just beginning to get light – there was the very first trace of dawn in the sky – and we sat by the shore and sipped from the flask of coffee that we had made for the trip. Beyond was a small salt-marsh, another very scarce habitat here. Most of this coast is rocky, and because the Baltic is so enclosed there is little tide and the waters are calm enough that every winter the entire sea freezes over with a thick layer of ice, thick enough that you could in theory walk over to Finland if you wished. More like a giant lake than an ocean.