We halt, lie flat on our stomachs and gulp mouthfuls of water from a small burn running through the undergrowth. It's a disappointment. The water's tepid, not the ice-cold draught I expected.
We return to the climb, breathing hard, saying little. Sometimes Andrew or Chris is ahead of me but always John takes the lead, setting a measured pace as we zigzag round rock or grassy bluffs taking care to keep hidden from the unsuspecting deer somewhere above us. From time to time, we pause to rest briefly, leaning on our sticks or scooping up more mouthfuls of water.
Finally, John moves ahead on his own, disappearing beyond a rocky bluff to spy out the land. We must be close. No one speaks. John returns and sits on the grass. I watch him take the gun and then five bullets. He slots the last one into the breech and slides the bolt home. He's put on his jacket again.
‘Wait here,’ he instructs before Andrew and he continue upwards.
Chris and I remain, silent or talking softly now and again. Time passes. Huge pyramids of hill surround us, moody in the light-absorbing haze, all plunging into the narrowing valley called Fionngleann – named, I speculate, after Fingal the Ossianic hero. The Argocat is a black dot far below near the deserted cottage of Camban, a ruin of bare stone walls and green tin roof. Two waters stream down the side of the hill facing us, one a startling dash of white as it drops through a gorge. At the valley floor each turns in an opposite direction – one flows westwards, the other, the Allt Cam-bàn, which is a source of the River Affric, bends eastward on the start of a long journey which will feed its waters, after passage through many lochs and over falls, into the Glass and then the Beauly rivers and finally the North Sea.
Not a sound. The shot, when it comes, is softer than I'd expected, muffled by the bank of hillside between us. ‘We'll wait a while,’ says Chris. Minutes pass, then another shot and a third. Another pause, then Chris rises and I follow, to find John and Andrew sitting reflectively on the grass. And the stag? John points to a half-hidden dun-coloured rock-like shape a couple of hundred yards down the slope. We move down towards it.
The stag has fallen at a slant, his head bent back – a handsome head, the blue-black eye still moist and lifelike and not yet glazed. We gather round. John kneels, takes his knife, cuts into the breast and slits down the belly. Blood flows and stains the grass. John wrestles the beast on to its back and, as it starts to slip down the grassy slope, he braces his leg against it and calls on me to grab a hind leg. It comes to rest and I feel the dead weight. John thrusts his hand into the belly cavity and drags out the stomach bag, grey and glistening like a dumpling, and then the bunched folds of intestine streaked with a smear of mustard-yellow faeces. They say the beast will have been feeding for body weight in preparation for mating – stags build up their strength before the rut, which is a time of stress during which they barely eat. John's hands and bare shin are bloody, the leg of his breeches is soiled, there's a daub of yellow shit on his hand which he wipes on the grass. He sizes up the animal and estimates its weight at, say, 15 stone.
He makes an incision in a hind leg through which Chris feeds a strap attached to his rope then they lever the body into position for the drag downhill. Chris winds the rope round his stick, which he holds with both hands behind his back parallel to the ground. He braces himself, takes the strain and starts to drag the beast behind him. It's a long way down to the vehicle. John says that, when he was young and worked in Affric with his father, they used ponies – though generally they didn't need to come this far to find deer. We've come many miles to reach this spot. ‘Would you like to walk a pony all the way up the glen?’ he asks. The Argocat's quicker.
John turns to help Chris manoeuvre the stag for the first and trickiest stage of the drag, telling Andrew to move on upwards. He'll catch up with us later.
We watch them depart, skirting the steeper slopes and dodging hollows, and, in a little while, we find a rocky outcrop where Andrew decides to wait for John's return. It's pleasant to rest in the sun. We chat. Andrew tells me he farms cattle and sheep near Buxton in Derbyshire, selling produce by mail order and on the Internet. Before he came to farming, he was an architect, living in the country but with a practice in London. When a local farmer decided to sell his smallholding of a hundred acres, Andrew bought the land and gradually added more parcels of land to it.
We have a good vantage point. We watch through binoculars as Chris, alone now, diminishes. Halfway down the hill, he strips off his shirt, mops his brow and starts hauling again. There's no sign of John. Half an hour has gone by and he should be back. Where can he be?
He's above us – that's where. There's a whistle – we look up and see him on the skyline, waving. It's not exactly a friendly wave, I think. When we meet again, there's a hint of frost – he's not best pleased, after a strenuous search along the high tops, to find us lounging below like sunbathers. But he's a model of restraint and says nothing. Together we move down the steep irregular ridge, noting as we do so a few deer gathered in a corrie overlooking the neighbouring glen.
We see the tiny Argocat inching forward. ‘I hope he stops,’ says John and he does. Chris gets out of the vehicle and makes contact by radio-telephone. He's instructed to drive into the next glen and rendezvous with us at a gravel bank beyond the peat haggs.
We move down the ridge cautiously towards the knot of deer, edging off the skyline to avoid alerting them. Once again, John and Andrew continue while I stay. They move over a crest and then, lying on their backs, feet first, heads tucked low, disappear from sight while they wriggle towards the herd below them. It's a tricky manoeuvre. I wait. An arc of sound breaks the silence, an increasing and then diminishing rumble as a plane crosses the clear sky trailing echoes as it disappears from sight.
The shot surprises me. Reverberating round the hills, it seems louder than before. One shot, no more. Wait. Move on cautiously.
I find John and Andrew sitting on a scarp with the deer some way below them at the foot of a sharp drop. Andrew moves first at a half run and we follow. John pulls back the thick hairs on the beast's shoulder to reveal a small red-rimmed orifice where the bullet has entered. It's a good shot, a clean kill.
By now, Chris has moved into the glen and we watch the Argocat splash along by the river. John sets off at speed, the beast slithering behind him. Sometimes he has to dodge aside to prevent it clipping his heels.
Andrew and I ford the river where it shallows while the others load the stag onto the vehicle. Now two stags lie side by side in the bucket leaving little room for the passenger – me. Andrew stands behind the cab, straddling the bench seats, legs flexed against bumps and jolts, scanning ahead like a ship's captain on the bridge. Chris has joined John in the front. I squash in as best I can beside the animals. The journey back is economy class. Bump, thump, jolt, shudder. The late afternoon sun still delivers its hammer blows and a cooling shower of spray is welcome when we plunge into a water-filled hole.
My dead companions lurch heavily against me in a less than neighbourly way. I discover that the hide of a stag, as I try to fend it off, is coarse and hairy. It takes energy to defend my space. A large head with brownish tongue lolling is too close to my face for comfort and the tine of an antler threatens to stab my chest.
Relief comes at last at Athnamulloch, where we transfer to the 4x4. I stretch out on the back seat, pleasantly fatigued. It's been a strenuous outing. ‘I'd call it an average day on the hill,’ says John. ‘You should try it when the weather's bad,’ says Andrew. ‘Try it in October.’
We take cans of beer from the cool box followed by a dram from the bottle that's been rolling on the bottom of the vehicle. Only now do we think of food, having fasted all day. John produces sandwiches made by Mrs MacLennan, venison soft as butter between thick slices of brown bread, followed by a slab of her home-made fruit cake. A feast.
At Fasnakyle, Andrew speeds away but there's still work to do for John and Chris.
We drive up to the Guisachan steading at Tomich where one of
the outbuildings serves as a deer larder. It's a shed with tiled walls and a concrete floor and down the middle runs a drain. Half a dozen carcases hang on hooks – it's like a butcher's back shop – the tally from past days’ shooting.
John and Chris sling one of our two stags onto a wooden horse where they cut out the red organs. Then they saw off the antlers and the head, first having prized out the hose-like windpipe. The head is flung into a bucket already half-filled with others. Dark, listless, sightless eyes in a pail.
They weigh the carcase on a spring balance – 15 stone 4 pounds, so John's estimate on the hill was pretty accurate. He takes the saw, cuts down the breastbone, wedges the breast open, sticks a label on the carcase to show the date and place where the stag was shot. The second stag, lighter by a stone, is butchered in the same way. Finally, John and Chris clean knives and saws and hose down the floor and a red river flows down the drain.
48
I wait among pine trees in the last car park in the glen. I'm on the lookout. I have a rendezvous.
A white van with the words ‘Forest Research’ on the side comes winding slowly through the trees, the red-bearded, freckle-faced driver glancing about him.
‘Joe?’
‘John?’
We shake hands.
It's August but too early in the morning for the tourists to be about – the bikers, the hikers and the random strollers. We have the forest to ourselves.
We cross the Affric River, dark and still as it flows under the wooden bridge on its way to the great loch Beinn a'Mheadhoin, then plunge into an undergrowth of long grass and straggly heather, the heather bells just beginning to show colour. Who else comes here, off the beaten track, now or at any time? A faint blush of purple is showing on the surrounding slopes. Behind us rears the prow of the lesser Sgurr na Lapaich (two hills in Strathglass share that name), a silent watcher.
The ground is broken and hummocky, the humps festooned with lush vegetation – mosses, blaeberry, cowberry and calluna. We brush through fine-spun, gauzy spider webs, almost invisible, which brush our faces in passing like soft fingertips. A wood ant, bigger and clumsier than the familiar garden kind, flops onto my hand. Joe says old forest like this is its natural home.
We reach a spot in open woodland where, in the near vicinity, a few spreading Scots pine grow alongside a birch or two dripping with hairy lichens, an alder and a spindly rowan. At our feet, a fallen trunk, species unknown, lies felted with vegetation, in slow decay. The remains of a pine tree, which snapped 10 feet from the ground in a winter gale, thrusts up a branch tufted with a single small mop of foliage.
This is Joe's research patch – a sheltered spot in the area marked Pollan Buidhe on the map.
He wanders among the trees, stopping to peer through a lens the size of a thimble, seeking out lichens and mosses lodged in crevices in the bark or drooping pendulously from branches. He hands me the lens and I struggle to focus (there's a knack in it). Suddenly, the blur resolves into a tiny forest of delicate fronds and fluted spicules, a secret landscape emerging from mists. He names this as a species of bryoria, Bryoria fuscescens in botanical terms, not by any means a rarity – it's all around. Joe's after something a bit more special.
The morning becomes a lesson in botany. Parmelia saxatilis – ‘brown branching hairy kind of stuff. It grows on rocks as well as trees. Saxatilis is Latin for growing on stone.’ A mass of pale yellowy-green moss draped over a rock is Racomitrium lanuginosum, soft and spongy by the look of it but dry and fibrous to the touch. Swathes of Alectoria sarmentosa hang from a broken trunk and, close by on a lone pine atop a bluff, Imshaugia aleurites – a presumed indicator of woodland longevity. Its presence here helps, in a small way, to reinforce the theory that this pinewood has grown in unbroken succession for centuries and possibly thousands of years.
Elsewhere in Pollan Buidhe, other scientists are busy. Helen is studying what the pollen grains stored in the soil can tell us. With her is Alex. ‘I'm the partner,’ says he. ‘I'm here to help carry the things.’
The sun shines, it's hot, a light breeze stirs the foliage. Pollan Buidhe on a summer's day is a Forest of Arden, except that Shakespeare's Arden never knew midges. Alex, who's small and dark, pulls a gauze veil over his face and trim beard for protection against the tiny bloodsuckers. Helen seems oblivious. I douse myself with insect repellent and we head into the undergrowth.
This cup-shaped hollow in Pollen Buidhe is ideal for Helen's purpose, which is to chart the vegetation that has grown in Affric through the ages. The clues are in the tiny pollen grains preserved for many centuries in the thick layer of peat that lies beneath the vegetation. Here the peat slowly accumulated to a depth of many feet, forming a sink into which a constant rain of pollen fell. Since no stream flushes through the ground the sediment of ages has remained undisturbed and little has seeped away. The picture is clear.
The ‘things’ Alex helped to carry are mainly a bundle of long tubes. Helen takes the first tube and they screw it into the ground, adding another and then a third as the probe sinks deeper. When the full depth is reached, they withdraw the tubes, now filled with a core of dark peat, a visible record of the past. Each centimetre marks the passage of ten years – a metre's depth is a millennium. Bits of fibrous material survive even at that depth but it's the pollen, invisible to the naked eye, which will provide the information Helen needs.
49
September. Joe's back. His red crop-head pokes out of a window at the Backpackers as I drive up. The Backpackers is where he likes to stay on his field trips in Glen Affric. My cell-like little room (I'm here for one night only) is spartan. It has two narrow beds but no bedside light (a disadvantage for a night reader), a minimal hanging cupboard and no chair. The walls are pale lilac and the thin curtain yellow. But it's cheap and I'm grateful for that.
In the kitchen, I watch Joe cook himself a mess (as in ‘mess of potage’) of fried sausage and mash. It's somewhat surprising, I suggest, for Joe has a slightly alternative air – I'd expect him to be vegetarian. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘you have to have real food sometimes.’ He tells me he's just back from a wedding in Dorset where they roasted a pig on a spit outdoors.
It rains heavily overnight and, next morning, big pools have formed in the gravel yard outside the hostel. Strands of mist cling to the trees and wrap the hills. Grass, heather, bracken and all are sodden but the sun breaks through early as forecast. It'll be hot again.
At the top of the glen, waiting for Joe to return – he forgot some necessary item of kit and had to drive back to fetch it – I take a stroll. Birch leaves backlit by early slanting sunbeams sparkle like cut glass. The foliage is mottled with yellow, a first sign of autumn. Great shags of high heather are in full flower among moss and blaeberry beds. I sit on a stone and enjoy the warmth of the morning sun.
Joe appears – he must have driven like the wind – and we head for another study site in Pollan Buidhe. We're late and hasten up the steep bank recklessly, plunging over wildly uncertain ground. I tumble face down, pick myself up and stumble again. ‘You do a lot of falling about here,’ Joe remarks.
Sometimes the heather is waist high. A fallen tree trunk has to be circumvented. Deadwood standing or fallen litters the ground in a debris of branches and shredded bark. A mossed-over corrugation in the peat is the earthly remains of a tree long deceased.
Joe finds an insect on his bare arm, a creature that half-crawls, half-hops in sluggish progress, flapping its wings all the time. It's a deer fly, he says. ‘They land on the deer, cast their wings and then burrow under the coat where they live parasitically.’ (The life of a deer in the wild is not a bed of roses.) He shakes it off.
We reach the study site where pine trees are marked with orange tape and each is identified by a metal disc. Joe stops at a tree perched above a small stony burn to check the number on the disc, takes a compass bearing (orientation is important) and carefully outlines a square section of bark with pins and a piece of string – it's not
high-tech. This is his microscopic field of study. The naturalist Edmund Wilson has written that a lifetime could be spent ‘in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree’. Joe's voyage round this pine tree, picking his way through the channels and creeks in the bark in search of telltale lichens, will be a little less time-consuming.
He identifies several different species of bryoria, adding a caution: ‘You have to be careful. Sometimes one species can pretend to be another.’ With a knife, he cuts through a little blob on a hairy lichen (of the genus Usnea) and exposes flesh red as a jewel of blood.
Another species catches his eye. This is Bryoria furcellata. ‘Amazing,’ he says. Through the lens, the drab speck springs into vivid detail. It has a fine branching structure, with little spines sticking out like antennae. ‘No question,’ he says, ‘really distinctive, a beautiful specimen.’ This is another lichen thought to indicate woodland succession, a hint that the pinewood has had a continuous presence in the neighbourhood, possibly even from the end of the Ice Age.
The downside is that this specimen is growing fractionally just outside Joe's string-and-pin enclosure. It's beyond the pale and won't be recorded. Who'd know, I ask. But Joe, with scientific rigour, won't have it. Furcellata's out.
50
What will the forests of Glen Affric look like in a hundred years’ time, in a thousand years, in ten thousand? What changes will there be? Will there be more trees in the future or fewer? Will the mix of species remain the same? What will the landscape look like? These are the questions Joe is attempting to answer in his research for the Forestry Commission. Much depends on variable factors, from fluctuating forestry politics through to climate change.
Season in Strathglass Page 10
